LITERARY LOCATION: Desolation Sound Marine Park, at the confluence of Malaspina Inlet and Homfray Channel, 32 km north of Powell River. Park created in 1973; named Desolation Sound by Captain George Vancouver in 1792.
Ever since his father started developing 38 lots of private property on five kilometres of oceanfront next to the Desolation Sound Marine Park, at the northern end of the Strait of Georgia, in the 1970s, former pop musician Grant Lawrence was compiling experiences for his memoir, Adventures In Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound (Harbour $26.95). Few stories are more memorable than 'Smoke on the Water', Lawrence's recollection of attending a nude potluck as a boy. Feeling obliged to accept an invitation from the "left-over hippie" Aldo, who lived only five minutes boat ride away, all four fully-clothed Lawrence family members were aghast to discover the spectacle of innocent, pot-smoking, naked bodies cavorting everywhere in the adjoining bay. Lawrence's book received the Bill Duthie's Booksellers' Choice Award and was nominated for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the richest annual literary award for a book of nonfiction published in Canada.
ENTRY
In Lawrence's second book, The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie (Douglas & McIntyre, 2013) the narrative passes back and forth between tales of Grant's life and a history of hockey. It reached the top of the BC Bestsellers List in November of 2013 and won the Bill Duthie Bookseller's Choice Award in 2014.
According to publicity materials: "He was an undersized child who wore thick glasses and knee-braces, and he understood, first-hand, what it was like to be in the attack zone of the hockey-obsessed jocks at his school. For Grant, bullying and the violent game of hockey seemed to go hand-in-hand. Yet he was also enamoured with the sport, and eventually learned that playing goalie on a hockey team isn't all that different from playing in a band and that artistically-minded wimps find just as much joy in the game as their meathead counterparts."
Grant Lawrence rose to prominence as the host of his CBC Radio 3 Podcast with Grant Lawrence and Grant Lawrence Live on CBC Radio 3 and Sirius 86. He was also frequently heard on various CBC Radio One programs such as DNTO, Spark, All Points West and On the Coast. He still visits the family cabin in Desolation Sound during the summer.
As a pop music aficionado, Grant Lawrence must have known before he decided to publish his memoir of being lead singer for his widely-travelled, never widely-touted rock band, The Smugglers, that he had some hard acts to follow. Having co-founded the Hard Rock Miners in 1987, Michael Turner had already set the bar high with Hard Core Logo (Arsenal), later made into a movie. John Armstrong's Guilty Of Everything (New Star, 2001) was shortlisted for a B.C. Book Prize for recalling his exploits as Buck Cherry in Vancouver's old-school punk scene with The Modernettes. And Lawrence would have been aware of the shadow cast by DOA frontman Joe Keithley's memoir I, Shithead (Arsenal, 2004), now into its third printing. The good news is Lawrence's reworking of his tour diaries for Dirty Windshields: The Best and Worst of the Smugglers Tour Diaries (D&M $26.95) contains some of the best and funniest writing you're going to find just about anywhere. Of course, there's no shortage of dismal circumstances and raucous tomfoolery, but Lawrence's description of the band's arrival in Los Angeles during the aftermath of race riots, in response to the acquittal of police for beating Rodney King, is riveting. "Los Angeles reeked. The stench was a disturbing combination of exhaust fumes, campfire smoke and burning plastic...." This book cannot be dismissed as a self-indulgent paean to boy-band glory days; it's a finely edited, very smart and wholesome On The Road. Okay, so Jack Kerouac didn't come home to his doting Mom and Dad, but Lawrence has his own style, his own adventures. Even if The Smugglers were mediocre at best, the writing deserves a chorus of praise.
SEE REVIEW OF DIRTY WINDSHIELDS TOWARDS BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and other stories from Desolation Sound
BOOKS:
Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nudist Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound (Harbour, 2010) $26.95 9781550175141
The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie (Douglas & McIntyre 2013) $26.95 9781771000772
Dirty Windshields: The Best and Worst of the Smugglers Tour Diaries (Douglas & McIntyre, 2017) $26.95 9781771621489
Bailey the Bat and the Tangled Moose (Orca, 2021) $19.95 h.c. 9781459827295
Return to Solitude: More Desolation Sound Adventures with the Cougar Lady, Russell the Hermit, the Spaghetti Bandit and Others by Grant Lawrence (Harbour, 2022) $26.95 9781550179712
AWARDS:
Lawrence won the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award twice for: Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound (2011) and The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie (2014).
