The ‘Beautiful Scars’ of Tom Wilson
LIFE MUST FIND IT difficult keeping up with Tom Wilson.
This week he’s been working in the studio on some new songs with his son Thompson, as well as writing material for the next LeE HARVeY OsMOND album.
There was also a Junkhouse show Thursday to open the Six Nations Fall Fair, a Blackie and the Rodeo Kings show Friday in Port Credit on Friday, and then, on Sunday he’ll return home to Hamilton where Blackie closes out Supercrawl.
At 58, Wilson remains one of the hardest working musicians in Canada.
HE’S FOCUSING one week at a time, so he’s not sure yet what song Blackie and the Rodeo Kings will perform at Toronto’s Massey Hall on Sept. 23 when the group inducts friend and collaborator Bruce Cockburn into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Wilson does know, however, that he will read a passage from his upcoming book “Beautiful Scars” at the same ceremony as part of the induction of another great Canadian songwriter, Neil Young.
“I wrote a piece about (Young’s) ‘Tonight’s the Night’ in the book,” Wilson explains. “So I’m going to be doing a little reading of that for Neil.”
“Beautiful Scars,” Wilson’s longawaited memoir, is due for release by publisher Random House sometime on Nov. 21 with a special book launch planned with the Hamilton Philharmonic in January.
The book, which recently made the Globe and Mail’s “most anticipated” list, has a lot more in it than just Wilson’s thoughts about Neil Young. The subtitle is “Steeltown Secrets, Mohawk Skywalkers and the Road Home.”
The book delves into Wilson’s youth, growing up on the east Mountain. It also chronicles Wilson’s discovery, just five years ago, that the people he thought were his birth parents were actually adoptive, and that the woman he had considered a cousin was, in fact, his mother. His background wasn’t Irish-French. It was Mohawk from Kahnawke, Que.
“The book is a 70,000-word love letter to a family that hid in plain sight and for a city that is disappearing around me,” Wilson says from his home, south of Aberdeen. “It’s kind of like Hamilton is another character in the book. It’s the Hamilton I grew up in, the ’60s east Mountain Hamilton.”
The city has been the spiritual anchor to his long musical career, starting out in the ’70s as a teenage folkie, then as a rocker with the Florida Razors and Junkhouse, through his several different solo projects including three albums under his LeE HARVeY OsMOND “acid folk” moniker.
During the past 20 years, Wilson has done some of his best work collaborating with fellow songwriters Colin Linden and Stephen Fearing as Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, originally coming together in 1996 to celebrate the music of Willie P. Bennett. Together the trio has recorded eight studio albums, gaining four Juno nominations and winning one.
Blackie is a respected name among in the North American roots community and the group’s latest album “Kings and Kings” drew an impressive array of high-profile guest performers that included Dallas Green, Eric Church, Buddy Miller, Bruce Cockburn, Jason Isbell, Vince Gill, Nick Lowe and Rodney Crowell.
“We enjoy the success we get,” Wilson says. “We might make another record. We might not. We’re all really busy. We’re all really happy when we’re on stage together. We love playing music together. There is no magic trick to that.”
SUNDAY’S SUPERCRAWL
performance at 5:45 p.m. marks the first time Blackie and the Rodeo Kings have performed at the free festival on James Street North and Wilson said the group “is happy to be a part of it.”
Wilson says he is also happy to see the many changes the city core has been undergoing over recent years. But he also admits a sentimentality for the old Hamilton stereotypes of grit and hard knocks that he writes about in “Beautiful Scars.”
“Locke Street used to be a place where you’d find $500 cars parked on the street and now there are people with $3,000 strollers pushing their kids,” he says. “Change is change. But let’s not pretend that what came out of this city and what lives and breathes out of this city doesn’t come from a deeper place than $3,000 strollers and coffee shops.”
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“The book is a 70,000-word love letter to a family that hid in plain sight and for a city that is disappearing around me.” TOM WILSON