Rockburn présente – prise deux

Unlike many of my guests on this program, I had met Colin Linden a few times prior to this interview.  It was because of that I wanted to spend more time talking to him. He is not just a hugely talented guitar player and songwriter – having created the group, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings to commemorate the work of his late friend, Willie P. Bennett, alongside his own solo career – he is also a well respected accompanist and producer, having worked with the likes of Bruce Cockburn, Emmy Lou Harris, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Leon Redbone, The Band and countless others.

Now you might assume that hanging around in company like that might make the guy think pretty highly of himself, and with justifiable reason, but Linden is the exact opposite. He is sweet, self-effacing and totally down-to-earth and - even better for someone like me - he loves talking about music.

He’s also a big fan of Neely’s Bar-B-Que, the Nashville eatery run by the Neely brothers, and he suggested we shoot the interview there. After we had finished our talk and Colin had picked up his to-go order to take home to his wife, the guys and I sat down to what was likely one of the best BBQ lunches in town. Thanks for suggesting the smoked sausage, Colin.

Craig Oliver has been around Ottawa covering politics for so long, when his autobiography was published in late 2011, This Hour Has 22 Minutes did a whole sketch – with his help – about him covering events going all the way back to the Big Bang.

I’ve interviewed plenty of old newsmen who, near or at the end of their careers, decided to write their memoirs so a waiting world could hear their take on past events. I won’t mention any names, although most of them are dead now, but suffice to say the vast majority are self-serving, “here’s-how-I-think-the-way-things-should-have-gone” tracts that usually contain little in the way of revelation, or even entertainment.

So I will admit that I approached Craig Oliver’s book with some apprehension. That I considered reading it at all was because a few years ago I heard him speak at a dinner in Toronto at which he was being honored and he spoke intelligently and articulately about how Parliament should be reformed to once again become a functioning, accountable body. It was pretty impressive.

And, to my delight, his book, Oliver’s Twist, was a remarkably candid accounting of his life and career, filled with funny stories, touching admissions, and revealing depictions of some notable Canadians. So we booked him to do the show and I’m glad we did. The result is a half-hour in which the word ‘politics’ barely gets a mention, but you will hear how he inadvertently crashed a private dinner with Ronald and Nancy Reagan in Washington, D.C., how his alcoholic mother tore strips off of Maureen McTeer, how Pierre Trudeau behaved stupidly around grizzly bears and how CTV beat CBC Television in delivering the election results in the 1972 federal vote by cheating. Now that’s television.

We drove down to Syracuse, New York to meet with Allen Toussaint on the day he was performing an evening of his New Orleans music at the Onondaga Community College.

It’s always a little nerve-wracking to have to film an interview with someone on-stage just hours before they have to perform and often minutes before they have to do a sound check. On top of that was my fear that, judging from everything I’d read about Toussaint and learned from people who knew him, he was a very low-key and modest person not given to talking much about himself. I needn’t have worried. The proto-typical and ebullient promoter, the very funny Frank Malfitano, brought Toussaint to our set-up about half an hour before the scheduled sound check and he was a polite and accommodating gentleman, dressed almost entirely in black: black shirt with white ticking around the collar, black tie with glinting silver dots in the centre, black suit, but white socks and black sandals. I honestly thought that was the outfit he’d be wearing to perform in later that evening but, no, later he wore a colourful, full-on, N’Awlins costume.

The conversation, to my very pleasant surprise, was great. He was more than forthcoming about his talent, his influences and his personal history and, for me, he remains one of the true musical greats.

Sometimes I’m eternally grateful for YouTube because, if I’m about to interview somebody who intimidates the hell out of me, I can always find them there intimidating some other poor soul. I have been a fan of Adam Gopnik’s writing for quite awhile and I really didn’t think that anyone with that sharp a mind and that sharp a wit could be anything but intimidating. So when I found him chatting away all over YouTube in the friendliest of manners I was greatly – no vastly – relieved.

He showed up a bit late for our interview because his assistant had given him a slightly-off direction, he was very apologetic (like I was the one going to be pissed off), and he proceeded to gob-smack me by telling me he had been in Ontario visiting his retired parents, “in a place you probably have never heard of called Campbellford”. It turns out, in one of those weird quirks of fate, that I had literally just come from a five-day visit with one of my oldest friends who now lives in Campbellford. Go figure.

