THE CREATIVE ARC ~ Derek MacNeill One World Without End ~ What’s that sound? I grow up in Vancouver on the edge of a rainforest. Stands of trees once stood where my parents’ house over looks the mighty Fraser River, the river that carries rainfall from the sky back to the sea. This is a cycle. It’s one of many cycles. Another is the cycle of the seasons. There are four distinct seasons on the west coast of Canada. Several weeks every summer it gets hot enough to play outside with the water hose for hours on end to cool down. Things musical surround me at an early age as a result of my mother’s love for music. It is everywhere in the household: Lerner and Loewe, Rogers and Hammerstein, Patti Page, Roger Williams, Jim Reeves, Don Messer, Jimmie Rodgers, Guy Lombardo, Chet Atkins, that kind of thing. Her record collection is a veritable eclectic circus. Radio reflects the state of transition of the late fifties: every conceivable genre is heard wafting in the backyard on any given Saturday afternoon - on the same station. Dad building the garage hears an array of catchy pop tunes, clever hooks, country corn, folksy platitudes, steamy torch songs and deep, harmonically rich tube recordings from the icons of twentieth century pop culture - Nat ‘King’ Cole, Patsy Cline, Sinatra, Crosby, Cole Porter, Ella Fitzgerald… all giants. I recall the summer day in the twilight of the decade when everything changes. It isn’t Buddy Holly – although he is the best. And it isn’t Elvis, who serves up slim pickings for a kid whose attractive Audrey Hepburn look-a-like older sister doesn’t buy into his, shall we say, pronounced sex appeal. Her preference is more the cleaner college guy look of a Pat Boone or the mellifluous appeal of a Johnny Mathis. No, it is a Texas country artist whose claim to fame are historically based “novelty” songs. And this is exactly how it happens: I am in the back yard building a supposedly waterproof fort after which I sit inside and my older brother douses it with a garden hose until I become as soaked as a dish rag. This constitutes great fun for kids. Funny how some things never change. The electric radio on the back porch is on “SEE- EFF-YOU-ENN… radio 1410…C-FUN.” It is as glorious as the sound of an ice-cream truck. “Splish-splash I was taking a bath….” “… She wore an itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny yellow polka dot bikini,” goofy, derivative songs even to a kid. Then, I hear this sound. It electrifies me. Johnny Horton singing “Battle of New Orleans.” Extra ordinary! I run across the yard, my brother spraying me with cold water as I yell… “stop, stop… not fair, not fair… I gotta hear this song!” I put my ear to the radio and listen to the sonic equivalent of a charged lightening rod pulsating from the speaker. Wow! It is the most unique and compelling sound I hear in my first six years on the planet. And I say to myself, “I want to do this!” Although I didn’t know it at the time and wasn’t aware of it for years to come, every significant decision I make in my life after that is directly or indirectly related to what awakens in me that summer day under an endless blue sky over looking the water’s edge of the Fraser River in an era when a day seems to last forever… or at least until dinnertime. The first decision is to perform. At age seven I step on stage to a packed house in the basement of Fraserview United Church at the Annual Cub-Scouts Father and Son Banquet and pantomime Johnny Horton’s “North to Alaska.” The place goes mad! The following year I have a return engagement “by request” and perform it again and another Johnny Horton classic, “The Mansion You Stole.” A few years later, my generation collectively experiences another awakening when four lads from Liverpool with a startling appearance, a magnificent joie de vivre and a sound like lightening in a bottle perform on the Ed Sullivan Show. How are we to know that our world will never again be the same? These are things that shape young, impressionable lives for all time. Captains who steward entertainment and culture, record company executives whose decisions shape the sonic landscape in which we live and those in the business of entertainment are inclined to think that the almighty buck is the bottom line. Think again. It all starts with the creative act, the genesis, the idea of engagement between the ethereal and the physical, and one that is inexorably borne from the realm of the sacred. Its creation creates us and its creation creates our future. In the beginning there is the word and the word is expressed. And if one is very lucky and if one is very vigilant and if one is prepared to make sacrifice, its arc promises the ride of a lifetime - for better or for worse… for richer or for poorer. In Canada however, for most creative and performing artists it’s the latter. Excerpt from Biography/ /http://www.derekmacneill.com Copyright Derek MacNeill 2003 Two for the Road ~ Formal Guitar Lessons While in elementary school, I begin formal music lessons. Study guitar for two years at Paramount Studios, Vancouver, BC and in grade eight play baritone horn in the