Every night I look
From star to star
Three thousand miles through these empty bars
And I end up sleeping
Out in my car
And the moon shines off my beautiful scars
– Blackie And The Rodeo Kings
I was at a tribute concert to Leonard Cohen in Toronto the other night – an evening of Canadian singers performing his songs, writers sharing personal anecdotes and reading Cohen's poetry – and one of the performers was Tom Wilson. Not only were his growling interpretations of some of Cohen's songs among the most entertaining of the evening, but when Wilson decided to share an anecdote of his own, I thought, “What a fascinating storyteller.” So I picked up his memoir. Beautiful Scars is Wilson's story of growing up on the poor side of Hamilton in the Sixties and Seventies, finding escape through drugs and music, hitting the peak of international success, and nearly losing everything through his own excess. It might have been just another rock 'n roll memoir, but throughout his entire story, there's a family secret that caused him pain growing up; a mystery that wasn't fully resolved until Wilson was in the process of writing this book. Again, I found him to be a fascinating – if slightly amateur – storyteller, and I found him to be so likeable and genuine that I was happy to have had this reading experience.
We survive, and with those skills, and in that survival, we create art.Tom Wilson's parents were older than the other kids' folks: His Dad, George, was a WWII RCAF airman who had been blinded during battle, and coming home disabled and addicted to morphine, he was a bitter and hard-drinking man; working at a government-funded concession stand for wounded veterans and collecting a small pension, George brought in just barely enough money to get by. Tom's mother, Bunny, would sit around the kitchen in her underwear and apron, only doing enough housekeeping to keep clear paths for her blind husband to navigate through the mess; spending her free time spying on the neighbours and shoplifting at the stores downtown. Despite obvious clues, Tom had no idea that his family was poor until the Christmas that his classroom's donation box for the “Needy” was delivered to his own home. Ouch. No matter how painful or personal the recollection about his parents, however, Wilson consistently keeps the tone conversational, but sometimes, a bit too crafted:
The most unthinkable stories she would save for supper time. She couldn't help herself. Tales of train wrecks, body parts, mob hits, Hiroshima, Kennedy's day in Dallas, priests and altar boys, shotgun suicides – all got thrown out across my plate of meatloaf and boiled potatoes, the bloody condiment to otherwise boring meals.It's valid for a professional lyricist to salt his writing with metaphors, but I sometimes found it jarring – which made the writing feel a bit amateur, in an overwritten way – but not a fatal flaw for my enjoyment. I won't get into the rest of Wilson's story – I wouldn't want to ruin any of the mysteries – but I will note that I enjoyed all of the Southwestern Ontario references: from African Lion Safari to Call the Office, folks smoking Player's and drinking stubbies, driving to Port Dover or Tillsonburg – these are my stomping grounds and touchstones and I don't see them enough in print. I also want to note that not everyone who picks up a guitar or sits down to write a book is necessarily an artist, but Tom Wilson seems like the real deal: the way he writes about his processes for making music over the years (as a member of the Florida Razors, Junkhouse, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, and Lee Harvey Osmond) seems so integral to who he is that not only did I find him to be 100% authentic, but recognised that making art was probably the only way that Wilson could have survived a bizarre childhood and the ensuing years of addictions. Recently, Wilson has been spending some time touring with a group of successful Canadian artists, giving mentoring talks to those just starting out:
For an hour at a time I'd talk to green writers and artists about surviving in a world that does not need what they have to offer. It was an easy hour to kill. My entire life I'd been struggling to maintain my self-respect while doing whatever it was I wanted to do creatively, dodging depression and criticism and resisting the urge to find a closet to hang myself in...I'd start my lecture with a simple line, “If you don't have to do this, don't. If you don't have the burning desire to wake up and create something, if your life does not depend on it, then please stop. You'll end up wasting your time and the time of anyone who crosses paths with your creation.” I would look back into the eyes of my audience and see them thinking, “I can't believe I spent all this money to get lectured to by a guy who looks like he sleeps in his car.”So, whether you're interested in a story of how art is forged in pain, a travelogue of Canada's most populous corridor, or a rock 'n roll memoir with limos, coke, and orgies (that's all in here too), Tom Wilson has a story to tell you, and he tells it well.
This is the same Leonard Cohen tribute concert I wrote about yesterday, and I have to admit that when Tom Wilson came out on the stage, I had no idea who he was (despite the Toronto crowd going nuts in the audience). He spoke and sang in a low growl, and despite him saying on his first entrance that he had been asked not to share any stories (which audience members protested, loudly), before a later song, he told the following story:
(Imagine the low growl of Wilson's voice): When I was a seventeen-year-old boy, I would drink underage in the Connaught Hotel in downtown Hamilton. Drunk and kicked out when the lights would come up, I'd often try to hitch a ride home with one of the taxi drivers who'd hang around outside, and there was this one woman taxi driver - a kickass thirty-seven-year-old who drove the nightshift in downtown Hamilton wearing men's clothes and a cap - and the first time she agreed to drive me home, she stopped at Gage Park along the way and we made love in the back seat of her taxi. If you are a seventeen-year-old boy, I would recommend you have an affair with a kickass thirty-seven-year-old taxi driver who takes the nightshift wearing men's clothes. Some nights she'd drive again to Gage Park, and some nights she'd park behind one of the brick factories overlooking the escarpment, and she taught me things in the back seat of that taxi, while her Leonard Cohen cassette played on the stereo. And I will also tell you that if you are a seventeen-year-old boy having an affair with a thirty-seven-year-old kickass nightshift taxi driver who wears men's clothes, you can have no better soundtrack than Leonard Cohen. (Pause.) I've recently thought about looking up that taxi driver again, seeing if she wanted to go for a drive. (Pause, shift the growl into a lower gear.) But it probably wouldn't be the same. (Because she'd be pushing eighty?) So this one goes out to the taxi driver, whose name I can't recall.
And then he sang Leonard Cohen's Closing Time, the perfect tie-in. How could I not pick up his book after that? (Of course I was looking for the taxi driver in this book: she's there, and her story doesn't end at the Connaught Hotel or Gage Park. Wowzers.) Bonus: Here's a video of a younger, less growly, Tom Wilson with a Junkhouse hit -