James Taylor finally tours Canada
TORONTO - James Taylor has never visited Saskatchewan, but - as improbable as it seems - the musician who immortalized his personal struggles with "Fire and Rain" has actually sung about the prairie province that gave birth to Canadian medicare.
That said, residents of Saskatoon or the other stops on Taylor's pending and first cross-Canada tour shouldn't expect to hear him break into the lyrics of the song in question, "Northern Boy," from Randy Newman's rock musical "Faust." (The musical, staged briefly in 1995, is captured on a CD released the same year.)
The picture painted by "Northern Boy" isn't what you'd call flattering. To be fair to Taylor, who played God in the production, his part of the cuttingly witty duet extols Canadians as "clean of limb, clear of eye." It is Newman's Devil who dismisses us as a nation of people "as dull as a butter knife."
Still, as Taylor readies to take his Band of Legends tour to places, like Ottawa, that are named in the song, he'd like to make it clear the song's views are not his own.
"You know, Randy Newman, he's a great writer. And when he decides to make fun of you, if you're a short person or if you're Mr. Sheep or "Northern Boy", he can really...." Taylor's sentence trails off as he looks for a gallant way to finish the thought.
"I think what I'm trying to say is, those aren't necessarily my thoughts on Saskatchewan."
In fact, the musical veteran describes himself as fired up about getting a chance to play places, like Saskatoon, or see sights, like the Canadian Rockies, that are new to him. He's even game to try Canadian cuisine, though it's clear one famous offering - poutine - has until now evaded his culinary radar.
"Putin like the (Russian) president?" he queries when asked if he plans to try poutine while in Canada. When told the cholesterol-laden ingredients - French fries and cheese curds topped with gravy - he bravely offers to go where no cardiologist would follow.
"If somebody puts a plate of poutine in front of me, I'll definitely eat it. I'll give it a try. I'll embark on it," he said in a recent phone interview from his home base in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts.
The quintessential travelling troubadour, Taylor has been a fixture on the summer touring circuit in the United States for decades. He routinely packs the open-air venues he favours with adoring fans who - as he put it in his song "That's Why I'm Here" - come back every year with their babies and their blankets and their buckets of beer.
Occasionally those tours spill into Canada for a date or two. Generally Toronto. Sometimes Montreal. Once in a blue moon Vancouver. But Taylor has never actually crossed the country.
The oversight, he insists, was omission, not commission. His tour schedules coalesce around offers to play that come in, he explains. And in the past, his schedulers haven't seemed to look north of the 49th parallel for gigs.
But Taylor - who hasn't been on a record label for several years and currently manages himself with help from others - is now using Sam Feldman, of the Vancouver-based management company MacKlam-Feldman, as a consultant.
Feldman, is "very knowledgeable about the Canadian audience and venues and stuff and just is the right person to ask to put that kind of thing together. So I'm finally getting good advice on it."
"I really am looking forward to coming to Canada and really playing the whole country," Taylor says.
"True, we won't be in the Atlantic, Maritime provinces, but we'll definitely see a much larger amount of Canada than I've ever toured before. And I'm really stoked about it."
Another reason for Taylor's enthusiasm is the fact that his wife, Kim, and their seven-year-old twins Henry and Rufus will be exploring Canada with him and his band.
The Canadian leg starts in Montreal on Sunday and takes in Ottawa (July 7), Toronto (July 8), Saskatoon (July 11), Edmonton (July 12), Calgary (July 13), Kelowna, B.C. (July 16), Vancouver (July 18) and Victoria (July 19).
It is bracketed by weeks of U.S. dates, during which Taylor and his 11-member band have been playing a set list heavy with cover songs that may or may not make the cut for a CD he will release through Starbucks Hear Music label in late September.
He gathered the veteran musicians - long-time partners like backing vocalist Arnold McCuller and bassist Jimmy Johnson plus newer collaborators like pianist Larry Goldings and drummer Steve Gadd - for a heady 10-day recording extravaganza in late January. They recorded 20 tracks in a studio built in a converted barn on Taylor's property.
"This band is really a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a very rare thing to have this kind of group of players get together," Taylor enthuses. "These players really are the best."
As he makes time to be interviewed, he's trying to finalize the set list for the CD, whittling down the songs to a dozen. More than that and a collection can lose its sense of identity, says Taylor, who is co-producing the CD.