With that bit of bonding done, I decided that Gopnik would be the one person I could begin an interview with by asking the question I’d never asked anyone before. And I did.

I came to Dr. Nora Volkow through a circuitous route. In the summer of 2011 I was reading Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Lacuna, a fictional account of the lives of the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, which also accurately depicted the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

Serendipitously, the Sunday New York Times Magazine ran a profile of Dr. Volkow, the brilliant director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Maryland. I discovered that she was Leon Trotsky’s great-granddaughter and had been raised in the very house (now a museum) in Coyoacan where he had been killed with that infamous ice pick.

Coupled with this bit of coincidence was the fact that Dr. Volkow’s ground-breaking work on addictions and the functions of the human brain was dealing with the subject of addiction in much the same way that Edgar Kaiser’s foundation in Canada was approaching the subject: as a health issue rather than a moral one. Ed Kaiser had been a guest on the program last season and had sadly passed away a few months after we met.

So with those two very interesting topics in mind, we began to chase Dr. Volkow as a guest. To my dismay, the CBS program, 60 Minutes, got the jump on us with a segment on the scientist that aired just before we left for Maryland. What are ya gonna do?

Yet despite having seen her interviewed by Morley Safer, as well as several other video pieces available online, I was almost totally unprepared for the dynamic (she calls herself “wired”) and intensely smart person I met. Sitting in her office, surrounded by all kinds of art – some of it hers – Dr. Volkow talked about her colourful family history and her unprecedented work on the processes of the brain in response to addictive substances with such blazing intelligence that thirty minutes went by as if it were five.

I was pretty excited and a bit apprehensive about interviewing Scott Turow.

I own a first edition copy of his very first published novel, Presumed Innocent, a book I very much admired, and I’d just finished reading his sequel, Innocent. I knew that his work had been translated into a couple of dozen languages and sold something like twenty-five million copies. I also knew that he had maintained a career as a lawyer while at the same time writing all of these award-winning novels. Why wouldn’t I be intimidated?

But it turned out, as it often does, that he is a very pleasant man who is also very generous about revealing his thoughts and processes.

We shot the interview in a former private club in downtown Ottawa, one of those beautiful old houses with wainscoting and leaded stained-glass windows. Turow was suitably impressed.  He was in town as part of the Ottawa International Writer’s Festival and had just come from a luncheon event where people had paid fifty bucks to nibble salad and listen to him be interviewed by Julie Jacobson, the wife of U.S. ambassador David Jacobson. I asked him how it went. He said it was fine – he and the Jacobsons knew each other from their years in the Chicago legal community. In fact, he said, he had introduced David Jacobson to Barack Obama in his home during a fundraising party he had thrown for the future president when Obama was a state senator.

“So, in other words, they owe you?” I joked. “Oh, no,” he replied. “I just introduced them, David did the rest.”

David Jacobson went on to become Obama’s deputy finance chair in his 2008 presidential campaign and was then appointed Ambassador to Canada. After last fall’s Wikileaks revelations it doesn’t seem like that was much of a plum posting.

We arranged to meet former heavyweight boxing champion George Chuvalo at a gym in Mississauga, Ontario. Chuvalo is in his early seventies now but when he arrived at HUF Gym he looked more like a man in his fifties who is still in decent shape.

HUF’s is an interesting place.  It was created ten years ago by a Jamaican man who had found God and pledged to start a gym that would instill fitness and religion into young people. Its walls are covered with biblical sayings and its equipment and boxing garb is emblazoned with the logo “Psalm 144”. In case you’re not up on your psalms, like me, Psalm 144 says, “Praise be to the Lord my rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle”. Despite that rather intimidating credo, the HUF staff are some of the friendliest and, dare I say it, sweetest people I have met in a long time.  And they love George Chuvalo.

The gym is on two levels in a building that used to be a supermarket. We had set up our cameras and lights in the lower level, where speed bags line the walls, heavy bags hang from the ceiling and a boxing ring dominates the centre of the large room.

