He has always been more than Music Box Dancer. Frank Mills had hit songs before that seminal instrumental made him a household name, and he had hits afterwards too. He was part pop artist, part classical artist, and always deeper than that one ubiquitous single that is held as one of Canada's greatest contributions to easy-listening music.
But even Mills didn't entirely grasp just how much more he was, as a songwriter and recording artist, until he stood in a Peterborough warehouse staring at a mountain of multitrack tape reels. Mills took The Citizen on a tour of that personal moment, standing in a lonely corner of the Mayfair Music Publications storage complex. Mayfair was the company started by John Loweth, radio personality and merchandising entrepreneur who happened to be a business partner of Mills early in the pianist's career. Loweth passed away at age 69 in 2009, but like all those who work in the arts industry, he left a great many physical legacies behind.
"John Loweth was a good friend, we had a lot of good times on the road over the years. And his son phoned me not long after John passed away and he said 'We've discovered some of your old tapes in our warehouse. Do you want them?' So I did the drive up to Peterborough, and he had 70 boxes of multitrack tapes, and they represented basically my life's work."
The tapes in those boxes were not cassettes or 8-tracks, that used to be slid into stereos everywhere. These were the large reels of chocolate brown mylar used in recording studios, each inch of the stuff capable of recording dozens of individual sound tracks - for example one for the drums, one for the guitar, one for the base, one for the vocals, one for each background vocalist, one for each additional instrument, and sometimes even isolated segments of what those instruments would play. Almost every note Mills and his accompanists ever played was invisibly contained on those miles of thin plastic ribbons.
"It was very emotional to me, to have (those boxes in front of me)," Mills said.
But years and decades had passed since those reels last turned. Unseen by the naked human eye, each micrometre of that tape was coated in an iron oxide sheen onto which magnetic pulses are imprinted. That's called recording. That's called music. But Mills knew there was something called physics doing a dance with another thing called time, and those miles of music were fragile. One false move and all those sounds, some of the most beautiful and artful music ever made, would fall apart like dust blown off a neglected book.
He called the best recording engineers he'd worked with over the years to get some advice. It was simple, he was told to his initial disbelief: you put the reels of tape in the oven overnight at 120 degrees. He had to literally bake his legacy.
After that, he was told, he could play those tapes a few times at most and the molecular bonds would disintegrate. He'd still have the tape, but much of the sound would be lost. But that was plenty of opportunity to transfer the contents into digital format and have them forever available in pristine condition on computer "by my friend of many years and technological wizard Hayward Parrott."
Mills had been retired for years. Well, semi-retired, because Rita MacNeil gently twisted his arm to do about 20 shows per year with her, and he couldn't refuse the charming Maritime music star. So, he had the time to focus on that pile of plastic. As he went through the minutes and hours and days of those old recordings - almost all his old recordings - he experienced many epiphanies. He was reintroduced to himself, the musicians and orchestras that worked with him, and the good vibrations they made together. And he felt, more than ever in his storied life as a music star, that he was proud of so many more songs than just the one that made him famous.
Fifteen of them in particular stood out to him - all of them recorded after Music Box Dancer stirred the world (it got to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1979, along with worldwide radio frequency) in the late 1970s.
"It's a compilation album, but it is re-mastered, re-mixed, re-digitalized, re-everything and they are a far cry from what these old tapes had on them," said Mills. "This album is basically: if there was one album to say what I did with my life, this is it. It was an expensive proposition, but we did it. I'm very proud of this album. It is what I think is the best of my work, the best of Jim Pirie's and Eric Robertson's arrangements, (and the musicians are top notch). Certainly it is my swan song for albums. It really isn't a Greatest Hits, but it is a Best Of, in my opinion."
There is no Music Box Dancer on this album, no Love Me Love Me Love (his only hit with singing included), no The Poet And I, no Happy Song, no Peter Piper - all the tunes that have made the charts and won awards for Mills over the years. This is deeper than the "radio Mills," it goes to the heart of the man.
It's a heart that has had its sadnesses as well as its triumphs.
"I have not written a song since Whatever Happened To Christmas for Rita MacNeil. That was three years ago," he said. "She's the one who brought me out of retirement five years ago (for a Christmas project she envisioned). I realized I loved it, I missed it, and so I kept going at it. It's good for me. It keeps my hands in touch and keeps my brain active."
He stays grounded in a most literal way. He loves to garden and farm, and he has about 40 acres of trees and pastures in Vermont where he lives during the warmer months, then down to the Bahamas to a winter retreat he's had for decades. These are his homes now, but Canada is always close at hand.
"You can take me out of Canada but you can't take the Canuck out of me," he said.
He did the most Canadian of activities, as a hobby. No, not hockey, even older than that. He tapped his maple trees for making delicious homemade syrup.
"I got a scare about diabetes which proved to be false but it made me conscious about sugar," he said. "I got off sugar. And we are spending more time in the south, so we were missing the (spring syrup run) season anyway. With a tear in my eye I took down my pipeline a few weeks ago."
He still has his pets, though. When they return to the farm each year, about a dozen cows are dropped off for the Mills family, and they raise them until fall.
"Between the cows and the firewood, I don't get a lot of time indoors," he said, pleased with this arrangement.
Once he retired, prior to MacNeil's creative intervention, he was quite serious about his golden years. The last time he was here, as best he can remember, it was Dec. 7, 1998 when he and Prince George's Bel Canto Children's Choir did a pair of shows at Vanier Hall. He called it his farewell tour and unlike football's Brett Favre or hockey's Dominik
Hasek, he meant it.
Since he was gone so long, he had lost touch with Prince George. Quite atypical of incoming music stars, Mills often interjected with questions about the local economy, the population, local culture. He was interested in the place and the people.
He was particularly interested to know Vanier Hall had an excellent grand piano for him to play. He recounted a memory of a tour stop in Lethbridge in about 1980 when his bandmates convinced him the brand new theatre only had a ramshackle piano, wheeling the old jalopy out on stage during sound check. It wasn't long before they couldn't keep their straight faces, watching Mills steel his nerves to accept the clunker and make the best of the puzzling situation. A splendid piano was hidden from view until the joke was over.
He knows Vanier Hall has no such problems.
He was also pleased that Prince George is part of the public piano movement that is tickling the ivories of the nation. As the population's interest in playing piano shrinks compared to 100 years ago, and technologies change to allow for electronic keyboards instead of heavy traditional pianos, and the overall population of piano players fades at the top end of the aging Baby Boomer bubble, there are scads of used pianos available for free.
To promote music and community animation, some places have obtained some of these pianos, had local artists adorn them with eye-catching facades, and placed them out in the open public for any passerby to play if the whim takes them. Some are even stationed outside, where the elements will eventually ruin the machine but not before some amazing musical moments happen there.
"It's a great idea. That's wonderful. Does Prince George have some of those?" he wondered, yes being the answer. "Isn't that fun."
Mills gives the Vanier Hall piano a workout on Saturday at 7 p.m. He will also do something unusual for a musician in concert - he will take the time to tell the stories that go with the songs, and add in colourful anecdotes from his years of composing, performing and touring the world.