"Originally it was going to be just sort of a good time party sort of soul song album. But I'm going to just try to choose the things I like the best. The 12 best songs and put them out. But it's hard to decide."
The U.S. audiences have been getting a preview of the possibilities - hearing songs like "Wichita Lineman" and "In the Midnight Hour."
But Taylor says the set lists for the Canadian concerts will focus more on James Taylor classics, songs like "Sweet Baby James," "Fire and Rain" and "Handyman" (itself a cover, but one for which Taylor won a Grammy in 1977).
"These are audiences that I won't have had the chance to play for and I ought to play James Taylor music, not cover tunes," he explains.
Taylor is also working on the songs for a new collection of his own material, which will be his first studio release since "October Road" in 2002. He's also planning an instructional DVD on his unique guitar style.
Taylor, who turned 60 this year, keeps up a pace unusual among his contemporaries. Many - Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne - make less frequent forays into the musical marketplace. But Taylor, who is clearly revelling in his work, has a sense that time is passing.
"I'm loving working now," he admits. "But you get to this point, you get to being 60 and it's not like open-ended really anymore."
"It's sort of like: What do you really want to do? What do you want to make sure to do? And let's put it on the calendar and let's get there and do it. Let's get it done."
Some facts about singer James Taylor, whose first cross-Canada tour starts Sunday in Montreal:
Age: 60.
Original claim to fame: Lanky, long-haired embodiment of the singer-songwriter movement of the late '60s and early '70s. Featured on the cover of Time magazine in March 1971.
Current claim to fame: Hardworking singer-songwriter who maintains an ambitious touring schedule, regularly selling out shows.
Hits: "Sweet Baby James," "Fire and Rain," "You've Got a Friend" (penned by Carole King), "Shower the People," "Mexico."
Albums: 22, including 15 CDs of original material, a Christmas album, live albums and "greatest hits" collections.
His song-writing process: "I don't control what I write.... What comes out as a song is a mystery and a gift. I don't turn any of it down. If it's good enough to finish, if it's good enough to actually follow through to its end, then it's good enough to exist."
Bozo the Clown actor dies at 83
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Larry Harmon, who turned the character Bozo the Clown into a show business staple that delighted children for more than a half-century, died Thursday of congestive heart failure. He was 83.
His publicist, Jerry Digney, told The Associated Press he died at his home.
Although not the original Bozo, Harmon portrayed the popular frizzy-haired clown in countless appearances and, as an entrepreneur, he licensed the character to others, particularly dozens of TV stations around the country. The stations in turn hired actors to be their local Bozos.
"You might say, in a way, I was cloning BTC (Bozo the Clown) before anybody else out there got around to cloning DNA," Harmon told the AP in a 1996 interview.
"Bozo is a combination of the wonderful wisdom of the adult and the childlike ways in all of us," Harmon said.
Pinto Colvig, who also provided the voice for Walt Disney's Goofy, originated Bozo the Clown when Capitol Records introduced a series of children's records in 1946. Harmon would later meet his alter ego while answering a casting call to make personal appearances as a clown to promote the records.
He got that job and eventually bought the rights to Bozo. Along the way, he embellished Bozo's distinctive look: the orange-tufted hair, the bulbous nose, the outlandish red, white and blue costume.
"I felt if I could plant my size 83AAA shoes on this planet, (people) would never be able to forget those footprints," he said.
The business — combining animation, licensing of the character, and personal appearances — made millions, as Harmon trained more than 200 Bozos over the years to represent him in local markets.
"I'm looking for that sparkle in the eyes, that emotion, feeling, directness, warmth. That is so important," he said of his criteria for becoming a Bozo.
Joy Division singer's gravestone stolen
Thieves have stolen a memorial stone for Ian Curtis, frontman of the influential post-punk band Joy Division from a cemetery in northern Britain.
The stone has the inscription "Ian Curtis 18 - 5 - 80" and the words "Love Will Tear Us Apart," the title of his most popular song.
Cheshire Police said the stone was taken some time between Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning. They have appealed to the local community for information.
Curtis, who was returned to the spotlight recently with the release of the film Control, based on his life story, died in 1980.
He suffered from depression and hanged himself at age 23 just before Joy Division was to tour the U.S.
The band's second album, Closer, with the single Love Will Tear Us Apart, was released after his death.
