Perhaps nothing better exemplifies how out of touch Corporate America and network television executives can get than the selection of entertainment for next week’s Super Bowl XLIV in Miami.

Of course, nobody could’ve predicted that a team vying for the NFL championship would hail from one of the USA’s music capitols, New Orleans.

And, yeah, I know every city has its own musical style. There are the other real famous ones like Detroit and Nashville. But Chicago and Memphis are right up there too. And New York, LA and Austin don’t have anything to apologize for. Heck, I’m sure there are supporters of the other competing team who could rhyme off a list of famous bands and great music that sprang from Indianapolis.

But instead of appealing to an audience already stoked with local fervor, even if they don’t live in New Orleans --- the people who program the Super Bowl Half Time Show this year chose to feature “The Who”, a band who’s first “Final Farewell” concert I witnessed in Toronto in 1982 (more than a quarter century ago).

Have “The Who” reunited, recorded, toured and retired since then. Yes, many times.

Have they had a big hit since 1982? Um. Not really.

Have they been a major influence on music since 1982? What? Are you kidding?

Okay. Are their old hits the theme songs of the three most popular shows broadcast by this year’s Super Bowl network, CBS?  Er…

C’mon, that’s not why they’re playing --- is it?

Of course it is.

If you’re in Las Vegas for the game, take the Sports Book Props option that “Who Are You?”, “Baba O’Reilly” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” will be part of the halftime set.

And oddly enough, the people giving CBS millions of dollars to have their ads sandwiched on either side of The Who’s performance are just happy to be at the Super Bowl with their private jets and celebrity boxes and apparently don’t mind that their brand is being associated with…

That’s the warning that a Florida child advocacy group sent to 1500 homes near the stadium where next Sunday’s game will be played.  A local wag in Miami suggested that kids not only be warned to beware of an aging rock star offering them candy and the chance to see some puppies, but not to be tempted by a suggestion they pick up a case of Bud Light or a new set of Bridgestone Tires either.

Okay, technically, Pete Townshend has never been convicted of physically harming a child. And he was only on that Kiddie Porn site to do research and only used his credit card to get, I don’t know, “better” research. And he didn’t call the police to tell them what he’d found because he thought it would get him in trouble.

Uh-huh.

Perhaps appreciative of his good intentions, police in Britain ultimately didn’t charge Pete, but he did have to provide his fingerprints and a DNA sample and was placed on the sex offender registry for five years.

Some say Pete got off said registry when his sentence expired last year. But others say he’s still there because of a short story about underage sex he published on his website in 2006 that was removed after it outraged European child advocate groups.

There was also the little matter of an “anti-Pedophile” comment he posted on his blog which compared kiddie porn to “a free line of cocaine at a decadent cocktail party: only the strong willed or terminally uncurious can resist."

“Only the strong willed and terminally uncurious can resist”? Oh, Pete… I know that “The Heart wants what it wants” as Woody Allen once said in somewhat similar circumstances. But couldn’t you have just left the spotlight in 1982 and maybe gone off to hang with Gary Glitter?

Because if you had, you might have made room on the Super Bowl stage for a bunch of talented musicians who have flooded New Orleans with songs to celebrate their beloved hometown football team.

The war cry of Saints fans is “Who dat?” which was born in 1983, when Saints players teamed up with Aaron Neville to record a version of “When The Saints Go Marchin’ In” that included the soon to be famous “Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?” The original song and a decade later update can be found here.

And in that New Orleans Jazz tradition of taking something old and breathing fresh life into it, local artists Prof. X-Man, BigShott Da Black Rhino, Big Rec, & Kuniqua have released another take on “Who Dat?”

But you won’t see or hear them at the Super Bowl.

And unless they each come up with the $2400 estimated to be the average price of a Super Bowl ticket this year they, like you, will be watching the game on TV and subjected to the dinosaur thinking of CBS and the two still-barely-sucking-oxygen members of a band that should’ve lived up to their first hit anthem and died before they got old.

Here’s “Heart of the City”. Savor the passion and the energy. Hope it soon has a place on television. And Enjoy your Sunday.

Read more »

If anybody ever tries to tell you that Canadian TV isn’t all that special, ask if they’ve ever heard of Nick Slaughter.

Nick was a fictional gumshoe from the classic Dashiell Hammett mould. Unshaven and hard-drinking, he was saddled with a “down these mean streets walks a man who is not himself mean” morality and a dark sense of humor.

