http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/...tershed-moment
Craig MacInnis
special to the star
In late August 1972, a friend and I boarded a bus in our hometown of St. Catharines for a daylong trip to the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto.
Our specific destination was the CNE Bandshell, where the free concert series that day offered a lineup that included our favourite new group, Brave Belt. (At 15, we had a favourite new group about every month.)
Earlier that year, the Winnipeg act had charted on CHUM-AM’s Top 30 with a wistful folk-pop hit called “Dunrobin’s Gone,” the opening stanza of which began: “Picking wild strawberries and catching the morning dew . . . ”
Well, there was nothing dewy or wistful about the band that lumbered onto the stage that afternoon. Founding member Chad Allan had left (unbeknownst to us) and remaining frontman and guitarist Randy Bachman, ex of The Guess Who, had forged onward with a new version of Brave Belt that included, at the microphone, a gruff, orange-haired man-mountain named C.F. Turner.
When Turner charged headlong into songs like “Waterloo County” and “Gimme Your Money Please,” he sounded like a Harley-Davidson in rev mode, a rough, coughing engine of a voice that suggested, for want of a better term, “human backfire.” What the hell was this?
What it was, history tells us, was the moment when everything changed. Torontonians of a slightly later vintage used to maunder endlessly about that long-ago Police show at the Horseshoe Tavern, attended by a handful of paying customers when Sting and company were mere pop zygotes, in 1978.
Yet no one ever name-checks Brave Belt, who, within months of their Bandshell gig, would morph into one of the greatest — certainly one of the most sternum-bruising — rock bands in the history of music, B.T.O.
Given that Canada had previously been known for relatively “polite” acts such as Gordon Lightfoot and Lighthouse, CanCon nurtured balladeers such as Frank Mills and The Poppy Family, and those rustic, history-obsessed mystics in The Band, early B.T.O. was a revelation: the first irrefutable sign of our burgeoning “hoser culture.”
Bred in a crossfire hurricane of the blues, a cornball dash of Steve Miller Band, a few choice Doobie Brothers’ licks and a Stones-sized guitar wallop, B.T.O. were the specific Canadianization of a universal rock trope. With the Guess Who, Bachman had never managed to sound half this kick-ass, not with control-freak Burton Cummings crooning and capering like a hippie-era Liberace behind his trademark white piano.
And here was the beauty part: despite their Yank and English influences, it seemed impossible to imagine B.T.O. having risen from anywhere but fertile Prairie dirt. Their graceless charm suggested what might result if you went into a lab and mixed a typical Saturday night in Flin Flon with a 2-4 of Canadian, a pair of worn GWG dungarees and a six-pound slab of back bacon.
In hindsight (and this is hardly breaking news), there was always something cartoonish about B.T.O, whose infectious early hits (“Let It Ride,” “Takin’ Care Of Business,” “Roll On Down The Highway”) gave way to a kind of unwitting, oaf-rock parody a few years on. (“You ain’t seen nu-nu-nuthin’ yet!” Actually, Randy, yes, we’ve seen enough. Now stop it.)
But it’s impossible not to credit their brief, volcanic impact on the world stage and the power of their live shows, which, by the mid-’70s, had come to define Everyman Rock for arena loogans from Miami to Moncton.
As the American rock critic Robert Christgau unkindly noted: “In 1972, a rock and roll that spoke up loud and straight for the self-reliant but spiritually unambitious ordinary guy could only have been conceived by a clod like Bachman himself.”
Yeah, fine. So name us a song, even one rendered dog-eared by constant airplay over the past four decades, with better brain-worm DNA than “Takin’ Care Of Business.” Clod? Debatable. But god-like? For sure. God clod!
Forty years from that distant day at the CNE, the one thing that sticks for me is the certainty that 1972, more than any year before or since, was the watershed moment when music seemed to burst out of itself; and not just in one measly genre but across a veritable spectrum from proto-punk to Canadian folk, from prog-rock to sleek art-glam to heavy metal and country rock.