Curtis's widow, Debbie, was said to be in "a state of shock" after being informed that the stone was missing.
Stephen Morris, former drummer of Joy Division and later rock band New Order, speculated that a misguided fan may have stolen the stone. He appealed for its return.
Fans from all over the world have travelled to the site over the past 20 years to pay their respects and often leave messages and tokens behind.
Springsteen remembers NJ boardwalk fortuneteller
ASBURY PARK, N.J. - Bruce Springsteen is paying tribute to a boardwalk fortuneteller he made famous in a song.
Madam Marie Castello, who told fortunes on the Asbury Park Boardwalk in New Jersey, died recently. She was 93.
Springsteen wrote about her in his 1973 song "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)."
In a posting on his Web site, Springsteen remembers Castello as a boardwalk fixture at the Temple of Knowledge.
"I'd sit across from her on the metal guard rail bordering the beach, and watched as she led the day-trippers into the small back room where she would unlock a few of the mysteries of their future," he writes. "She always told me mine looked pretty good — she was right."
Springsteen adds: "Over here on E Street, we will miss her."
Indy Jones, fridge replace Fonzie
LOS ANGELES -- Harrison Ford doesn't tell Shia LaBeouf to "Sit on it." Nor does Cate Blanchett's slinky Soviet come running when the crusty 65-year-old hero snaps his fingers. But with the 19-years-in-the-making sequel Kingdom of the Crystal Skull still in theatres, the question is curiously apt: Is Indiana Jones the new Fonzie?
Apparently so. What other conclusion is there now that "Nuked the fridge" may soon surpass "Jumped the shark" as the catch phrase of choice to describe a once-beloved franchise that has spiralled into such preposterousness it will never recover?
A brief recap for those of you with lives: During the opening sequence of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Ford's intrepid archeologist-adventurer finds himself on ground zero at a secret nuclear test site.
Faced with imminent atomic doom, our newly-minted senior citizen ducks into a lead-lined fridge -- he's in the middle of simulated suburbs populated by mannequins -- and is blasted who-knows-how-far as everything else in range is logically decimated.
Miraculously -- or simply because, like Jar Jar Binks, story architect George Lucas thought it was a neat idea -- Jones survives, tumbling out of the household appliance unharmed by the mushroom-cloud-sized explosion and radiation-free. (If only Bruce Banner had hopped into a beer cooler before those gamma rays turned him into a rampaging green-skinned goliath.)
Although the Steven Spielberg-directed sequel earned mostly positive reviews (mine included) and has amassed $300 million at the North American box office, nastier-than-thou fanboys and bloggers retaliated the only way they know how: By inventing a ridiculing viral lingo. And thus the term "Nuked the fridge" was born, a reference to -- and replacement of -- "Jumped the shark" which harkens to the 1970s sitcom Happy Days.
Back then, fans were stunned into disbelief by an episode in which Henry Winkler's leather-jacketed rebel, strapped to water skis, spends his Hawaiian vacation jumping a Great White. Ever since, "Jumped the shark" has been invoked to describe a series that has careened well past its prime. (Most recently Lost jumped the shark in Season 2 only to rebound or "reverse jump the shark" this past year.)
Although "Nuked the fridge" is barely a month old, it's already become an Internet sensation, popping up on message boards, online reviews of other movies and cultural catch-all YouTube. It's even gotten its own url (nukedthefridge.com) and been named "Word of the Day" on urbandictionary.com recently.
According to the latter site, "(Nuked the fridge) is used to denote the point in a movie or movie series at which the characters or plot veer into a ridiculous, out-of-the-ordinary storyline. Films that have 'nuked the fridge' are typically deemed to have passed their peak, since they have undergone too many changes to retain their initial appeal, and after this point critical fans often sense a noticeable decline in their quality."
The site goes on to name several other examples of franchises that nuked the fridge, we just didn't have a phrase for it then:
* Star Wars: "Jar-Jar Binks says 'Ex-squeeze me.' "
* The Matrix: "When 100 Agent Smiths attack a CGI Neo spinning around on a pole."
* Spider-Man: "When Peter Parker turns Emo and starts dancing around a bar."
As for how Lucas, Spielberg and Ford reacted after learning their sequel has contributed so dubiously to the lexicon, we can only imagine. As The Fonz himself might have said: "Heeeeeeeeey."