George arrived a bit late, spent at least twenty minutes upstairs answering questions and saying hello to gym patrons, then came down to us, apologizing for his lateness and saying he had been at home trying to finish a crossword puzzle and had gotten stuck on two clues.

We started the interview with my intention being to spend fifteen minutes talking about his boxing career and fifteen talking about the horrific events in his personal life. George is a storyteller, and a damn good one. He was keeping us spellbound with the behind-the-scenes stories of his fight with Floyd Patterson at Madison Square Garden, and his two fights with Muhammad Ali, when Dan, my producer, flashed me the five-minute warning. We had done twenty-five minutes and we weren’t even finished talking about boxing!

Need I explain why the finished interview is an hour, not half? I don’t think I do. George Chuvalo is an incredible Canadian character and I think you’ll be as riveted by his story as I was.

I finished reading John Kay’s autobiography on the plane on the flight to Nashville and, although I knew he was not exactly the tough, leather-clad rock star bad boy his image projected, I was startled to realize what kind of a life he had led.  I had seen Kay perform with an acoustic guitar at the 2010 Governor-General’s Performing Arts Awards Gala at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, singing a song to Buffy St. Marie, one of that year’s winners.  Like everyone else who had grown up in the Sixties (or listened to classic rock radio), Kay’s gravelly vocals with his band Steppenwolf were part of the gestalt.  “Born to be Wild”, “The Pusher”, “Magic Carpet Ride” and “Monster” captured the essence of the times and the inclusion of those first two songs on the soundtrack of “Easy Rider” cemented their legend.  But Kay’s life was more than the usual suburban-kid-dreams-of-rock-stardom-and-it-comes-true story.  As a child he fled East Germany with his mother, cutting through barbed wire to the sounds of machine guns.  He is legally blind (hence the sunglasses) though he has some vision, has an almost intolerable sensitivity to light and is perfectly colour-blind, seeing what he can only in black and white.  I also discovered that his early musical tastes leaned to folk music, and folk blues (he was a fan of John Hammond Jr. and was taught some guitar chords by Paul Siebel), and spent many an hour frequenting Toronto’s Yorkville coffeehouses.

He was in Nashville having some eye surgery and arranged for us to meet and film the interview at the legendary Bluebird Café.  The Bluebird is a small club dedicated to the nourishment of the singer/songwriter.  Most nights find the place jammed to the rafters with two, three or four guitarists sitting in the round in the middle of the room, not even on the small stage, trading songs and licks.  It was the perfect spot for the interview and what began as a half-hour chat turned into a fascinating hour.  I hope you enjoy it.

I don’t know why I was surprised that John Sayles, the much-admired film director and author, came from Schenectady, New York – you have to come from somewhere, after all – but I was.  I’d never been to Schenectady and had only two cultural references to it in my entire life: one being a small news story that came across the wire back in my News Director days telling of the hijacking of a small airplane and the hijacker demanding to be taken to Schenectady; the other being Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 film, Synecdoche, New York, which was set in Schenectady.  Pretty thin gruel.

Anyway, it turns out that you can’t fly to Schenectady – so I don’t know what that hijacker was thinking back in the 80s – and we ended up driving a tedious six hours to get there.

The city, which Sayles would later tell me now has half the population it had when he went to high school there in the Sixties, seems to consist of two types of buildings: the historic and ornate structures that have been around since the 1700s, and the two-story, box-like buildings that reminded me of either an Edward Hopper painting or a scene out of a Raymond Chandler novel.  The main employer is the General Electric plant and Angelo, the night desk man at our hotel, told us he went straight from high school into a job at the plant driving a forklift and was about a year away from retirement.  He had also never heard of Ottawa.  This may give you some indication of the insular nature of small town, upstate New York.

John Sayles was finishing his forty-day book promotion tour in his hometown, before flying with his partner, Maggie Renzi, to the Philippines to continue promoting his new film, Amigo, which is set there.  His novel, A Moment in the Sun, is an enormous, 1000-page historical epic set at the turn of the last century when America went to war with Spain.  The movie also addresses the same topic.

