Snowplow Central Station

Levon Helm, and the Radius of the Heart

Not one member of The Band is from Hamilton. Robbie Roberston is close: born in Toronto, he grew up just outside Brantford at Six Nations. Rick Danko wasn’t much farther away, hailing from tiny Green’s Corners, half way between Simcoe and Turkey Point. Garth Hudson was born and raised in Windsor; Richard Manuel, from Stratford.

Levon Helm, on the other hand, grew up in the improbably-rustically named Turkey Scratch, Arkansas.

The Band certainly spent some time in Hamilton back in their formative years. They must have played here at the height of their career. They didn’t record here, although Robertson did some solo work with hometown hero Daniel Lanois in the mid-80s. But I never saw The Band, never met them, individually or collectively. They broke up when I was six. I don’t have a Levon Helm story.

So why devote a post to Levon?Why step outside the charmed and charming circle I’ve drawn around this city? Well, to quote myself from my very first post, “…the music that is most nourishing, most natural, most representative of my world, is the music that is made by the people around me.” Although Levon Helm and The Band were never physically around me, their music is woven into the fabric of my youth.

One of the first songs I learned on the guitar was The Weight. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down followed soon after. They were easy songs, just a couple of open major chords with a steady rhythm behind them; but their simplicity belied an emotional depth and complexity that I still aspire to, 30 years later.

All my seven brothers and sisters loved The Band, too. Summer nights, we’d sit around the big kitchen table in the farmhouse out on Highway 6, half way between Hamilton and Robbie’s Six Nations’ roots, our windows and doors open wide to catch a cross-breeze, playing cards: euchre and president and canasta until we couldn’t keep our eyes open. The CD player in the corner would be churning out Cripple Creek, Ophelia, Stage Fright, Chest Fever, King Harvest Has Surely Come. We knew all the words. We knew the order of tracks. We internalized The Band, and Levon’s weathered voice was at the center of that sound.

We Shea children all grew up. We all found other musics we love, and our copies of Music from Big Pink and the eponymous second album got scratched or lost or just put away and forgotten for a time. We scattered across the country, taking our acoustic guitars, our vocal chords and our euchre cards at various times to Halifax, Whycocomagh, Kingston, Townsend, Simcoe, Toronto, Guelph, Calgary, Kelowna, Vancouver, Prince George. I even spent a couple of years in Kuwait.

But I took my guitar with me. And I took the love of my family with me. And I took The Band with me, too—it seemed like the sort of thing a Hamilton boy should have close at hand when moving halfway across the world: a Swiss Army knife, a Canadian flag sewn onto your backpack, and a copy of The Last Waltz. Certainly all the other Canadian expats sang along in a joyfully homesick chorus when my Kuwaiti pick-up band launched into The Weight. Home is where the heart is, and Levon Helm will always have a place in my heart, a place in my home.

Thank you, Levon. I’ll miss you.

Real Life

I have learned something lately.

A couple weeks ago I started a new blogging project, Hundred Mile Microphone.

I have this vision of how it can connect my band to every other musician in my city. I have this vision of how it can connect me to my music, my history, my geography, and my micro-culture.

I have this vision of it expanding into a travelling road show a la Stuart Maclean’s Vinyl Cafe.

And my first thought, after the flash of clarity and vision passed, was “I have no idea how to do this, and do not know the appropriate people. This is a nice dream, but it is clearly someone else’s dream.”

Well, I’ve been working diligently at the blog. And yesterday I was walking around Disney World (hold on, they’re related ideas).

Walt Disney famously once said “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

Which is what I’ve been doing. I’ve been drafting a wish list of artists I’d like to interview. And then I’ve been calling them up, poking them on facebook, saying “Hey—you free for an hour next Thursday? I’ll buy you a coffee and listen to you talk!”

And I’ve learned some things. I mentioned that. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1) Everyone wants to be interviewed. Everyone. Period. If you call up a complete stranger and say “I think you are really interesting; may I hang on your every word while you tell me about the most amazing parts of your life?” nobody will say no, unless they are legitimately too busy to say yes. And then they still won’t say no—they’ll say “Call me back next week when my schedule is settled.”