[BCBW 2023]
Ever since his father started developing 38 lots of private property on five kilometres of oceanfront next to the Desolation Sound Marine Park, at the northern end of the Strait of Georgia, in the 1970s, former pop musician Grant Lawrence was compiling experiences for his memoir, Adventures In Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound (Harbour $26.95). Few stories are more memorable than 'Smoke on the Water', Lawrence's recollection of attending a nude potluck as a boy. Feeling obliged to accept an invitation from the "left-over hippie" Aldo, who lived only five minutes boat ride away, all four fully-clothed Lawrence family members were aghast to discover the spectacle of innocent, pot-smoking, naked bodies cavorting everywhere in the adjoining bay. Lawrence's book received the Bill Duthie's Booksellers' Choice Award and was nominated for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the richest annual literary award for a book of nonfiction published in Canada.
ENTRY
In Lawrence's second book, The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie (Douglas & McIntyre, 2013) the narrative passes back and forth between tales of Grant's life and a history of hockey. It reached the top of the BC Bestsellers List in November of 2013 and won the Bill Duthie Bookseller's Choice Award in 2014.
According to publicity materials: "He was an undersized child who wore thick glasses and knee-braces, and he understood, first-hand, what it was like to be in the attack zone of the hockey-obsessed jocks at his school. For Grant, bullying and the violent game of hockey seemed to go hand-in-hand. Yet he was also enamoured with the sport, and eventually learned that playing goalie on a hockey team isn't all that different from playing in a band and that artistically-minded wimps find just as much joy in the game as their meathead counterparts."
Grant Lawrence rose to prominence as the host of his CBC Radio 3 Podcast with Grant Lawrence and Grant Lawrence Live on CBC Radio 3 and Sirius 86. He was also frequently heard on various CBC Radio One programs such as DNTO, Spark, All Points West and On the Coast. He still visits the family cabin in Desolation Sound during the summer.
As a pop music aficionado, Grant Lawrence must have known before he decided to publish his memoir of being lead singer for his widely-travelled, never widely-touted rock band, The Smugglers, that he had some hard acts to follow. Having co-founded the Hard Rock Miners in 1987, Michael Turner had already set the bar high with Hard Core Logo (Arsenal), later made into a movie. John Armstrong's Guilty Of Everything (New Star, 2001) was shortlisted for a B.C. Book Prize for recalling his exploits as Buck Cherry in Vancouver's old-school punk scene with The Modernettes. And Lawrence would have been aware of the shadow cast by DOA frontman Joe Keithley's memoir I, Shithead (Arsenal, 2004), now into its third printing. The good news is Lawrence's reworking of his tour diaries for Dirty Windshields: The Best and Worst of the Smugglers Tour Diaries (D&M $26.95) contains some of the best and funniest writing you're going to find just about anywhere. Of course, there's no shortage of dismal circumstances and raucous tomfoolery, but Lawrence's description of the band's arrival in Los Angeles during the aftermath of race riots, in response to the acquittal of police for beating Rodney King, is riveting. "Los Angeles reeked. The stench was a disturbing combination of exhaust fumes, campfire smoke and burning plastic...." This book cannot be dismissed as a self-indulgent paean to boy-band glory days; it's a finely edited, very smart and wholesome On The Road. Okay, so Jack Kerouac didn't come home to his doting Mom and Dad, but Lawrence has his own style, his own adventures. Even if The Smugglers were mediocre at best, the writing deserves a chorus of praise.
SEE REVIEW OF DIRTY WINDSHIELDS TOWARDS BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and other stories from Desolation Sound
BOOKS:
Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nudist Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound (Harbour, 2010) $26.95 9781550175141
The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie (Douglas & McIntyre 2013) $26.95 9781771000772
Dirty Windshields: The Best and Worst of the Smugglers Tour Diaries (Douglas & McIntyre, 2017) $26.95 9781771621489
Bailey the Bat and the Tangled Moose (Orca, 2021) $19.95 h.c. 9781459827295
Return to Solitude: More Desolation Sound Adventures with the Cougar Lady, Russell the Hermit, the Spaghetti Bandit and Others by Grant Lawrence (Harbour, 2022) $26.95 9781550179712
AWARDS:
Lawrence won the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award twice for: Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound (2011) and The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie (2014).