I was fairly apprehensive about meeting Sayles simply because life doesn’t give you many opportunities to meet true Renaissance Men and Sayles is surely that.  The guy has made countless highly-regarded films – Lone Star, Passion Fish, The Return of the Secaucus Seven, The Brother From Another Planet, Matewan, Eight Men Out – written novels, short story collections, worked as a script doctor on some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters, acted edited and who knows what else.  And he’s done his best work outside of the traditional confinements of film studios and major publishing houses.  This has earned him, at the age of 60, the sobriquet “The Godfather of Indie Film”.

We had set up our equipment to shoot the interview at a downtown Schenectady art complex, gone out for a quick bite to eat, and were stepping into the elevator on our way back when a tall man in black jeans and black shirt came scurrying across the lobby and through the door as it closed.  It was John Sayles.  No entourage, no big deal.  We all shook hands and made small talk as we miked up and prepared for the interview, waiting for Maggie Renzi and his brother, Doug, to show up to confirm their dinner plans later.  She arrived with a box of chocolate cupcakes for everyone.  These were the most down-to-earth folks you could ever hope to meet, and, while he admits to having no lack of confidence in his own talents, Sayles is a pleasant, self-effacing man who loves to talk about his work.  Enjoy the interview.

The interview with Texas icon Kinky Friedman almost didn’t happen because I ended up in San Antonio alone, with Dan, Rob and Oscar stuck back in Ottawa at Customs. We had a very small window of opportunity to talk to Kinky the following morning at his ranch just outside of Medina. Luckily the three of them managed to make it to the hotel by 2 a.m., and with very little sleep we set out to find the Kinkster at the crack of dawn.

Friedman’s spread is composed of two elements: the Echo Hill Ranch, a non-competitive camp for kids with cancer (though, oddly, Kinky writes that it’s for kids with cancer but the website doesn’t mention that at all), and Utopia Animal Rescue, which take in all breeds of dogs who have been abused or abandoned.

Kinky emerged from a small cottage-sized cabin with a corrugated tin roof, wearing his trademark black cowboy hat, with a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth and a cup of seriously strong-looking black coffee in his hand. He introduced us to his pal, Brian, “a Jew from El Paso”, and we decided, rather than shoot the interview in the shade of a nearby tree with hummingbirds zipping around our heads but with loud-speaker announcements being made every few minutes, we would shoot over at the dog compound.

Now I’ve said before that it takes some time for us to get things set up to film one of these interviews and, while it’s less time-consuming outdoors where you need no lights, it’s still not a fast operation.  While all this was going on, Kinky was sizing me up in a curmudgeonly way and telling me how tired he was from a just-completed tour of concerts in Australia, followed by a stint in Hawaii working out a co-writing book arrangement with….wait for it….Jim Nabors. Kinky is writing a book with Gomer Pyle!

But as he’s telling me all this, and we’re standing there in the 100-degree heat waiting for the cameras and mikes to be ready, he’s getting more and more antsy because it’s taking so long. He’s grumbling to himself, saying, “Let’s get this thing going, fer crissakes” and things like that.

This, believe me, is not the mood you want one of your guests to be in before you start asking questions.

Finally. we get started and quickly the character of Kinky Friedman emerges; he’s playing to the cameras, he’s dropping one-liners like Henny Youngman and, at one point, he says, “Only two kinds of people wear hats.  Cowboys and a—holes.”

I say, “Well, we’re both wearing hats, but only you have a cowboy hat.  What are you calling me exactly?”  “Not determined yet,” he smiled.

By the end of the interview I had apparently passed the test because he strolled around the dog cages with me, chatting away while we filmed cover shots, insisted on giving me his new book, which he autographed to me (“From one Texas Jewboy to another”), and gave me the secret handshake.

He never offered me a cigar though.

He is one of the world’s most beloved science fiction writers, as well as a podcaster, blogger and folk singer.

Spider Robinson has written at least one book a year over the past thirty-five years, his rhythm only broken in the past year after the death of Jeanne, his wife of, not surprisingly, thirty-five years.