2) Everybody is interesting. If you give your sincere attention to anybody; if you record their every word and then transcribe it as honestly and faithfully as you can, you will find wisdom, humour, and love. I have not had an interview yet where I did not learn something about life, love, music, and my home town.

3) Nothing gets done unless you do it. All my life I’ve felt like an outsider in my own city, a stranger to my own music scene. But it is plain to me now that I know tons of musicians. What’s more, they know me. And they actually like and respect me, too! The total distance between me and the heart of the Hamilton music scene is exactly equal to the distance between my left and right ears. I have imagined a barrier, and it has kept me back. Now I am imagining contact, and I am connected.

4) There is no such thing as shameless self-promotion. Because there is nothing shameful about self-promotion. I used to think it was crass and tacky to tell people how awesome I am and how excited they ought to be to hear me. I see now that that attitude was spawned from a lack of belief in my product, a lack of belief in myself. I couldn’t sell people crap. I still can’t. But now I don’t have to.

To summarize (and complete the assignment):

Action Steps: Get on the phone. I have a plan. I need to mobilize people to make it happen. And everybody I talk to supports me. So I need to talk up enough support that this bird takes flight. It’s a question of when, not if.

Biggest breakthrough? An awareness that I am actually good at this. A good writer. A good musician. A good people person. Growing up a gifted kid, I have always had imposter syndrome—I’ve always believed I was just tricking people into thinking I was competent. Now I believe in me.

Most important week? Week 6—Blogging. My brain caught on fire, and it hasn’t died down.

So thank you, Ariel. Thank you, all you wonderful co-participants in the Music Success in 9 Weeks Challenge. Thank you Lily for organizing. Collectively and individually, you have inspired, challenged, amused, entertained, and enlightened me. And now you’ll excuse me—I have a world to change.

Peace, love, and Maj7#11s,

Tom Shea

http://hundredmilemicrophone.blogspot.com

http://www.trioarjento.com

Continuum Plans

I want to make a living making music.

I do not, on the other hand, want to make a living selling Trio Arjento mugs, t-shirts, toques, snowglobes, and oven mitts. We are musicians, not bric-a-brac peddlers.

Perhaps I shall have to adjust my expectations, or maintain other revenue streams such as teaching. At least I’ll have my integrity—and the local landfill won’t fill up quite so fast. Then again, like Ani DiFranco said: “Generally my generation wouldn’t be caught dead working for the man. And generally I agree with them; trouble is you have to have yourself an alternate plan…”

Lucky me; I do have a plan. Maybe it’s more of a dream at this point, but it’s fast becoming a plan. (The difference? Dates and dollar figures. That’s all.)

Meet my new blog, Hundred Mile Microphone.

Go ahead. Click on the link. It’s friendly.

This little exploration of my relationship with local music and culture, this personal challenge to listen exclusively to Hamilton music for the month of March, has already taken off. Almost 1100 hits in the first week alone.

And I can see already how it becomes a concert series, featuring a mix of interviews and live music, anchored by my band and ehanced with guest artists.

I can see how local painters, sculptors, videographers, dancers, and artists of all stripes will want to participate.

I can see how it becomes a syndicated newspaper column.

I can see how it becomes a television show, or a radio series.

I can see how it becomes a way for me, Marcy, and Jennifer to play our music the way we want. With the right sound, the right lighting, the right staging. With an audience that’s there to listen, show after show after show.

I can see how it becomes not just a personal exploration of the notion of home, but a call to arms for indie musicians everywhere to give up the futile chase after the brass ring of stardom and get on with the business of living inside their lives, singing their own songs, and loving their neighbors.

I can see how all of those things have direct financial implications.

But most importantly, I can see how all it is a way of building networks, of celebrating community, of loving the life I live while living the life I love.

What’s more, I know now how to make it all happen. Maybe not all at once, but bit by bit. It’s already begun.

How’s that for a continuum plan?

Marcy’s Wisdom

I shared my last post with the band. We had a good discussion about it. Once again, I am reminded how lucky I am to work with Marcy and Jennifer. They are not just great musicians, but they are—in very different but quite complimentary ways—two of the most wonderful human beings I know.

Here’s Marcy’s response. She is wise.

I like the “relax and take my time”. I mean who put this pressure to perform on us anyway? Everything’s in such a big hurry. Life…needs to slow…down….anyway.