[BCBW 2023]
Articles: 3 Articles for this author
Staebler Prize Nomination
Press Release (2011)
Grant Lawrence's debut book, Adventures In Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound ($26.95, Harbour Publishing), has dominated the BC Bestseller list for much of 2011, and Lawrence was honoured earlier this year with a prestigious BC Book Prize, the Bill Duthie's Booksellers' Choice Award. Now his book has been recognized on the national stage with a nomination for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. The $10,000 award, administered by Wilfrid Laurier University, encourages and recognizes Canadian writers for a first or second work of creative non-fiction that includes a Canadian locale and/or significance.
The other two books shortlisted for the prize are Jew and Improved: How Choosing to be Chosen Made Me a Better Man by Benjamin Errett (Harper Collins) and Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery by Helen Waldstein Wilkes (Athabasca University Press).
Award juror and Laurier professor Tanis MacDonald said the books shortlisted for this year's award are different from each other in tone, style and subject matter, but similar in that they all address issues of defining or redefining the self through a search for family. "Each book in its own way is about finding space for history and finding oneself inside that history," said MacDonald.
Vancouver resident Grant Lawrence is a popular voice across Canada as host of the CBC Radio 3 Podcast and Grant Lawrence Live, and through his appearances on various CBC Radio One programs such as DNTO, Spark, All Points West and On the Coast. Fans of independent music tune in to his podcast or turn up an old song from a record by The Smugglers, Grant's defunct rock band.
In Adventures in Solitude we meet the childhood Grant, a self-proclaimed nerd donning knee braces and coke-bottle glasses who was reluctantly dragged each summer to a piece of land his father bought next to BC's Desolation Sound Marine Park in the 1970s--just in time to encounter the gun-toting cougar lady, left-over hippies, outlaw bikers and an assortment of other characters. It was these early experiences, many alongside an influential hermit named Russell, which led Grant to a life of music and journalism far away from Desolation Sound, only to return as an adult and discover the magic and beauty the place has to offer. In Adventures in Solitude Grant regales us with tales of "going bush," the tempting dilemma of finding an unguarded grow-op, and other laugh-out-loud stories from this unique place. He still spends much of each summer at his cabin in the Sound.
The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie
Review (2014)
Fans of Grant Lawrence's first book, Adventures in Solitude or his alt-rock band, The Smugglers, will enjoy his trademark blend of humour and hyperbole in The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie by Grant Lawrence (D&M $26.95). But it's also an honest, introspective look at childhood bullying and the scars left unhealed in adulthood as well as the grip that hockey has on our national psyche and our sometimes appalling behaviour as fans. The upside is an insider's account of the Exclaim! Hockey Summit of the Arts, wherein a national gathering of artistically inclined individuals (Sam Roberts Band, Sloan, the Rheostatics, Sean Cullen, Patti Schmidt, the Sadies and others) meet in team uniforms to play hockey and music and to party in "a frozen nirvana.";
Chapters devoted to the author's undersized childhood, cursed with glasses in Grade 2 and a bizarre condition wherein his knee-caps painfully dislocate without warning, set readers up for a decidedly non-athletic path. Lawrence gravitated to the nerds in the school library but watching the Vancouver Canucks with his Dad ignited the fan fuse. The well-designed book is illustrated with photos, quirky line drawings and pearls of wisdom from great goalies, (cleverly structured in First, Second and Third Period eras and Overtime.)
Some volatile goalies featured in Between the Pipes might have benefited from reading this thoughtful book, seasoned with the tears of a clown.
