Garnet Rogers – Night Drive: Travels with My Brother

Night Drive: Travels with My Brother

A Memoir by Garnet Rogers

Tickle Shore Publishing

751 pages

garnetrogers.com

I first met and became friendly with the late Stan Rogers at the Mariposa Folk Festival in June 1975. We were friends for eight years – until he lost his life, along with 22 others, on June 2, 1983 in an airplane fire that forced an Air Canada flight en route from Texas to Toronto to make an emergency landing at the Cincinnati airport as Stan was returning home from the Kerrville Folk Festival. Over those eight years that I knew him, Stan rose from relative obscurity to become one of Canada’s greatest folksingers and songwriters.

About a decade after his death, a highly disappointing biography called An Unfinished Conversation: The Life and Music of Stan Rogers (now renamed Northwest Passage) by Chris Gudgeon was published. As I noted in 1993 in Sing Out! magazine, “As a friend, colleague and admirer of Stan Rogers, I looked forward to this book. I've long thought that someday someone will write a great book about his life and music. Unfortunately, despite its good intentions, this book isn't it.”

Well, it took another 23 years, but that great book about Stan’s life and music has finally arrived in the form of Night Drive: Travels with My Brother by Garnet Rogers. There is no one who knew Stan better. They grew up together – Stan was about six years older – and spent the last decade of Stan’s life constantly traveling together back and forth across Canada and through the United States, usually with a bass player in tow, as bandmates. On many occasions over the years, both publicly from the stage, and privately over late night beers in various locales when we’d talk about how things were going, I heard Stan say that Garnet was his best friend and most important musical influence.

Garnet Rogers and Stan Rogers (stanrogers.net)

In 85 short chapters, each a story in its own right, Garnet describes his years with Stan – from their youth in a working class family to their years on the road when there wasn’t much of a folk circuit – in vivid detail, with sometimes brutal honesty, and often laugh-out-loud humor. Despite its length (and the actual weight of holding up such a long book as I read), Night Drive: Travels with My Brother remained a compelling page-turner from start to finish.

I knew Stan and Garnet during the years when most of the book takes place. I was there for a few of the incidents Garnet writes about (not just in Montreal, but also in Philadelphia, Toronto, and at various folk festivals in Canada and the U.S.). I also knew (know) many of the people who weave in and out of the story and so many of them come to life on these pages with great authenticity. Reading the book put me right back in those years.

In the years after his death, Stan became a sort of mythologized hero figure. And while Gudgeon’s earlier book fed some of the myths, Night Drive: Travels with My Brother tells the real story of how hard it was to build and sustain a folk music career. Stan, and Garnet – and their parents, Valerie and Al Rogers, who put up their life savings to bankroll an independent record company that they ran from their home – as well as many peers who come and go through the story, cobbled together careers that may have included some terrific folk festivals in the summer months but also included long periods of almost no work or months of travelling from small coffeehouses to shitty bars and nobody-cares college gigs.

There are great stories about so many of those gigs (one of which concerns Stan’s first Montreal gig at the Golem, the folk club that I ran in the 1970s and ‘80s; more on that later) and there are so many stories about them, and about the road trips in getting to them, and the adventures and misadventures along the way.

Garnet writes with great affection about many friends who became part of the story – including fellow performers and folk music presenters. There were, of course, others who don’t come off well and in some cases he left them nameless, or in at least one particular case, used a thinly disguised anagram of the fellow’s first name. I recognized some of the unnamed people as people I knew and understood why Garnet left them unnamed.

While many of the negative depictions in the book matched my own memories of the individuals – including a well-meaning but incompetent agent I had warned Stan about before he began working with her on his early U.S. tours – one negative depiction in Night Drive: Travels with My Brother that made me somewhat uncomfortable was of Paul Mills, the CBC radio producer and guitarist (a.k.a. Curly Boy Stubbs), who produced all but one of Stan’s albums. For whatever reason, Garnet and Paul never got along and that is reflected in Garnet’s descriptions of the recording sessions and of the occasional live gigs when Paul became part of the onstage band. While I wasn’t actually at any of the recording sessions and have no dispute with Garnet’s own impressions, Stan always seemed enthused about his recording projects when I’d chat with him about what he’d recorded and what was coming out next. Back in the day, I only heard Stan speak glowingly about Paul, as a producer, as a musician and as a friend. I still listen to and appreciate the records they made together.