I have never met a man more in love with his wife. Spider and Jeanne – who was a dancer and Soto Zen Monk – were devoted to one another in a way that most married couples would envy.  Her passing, in May 2010 of a particularly virulent form of cancer, left him in a hole from which he is only now just beginning to emerge.  As a friend of mine recently quoted about the passing of a mutual friend, “death ends a life, not a relationship”.

We visited Spider at his home on Bowen Island, in the Georgia Strait. He is a remarkable human being – warm, friendly, garrulous, and full of anecdotes.  During the hour or more that it took Rob and Oscar to set up the lights and monitors, Spider and I chatted about musicians we admired, books we liked, and swapped stories about the sixties (the decade, not our age). Turns out we have a lot in common – well, except for the fact that he is blessed with writing talent and I’m not.

For Spider Robinson fans, this hour-long interview is going to be a feast.  He talks about his fear of not be able to overcome this current writing block; he talks about how he got his name; he talks about his wife, how they met, how she died; he sings a song to her; and on and on.

Even if you’ve never read his books, this one is worth tuning in for, believe me.

We flew back to Washington D.C. on a hot and humid July Monday to speak with David Frum.  It had only been a month or two since he had been sacked as head of the American Enterprise Institute for apparently telling fellow Republicans something they didn’t want to hear:  that they had blown it in their fight against Obama’s health care package and it was time to give up that particular fight.

I had just finished reading two of Frum’s books in preparation for the interview; his book about George W. Bush (see my book blog on this website), which was really about Frum’s 18 months in the White House as an economics speech writer, and his most recent book, Comeback – Conservatism That Can Win Again.  The latter was an entire book saying pretty much the same thing Frum was telling them about health care; that there were certain issues that weren’t worth fighting anymore because time and events had moved beyond them.

At any rate, I was feeling a bit self-conscious as we set up in the house we had rented in downtown Washington because I wanted to have the books nearby so we could get shots of them while the interview was happening.  But I didn’t want Frum to see the spines of those books.  This was because they were from the Ottawa Public Library.  Now I realize that this makes me look like a cheap bugger, but there was good reason.  Over this past year I have purchased more books than I can remember for interviews that got deep-sixed at the last minute.  I bought all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books – all or them; I bought Norman Jewison’s autobiography; I bought Paul Shaffer’s autobiography…etc, etc.  So I decided enough was enough.  Anyway, we artfully arranged the books so that a nice silver bowl hid the offending portions of their spines.

David Frum arrived a few minutes late with his laptop open. He explained that he had written a piece for a British publication and they wanted some last minute changes.  He asked for ten minutes and retired to a corner to tap away. When he was done, we sat down and had our chat, which, I have to say, was pretty interesting and fun.  He talked about growing up with his famous mother, about his experiences with Dubya and about being sacked by the AEI. He left, again with his laptop open, in search of a spot with WiFi so he could send off his British corrections.  We spent the next hour or so packing things up and then we headed off, dodging thunderstorms, to find a place to have a late lunch.  A few blocks away there was David Frum, laptop still open, wandering from restaurant to restaurant, trying to find a WiFi connection.

Nobody ever said being the conservative bad-boy in exile would be easy.

David Steinberg has probably met more funny people in his life than any of the rest of us. When you watch this interview, you’ll see him talking about getting to have lunch once a week, when he was 28, with Groucho Marx, Jack Benny and George Burns at the swishy Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles.

We met and shot the interview in his Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City. I know how that sounds. You’re already imagining some palatial abode with a jaw-dropping view of Central Park.  Well, sorry.  His very expensive, but quite ordinary one-bedroom looks out on the building across the street.  You’d have to crane your neck to see the park.  But bear in mind that this is just his and his wife’s little pied-à-terre in New York; they live permanently in Los Angeles.

Steinberg, after a very successful career as a comedian – he got the Smothers Brothers tossed off of CBS back in 1968 – went on to become a talented and very much in demand director. He’s been involved in “Seinfeld”, “Mad About You” and, more recently, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Living in Your Car.”

He is a warm and very friendly guy and, in that time before the actual interview begins, while the lights are being set up and the cameras adjusted, I got to relate to him the content of an interview he’d done with Tom Snyder on The Late Late Show in 1995.  Steinberg had no recollection of this interview and was in stitches as I told it back to him, which, I have to say, made me feel pretty damn good.

