The story flows like water through a mighty watershed. It pools and leaks, it runs in rivulets and rivers, it cascades and evaporates, it freezes and floods at different times. For some the story is fatal and for others it awakens life. Cities are built beside the best story sources, and story is what sustains a community through all its moods and stages of growth.
When a municipality turns 100 based upon a spot known to be an active civilization for at least 10,000 years before that, you know you are in a place where the story waters are deep - this place, this municipality, this city, this Prince George, in the heart of this Lheidli T'enneh territory.
Who better to mark this notch in time than the man known best for telling the story of Canada all across the map in person, and under the full blanket of national public radio? Who better than Stuart McLean to tell the story of Prince George in his Vinyl Cafe - a cafe with no walls or locked doors?
McLean and the Vinyl Cafe cast and crew will be live at the biggest room in town, CN Centre, on Sunday at 3 p.m. The entire population can come and watch the performance, and later the whole nation will cuddle up around their radios and podcasts to share the moment.
"My brother lived in Prince George for many years," said McLean. (Alistair McLean was the founding Director of Ancillary Services at UNBC before moving on after five years and is now CEO of Hostelling International-Canada). "I've always felt a deeper connection with Prince George than I otherwise would have. We are looking forward to this concert, the larger audience, we are recording this one for the air, we were happy to be invited for the city's 100th birthday, and it is a bit of a big deal for us."
The Vinyl Cafe has become a big deal for Canada. McLean's weekly radio show airs on CBC Radio1 at noon on Sundays, then again at 11 p.m. on Tuesdays, and on CBC Radio2 every Saturday at 9 a.m. The shows are also broadcast on public broadcasting stations in 17 U.S. states, plus three times a week on Sirius Satellite 169 and online. It makes McLean one of Canadian culture's most recognized voices.
If you read his stories out loud, you'll probably find yourself speaking in his voice. There are now scores of short stories inside more than 10 books, all about the fictional family of Dave and Morley, their two kids Sam and Stephanie, their neighbours, their hometowns, and the record store Dave owns called, of course, The Vinyl Cafe. And each one has its Stuart McLean pacing, a cadence he is famous for as he reads them, and you'll find yourself falling into it if you give yourself the chance.
"I've never really enjoyed short stories, is the funny thing," he confessed to The Citizen. "I read mostly nonfiction and if I do read fiction I prefer a novel to a short story, which is odd. I've read Alice Monroe (Canada's Nobel Prize-winning short story specialist) and when I did I was gobsmacked. I went back through with a pencil, taking notes on the literary tactics she used, I had to deconstruct the story to find out how technically she could do it."
So why, then, have Dave and Morley, Sam and Stephanie not been conjured into a novel? McLean said it was not a matter of lacking the material, it was lacking the time to evolve one or several of the short stories into a single full-length tale. He does need to produce a weekly radio show, and he is involved in regular concert tours across Canada and increasingly into the United States. That calendar favours the short story.
"One of the great things about performing these stories is, I get to be there for the giving and receiving," he said. "As a writer mostly you have to intuit how your writing is received. As a novelist you have to watch the bestseller lists or the shortlists for the awards, and wonder, and get your feedback that way. Essentially I get to be inside the radio peering through the grill to see if people like or didn't like the story. I also get to be edited by my audience," since changes are often made based on how an audience reacts to the presentation.
The reaction has been so positive, and the Vinyl Cafe lives in so many mediums now - radio, book, live on stage - that it is almost flabbergasting it hasn't been made into a television show. McLean said he gets a pitch for that every couple of months or so, almost always by an upstart or independent production company. Twice, though, the application was made by those with heavy resources and long track records.
One of the pitches was from a group of animators with production links to The Simpsons, Futurama and the sit-com Everyone Loves Raymond. CBS even funded the making of a pilot episode.
In both these instances "It was a very close thing, it got right to the end," but scheduling conflicts, not disinterest in the material, caused that window to close. McLean was not upset.
"There is just so little real estate on the air that it's a hard one to crack. And one only has so much time. And I just feel it is a radio show. My audience brings a lot to the table, it is in their minds, and I'm afraid of making it into something it's not. I don't want to cheapen what it is, just for a few bucks."
He is content with the circles of life he, his cast and crew, and his characters all share. For a writer - usually solitary artists who often hunch over typing machines for unhealthy portions of time - he sure gets out a lot, and meets an abundance of different people. He is a road warrior, more akin to a rock star than a bestseller.
He loves wading in that pool, but he insists he would never plunge fully into the touring performer world.
"Maybe the performing is more fun, but I could live without it. I couldn't live without the writing," he said.
And why change the recipe? He gets to cook up all kinds of experiences for the audience and himself in the company of musicians. He doesn't have to shed his own creative forces to do that. He gets to be the writer, the host, the entertainer, the audience member with the best seat in the house, and still satiate that lifelong primal interest in music he never self-fulfilled by learning to play an instrument.
"I lived it as a boy growing up in the '60s, music was a big part of my life," he said. "I saw the Beatles live, I saw the Rolling Stones live, and I was an odd little boy. I used to try and get backstage and peer behind the curtain which was kind of my journalistic impulse asserting itself at that early age. I had little adventures. I was backstage with the Beatles during their one and only Montreal concert (Ringo received a death threat that night, so tensions were high), and I was in the Rolling Stones dressing room for like a minute. The music world was very important to me but I was never really a part of it."
Instead, he populates his live performances with other acts to provide the music and turn the Vinyl Cafe concert experience into a modern Vaudevillian presentation. He has brought along with him to past Prince George appearances some old favourites like Dan Hill and Murray McLauchlan and new discoveries like Danny Michel and The Dala Girls. He always has band leader John Sheard in the middle of the action with the show's house band.
This time, McLean is looking close to home for his spotlight music act. Cariboo acoustic folk duo Pharis and Jason Romero - giants of the handmade roots music industry - will be on several dates of his B.C./Alberta tour. They have just released their latest album
A Wanderer I Will Stay, extending their already high esteem within traditional folk circles. This is perhaps best punctuated by the many appearances they've been invited for on the radio show A Prairie Home Companion hosted by short-story writer Garrison Keillor, who augments the broadcasts with live variety show tours.
Sound familiar? People have often drawn the parallels between what McLean does and what Keillor does.
"I think we plow different parts of the field," McLean said. "I've only heard his show about 10 times in my life. I thought it was fantastic, and when I started doing mine, because I respected him so much as a writer, I stopped listening, because I didn't want to copy him."
He didn't know of the Romero musical connection, so he is all the more looking forward to meeting them, and sharing together this new sentence written in the story of Prince George.