David Thompson Secondary School Junior Band: First songwriting attempts at twelve or thirteen produce the unspectacularly memorable lyric “going away, far away… won’t be back for many a-day.” You get the idea. Oh yes, and as no pop lyric is complete without repetition, “…I’m going away, far away… far, far, far away.” Sure enough, the reception does pick up things far away, and soon I am writing songs with lyrics that I have no idea where they may have come from. In my mid teens I wrote, “When I was young/ when I was young/ In Nova Scotia/ I have sung/ Once a week/ In a small café/ Where all the children/ Came to play.” Why Nova Scotia? Why past tense? I don’t know. Creative people tend to have their own “radio station” that they tune into. I would come to know it as my muse. (At a later stage in life I would come to take it for granted, as its currency for its own sake is not valued much in our culture. Its re-discovery, however, serves as a compass that rights the wrongs in times of peril.) Door Number ‘Three Please ~ Rock ‘n Roll In Grade ten we start a rock-n-roll band. I am one of the original members of the Certified Daydream with Gary Hoffard (vocals), Daryl Bennett (drums), Randy Zapp (bass) and of course myself (rhythm/lead guitar, vocals). We play a mixture of fairly edgy top 40 rock-n-roll covers by CCR, the Rolling Stones, Them, Cream, Monkees, Troggs, Beatles and folk-rock stuff a la Buffalo Springfield, Donovan, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and a cat by the name of Bob Dylan, who goes through almost as many stylistic changes as the Beatles. Whenever we practice, there’s an obligatory party that just seems to show up. In our circle of friends, we are the house band. Gary’s great – in fact, that is one of our names for him: ‘Gary the Great’ – he prances around the stage like Mick Jagger II, the roaster in the hen house, thing. But in the end, the Troggs’ Wild Thing and Dovovan’s Isle of Islay are just too far apart for the centre to hold. And to paraphrase George Harrison, all good things must pass. And they do. We play together from grades ten through twelve, and then never play together again. Our great drummer, Daryl Bennett dies a few years later in his mid twenties from cancer after pursuing a career as a cop. Gary goes on to manage a Colour Your World outlet and raise a family with his high school sweetheart. As for Randy, no one knows if he ever does blow himself up with his electronic gizmos on which he attempted to kill us several times on stage. My original songs develop into a decidedly acoustic-folk style fashion. I buy a 12-string guitar that is almost tunable, and that pretty much marks the end of the band. The Certified Daydream is over. New songs include Blow Rain On Me, Carousel Of Mirrors, Song to a Seagull, When I was Young, I Never Expected To Stay For Dinner and Wine, Ballad in Em (everybody writes one of these, don’t they?) and many more. Long live the Certified Daydream! Go Fourth ~ Community College: (football-hockey 101) After High School I enroll at Vancouver (City) Community College in the last year at the old Oak Street and King Edward campus. First year English instructor is a rumpled, middle-aged self-deprecating man, one Charles Nelson. He cuts a character right out of a Katherine Parker short story or a Steinbeck novel. He is brilliant - a blue-collared failed novelist who looks more like a construction foreman than a sensitive writer possessing the keenest sense of observation. His encourages me to continue to focus on writing. Meanwhile, a mystic lecturer on campus was turning everybody’s heads in music and art history. For Dick Grooms, the subject matter was just a convenient topic from which to expound on the metaphysical. He is an affront to everything that is deemed “normal.” He is fantastic. His lectures are live theatre and his props are the myths and symbols of ages past and present. He reads culture like a book. He constructs HIS- and HER-story. Heavily into the arts, but football-hockey 101 is my specialty in between classes. Form the “Havoc Line” with Hobbs and Risinski, and terrorize apposing teams when our team the Cash Acme Comets goes to the city finals and loses two to one in overtime. (I hit the goal post in the last minute of the third.) Songs from this era include: Just A Little While, Early Bird, Theresa, Act II; Scene IV; The Traveller’s Inn, Took a Trip to Seattle, Now I’m Going Away (recurring theme), and many more. Five Stars ~ Europe or bust Leave school for one year - work at Weldwood, a plywood mill in Quesnel, BC. So hot working around the presses, I go home and slip out of my work pants without undoing the belt and fall into bed. Exhilarating summer, loneliness like I’d never felt. Team Canada defeats the Soviets that September. With $680 cdn saved from summer wages I leave for Europe with fellow Havoc Liner Rick Sinke in the fall of 1972. Sing “O Canada” with expatriate Canadians in a bar in Germany. Prost. Drink wine on top of a monumental statue in Florence, Italy with Risinski and some drunk American. Start writing Angel’s Song at our villa on the Costa del