It all had to do with Snyder wanting to know how, on an episode of “Mad About You,” Steinberg had managed to get Murray the Dog to lick himself on cue.  Steinberg said this had reminded him of his favorite line from a Catskill comedian named Mal Z. Lawrence, which was: “The food at the Catskills was so bad the dog was licking his bottom to get the taste out of his mouth.”

Ah, comedy.

Here’s a pearl of wisdom from somebody (me) with a paucity of pearls:  the older you get, the more cynical you get. This may be a function of turning into a crabby old person but there are days when it’s difficult to be optimistic about much.  So it was with some trepidation that I began reading Warren Berger’s book, “Glimmer,” which I was told was about the power of design to change our lives.

Right.

Well sometimes, when you least expect it, something comes along to blow away the jaded cobwebs and re-energize you. “Glimmer” was that for me.

The book is mostly about the trend in the design world to move into the social sphere.  It’s about designers who have come to think that creating the perfect coffee urn or lounge chair pales in comparison to designing affordable housing for hurricane victims, or public transit systems that actually work, or even entire cities.

The sub-title of “Glimmer” says “featuring the ideas and wisdom of design visionary Bruce Mau.” This is no empty statement. The Sudbury-born Mau has become the flash point for this global design movement, and rightly so.

(If you have a moment, check out my review of “Glimmer” on my book blog, The Rockburn Files.)

Needless to say, I wanted to talk to Bruce Mau, the man that legendary architect Frank Gehry says he always wants to work with.

We traveled to his Toronto studio (he also has one in Chicago) and ended up talking to the soft-spoken Mau for a full hour.  It was the morning after the staff Christmas party and the few who actually made it in to work were strangely subdued.  But Mau was engaging and riveting.  If you, like me, sometimes feel as if we’re all going straight to hell in a handbasket, watch this interview.  Then go out and get the book. Trust me, you’ll feel a whole lot better.

Peter Turnley is the whitest guy in Harlem. I’m not kidding. The award-winning photojournalist, the man who has over forty covers of Newsweek magazine to his credit, divides his time between apartments in Paris and Manhattan.

When he’s not traipsing all over the world in search of the definitive shot, he’s conducting photography workshops in dozens of exotic locales.

Turnley is the only photographer to have stayed overnight at Ground Zero the day it all happened. He evaded the police and security people and, at dawn on September 12, took some of the most memorable pictures of the firefighters and first responders.  He has witnessed most of the major political events of the past thirty years.

When we visited Peter Turnley at his Lenox Avenue apartment we decided to shoot the interview outside.  Now, unless you’re in the TV or film business you probably don’t know what a chore it is to film anything in New York City.  Pull out a camera and either the cops or the security people from the surrounding buildings descend on you like you’re wearing an al-Qaeda T-shirt.

This, however, is not the case in Harlem. Up in Harlem nobody really gives a…whatever.

So we decided to shoot out on Lenox Avenue. The revelation was that Peter can’t walk down the street without being hailed by just about everyone. He is widely known and loved.

But here’s the thing: he is a pale-skinned man with strawberry blonde hair pushed behind his ears, wearing glasses. The day we shot our piece, he wore a blue Oxford-cloth button-down with an ascot, a dark blue Ralph Lauren sleeveless pullover, chinos, and loafers. Can you get whiter than that? I don’t think so.

And yet he was…accepted.  As far as I’m concerned, this is proof that it’s not what you look like, it’s who you are.  Peter Turnley is the real deal and his neighbours in Harlem know it.

Like Bruce Mau, Peter Turnley is likely not a name you recognize.  But, like Bruce Mau, he is one of the few guests we spoke to for an entire hour.  And I have to mention that the last part of our interview took place in the T.R.Y. Star Barbershop, where Terry, the owner, and Ernest, one of the barbers, were very, very accommodating.  It turns out that Chris Rock shot some of his documentary “Good Hair” in the T.R.Y. Star.  I’ve seen the film, it’s very good, and let’s just say that their topic of conversation wasn’t anywhere in the same ballpark as ours with Peter Turnley.

