Brent Mason - The Godfather of the Saint John Music scene

THE MARITIME EDIT - VOL.6 - SEPTEMBER 2018 Written By Brent Mason ©

It’s the end of April and the beginning of the end of long, slow spring in Saint John. We’re still waiting for the annual flooding along the river that eventually disgorges itself into the harbour, along with decks, gazebos and whatever else can be torn loose by the freshet and carried along to the Bay of Fundy. The city sits at the confluence of the Bay of Fundy and the St. John River, and just as the water is always moving and changing with the tides and the force of the river, the city itself is in a metamorphic state these days.

Coming from an early gig out of the city, I park my car and walk along beautiful brick Victorian Germain Street, past iconic and much loved Backstreet Records and the stunning cathedral. I cross the street at Guatemalan restaurant/all ages indie venue Taco Pica, with its pods of young smokers out front. Ink and smoke and and unlined faces, most of whom I don’t recognize. There was a time I would have known everyone there…

At the top of the Grannan’s Alley I stop beside the always packed Italian by Night restaurant, which now occupies a former furniture store. Looking down the steep sloping alley, I am surprised at the sheer volume of people all the way down; it takes a second for me to realize this weekend is the Quality Party festival in the ‘uptown’. Music in cafes, bars , homes and on the street. Venues hopping, vinyl bars spinning, scotch bars swilling, craft beer, americanos, faded ads painted onto the sides of the brick buildings (chew Shamrock tobacco plugs!), skateboarders weaving rolling past a family of Syrians, a rainbow couple holding hands....

Over the hill from the stunningly beautiful uptown core of heritage buildings, thgere are 5000 people taking in a comedy and music extravaganza. It feels, momentarily, like an out of body experience as I am somehow high overhead this city I call home, looking down in amazement at the beehive of activity that belies its reputation as a bit of a backwater (people used to say they were going to the John): Things have changed.

It was 1992, on a beach on the west coast of Vancouver Island, that the epiphany hit me. I had left New Brunswick several years earlier and truly could not get out fast enough, propelled by the typical youthful loathing of home and a Kerouacian urgency to have unconstrained freedom and adventure. Blowing off a funded graduate degree and working carnival midways across the continent accomplished the mission. I got spit out of that maelstrom and landed in Victoria, where I tentatively began playing live music and writing songs, gardening to pay the bills.  Late bloomer indeed. As I stood transfixed under a silver Pacific moon, waves lapping at my ankles shifting the sand beneath my feet, I was overwhelmed by a sense of purpose and direction: it was time to go home.

I landed on the shores of the harbour in the spring with all the wind in a sail an epiphany can give, giddy with a sense of the possible in a city I was seeing with very different eyes than the last time I had passed through. I bought a $1000 juicer and set up a stand in the wonderfully eccentric City Market, where my midway skills had me meeting what felt like half the city and hustling enough orange juice to pay for a recording of the songs I’d written. In that pre digital era there weren’t many options, but I was naive enough to believe in what I was doing, in spite of all empirical evidence to the contrary (I was still learning to tune my guitar, for example !). Going with my gut I connected with a guy who had a studio in Fredericton and committed to working with him.  

Head for the High Ground was my first album., one of the first independent records of original music to come out of New Brunswick. I was completely floored when I heard the final product for the first time- I’d sit in on the floor in front of the stereo playing the cassette over and over, marvelling at the magic that my now good friend and producer Lloyd Hanson had alchemized in the studio. It was far beyond what I had expected, and CBC noticed. While there was a ton of music out of the other Atlantic provinces, New Brunswick was a bit slow out of the gate on the indie front, so they were really keen to have some local content .The first time I heard one of my tunes on the radio was a pretty special feeling, on some level validating years of directionless effort.

The release of that first cassette led to a plethora of gig opportunities, which was both exciting and terrifying in the sense that I still didn’t really have a clue what I was doing musically. I could write, but performance is a whole other basket of plantains that I took my good old time to figure out. When I got a call from CBC Toronto to appear on a national broadcast called “Swinging on a Star” with Murray McLaughlin and a new up and coming band called the Barenaked Ladies, I knew it was a really special opportunity, but nerves and inexperience ensured a performance that was less than career enhancing.