Sol, Spain, which thirteen years later evolves into the seminal Torremolinos (Geography of the Mind, 1986). The villa costs me, Risinski and “The Kid,” (Richard F. Burke Jr.) $25 cdn a month! (Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, fully furnished – the whole meal deal. Unbelievable.) We are young Lions. Throughout it all we see Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris, El Greco’s work in Toledo, Spain, and unsuccessfully scale the Acropolis walls at midnight for a chance to see the Parthenon under a full moon above the city of Athens. We employ the buddy system, which probably saves our lives a couple of times without us ever knowing it. We leave Vancouver as kids, we return as young men of the world. New songs include: Some Paradise, Madrid; Angel’s Song, Song from the Ocean, Torremolinos; Barbara, Aghios Nicolas, Crete, Candle Bearer, You Don’t Have To Be Alone, I Think It’s Fine, Do you Still Love Me Norwegian Girl? Friends and Other Things, How Many Times? Sixth Sense ~ Return of the Warrior-Poet Upon returning to Canada, I find myself in Montreal on several occasions. I attend a seminar with the legendary jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie at the University of Montreal between December 1973 and January ’74. Very hip times, they were. I brave to ask him one question: what is the difference between writing and performing? “Ya see it’s the same thing, in a way, isn’t it? Ya create the composition; well ya create the performance, too. A performance is a creation…just a different spin on the same thing… ya know what I mean?” And I say I do, but I don’t know because I don’t have the experience to know. Now I know, know what he means, know it’s true. His conversation drifts away to answer another question. He plays the questions like the response is a musical phrase… you either know what he’s saying, or… After the seminar, we attend his concert performance. His cheeks blow up like two balloons. The musical syntax, sonic articulation and rhythmic energy are way beyond anything I ever heard. I practice the guitar for hours and hours. In Vancouver, I walk past Queen Elizabeth Theatre day after day on my way to a summer job and vow to play on its vast stage someday. Study the Montreal poets, especially Leonard Cohen (who cuts an admirable swath) and Irving Layton in addition to the English poets Keats, Blake and John Donne. With the likes of Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Don McLean a world community gathers anywhere there is an acoustic guitar or a piano. Its inconceivable that a world might exist without music the masses creates for itself. It is a golden age – and we know it. Seventh Heaven ~ Eagle Beaver: Acoustic-Progressive-Folk Return to formal studies at the University of British Columbia as an undergraduate in the creative writing department. Study under Doug Bankson, Bob Harlow, George McQuirter, Jake Zilber, Jerry Newman and the late Pat Lowther. Along with Glen Sherman and Ann Griffen, form the folk ensemble Eagle Beaver – primarily a very progressive acoustically based ensemble whose performances are centred on original songs. We dominate the campus folk music scene during my third year with much publicity, a special following, intense practice and many performances. Our year culminates with a starring performance in NOON TUNES, a 3-day concert series at the SUB auditorium featuring Pied Pumpkin, Joni Taylor and Eagle Beaver. See my first publication of poems in the UBSYSSY, “Gardener’s Poem” among others. Songs include I Wait For You, Little Lady Blues, I Promise If I Give You My Love, Wednesday 2 am, Ballad of Pokey Allen and more. Eighth Wonder ~ Return to Europe Live, perform and work in Scotland, England, France and Greece with visits to several countries throughout Europe 1976 - 1977. Perform with Charlie Cowie and his entourage in southwest Scotland. Invited to serve as house musician at the Crown Hotel in Portpatrck the following March. Noted songs: Louisa (Geography of the Mind), Chartres, France), and several others. Trace the roots of Romanesque and Gothic architecture and journey across Western Europe to Italy and Greece. Live in Thera, Santorini for much of the winter. Write Notre Dame de Chartres. Nine lives ~ Let the Games Begin Graduate from UBC with a bachelors of fine arts degree while performing at the old Medieval Inn in Gastown. Perform at a slough of places throughout BC and Alberta. Perform on two Variety Club Telethons from Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre before a live television audience. Sing “I Wait for You.” Ronnie Prophet ushers me off stage after one song, due to outrageous monitor mix that almost blows me off the stage during one of the shows. “10” ~ Launch Water’s Edge Studio Launch Water’s Edge Studio at the old house on East 37th, 1980. Production work includes numerous recording projects featuring singer-songwriters, musicians, video productions such as “The Forgotten Paradise” and sound designs for a stream of stage productions such as Kico Gonzalez’s magnificent Kitsilano Theatre Company. Let it Ride, Girl in the