Earlier, I mentioned the brutal honesty employed by Garnet in telling the story of his years on the road with Stan. This is reflected in his descriptions of the inevitable conflicts borne of too many hours in a day and too many days of the weeks, months and years they spent cooped up travelling long distances on the road, too many nights in cheap motels, and too many bad gigs along the way. Garnet also writes honestly of the copious amounts of substance abuse (mostly alcohol) used to both alleviate the boredom of life on the road and to self-medicate for personal problems including Garnet’s clinical depression and Stan’s marital tensions.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the early chapters in Night Drive: Travels with My Brother is about Stan’s first gig at the Golem, the Montreal folk club I took over running in 1974. I met and first heard Stan at the 1975 Mariposa Folk Festival and booked him to play at the Golem on the first open date that fit both of our schedules. That turned out to be a weekend in February of 1976 on what turned out to be the coldest weekend of that winter (and, perhaps, the coldest weekend of all the years I ran the Golem). The description of coping with the cold in a car with no heat is classic.

Garnet did make a mistake in talking about the format of Golem gigs in the 1970s. Noting that the Golem was in Hillel House – the Jewish student centre at McGill University – he described the gig as being two nights: Friday and Sunday nights with a night off on Saturday because shows could not take place there on the Jewish Sabbath. It was actually a three-night gig: Thursday, Saturday and Sunday nights. The Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Fridays and ends after sundown on Saturdays – so Friday was the night off.

In early-1976, Stan was still a relatively unknown artist. Fogarty’s Cove, his first LP was still a year-and-a-half away. So the lack of fame and the intense cold combined to keep the crowds tiny over those three nights. Garnet remembers 13 people over two nights while I think it was closer to 20 people over three nights – numbers, I guess, that are close enough for folk music.

Garnet also tells a tall tale about Frank Wakefield playing at the Golem. A pretty funny story but totally apocryphal.

Mike Regenstreif and Garnet Rogers in Montreal (2006)

I had two stints running the Golem, from 1974 to 1976, and from 1981 to 1987. I had inherited the Thursday-Saturday-Sunday format from Saul Markowicz, who had founded the Golem in 1973. When I returned in 1981, it was for one-night gigs with popular artists doing two concerts in one night. When Stan played his final gig at the Golem in December 1982, he was selling out two shows a night. He was scheduled to return to the Golem again the following fall. Garnet, himself, played the Golem regularly as a solo artist after Stan's death.

Night Drive: Travels with My Brother made me laugh frequently and made me cry occasionally as it brought back some memories of my own and let me share in the so many more memories of the man who knew Stan Rogers better than anyone.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Stan Rogers – Northwest Passage; From Fresh Water

STAN ROGERS
Northwest Passage
Fogarty’s Cove/Borealis 
borealisrecords.com/artists/stan-rogers/

STAN ROGERS
From Fresh Water
Fogarty’s Cove/Borealis
 borealisrecords.com/artists/stan-rogers/

Northwest Passage, first released in 1981, and From Fresh Water, first released posthumously in 1984, were the final two albums recorded by Stan Rogers for Fogarty’s Cove, his family-owned record label. They are also the final two installments in Borealis Records’ project of releasing remastered versions of the original albums from the tragically too-short career of the artist I’ve long thought to be Canada’s greatest folksinger and songwriter.

These albums also continue Stan’s ongoing project to create song-cycles set in Canada’s various regions – something he began to do on Fogarty’s Cove when he wrote and sang about Atlantic Canada and its people. On Northwest Passage, he wrote and sang about the prairies and the north; on From Fresh Water, about Ontario, particularly the Great Lakes region.