At about the same time I bought the juicer I decided to try starting an open mic. I had stumbled into hosting one for a few months in Victoria, and while today there are open mics nearly every night of the week in nearly any city you are in, in 1992 there was nothing of the kind in Saint John. There was very little happening in terms of venues for original music .As with everything else I was doing, at time I thought “What the hell, can’t hurt to give it a try”. And thus began my 25 year association with Oleary’s Pub in Saint John.

It’s hard for me to be objective about the phenomenon that O leary’s on Wednesday night became. Right out of the gate it was obvious that something special was going on. Within a couple of weeks performance slots were filling up quicker than the bar, people were showing up with bagpipes and poems, tie dyes and smoke ( the Deadheads came out in droves), cellos and amps. It became a place to meet, to collaborate, find a mate, fill the wait. Many nights would be lined up out the door and around the corner, with 5 or 6 hundred people wading into the smoke filled, low ceilinged brick and beam vortex. It was the most wonderful kind of chaos.

Word got out in spite of the fact there was no internet. People would travel from Moncton or Fredericton to perform or attend. Bands on tour had it on their radar if they were rolling through the region -George Jones’s band, Jimmy Rankin, the Pursuit of Happiness….There have been a lot of special guests over the years, but it was the endless stream of local talent that has always sustained Wednesday nights at Olearys; so many fine young artists cut their teeth on that a stage, started bands, debuted new material and found their musical voice.

An acoustic guitar on its own wasn’t going to cut through, so I started playing with other people: a mandolin, congas, bass provided by a guy who did a little local porn acting on the side- I became a band and learned about playing with other people, how to really listen, leaving room within the music.. The lineup has changed over the years, other than the amazing Peter Doyle bringing the passion to the drums all this time. I’ve been fortunate to play with some truly extraordinary people. The music has evolved and tightened to a point where we sound like no one else. I learned to be a musician there, for which I am forever grateful..

I really believe a part of the enduring success of Oleary’s open mics can be attributed to the nature of Saint John itself .There’s something special about this port town, something concurrently tough and lacking pretense and accepting and inclusive. Blue collar, white collar, street people, lawyers, journalists, politicians, hippies, students, cynics, - anyone and everyone was and is welcome. Open mic isn’t the phenomenon and destination it has been in the past, but the fact that 1400 Wednesday’s later we’re still rolling it out seems pretty cool.

Through the nineties I kept making albums and becoming more involved in other aspects of music. There were no outdoor music festivals happening at the time so a couple of friends and I started the Poley Mountain Music Festival, which was a fantastic experience in terms of learning how that world works, from booking to marketing to porto potty wrestling: It was also a valuable lesson in how to lose money in the music business. As a consequence, when I play or attend festivals I am acutely aware of how much time and effort goes into trying to create a good thing, and am extremely grateful.

The initial sense of purpose that had initially propelled me levelled off as time passed, and mutated into a far more long term proposition. I met the woman who would become my wife. Among many other things she has given me, which are outside the purview of this piece, I will be forever grateful to her for introducing me close up in sail to the stunningly beautiful St. John River, an amazing boy of water that runs the length of the province before squeezing full force into the Bay of Fundy.

Sailing on the wide and deep Kennebecasis, swimming and camping along the river, watching the long summer days slip slowly into glorious pastel sunsets, bonfire jams and dreaming of the Mississippi-like paddle boats that used to run up and down the St. John, Kennebecasis and Belleisle Bay spawned a profound desire in me to give something back to this very special river.

Before I blew off grad school and became a carny with Conklin Shows, I had completed a degree in History from the University of New Brunswick and I was determined to finally do something with my education. Belatedly but not accurately fulfilling my mothers’ wishes I researched maps and old books and interviewed people who knew the river, who had spent their lives on it. The “Singin’ Banjo Man”, George Hector, talked about how seeing the riverboats going by the Village of Gagetown when he was a kid and thinking it was a ‘city floating by’. I wrote a song a week for 4 months, covering the unique cable ferries to Babe Ruth fishing it in 1940 to the annual log drives that brought the wood to the mills.

There was nothing mercenary about the project- it really was born of a desire to enhance the appreciation of the St. John- but were some interesting by-products. I got my first nomination for an East Coast Music Award for River Songs. CBC did a one hour feature on the record and the river. (http://www.cbc.ca/landandsea/2010/05/river-songs.html). To see the lyrics for the log driving song “Deep Woods Off” in an elementary school textbook in a school where I was performing in Beijing was simply surreal. And to hear people singing the “Evandale Ferry Two Step” off a sailboat way across the river the year the record came out was a moment that made me feel I’d done something special.