Field, Misery, Waiting all Night (for this dance) and Fire in the Basement are indicative of this era. Release “Geography of the Mind” in 1986 at the height of Vancouver’s Expo 86. It receives solid reviews including the prestigious Canadian Musician magazine. One critic generously proclaims MacNeill as the Monet of the recording industry. Okay, that’s cool. Eleventh Floor ~ Sky’s the Limit: Rogers Pass Arrive at Glacier Park Lodge in Rogers Pass, BC for a five-week engagement. Stay eleven years. What a paradise deep in the mountains! The long trek sometimes surprises, and this is no exception. Days hiking and climbing mountains, doing photography and doing research on the history leads to evenings performances of songs and talking about the area to curious tourists. Most people release an album, go on tour and market it in major centres; I release “Geography of the Mind” and disappear from the radar screen. Career suicide? Probably, but it is magical, It is a Brigadoon. I write/produce two additional documentary style videos on Rogers Pass and Glacier National Park that are featured in the Parks Canada Rogers Pass Centre and at evening shows at the hotel, “The Incredible Rogers Pass” and “Rogers Pass, Wilderness Skiing the Forgotten Paradise.” And on the album one song more than any other tells the story of what many British Columbians have been accustomed to in the summer growing up and working in small town BC: Forever When We Are Young. Twelve Apostles ~ Hiatus At some point in time, one needs change. Having reached that point, I return to Vancouver with the intention of broadening my horizons in a very specific discipline: business. Recognizing that financial concerns are the greatest challenge to the artistic experience, personal or otherwise, I pursue a new business profile and forge a career downtown Vancouver in the financial district. At first I am exhilarated. The suit and tie thing is very cool for a while. It is my feeling that the well is dry and new challenges exist elsewhere. It is my intention never to return to the creative or performing arts, except perhaps in an administration role. But in time, I am aware that making nothing but money best suits those whose imaginations are, hmmm, less bountiful. Contrary to everything I’ve come to understand, business - not the creative arts - is a playland, and the real cutting edge in life is the ability to live in the moment, and to appreciate the mystery that each particular moment offers and reveals to those who are aware. Not an easy task in these most demanding times. And so, and most surprising to me, after eight years downtown, I find myself gravitating towards the course that was clear to me so many years earlier when I heard Johnny Horton sing “Battle of New Orleans.” Baker’s Dozen ~ Re-Awakening: Welcome to the 21st Century I’m invited to join the board of directors of Opera Breve 1998, preside as president in 2000. I chair a series of meetings for the UBC theatre, film and creative writing Alumni Association, 2000, and then re-launch Water’s Edge Productions in 2000 with a magazine article series, a CD release of Geography of the Mind and a manuscript containing a compilation of songs, poems, articles and stories the forms “The Nature of Light on Skin.” Little do I know that when I begin writing again, an entire world presents itself to me anew and overflows with abundance. Clearly, the well is not dry any more. The new songs (and all works) are rich beyond my previous expectations, and I’m currently in pre-production for a new series of CD releases that will contain my best work to date. Of this, I have no doubt. I look forward to sharing this new body of work with those who love the kind of music I produce. In addition to launching the Water’s Edge Productions Songwriting Award in 2002, of which Erin Lee is a wonderfully gifted recipient, I have several other projects I am producing. Perhaps most noteworthy, but not to the exclusion of the other fine productions, is the Rick Taylor guitar instrumental project. At time of writing, we are 95% done with the bed tracks and are now preparing for the mixing and mastering stages. All tracks are recorded live. Clean, pristine, transparent and harmonically rich, let me assure, you will never in your life have heard a guitar as we have for you. Not only is Rick a Canadian guitar playing treasure, this work is going to be regarded for years to come as one of the quintessential Canadian Acoustic Guitar CDs. In the mean time, there is more work to be done. Another collection of new songs, essays, poems and at least a couple of screenplays are already being prepared, and it’s my fervent wish that one day when you read this you will know that I was thinking about someone just like you, and hoping you’d find a new creative friend in the galaxy of opportunity that might enhance your view of the world - and augment that which we conveniently deem as our life. Derek MacNeill Vancouver, BC, Canada June 4, 2003 By Derek MacNeill Excerpt from Biography/www.derekmacneill.com Copyright 2003 Derek MacNeill, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Back to Top