Other years are more famous, like, say, 1969, which saw the release of The Band’s eponymous debut, The Who’s Tommy, The Beatles’ Abbey Road, King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King and The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed. Others vouch for 1991 and the rise of Cobain’s grunge while most in my pre-pensioner cadre (mid-50s) bang their canes for 1977 and the clarifying snark of Elvis Costello, The Buzzcocks and Talking Heads.
I’m down with all of that, but 1972 just seems better, because it was happening on every front. By now, it’s a tired assertion that the punk music of the mid-to-late-1970s detonated everything in its wake (unless you were one of the millions who bought into Fleetwood Mac or Peter Frampton or disco, instead). Here’s a question though. Why was punk’s erasure of everything a good thing? No, really. Remind me.
The year 1972 was not about rolling over your genre enemies or laying waste the sacred canons of “good taste.” It was more about leaving room at the table for everyone, past, present and future.
For those too young or too memory-challenged to recall, here’s a rundown of the landmark albums that came out that year.
In May, the Stones released Exile On Main Street, which, it says here, was their best ever, and certainly their last great album.
David Bowie, the man of a thousand poses, unfurled his greatest persona ever (and the best music of his career), with the release of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.
Genesis, which wouldn’t become a joke until a few years later when Peter Gabriel left the band to that elfin vaudevillian Phil Collins, put out its greatest album in 1972 — Foxtrot, with its surreal, post-apocalyptic song cycle, “Supper’s Ready.”
It was also the year that Roxy Music made its self-titled debut, with the stylish Bryan Ferry proving dinner jackets and archly mannered crooning had a place right in the demented heart of rock.
Across the ocean in North America, Lou Reed, working a different corner of “glam,” would release his greatest album, Transformer, which featured the enduring classics “Perfect Day,” “Walk On The Wild Side” and “Satellite Of Love.”
Elsewhere, 1972 saw the release of: The Eagles’ self-titled debut; T. Rex’s The Slider, Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy A Thrill; Uriah Heep’s Demons & Wizards; Gentle Giant’s berserk-baroque classic Octopus; Deep Purple’s rock masterpiece, Machine Head (hate “Smoke On The Water” all you want; you’ll never get it out of your head); Yes’s prog-rock dazzler, Fragile; and perhaps the greatest power pop album ever recorded, Big Star’s #1 Record, which anticipated the New Wave and every other jangly pop project of the next 40 years.
Canadians didn’t have too shabby a year either. Neil Young’s fourth and arguably greatest studio album, Harvest, was released on Valentine’s Day, 1972. Lightfoot, never much of an “album artist,” had one of his best that year, Don Quixote, which contained two of his career-defining songs, “Alberta Bound” and “Beautiful.” Murray McLauchlan released an eponymous disc, which included his breakout hit, “Farmer’s Song.” And that eternal hippie of our national conscience, Valdy, loomed out of the folk marshes with his album, Country Man, which included his timeless beatdown on rock riff-raff, “Rock And Roll Song.”
Bruce Cockburn has had such a long and varied career it’s probably not fair to single out his 1972 album (one of more than 30 he’s recorded) as the high watermark of his career. But we will anyway. Sunwheel Dance, released in ’72, is the quintessence of Christian pastoral folk rock (a genre Cockburn virtually invented).
Canadian rock bands of the early ’70s have always been easy pickings for the critics, but Crowbar, with their album Heavy Duty, April Wine with On Record and A Foot In Coldwater with their eponymous debut (which contained their indestructible hit song, “(Make Me Do) Anything You Want,” all released the best albums of their erratic careers in 1972.
Ken Dryden once observed that the golden age of hockey was whenever you were 12. By that calculus, my golden age of rock was when I was 15 and a barely known band called Brave Belt exploded my teenaged brain at the CNE Bandshell.
Craig MacInnis is a former music critic for the Toronto Star.
Canadian Music 1972