When we set up our conversation with Randy Bachman, his publicist said half an hour wouldn’t be anywhere near enough. Once he starts telling stories, she said, he can’t stop, better do an hour.  So we arranged to shoot the interview in the Pyramid Cabaret in Winnipeg, two days before Bachman and Fred Turner, his old BTO colleague, were about to launch a reunion tour. Then, a week before we left for Winnipeg, the same publicist called to say Bachman’s schedule was tight and we could only get 40 minutes with him.

Now, as everyone who has ever turned on a television set knows, things work in 30-minute blocks. There are half-hour shows, hour-long shows, and so on. You don’t get to watch a 40-minute show very often. But what can you do? It is what it is.

So we went to Winnipeg, cold and rainy in May, and set up at the Pyramid, a great club that had seen the Buzzcocks play the night before. The Pyramid is a large room, a former taxi repair garage, with brick walls, two huge bars – one with a chandelier made out of papier mâché skulls – and lots of posters and moving lights.

At the appointed time Randy Bachman and his publicist arrived. He was carrying a glass of tea and had a scarf wrapped around his throat. He explained that he had just come from Rouyn, Quebec, where it was hot and humid and the change in temperature had screwed up his voice. He was going to need plenty of hot tea and water if he wanted to be able to talk at all. My heart sank. I wasn’t sure at this point whether we’d even get 30 minutes from him.

The boys gave me the five-second countdown and we began. At 55 minutes we ran out of disc space in the camera and had to stop to reload. By the time we shook hands goodbye, Randy Bachman had spoken to me for over an hour.  And all of it was amazing.

If you want to hear the story of how he wrote “Takin' Care of Business,” and a whole pile of others, be sure to watch. This stuff is gold.

We were to interview playwright and novelist Tomson Highway just 24 hours before the start of the G20 in downtown Toronto.  The security fences were up and the streets were empty.  We had arranged to do the interview on stage at the Canadian Stage, where Tomson was performing a cabaret with a singer and sax player.

The interview was due to start at 3 pm.  At 3:10 we called the publicist to find out where he was.  She didn’t know.  Apparently she wasn’t bringing him to the theatre.  At 3:15 we called the other publicist (yes, that’s right, it takes two sometimes, believe it or not) and she didn’t know where he was either but wanted to know why we were blaming publicist #1 (?).  Go figure.

We were just about ready to pull up stakes and go home when Tomson climbed out of a cab, came in apologizing for his lateness and (this is something you always want to hear from a guest you’re about to interview) asking what the interview was for, that he’d never heard of CPAC and that he was tired from doing interviews about the cabaret all week long. Yes, I thought, this is going to be really good.

Well, it turns out it was really good.  He is a very thoughtful and intelligent man with plenty to say about the theatre and music.

But there was one bit of weirdness right off the top of the interview that I’m still trying to figure out.

Tomson and his brother, Rene – who died of AIDS in the 1990s – were taken away from their family home when Tomson was six and placed in a Roman Catholic residential school in The Pas.  By all accounts the brothers were abused there and it affected the rest of their lives.  In 1998 Tomson wrote The Kiss of the Fur Queen, described as a semi-autobiographical novel about two brothers and their experiences of abuse in a residential school.  In an interview in the literary journal Quill and Quire, Tomson said: “I didn't have a choice, I had to write this book. It came screaming out because this story needed desperately to be told. Writing it hit me hard in terms of my health. So I went to a medicine man, who helped me defeat the monster. We lanced the boil and cured the illness." In another article, by journalist Judy Steed, Tomson’s partner is quoted as saying Tomson is so anti-Catholic he’s almost anti-morality.

So it came as some surprise to me when I began the interview by asking him about how his early years, the good and the bad, informed his later life and he responded immediately and quite strongly by saying people had it all wrong, that his experience at residential school was a wonderful one and that’s where he was first introduced to the piano.

He said it with such force and conviction that I dared not press him on all the evidence to the contrary for fear of ending the interview right then and there.  Later, when I spoke to a long-time acquaintance of his and related this rather odd situation, she expressed shock and amazement.  “He wrote a whole book about it!” she said.

So I can offer no explanation for this, other than to just point it out.  The interview, though, is pretty damn fascinating.