The way I look at it, we still have lots to learn. To promote right now feels premature. There is a reason we only have 200 fans. It’s not that we’re not good: it’s that our energetic resonance says “keep it small for now”. Who knows why? But from a business perspective—well my business, osteopathy— things slow down when time is needed to strengthen and grow. I have always said “the universe provides.” What I mean is “the universe provides opportunities that are appropriate to the path that is before me.” It’s up to me to take the time to use the opportunities wisely.

We’re still learning how to connect to people. Music is simply the medium. We have fear that needs to be unlearned. That takes time. We need to learn through experience, so that it rests in our cerebellums, that the experience of connection and sharing with people through the medium of music can be consistently and reliably a life-giving act. This will happen when we are strong in our own sense of self (as individuals) and can create the environment, consistently and reliably, for that life giving to happen.

Also when we no longer need the audience to decide whether we are good enough…we’re co-dependant like that.

We are individually growing.. getting to know ourselves.. where before I think there were too many question marks. All this takes time.

This is the key to takes the opportunities of space right now, continue our self growth, bring that to the collective, and then let the proof be in the pudding. Then what we create in our web presence will have the appropriate energy.

Just saying.

Open Arms / Closed Doors

Researching newsletters this week. Thinking (again) about how public we want to be, versus how public we want our music to be.

Interviewed jazz piano giant and all-around super guy David Braid for Hundred Mile Microphone. He doesn’t have a widget to collect emails for a newsletter. Just relies on being awesome, I suppose. And he’s awesome enough that it probably works just fine for him. Probably doesn’t hurt that he has a steady income as a professor at U of T, either. And I suppose once you get that many Juno nominations, you can count on a steady fan base.

Interviewed dreamy pop songster Drew Smith, too. He collects emails—mine included. But he has virtually no other online presence—no photo album, no bootleg videos on youtube, not even a bio or a tour schedule. I asked him about that. Will update you when I get his reply.

And I had a great jam session and co-writing experience with Shane and Jeremy (formerly of The Struggle Fish). They have no web presence, so I can only link back to their awesome song 1888. They’re just enjoying being themselves, making music, exploring, playing. We entered the church basement with no goals or expectations; we left with a friendship, a solid set of collaborative music, and the seeds of at least one new song.

I guess every artist finds their comfort level. It seems to me, though, that the music should be the selling point, not the personality. Maybe that’s naive, or modest, or anti-social. Maybe that’s old-school big media thinking. But Thomas Pynchon has done pretty well as a novelist in spite of virtually zero media contact in a 48 year career.

With all this in mind, I started to set up a newsletter via my Reverb Nation profile. Turned out I was going to have to upgrade to the deluxe package, for an additional $9.99 a month. Had a moment of crisis. Wondered who really wants to know. Wondered if I was generating revenue for myself, or for Reverb Nation. I have a small fan base. It grows very slowly (perhaps because I am reluctant to splash the cash to spread the word). I keep doing things I think are awesome, and keep getting approximately no response from the world. Is it because the world doesn’t want to know? Or because I just haven’t found the right mechanism to tell the world about it yet?

Gut check time, I suppose. I am going to keep making music. No doubt there. But am I brave enough, forward enough, confident enough, to share it with the world? Or will I let false modesty and self-doubt shut me down and limit me to the small, safe fishbowl I currently swim in? Of course I am. But I have to do it on my terms. I’m not a religious man, but I’ve always fancied Mark 8:36: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

I still haven’t set up that newsletter. I’ll wait until after I’ve discussed it with the band. And in the meantime, I’m pondering Toronto sax legend Rich Underhill’s advice to “wait for your A-game.” In a self-induced panic to promote, I keep tossing half-baked bits of our brand identity on to the web hoping to engage people. But I suspect they now see us as half-baked, since there’s no finished product to dispel the notion.

So what have I learned this week? Do good things. Tell people about them. Take my time. Relax. Enjoy the process and let the end result take care of itself. I have the whole rest of my life to do this right. So you’ll probably be seeing a lot less of Trio Arjento in the next couple months. But when you do, damn, is it going to be good.

Peace, love, and major 7#11s,

~tom

www.trioarjento.com

www.facebook.com/trioarjento