Saint John has always been a place where creativity and the sometimes gritty day to day of life in a port town have co-existed very well. When walking the streets in the uptown at almost any time of day, there’s no shortage of ‘material’ as people go about their lives. There’s something about the brick, salt air and foghorns on the harbour that brings the characters banging into each other’s lives. In the middle of the last century there was an exceptional gathering of talent capturing, ataloguing and mythologizing the city. Internationally respected painters like Miller Britain and Fred Ross and poets and writers such as Kay Smith and Alden Nowlan made names for themselves. Today here is a palpable ‘scene’ going on right now in drama, food, music, comedy and art. 

In 2007 I had an idea for a television show, and because Hemmings House Studios was an up and coming local company with talent and imagination, we were able to make it happen. Grave Concerns was to be a show about pop culture and history, featuring myself as the host, travelling in a hearse to the graves of famous people. The memories of people who knew the deceased would be the oral history component, adding another dimension to the existing information. It was to be a ‘road trip’ series, and in terms of road trips there was no better subject for the pilot than Jack Kerouac. Greg Hemmings, the effervescent uber optimistic owner of Hemmings House, and I set out for Lowell, Massachusetts!

As a tortured teen suffocating in rural New Brunswick, it’s not an exaggeration to say Kerouac’s On the Road gave me hope where none was evident. The grand sweeping sense of adventure embodied in his prose planted the seeds which would much later see me turning down a scholarship for a carnival midway. Greg and I rolled into Lowell with no plan whatsoever, but the fact that the On the Road ‘scroll’ was going to be on display in Lowell for the first time since Kerouac died meant we’d have some pretty special opportunities.

We got to meet and drive around with the legendary musician and composer David Amram, get the tour of Lowell from local Kerouac enthusiasts and be ‘backstage’ at the unveiling for the politicians and ‘A” list people. To spend time with Jack’s best friend/bodyguard Billy Koumentzelis in his home was an unexpected treat-:sitting in the lazy-boy where Jack drank and scribbled notes seemed like other wordly l Later, Billy and his wife came to Saint John for a few days and stayed with us. I had written a song for Jack after we got back from Lowell, and singing it to them at Olearys open mic gave me a profound sense of the circle completing itself.

CBC really liked the idea, bought the pilot and commissioned a couple more episodes. We were told it ‘had legs’. We shot episodes featuring ‘Fighting Fisherman’ Yvon Durelle and the songwriter Gene Maclellan of “Snowbird’ and “Put Your Hand in the Hand” fame. All of the epsiodes aired nationally and were pretty well received, so of course there were no more shows  and the idea died on the budget cutting vine.  It still seems a shame to me that the idea didn’t go further, but I’m really glad we did what we did.

Just as Greg and I started working on Grave Concerns, a tiny twitch began in my left eye. It was barely perceptible initially but over the period of a few months its severity increased to the point where the entire side of my face was spasming and my eye was completely shut for up to 30 seconds at a time. It played hell with my ego, confidence and performances. Eventually it was determined some good old fashioned brain surgery was in order, and after a near death experience that only somewhat mitigated the phenomenon, I had to learn to accept it. One result of coming close to cashing it in was to reevaluate what I was doing in the world of music.

From the first open mic in ‘92, I found myself in the not necessarily complementary roles of both creating and organizing. Open mic let to Poley Mountain Music Festival, led to working on committees for the ECMAs and the CCMAs, becoming AD for the Salty Jam Festival and on and on. I felt it mattered but it was very time consuming. After the spinal fluid coming out of my left nostril was sealed up and  dealt with, I decided whatever hours in the day were available to me would be best spent doing what brought  the greatest sense of happiness and accomplishment, and without a doubt that is writing, creating and sharing those things. That’s pretty much where I’m at now- 10 albums in, playing more than ever and working on some not -songs as well!

So here I am at the top of Grannan Alley looking down at my happening town. The Harbour Station show is out and the streets are heaving with people. Jam space rock careening off the bricks, mixing with jazz floating out of the door of the 5 and Dime, Picaroons has their doors open and the dogs and beer and people are everywhere. Hopscotch is hopping, and they’re lining up outside Oleary’s for the mating rituals of Saturday night. A stunning mauve and orange sunset is teasing its colours on the onto the uptown. Twenty five years in and I love this place more than ever- it has made me who I am.