978-1771000772
***
In Between the Pipes: A Revealing Look At Hockey's Legendary Goalies by Randi Druzin (Greystone Books $19.95), veteran sports writer Randi Druzin showcases twelve outstanding NHL goalies, with a foreword by eminence grise, Roy MacGregor, who writes:
"This is a storyteller's book, and as such it is also a reader's book. You don't have to be a goaltender to enjoy it; you just have to be a reader who loves words, loves sports and appreciates the sorts of insights that will never be found in 140 characters or less.";
Good hockey writing manages to synthesize and emulate the adrenalin and energy of the game, the tragedy of career-ending injuries and the comedy of wags like Gump Worsley and Bernie Parent.
Druzin gives us gems like: "The butterflies in his stomach became pterodactyls"; and "(the defenceman) was patrolling the blue line with the diligence of an East German border guard.";
And "...the team was as vigorous as a small dead animal. Squeamish spectators looked away.";
Readers will appreciate that goalies suffer extensive physical damage from pucks fired at 100 mph or more, the honed, knife-edges of skates and dog-piles of huge, angry men in the crease. Then there is the mental and emotional stress of carrying much of the game's outcome on their shoulders.
Druzin presents her iconic goalies with a key personality trait or role within the team.. For example, Terry Sawchuk the Tortured Soul came to hockey from working class Winnipeg where he and his pals used a "prairie puck"; aka frozen horse dung. He was a cranky chain smoker who lived with chronic pain. His life story is a tragedy, from his sad childhood to his alcohol-fuelled death at age forty, except for his records which lasted for decades and a posthumous Canadian stamp-plus Winnipeg's Terry Sawchuk Memorial Arena.
Lorne "Gump"; Worsley may have said it best when asked about Terry Sawchuk: "He was one of the great ones, but a strange man... He drove his own team-mates nuts too ... maybe that's the mark of a good goal tender. We're not well, you know, or we wouldn't be playing the position.";
Glenn Hall the Trooper was famous for barfing into a bucket before every game, the Lawrence Olivier of net-minders, and for his butterfly style. By the 1962 season, he'd played 502 consecutive regular games, a record unbroken to this day.
Jacques Plante the Maverick enhanced the goalie reputation for eccentricity by knitting his own toques and cooking for the fun of it. Born in 1929, Plante suffered from debilitating asthma. After experiencing the usual broken nose and cheekbones, hundreds of facial stitches and concussions, the maverick created his own face mask for training camp and defiantly wore it to a game in 1959, changing the face of goal-tending forever.
Gump Worsley the Joker handled media questions with aplomb despite dropping out of school at age fourteen to work. While Plante was a string bean, Worsley was somewhat potato-shaped, with a brush-cut and lightning fast reflexes. He went to a therapist every day for a month to control his fear of flying and baked pineapple squares christened "gumpies"; by appreciative team-mates.
Johnny Bower the Gentleman began his career in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, wearing goalie pads made from an old mattress and a stick his Dad carved from a branch. He may be the only NHL player to have recorded a best-selling record in 1967, over 40,000 copies of Honky the Christmas Goose. He played with rheumatoid arthritis and a positive attitude, the kind of goalie who checked on anyone who crashed behind his net to make sure they were okay.
Bernie Parent the Bon Vivant was an extrovert, the toast of Philadelphia, where he anchored the first expansion team to win the Stanley Cup. His game day ritual was a 16 ounce steak, exactly ten mushrooms, a nap with his dog Tinker Bell and then a video of The Three Stooges. He wrote a self-help book in 2011, Journey Through Risk and Fear after a freak eye accident prematurely ended his career and he had successfully battled alcohol and depression.
Ken Dryden the Scholar forged successful careers as a star goalie, author of The Game, and as a lawyer, politician and businessman. He possibly earned his sober moniker by working with Ralph Nader on a water pollution project after winning his first Stanley Cup in 1972, instead of golfing.
Others included are Ron Hextall the Warrior, Patrick Roy the Cock of the Walk, Ed Belfour the Fanatic, Dominick Hasek the Enigma and Martin Brodeur the Cool Customer.
978-1771000147
***
Caroline Woodward will no longer attempt the butterfly but remains a Canucks fan, an equally painful position some days.