Nick was played by one of Canada’s finest actors, Rob Stewart, the lead character in a 1990’s TV series titled “Tropical Heat” in some markets and “Sweating Bullets” in others.

The series ran three seasons from 1991 – 1994, shooting first in Mexico then Israel and finally South Africa, taking advantage of whichever co-production deal offered its producers the best bang for their buck.

But the creative team was entirely Canadian and for all of the exotic locations and sun-drenched beauties, the writing, directing and acting all displayed a decidedly Canadian take on the “blue-skies” private eye genre.

I had the good fortune of writing five episodes of those three seasons and was later able to hire Rob to star in “Broken Lullaby” a CBS TV movie we shot in Hungary in 1994. 

The Bosnian Conflict was at its height at the time and on Saturday mornings we could visit flea markets selling Russian AK-47’s and land mines that had been turned back at the border. And sometimes at night you could see the flashes of distant artillery and rocket fire on the horizon.

Little did Rob know that while Canadian jets were raining devastation on Serbia, he was giving the innocent in that war hope for a better future. 

For it seems that the UN trade embargo imposed on the country had gone into effect just after tapes of “Tropical Heat” made it over the border, becoming the only escapist entertainment available during the civil war that tore the former Yugoslavia apart.

“Tropical Heat” became so popular it ended up running on all four Serbian TV networks for several years, eventually becoming a symbol of opposition politics, particularly among the country’s urban youth.

The show’s idyllic tropical setting and content imbued with a Canadian sense of justice, fair play and self-deprecating humor had turned it into a national cultural phenomenon.

Soon after the war, with the country roiling against election fraud perpetrated by President Slobodan Milosevic in 1996, a movement was ignited to establish Nick Slaughter as a symbolic revolutionary hero. During the student protests that followed, Graffiti began appearing in Belgrade that read "Slotera Nika, za predsednika" ("Nick Slaughter for President") and meaning “Anybody but Milosevic”.

Meanwhile, a local punk band  by the name of “Atheist Rap” had a hit record with "Slaughteru Nietzsche" with its chorus of "Nick Slaughter, Serbia hails you".

Local bars renamed themselves "Tropical Heat" and mothers were encouraged to name their sons “Nick Slaughter”.

The result of all this – the only peaceful overthrow of a dictatorship in the 20th Century. Carrying banners emblazoned with the logo of a mostly forgotten Canadian TV series, the people of Serbia drove Milosevic from power without firing a single shot.

Oddly enough, or maybe not odd at all when you consider how little publicity Canadian television gets, nobody associated with “Tropical Heat” knew anything about all this. And they wouldn’t for ten more years.

That all changed in 2008 when somebody talked Rob Stewart into going on “Facebook”. He posted his profile and woke up the next morning to discover he had 17,000 friend requests from Serbia.

After learning the reason for his immense popularity in a country he’d never set foot in, Stewart, filmmaker Marc Vespi and Vespi’s sister Liza, decided to travel to Belgrade and make a documentary on what transpired.

What followed was one of the most astonishing experiences of Rob’s life. Grown men dissolved in tears on meeting him, politicians thanked him for saving their country and thousands turned up to see him join “Atheist Rap” onstage to sing their hit song about a character he’d first brought to life.

All of that will be available for other Canadians to see in a soon to be released documentary entitled “Slaughter Nick for President”…

Or…

It would be…

If the people I’ve been railing about all week who run Canadian television had any interest in scheduling it.

So far nobody has stepped up to broadcast or distribute this remarkable story.

Why?

Well, it might just be that those people don’t want Canadians knowing the kind of effect our television has had on the rest of the world. Because then Canadians might start taking an interest in it. And then they’d have to make more of it.

And we can’t have that – can we?

On the other hand, it might be that those executives live in the same world as John L. Sullivan, the fictional Hollywood director in Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels”.

In that story, Sullivan detests the popular entertainment that has made him a huge success, feeling its beneath him and wanting to explore the plight of the downtrodden in a film called “O Brother, Where Art Thou”. But by the end of the story he has learned the power and importance of escapist entertainment.

A power exemplified by a Canadian TV series known as “Tropical Heat”.

Here’s a taste of an absolutely original Canadian documentary. Savor what Canadian drama can do.

And Enjoy Your Sunday.

As an added treat --- here’s a clip from one of those original “Tropical Heat” episodes I wrote, starring one of my own childhood cowboy heroes Clint “Cheyenne” Walker.