Northwest Passage begins with the anthemic title song, a vivid portrait of Stan driving west across the country recalling the early explorers who searched for the elusive Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the arctic – centuries before global warming actually seems to have made a Northwest Passage feasible. Sung a cappella, the powerful song has proven to be one of the most enduring classics in a song catalog filled with enduring classics.

On other songs, Stan writes as empathetically about the people of the west and north as he’d already done so successfully about Atlantic Canadians.

In “The Field Behind the Plow,” he sings to and about an everyman farmer insightfully and authentically capturing his hopes and dreams, and his sometimes cruel realities.

In “Lies,” he sings, again insightfully and authentically, about a farmer’s wife and the hard life she leads. I’ve always thought of “The Field Behind the Plow” and “Lies” as companion songs married to each other.

“Night Guard” is a modern-day cowboy song worthy of Ian Tyson about a rodeo cowboy – now too old for the game – making a living protecting a cattle herd from rustlers, and “Canol Road” is an exciting, vividly cinematic song about a guy in the Yukon, crazy with cabin fever, who just had to get out and get that drink, no matter what the conditions, and no matter the price he’d have to pay.

A couple of the best songs on Northwest Passage blend the west with Stan’s eastern roots. In “The Idiot,” Stan sings in character as one of the countless Maritime boys who left home to work in the Alberta oil fields. And in “Free In the Harbour,” he sings about Newfoundlanders, stopping in Winnipeg on their way to Alberta, or sitting in the taverns of Edmonton and Calgary, nostalgically remembering home, “where the whales make free in the harbour.”

From Fresh Water begins with “White Squall,” which Stan sings from the perspective of an experienced Great Lakes shipman, used to the fury of lake storms, commenting on a much younger mate who, tragically, didn’t heed his warnings.

One of the finest songs on the album is “Lock-keeper,” sung from the perspective of such a man on the St. Lawrence Seaway. In some ways, I think “Lock-keeper” is related to “Northwest Passage.” In the latter song, Stan sings about leaving “a settled life” for the life of the adventurer. But, in “Lock-keeper,” he sings about the greatness of that settled life – of love and family – in contrast to the ultimate loneliness of the adventurer.

One of the most powerful songs on the album is “Flying,” ostensibly a hockey song about all the young players who dream of making it to the NHL while only a small, select few ever do. In reality, it’s an allegory about reaching for any kind of a star knowing so few will get there.

And, in a very sadly, prophetic line in “Flying,” Stan sang about “go up flying and going home dying” – something that tragically happened to him just a few months after writing the song.

Other favorites include “Tiny Fish for Japan,” which captures the feelings of Great Lakes fishers whose catch is bound for foreign markets, “The Last Watch,” a sad lament about a lake steamer about to be scrapped, and “The House of Orange,” a quiet, but very powerful commentary about the refusing, as an Irish descendant, to be part of the centuries-old conflict in Ireland that still raged in 1983.

As with Fogarty’s Cove, Turnaround and Between the Breaks … Live, as well as The Very Best of Stan Rogers, the remastered sound makes Northwest Passage and From Fresh Water sound better and fresher than they did as LPs or in their first issue on CD and are potent reminders of the tremendous singer and songwriter lost in that airplane fire almost 30 years ago. He was an artist with so much more to accomplish.

Kudos to Borealis Records for reissuing the albums, to Paul Mills, who produced the albums and supervised the reissue remastering, and to Ariel Rogers, Stan’s widow, who has kept the music in print over these many years.

I think it’s also important to acknowledge the important contributions of Garnet Rogers, Stan’s younger brother, and Valerie Rogers, his mother.

Garnet’s playing and/or singing can be heard on almost every track of all five of the albums – as it was at almost every gig Stan played in the last 10 years of his life. On more than one occasion, over a late-night beer, Stan told me that Garnet was his biggest musical influence.

And Valerie, who passed away this past summer, was the driving force behind getting most of these records made and into the hands of his growing legion of fans during his touring years. Stan expressed his tremendous appreciation for his mother’s efforts at virtually every concert I saw him do – at least since Turnaround came out in 1978.

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--Mike Regenstreif