[BCBW 2014]
Caroline Woodward
Dirty Windshields: The Best and Worst of the Smugglers Tour Diaries (D&M $26.95)
Article 2017
As a pop music aficionado, Grant Lawrence must have known before he decided to publish his memoir of being lead singer for his widely-travelled, never widely-touted rock band, The Smugglers, that he had some hard acts to follow. Having co-founded the Hard Rock Miners in 1987, Michael Turner had already set the bar high with Hard Core Logo (Arsenal, 1993, 2009), later made into a movie. John Armstrong's Guilty Of Everything (New Star, 2001) was shortlisted for a B.C. Book Prize for recalling his exploits as Buck Cherry in Vancouver's old-school punk scene with The Modernettes. And Lawrence would have been aware of the shadow cast by D.O.A. frontman Joe Keithley's memoir I, Shithead (Arsenal, 2004), now into its third printing. The good news is Lawrence's reworking of his tour diaries for Dirty Windshields: The Best and Worst of the Smugglers Tour Diaries (D&M $26.95) contains some of the best and funniest writing you're going to find just about anywhere. Of course, there's no shortage of dismal circumstances and raucous tomfoolery, but Lawrence's description of the band's arrival in Los Angeles during the aftermath of race riots, in response to the acquittal of police for beating Rodney King, is riveting. "Los Angeles reeked. The stench was a disturbing combination of exhaust fumes, campfire smoke and burning plastic...";
Dirty Windshields cannot be dismissed as a paean to boy-band glory days; it's a finely edited, very smart and wholesome On The Road. Okay, so Jack Kerouac didn't come home to his doting Mom and Dad, but Lawrence has his own style, his own adventures. The Smugglers never topped the charts but this writing deserves a chorus of praise.
978-1-77162-148-9
REVIEW
Dirty Windshields: The Best and the Worst of the Smugglers Tour Diaries
By Grant Lawrence
Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2017. $26.95 / 9781771621489
Reviewed by Dustin Cole
*
Grant Lawrence's memoir Dirty Windshields recalls his days and nights as lead singer in the garage rock band Smugglers, Canada's self-proclaimed Rock and Roll Ambassadors. The band was formed by Lawrence and two other sixteen year-olds, Nick Thomas and David Carswell, at Hillside Secondary School in West Vancouver in 1988. Lawrence's story spans some sixteen years before the band stopped performing in 2004.
The book's first section, Clam Chowder and Ice, details Lawrence's early experiences in Vancouver as an aspiring musician, chronicles the Smugglers' first regional tours, and recalls his attempts at show promotion and event organizing alongside his D.J. friend from high school, Nardwuar the Human Serviette (John Ruskin).
The second part, Big Macs and Bombers, follows the Smugglers on their first extended US tours, tells of their signing to Lookout! Records, and revels in their YTV Achievement Award in 1992.
The final section of Dirty Windshields, Sushi and Squats, accompanies Lawrence and his bandmates to more exotic locales, such as Nagoya, Adelaide, Aukland, and the obscure town of Izny in Germany. These tours marked the zenith of the band's career, as enthusiastic fans danced themselves into delirium and sang along to the lyrics of songs from their album Selling the Sizzle (1996).
There is a predictable arc to Lawrence's book. But this overarching pattern is filled with finer threads and distinctive themes. Each chapter functions as a vignette within a wider tableau. There is, of course, the Smugglers' thread, entwined with our narrator's own journey and struggles, namely Lawrence's brazen ambition and his need to be always in control.
A diverse troupe of characters enter and exit the frame. Lawrence renders with economy his sketches and portraits, not the least of which is his own remembered self, drawn as an old road warrior pal you may have met, pint in hand, sitting on the other side of a scarred table in a dark club, just back from yet another continent-wide stint.
Lawrence's stories and candour set the prose clipping right along, as did many stretches of roadside phone poles for him and his bandmates during their sixteen itinerant years.
Dirty Windshields' text is enriched by an eclectic visual dimension. Always the band diarist and documentarian, Lawrence's recollections of this period are interposed with reproductions of his own gig reports, artifacts such as hand-drawn gig posters, and photographs, many taken by Smugglers guitarist Nick Thomas.
These curated vestiges of Lawrence's past, and the distance he has found after more than a decade away from the band, makes his story both casual and detailed. He avoids a remote, detached voice, but sometimes I wondered what was embellished and what was bald truth.
