UP- AND- COMING
ANDREW BAULCOMB’S DOCUMENTARY OF HAMILTON MUSIC IS A PROMISING STORY LEFT UNFINISHED
Evenings and Weekends: Five Years in Hamilton Music, 2006– 2011 By Andrew Baulcomb James Street North Books 264 pp; $ 20
If there were a sound that captured t he Toronto music scene, it would be people leaving, shuffling along an often westbound highway toward cities like Hamilton, where the living is cheaper. A sort of rock riff for the 21st century. Pretty soon there will be no one left, the artistic vitality of Toronto replaced by a soulless collection of condos housing the “creative class” — shorthand for a consumptive, wealthy middle class that works so much there’s no time left for creation.
Certainly i n my own circles, the announcement of yet another friend’s participation in the Hamilton exodus is no surprise. These rejects bang out a work week in the steel city, then bear down t hrough blizzards in rattletraps for weekend gigs back in Toronto. Sometimes the grind gets to be too much, and they return to renting in Toronto, paying for it by subletting their Hamilton spots. This exodus surely was the harbinger for a new Southern Ontario arts scene, and for a while there it looked like Hamilton was the place to be.
Why Hamilton? Readers of Andrew Baulcomb’s Evenings & Weekends: Five Years in Hamilton Music, 20062011 may not find the exact answer. An account of the rock scene’s growth spurt in the city, the book, while celebratory, does little to explain why it all happened there, when it did.
The obvious answer is cheap rent. Compounded by the recession that forced university graduates back into their parents’ basements, the shuttering of once- lucrative live music venues in Toronto, and a devaluing of the product we call music shrivelling up performers’ incomes, the skyrocketing housing costs in big cities forced artists to take up residence elsewhere. Or, in the case of many Hamiltonian musicians, to stay put.
Baulcomb comes at the t opic f rom his perspective as an undergraduate music reporter for his university’s newspaper — a job he takes seriously and with much enthusiasm. This put him in the position to cover bands as they were coming up, and to ingratiate himself in a scene desperate for proponents. As such, he covers bands for which he has a particular affinity and those which are part of his extended social group. Yet, we don’t quite get the full picture: why did these bands start up — or stay — there? What of the artists who moved into the city because it was an economically welcoming destination? And what about Hamilton facilitated a nostalgic return to rock as the genre was dying a slow death everywhere else in the world?
I kept returning to these questions as I turned the pages, hoping for a broader analysis of the city’s role in birthing this scene, because music scenes do not spring up fully formed. Presumably, the scene benefited from the downturn in the city’s primary economic drivers, as recession often yields immense creative productivity ( see: Birmingham, 1960s or Detroit, 2010s). These factors are touched on, but only briefly.
Structurally, the book is frustrating; although it is set up to document the scene as it is born, matures and fades over a five- year period, often Baulcomb closes sections with a suspenseful teaser, never to return to it. He weaves his own coming of age into the narrative, though it is gapped and primarily focused on repeated accounts of the drunken, staggering nights of an under-25 demographic.
Because Baulcomb is one of Hamilton’s primary music critics, I would have loved to hear more of his perspective on the greater relevance of the acts that succeeded there, and a more well- rounded approach to the scene’s diversity. As it is, it seems there are only three female acts in Hamilton – and they get very brief coverage — and women therefore serve no other purpose in the narrative aside from casually dating Baulcomb and his friends.
Nevertheless, the book is laudable by being the first. Baulcomb is paying the pioneer tax as it were, given that nobody else has written about Hamilton’s 21st- century artistic explosion. His perspective, limited as it is by his work and social circle, lends a youthful enthusiasm to music and musicians that have been otherwise ignored by national media. It’s rare that we get the opportunity to hear from someone as they are experiencing the growth of a scene, as one of its participants.
Moreover, although the book is limited in its genre coverage, focusing mostly on rock, punk, and electro, the prevalence of these styles in Baulcomb’s account suggests that a particular sensibility endemic to Hamiltonians and the city allows them to flourish.
In other words, the rough-and-ready nature of rock and punk, or the escapist potential of electro, gripped the locals as they witnessed their city coming down around them. And, the music gave them a new sense of purpose.
There are too few local music critics who stay in their scene and promote it to the rest of the world: Baulcomb is one. I suspect his maturity as a writer and documentarian of all things Hamilton, already evident in the closing of the book, will continue to beget muchneeded commentary on the scene.