Final Thoughts from the Grove: Risky Business

This is my last morning to be able to do this. Li Robbins will be taking over the blog for the next little while as I take over Nightstreams for the next little while. This grove is perfect this morning so it'll be nice to remember in a cramped studio.

There used to be a club in a fleabag hotel at the corner of Carlton and Jarvis in Toronto: Larry's Hideaway. While some of the clientele were having their own kind of sublime experiences upstairs, my contemporaries and I had some of the most sublime music experiences of our young lives downstairs.

Pylon, from Athens Georgia, who preceded REM by a couple of years and pointed to something in the water in that college town; Jah Wobble & Invaders of the Heart - we thought the bass might bring the hotel down and yet the music soared to places well beyond gravity. When I met Jah Wobble years later we had a conversation about that night and he immediately recalled it as one of the most memorable gigs he'd ever played. And Shriekback - before they got very popular. I remember thinking that everyone was floating about 6 inches off the ground. The crowded created a kind of wave that the band rode with absolute joy and abandon. There are a handful of my friends who were at those gigs with me and I occasionally meet others who claim to have been there for those magic nights. It's a limited number, of course, since I'm sure the club didn't hold more than 200 people and yet the impact of those performances was profound and continues to resonate among those who witnessed them.

I'm sure that everybody who ever buys a ticket to something is hoping for that experience. And every club or concert hall owner hopes that their venue will be immortalized by the presence of great music. And every musician hopes that the connection between their music and the audience will be that direct and keenly felt - but in spite of great expectations and great intentions, it remains a rare event - a perfect storm. I remember having high-hopes for a programme of songs by Jessye Norman at Roy Thompson Hall. She was wonderful but - perhaps because it was February - each piece was punctuated by a chorus of coughing that put everyone on edge. It was the fly in the ointment.

The real secret ingredient in these special performances, I believe, is risk. The performer cannot be in a place where they're simply repeating what they did the night before. There has to be something on the line for them, personally, that the audience doesn't know about. Likewise, the audience can't go in with the attitude that they've paid their money and are therefore owed something. It has to be imbued with the feeling that time is precious and they won't get these two hours back.

I feel that way about radio, too. If I want to switch on and find something that sets my soul on fire, I have to be prepared that I'm going to turn on the radio and I'm not going to like what I hear. It's the gamble of discovery. Even with my own music collection, I now live almost entirely on the Shuffle function of my iTunes so that even the music I know best has the ability to surprise me simply by popping up when I didn't expect it.

Canada is a hard place to take risks in. It's a small population spread over a long distance. If you're going to develop and sell widgets, you'd better be sure there's a market for them because it's going to cost you a fortune to get them across the country. If you have a band, you load your stuff into a van and strike out looking for places to play and you'll drive quite a distance between places that can actually afford to pay you enough to cover gas, food and lodging - let alone new equipment and some shiny shirts. Compare that to a band from, say, Boston - who has enough places all within 40 minutes where you can build a local following fairly quickly if you're any good.

But we don't have that option in Canada. In order to tour, most musicians need support from the arts councils - even ones who are fairly well known and get their music played on the CBC. Now, the arts councils don't have endless amounts of money - so they need to be strategic and try to be fair with what they disburse. At the same time, they're trying to support orchestras - which mostly stay put but are still very expensive to maintain. Into this equation is thrown the CBC, which is supposed to ultimately be a tool for weaving together the various strands of our collective culture. The latest changes in programming at Radio Two are meant to do what all the arts councils are also trying to do: be both fair and strategic about how they can go about supporting all kinds of music in Canada that represents the breadth of what Canadians are creating.

Several people complaining in this forum about the changes to Radio Two schedule have used that hoary phrase about "my tax dollars". Most Canadians pay taxes. And while one commenter cynically suggested that he paid more taxes and was therefore entitled to have a greater say about what he heard on Radio Two, I think most Canadians would agree that that's not a fair assessment - and that, in fact, there are people who pay less taxes and yet a greater proportion of their income on tax - just as there are those who pay more taxes but a lesser proportion of their income. So rather than play around with those numbers, I think it's fair to say that the CBC belongs to everyone and needs to do a better job of reflecting everyone in its programming. What was particularly irksome about this one commenter was that he has long been a beneficiary of government largesse through arts council grants, foundation grants and endless support from the CBC. While he might like to still claim to take artistic risks with his music, his real sense of risk in the context of what it means to be a culture maker in Canada is long obscured by a lifetime of access to programmes that limited that risk.

I'm reminded of the battle Frank Lloyd Wright waged in trying to build the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. He had resistance from the architectural community, from the patron and - worst of all - from artists who said this would be an impossible building to display art in and that it was a disaster. Among those who were most vocal were artists who were themselves perceived as iconoclasts - like Marcel Duchamp.

So I'd like to invite new listeners to take a risk on CBC Radio Two. I'd like to thank those listeners who've written in and said they weren't sure they were going to like the new schedule but it turns out that they do. And I'd like to encourage those who continue to rail against the recent changes to consider that great cultural experiences require risk on all sides - even theirs.