On other occasions I was curious about what happened in the interstices between gigs, tours, and albums. I craved more nuanced examples of, say, those fleeting moments in theatre green rooms night after night. Someone lacking performance experience might have a hard time imagining the cigarette stench mingled with fermenting beer, stained carpets, buckled springs in old chesterfields, and fist and boot holes in the drywall.
There were also times when reading this entertaining book that I was left wanting some gesture towards the minute intimacy five men might encounter after months cooped up in a smallish van. I wanted the ephemeral, not just the visceral. Rather than a writerly shortcoming, this limit of detail is, I think, an issue of memory -- the very material of Lawrence's stories.
We know memory to be imperfect and unreliable, but what does it succeed in doing? It organizes the past into something useful. This use-value of memory is personal. Our memory selects and reassembles what is otherwise overwhelming, formless and chaotic, and combines these formerly disconnected parts into something meaningful and instructive, something we can draw on in the present and the future.
In this way Dirty Windshields reorders the past into something meaningful for Grant Lawrence -- and maybe for you too.
Lawrence's memoir combines themes of home, transiency, transportation, community, and aesthetics. These subtler contours give the text its structure and direction. A defining moment was the band's YTV Achievement Award, engineered by Nardwuar the Human Serviette, who, unbeknownst to the Smugglers, nominated the band for this nation-wide youth prize.
Chosen by a jury comprising members of Canadian rock band, Pursuit of Happiness, most of the Smugglers had since come of age, and their bassist Beez (Kevin Beesley) was already 27 in 1992. This did not stop them from flying to Ottawa to receive the award from Ray Hnatyshyn, the Governor General of Canada, and brunching with him at Rideau Hall. Actor Alan Thicke hosted the event. Right Said Fred shared the musical bill, performing their international smash, "I'm Too Sexy.";
With $3,000 in prize money, the Smugglers purchased their van L&P's Getaway, a second-hand 1979 raised-roof GMC Vandura, which propelled them from Saskatoon to Moncton, Hoboken to Atlanta, Chattanooga to Denver, Olympia to Calgary and served as home on the road for the next dozen years.
Lawrence provides a loving description of the Vandura's interior customization process that reminded me of tenants sprucing up their new apartment suite or astronauts preparing for interplanetary travel. They installed two double beds, a plywood box at the rear of the van for equipment and merchandise, a luggage rack over the driver, shotgun seats, shelves along the inner sides of the vehicle for books, cassettes and VHS tapes, a steel security bar along the back doors to thwart break-ins, and finally, every available interior surface was clad in salvaged red shag carpet.
Transportation technology and notions of home, from transient to transitory, unexpectedly reinforce one another in Lawrence's book. These categories also uncover additional sub-themes: binaries such as visitor and host, tourist and tourist attraction, geographical disparity and community.
While on the road, the Smugglers constantly stayed with strangers at their bizarre homes. An arms-dealer put them up in Bellingham and passed around automatic pistols as the band hunkered down after their gig. In Green Bay they lodged at a rancher-style house with halls decked out for Christmas all year long, including a towering evergreen encircled with perpetual presents in a corner of the sunken den.
In Boston, their host, a figure called Metal Murph, offered to order in hookers and urged them to take triangular blue pills called "vitamin K"; - ketamine, a horse tranquilizer.
In Nagoya, the old proprietor of a shoebox hotel yelled out, in Japanese, the arcane footwear regulations of his establishment as the band passed from paper wall room to paper wall room.
Vulnerable to these odd incidental experiences, and despite them, the band showed a willingness to see new things. This curiosity, this willingness to explore, contrasts with the uncertain existence of five nautical chaps from West Vancouver untethered and plying the oceanic contingencies of road life.
In Dirty Windshields the Smugglers are road worn and weary touring musicians but also unabashed tourists and sometimes even rock and roll pilgrims. In Buddy Holly's hometown of Lubbock, Texas, they played a laundromat before visiting the town's Buddy Holly statue.
In Clear Lake, Iowa, where Buddy Holly played his last show and met an early, tragic, end, the Smugglers visited the site of Holly's last concert. This meticulously preserved edifice, called the Surf Ballroom, exuded a kind of sacred aura for Lawrence and his mates who were awed to a hushed solemnity at the hardwood dance floor, vaulted ceiling, art deco mouldings, and the payphone where Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens made their last phone calls.
