ACCIDENTAL LEGACY
Stuart McLean’s final story collection emerged from aborted Christmas tour
Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe
Stuart McLean Viking Canada
Vinyl Cafe
Thunder Bay Concert Dec. 17, 19, 21. CBC Radio One
It wasn’t supposed be this way.
Stuart McLean didn’t know he was critically ill when he embarked on a new Christmas tour in the autumn of 2015. Neither would have it occurred to him that the tour’s final moments would help shape the celebration of his legacy, now happening in the countdown to Christmas 2017.
Indeed, McLean and his Vinyl Cafe pals didn’t even have legacy on their minds when they took to the road two years ago. They were simply intent on delivering the latest instalment of what had become a treasured yuletide tradition. But then, early in the tour, came the result of medical tests: McLean was suffering from melanoma.
He knew the tour would have to be terminated so he could begin treatment. But ever the optimist, he saw his illness as a temporary blip before he would return to entertaining Canadians over the air and in person with further tales chronicling the adventures and misadventures of Dave and Morley, their kids and friends. This was not to be.
“We decided to do one final touring show in Thunder Bay on Nov. 22, 2015,” remembers McLean’s CBC producer, Jess Milton. “In fact it turned out to be the last one we ever performed.”
McLean died on Feb. 15 this year at the age of 68. But the presence of this beloved storyteller and humorist remains palpable this holiday season.
A new collection of his Christmas stories is now in bookshops. Later this month, CBC Radio has scheduled three separate airings of that final 2015 touring event. And Outside Music is distributing a new CD of favourite Vinyl Cafe stories.
“These are all celebrations, and that’s what Stuart would have wanted,” Milton says. Furthermore, McLean’s last appearance in Thunder Bay proved an important influence on what’s happening this month.
That aborted 2015 tour introduced the 20th and last of the Christmas stories that had become a Vinyl Cafe tradition over the decades. It’s a piece called The Christmas Card, and it chronicles Dave’s disastrous experience with Canada Post. It occupies an honoured place in Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe, the new story collection published by Viking Penguin. And it shares the volume with the classic Dave Cooks the Turkey, the first and most famous of McLean’s Christmas stories.
“I’ve been in publishing for more than a quarter of a century, and I have to say that it’s almost impossible ever to distil what captures a reader’s or listener’s imagination,” says Meg Masters, McLean’s longtime editor. She’s trying to explain the mythic place the hilarious turkey yarn holds among Vinyl Cafe listeners.
“Publishers are always trying to figure out what’s going to be a hit — and you can’t. But we can look at that story retroactively and point out the verbal and visual humour and madcap pacing. What is certain is that it became a hit the very first time Stuart read it. It snowballed into a favourite Christmas tradition.”
The CBC quickly became aware of the impact on listeners of the turkey saga.
“It was a turning point,” Milton says. “It turned Christmas into a big deal for us at the Vinyl Cafe. Once Dave cooked the turkey, we realized we would have to do something Christmasy every year.”
A few months before McLean’s death, he asked Masters and Milton about the possibility of a new book.
“We were both very excited by that,” Masters says now. “We knew that Stuart loved to share his stories. He wanted the little world we had created, the world of Vinyl Cafe, to continue after it was off the air and after we were all gone. So we had that in mind after he passed. We had the last story he ever wrote and performed on stage — The Christmas Card — so we really wanted to get that out. There are also five other never-before-published stories in the new book. But the turkey is the essential.”
As for the upcoming CBC broadcasts of that final Thunder Bay performance — well, they wouldn’t be happening had not Milton decided at the 11th hour to push the record button.
“Stuart was very optimistic about his treatment,” she remembers.
“The reason we cancelled the tour was that he had got into a trial for a new form of treatment for melanoma with an incredible 85-per-cent success rate. He’d have a few weeks of treatment and that would be that. It never occurred to us what actually would happen. We didn’t think it would be our last show.”
Milton explains that the Christmas tours were normally not put on the air. “So this was never intended to be a broadcast show but just a show for the people of Thunder Bay, so there was no plan to record it.”
But because this was part of a tour that was being terminated, with content that might still be good for a future tour (one that, as it turned out, would never happen), Milton decided that it should be preserved.
“It was a ( last-minute) decision to press ‘record.’ And because of that it’s pretty special.”
After McLean’s death, Milton and her colleagues were discussing ways of honouring him this Christmas — “and I realized we had this recording and that it was the very last time Stuart stood on stage ...”
The recording had been stored in her office, and Milton had not been able to bring herself to play it.
“I was nervous about how I would feel. He was one of my closest friends and I had spent a lot of time with him in the last months and weeks of his life. I worried that I would feel his absence very deeply.”
Finally she steeled herself to play it through.
“It made me feel the opposite of sad. It made me feel really lucky. We had all been so lucky with Stuart to be doing something we loved, and hearing him perform that very last show was an incredible reminder of how much he loved standing on stage and telling a story.”
Meanwhile, as Christmas approaches, his still-grieving colleagues remember with affection the joy of working with him.
“Stuart wasn’t possessive about his writing,” says Masters, who was already McLean’s book editor before the Vinyl Cafe began on CBC.
“That was the interesting thing about him. There was no way you could push him into a direction he didn’t want to go or put words into his mouth that he didn’t like. But he was very collaborative, and not just with me and Jess. He wanted feedback from everybody.”
Milton has lost count of the number of times McLean would appear in the lobby after a show and quiz audience members about how well he had done.
“The first question he would ask people was — what was your favourite part of the show and what part didn’t you like, and why. The audience became an important editor because we learned so much from it over the years.”
Masters and Milton constantly missed McLean’s presence in preparing the new book.
“Working on this was hard,” Masters says. “That’s because Stuart wasn’t there. There was this great sense of loss working on it as well as happiness to be back in his world.”