Read more »

“There’s three things that separates a man from all the other animals. One, he’s got thumbs. Two, he knows there’s a future. And three, he can lie like a sonovabitch!”

That’s a line from a play called “Pumpkin” that Paul Quarrington wrote sometime in the late 1970’s.

It was about a bunch of guys from Timmins or North Bay or Sudbury who had come to Toronto to see a Leafs game, a game in which the home team’s Ian Turnbull had scored five points.

According to the NHL record book, that would make it the night of February 2, 1977 when Turnbull racked up the most points ever for a defenseman in a 9-1 thrashing of the Detroit Red Wings. It’s a record that still stands.

The boys have been celebrating in the closed club car of a CN passenger train as it carries them home through the Northern night, back to crummy jobs and uncertain futures that have been momentarily erased by the historic moment they’ve just witnessed. Drinking the only alcohol they can find, somebody’s homemade bottle of fermented pumpkin, they pass the hours telling each other lies.

I don’t know if the play has ever been produced. I don’t know if it’s even been published. What I do know is that, like the river of work that flowed out of Paul over the next 30 years of his life, it was rich with reality, layered with endless imagination and just a whole lot of fun to wallow in.

I got to spend a week with “Pumpkin” when it was workshopped by the Factory Theatre not too long after the date on the calendar it marked. We’d gone through about a dozen new plays during the theatre’s season as the Artistic Director tried to winnow submissions down to those that would make up the coming season and it was just the next one on the pile.

Workshopping plays was a great gig for an actor, because even if you were doing a show that night, Actors Equity required that you get a second pay check.

But you also got to work with the writer in helping his baby learn to walk. There were no performance deadlines or expectations. You could try things dozens of different ways to figure out what clicked and what didn’t. The writer got to hear his words spoken by real people and could revise them overnight or on the fly. And maybe most important for everybody ---  you got to be part of creating something new.

Paul was about my age, an easy going and unassuming guy who’d written a book he was trying to get published and was into music. He said he’d never written a play before and wasn’t sure if what he’d done was how you did it. And even though the concept of Canadian plays was little more than a half dozen years old at the time and we didn’t really know much more than he did, he said he felt humble to be chosen to work with such “veterans”.

I remember glancing up at him as we “veterans” struggled through the first cold table reading. We didn’t know where the thing was going, hadn’t yet got a handle on the tone or the tempo. I’m sure we made it sound far more confusing and formless than it was. But when I looked at Paul, he was beaming from ear to ear. I don’t think I’d ever seen a man look happier.

Later as we wrestled with a scene that just didn’t work, I registered his expression again. It was as if he was in physical pain.

But for the next week, he was tireless in trying new things, polishing moments or making us understand what he’d been after in the writing. His good humor was bottomless. And while a workshop can be Hell for a writer and I’d seen others frustrated and bereft of ideas on what should be done, he never once backed away from attacking the material again and again.

On the final day, we did a full “performance”. Paul had a great laugh that echoed around the theatre as we made our way through the play. But it wasn’t the laughter of a writer enjoying his own creation. It was an honest appreciation of what had been brought to his work by others.

In the end, there was something about “Pumpkin” that Paul still wasn’t happy with and he wanted to hold it back and work on it a while longer. I don’t know if he ever did.

Because not long afterward, Paul began to get noticed. He wrote a novel called “Home Game” that is one of the best books about baseball ever written.

And he wrote “Whale Music” which Penthouse magazine called “The best book about Rock and Roll ever written.”

And he wrote “King Leary”, which anybody will tell you is the best book about hockey ever written.

He went on to write a lot of other great books and some great movies and some great television and a lot of great songs. He won all kinds of awards and prizes and got incredibly famous. But he stayed that easy-going guy with a wonderful smile and a big laugh and endless enthusiasm.

A year ago, just prior to being diagnosed with terminal Lung Cancer, Paul wrote “The Ravine” which he described as semi-autobiographical. "It's about a writer who squanders his talents in television, drinks too much, screws around and ruins his marriage. The reason it's 'semi-autobiographical' is the guy's name is 'Phil.'"

Paul Quarrington died yesterday. But that quote from “Pumpkin” perfectly sums up his life for me.

Right to the end, he used his thumbs and the rest of his digits to write not one but two different screen versions of “The Ravine”.

Even though the doctors said he had no future, he knew he had audiences waiting and recorded and toured with his band.

And in suggesting he had “squandered his talents” he continued to lie like a sonovabitch.

Read more »