After being asked to leave by a Surf Ballroom employee, the band decided to find the crash site where Holly, Valens, the Big Bopper, and their twenty one year-old pilot fell out of the sky to untimely deaths. The same employee marked out directions in the dust on the side of the band's versatile L&P's Getaway.
In a cornfield, at what they thought was the site, the band found a marijuana grow-op, which they duly pilfered. Down the road at a gas station the local attendant claimed there was indeed a gigantic horn-rimmed glasses monument next to the actual crash site, which they had not seen.
There are many memorable scenes like this in Dirty Windshields. Lawrence renders character after fleeting character with brevity. People and places constantly flit through the action of his stories. A good many would never be seen or heard from again, but some stronger and more lasting bonds were also forged.
The band plugged into communities far and wide. What I find interesting about this connectivity is the aesthetic basis for friendships and business contacts. Whether in Spain, Japan, Germany, or the United States, the band secured ties with other like-minded people across large geographical expanses. Through these networks the Smugglers travelled and performed their art. This suggests the universal appeal of rock and roll music, a form with its own signifiers and language that are rooted more in abstract sound and fashion and confrontational attitude than researched exposition, and that rely more on audio-visual angst than discursive intellectualism.
Misadventures in Nagoya while touring with their Japanese friends Supersnazz testify to this global garage rock community. Lookout! rep Chris Appelgren and guitarist Dave Carswell set off into the radial entanglement of Nagoya's dense streetscape and went missing, confounded by an unfamiliar urban design and transportation infrastructure.
After ten hours of disoriented wandering they stumbled upon an international telephone provided more as a public courtesy for tourists than as a commonplace service. The payphone displayed a panel of different little national flags. They selected the Canadian flag and out of desperation called the Mint Records office in Vancouver.
It was the middle of the night in Vancouver, but Randy Iwata, burning the midnight oil, picked up the landline. After accessing the band's tour files, he called the Japanese tour manager in Nagoya on his cell phone. The manager then went out in search of the missing band members. To guide him, Chris and Dave described to Randy the city landmarks they had passed as they got lost twenty miles from their hotel. Randy then relayed these audiovisual cues to the tour manager and guided him as he drove through Nagoya to connect with Chris and Dave.
Vital to the rescue was Nagoya's rail system. The city's network of train stations superseded its primary mobility function and the remembered stations became mnemonics and spatial co-ordinates for the tour manager to recognize from an overseas cellphone call from the other side of the Pacific Ocean. In this way the Nagoya manager located the two lost Smugglers.
I found the Nagoya episode one of Lawrence's most titillating. It was like turning a small, serious, exotic artifact over and over, and with each turn finding a new aspect of its form. Both comic and complex, the scene is too weird to invent.
In it, Dirty Windshield's themes of musical (rock and roll) community, tourism, transiency, transportation, and communications intersect in unexpected and suspenseful ways.
Grant Lawrence's book feels like a straight telling. His narrative suggests a psychological richness while his levity and wry sense of humour give the book a necessary momentum. The impetus gained from the Smugglers' twelve- year road trip in L&P's Getaway continues in Dirty Windshields. I could have used less simile and pop culture referencing, though. At times the image was already clear in my mind without the added window dressing.
As for the Smugglers, as the years wore on, one member after another tired of rock and roll circuit touring and quit the band, frustrated at their slowly rising success and tempted by other opportunities on the Vancouver music scene. Guitarists David Carswell and John Collins went on to start JC/ DC, a recording studio in Vancouver, and Kevin Beesley is now co-owner of Mint Records, also in Vancouver.
Grant Lawrence's Dirty Windshields should appeal to a diverse audience from rock and roll fanatics, historians of popular culture, local fans and music buffs, to devout Canadianists - and even human and transportation geographers. All will find much of interest in this volume.
*
Dustin Cole was born in Hinton, near Jasper, and raised in the town of High Level, an isolated community in northwestern Alberta. He received his B.A. in history from Simon Fraser University. Dustin has authored one book, the collection of oneiric poetry Dream Peripheries, released by the small press General Delivery. He lives in Vancouver.
*
The Ormsby Review. More Readers. More Reviews. More Often.
BCBW 2017