• A no-holds-barred insider's view of the music scene (and whatever else is on his mind) from one of Canada's musical mainstays, Mike McDonald (previously of Jr. Gone Wild, now of the Mike McDonald Band) •

Mother Nature Talks Back The McDonald Papers (Vol. 1, #32)

GREETINGS, EARTHLINGS!

Hope you had a nice hallowe'en. Get real scared? I didn't need hallowe'en to get scared, the TV news was scary enough. I believe, folks, that mother earth has indeed had it up to here with our insolence. The cyclone in India left one million homeless! That ain't just a couple shacks and a strip mall that went down.

Look at it this way, my hometown of Edmonton has nearly a million people in it. Imagine everyone in Edmonton instantly rendered homeless. Hurricanes brutalise the east coast of the States. Last year's calamity in South America. Oh, and to top it all off, they're having a war in the old Soviet Union. And NATO for some reason wants countries to spend more on defence! Canada actually got in shit, ‘cuz of all the NATO countries, we are the second lowest in defence expenditures, except for Luxembourg, of course (the exact figures? According to the piece i read in the Edmonton Journal, Canada spends 1.5 % of their gross domestic product, and Luxembourg spends only .84 of their GDP).

I saw a documentary reporting that since the Nuremburg trials, that were supposed to put a stop to such activity, more people have died from suppression and ethnic cleansing and just plain all around dictatorial fervour than died in both WWI and WWII of the same causes. I don't recall the exact figures, but on this planet, it somehow makes sense and I'm willing to consider it as fact.

My point? People are fucked, and mother nature is currently letting us know that we are not the ones in charge here. Too bad she's non-discriminating. It's too bad it's poor people who get hit. Well, one day it'll be one of those evil fat cat's kids who blow away their classmates with an Uzi, and then maybe they'll do something about it. Once again I’m left with my naive musings that all political systems on earth are failures. You know, the one thing I can't get my head around is how really smart people like the Americans don't see the nonsense and lack of logic behind their various manifest destinies. What we have to do is make power unfashionable (except in rock ‘n’ roll, of course).

One thing cool in the States is that they now have a political party whose high profile members include Jesse the body Ventura, Donald Trump, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan. If that isn't the ingredients for a sitcom, I don't know what is. What is significant is, despite how frightening a prospect it is to have Donald Trump or Jesse “The Body" run the show next door, it is a wonderfully sarcastic comment on what the state of the Democrat / Republican war is all about, which is definitely not people (I see the absurdity of the American reform party as a sign that pax americana is in its twilight).

I like the idea of non-professional politicians. I believe political office should be a duty, not a privilege...you're not supposed to like the job. Therefore, they should remove all money from the equation. You shouldn't be able to get rich from office. It should be a poor person’s job, and I think maybe in North America it's high time another woman (an effective one, please) got in charge. I for one believe that no mother would send their children to die for a concept as abstract as political idealism, economics, or religion. Well, Maggie Thatcher sent kids to the Falklands for no sensible reason that I could discern, but on closer inspection I’m not sure Thatcher was a woman...or a man for that matter. Reagan without the shakes, that's what she was. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. Anyhow, I read a lot of Tom Clancy, so my paranoid mind likes to link up all activity on earth to put under a heading of "this is what happens when you don't resolve properly the problems of the Crusades and WWI".

Mostly though, I think Mother Nature has had it and is letting us know. Y2K will be the least of your worries if she decides to hit us, pal. I suggest you find a god and get pious most ricky-tick. Nature don't care about your feelings. And she doesn't seem to like many of our behaviours either. So watch out, and smarten up...

So, Hallowe'en was fun for me... my rock band MMB played the New City Likwid Lounge in front of the literally dozens of die hard MMB fans, and all 55 of them showed up. we thank you all, and so does Thirsty, my buds from Kamloops (who played a most effective first set). I had an old experience that night in that we debuted a new song of mine called Bletchley Park, a pop rock ballad about the genius code breakers who arguably won WWII. Not the usual grist for a pop song, but I was inspired by Rockaway Beach and songs like it that extoll the virtues of sunny teenage partying places. My sarcastic mind thought it would be funny to give that sort of treatment to a serious park. The place the codebreakers worked on the Enigma machine was a large mansion called Bletchley Park. I’d say about half the war documentaries you probably channel over while dominating the remote deal with Bletchley Park. It was a central force in WWII. Anyhow, I digress. Usually, new songs, brand new ones, have a tendency to fuck up royally the first time played in public. Not so for Bletchley Park. It was shiny and fluid right out of the box, and for once I wasn't getting ulcers unveiling a new one. I had more fun playing that song Saturday night than I've had in ALL the gigs I've done in the last 5 years. The crowd couldn't have responded better, so Bletchley Park is definitely a keeper, and I managed to remember why I got into a band in the first place. So, thanks!

(Mike McDonald has kindly given us permission to reprint from his McDonald Papers which he sends out by email. This is an excerpt from his weekly email newsletter. Please visit his site, sign up for the McDonald Papers and/or preorder his new album if you can.)

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