This is getting to be almost a tradition, although so far it has happened only twice.  The Austin, Texas-based rock and roll band Grady, headed by the former leader of Big Sugar, Gordie Johnson, and with my son Ben as bass guitarist, and pint-sized Nina Singh, a Vancouver girl, as drummer, yesterday gave a workshop in the de la Salle High School for the Arts, in Ottawa.

As their teacher Michel Dubeau enthusiastically told the jammed lecture theatre of students, this is the second such occasion within a year, and he seemed justifiably proud at his success in drawing Johnson, an iconic figure in the history of Canadian rock and roll, to his school.

The band undertook the unpaid gig last year at a moment’s notice, and their performance this year was much smoother from a pedagogical point of view, and was apparently much appreciated especially by the good admixture of music students in their audience.

They played a number of their (extremely loud) band numbers that they are playing on the tour they are just setting out on, across the Western part of the country, and Johnson took over to answer the many questions from the audience, more smoothly and completely than last year. My son spoke a bit of French this year, which went over well with the students, who, however, as last year, seemed totally at home in English.

The questions started out with fairly mechanical queries —- “what is the hardest thing about touring?” — but quickly became more technical. Great interest was taken in Johson’s two two-stemmed (or whatever they are called) guitars. He demonstrated how the separate bands of strings give him a remarkable range of sounds, veritably at the touch of a finger, and allow him to avoid that slightly irritating thing when guitarists are always treading on some pedal or other to change sounds or intensities or whatever.

“How do you measure the success of your music?” asked a young man.  “We measure it by the size of our hats,” said Johnson quickly. A girl asked Nina Singh how she felt being the only woman in a band of men. She said she had once played in an all-girls’ band, but more recently she had stopped thinking about how she was the only  woman, and thought more that they were just a group of people who had gotten together to play, and she concentrated more on what they were playing than on who they were.

Another student asked Johnson to name his guitar influences, and whether he had been influenced by slide guitarists. He thought a few moments, said he had never been particularly influenced by slide guitarists, but then rattled off a great list of them culminating in Blind Willie Johnson, a man who had the capacity to  make his guitar sound like a church congregation responding to the preacher, namely himself.  “I think if there was any one influence, it was Blind Willie, maybe because he had the same name as me.”

Before the session concluded Eric Beevis, another teacher —- and I can tell you, judging from these two men, teachers didn’t come like this in my day —  sang one of Grady’s songs, Woman Got My Devil,  that he had translated into French especially for the occasion. Beevis is quite a rock and roll howler, too.

Asked who he admired, he said, he had a deep respect for Willie Nelson, a man of 70, still performing, and a generous, warm person who lives modestly on his ranch just outside Austin. “I’m not really into country music, but I do respect Willie Nelson.” Whose other music would he like to play apart from his own? Johnson seemed momentarily stumped, then said, among much laughter ”I guess, Thriller….At least he drove a bigger car than I do.”

Last year Michel  Dubeau  taped, circulated and maximized every moment of the workshop, to such a point that my son began to call it “the workshop that will never die.”

He even tried — unsuccessfully, as I had warned him — to get a piece I wrote in this space to be accepted by the Ottawa Citizen.

I don’t doubt that he will do the same thing again, and that he is already looking forward to the third issue of this event.

At the end, Eric Beevis, who gave me a Tshirt bearing the logo of the school last year, this year gave me one bearing the inscription “dubeau, beevis,  tahibet et al,” on the front, and on the back an inscription  bearing the words “Les Canards”, which presumably must be the name of their local group.  He told me a friend had seen me wearing the earlier Tshirt as I walked around the Glebe last summer, and asked himself, “What the hell is our Tshirt doing in the Glebe?”, introducing just a smidgen, but only a smidgen, of traditional language antagonisms. None of which were discernible during yesterday’s expertly translated session.

By Boyce Richardson – BoycesPaper

http://boycespaper.airset.com