HEARING HIS OWN VOICE
Singer Tom Wilson traces the twists and turns of his history in memoir,
Imagine, if you will, finding out at 53 years old that you are not the person you thought you were. That your parents aren’t really your parents. That you were actually 75-per-cent Mohawk instead of simply a white, cigarette-and-coffee kind of guy from Hamilton. A warrior, potentially, if your life hadn’t taken a few twists and turns before you were even aware of it. It’s a helluva story. It begins with Tom Wilson — the Canadian singer famous with the bands Junkhouse, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, and Lee Harvey Osmond — and Bunny and George Wilson. Parents who were older than most, a curiosity Wilson questioned even from an early age. Bunny was well-dressed and wore her hair in a bun; George was a Second World War vet — one of those crazy, adventurous guys who volunteered to be in the tail gunner position in a Lancaster Bomber.
“He was a war hero and, like most heroes, he came home a broken man.” Blind, he at first hung out at the El Mocambo raising hell, then in Hamilton he ran a concession stand that brought in the family’s small income.
Bunny was a character. She protected him fiercely, She smoked, couldn’t cook, she shoplifted — and he knew she loved him.
“I put the spirit of Bunny into everything I did. She was everywhere. She was in my art, my day-to-day life. Her brutal and inappropriate observations and her irreverent, rebel attitude stood beside me, guiding me through a world of bulls---,” he wrote.
Also around was cousin Janie, who had left Kahnawake and lived in Toronto. Bunny’s sister Isabelle had married a Mohawk man, John Lazare, and Janie was their daughter.
Beautiful Scars is not a long book — just 230 pages or so — but Wilson has the ear of the poet and the eye of the painter.
He manages to pick just the right anecdote to sum up a personal feeling, at the same time as capturing a broader cultural moment.
Wilson says that while writing the book, certain memories made him cry, even though they didn’t make it into the final version. One such memory was George’s blindness. He gets choked up a few times as he remembers George being in his own bedroom.
“George was alone, blind, in this room in a corner in a bed. And he’d listen to the radio. And it would be his security.” The sound of the radio, of Ray Sonin’s show Starlight Serenade on CFRB, cutting through the darkness.
Hilarious in many instances, Beautiful Scars goes down memory lane (those whose parents and grandparents listened to Ray Sonin will surely get this joke) to produce a picture not only of Bunny and George and Tom’s life, but life on the east side of Hamilton Mountain in the late 1950s and into the 60s.
The story evoked the poverty they lived in; there’s an incredible anecdote in the book where Wilson recounts the moment he discovers they were poor. He and other kids in his school were collecting food for “the needy” for Christmas. “The needy” then became the brunt of jokes in schoolyard games.
Later, Bunny opened the door to accept a box from the Salvation Army — and there were the same cans of kernel corn, boxes of Kraft Dinner they’d collected at school. “I was one of ‘the needy,’ ” he writes.
That poverty, in part, has driven him to be successful — both financially and creatively. After, of course, he went through an exceptionally destructive period of drug use and partying. He’s clean now — “I’m 18 years sober . . . which I don’t preach about” — he’s had a family; his two kids, Madeline and Thompson, work in the music industry. He’s a songwriter, performer, painter, writer and voice-over actor.
“There’s some things in this world . . . ” he starts. “Close your eyes.” I close my eyes. The mellifluous — and familiar — tones start up again. “There’s some things in this world you can still count on. McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese.” We laugh. It’s a long way from his teens, from the days he stole his first guitar in a complicated deception that saw him borrowing an ID and using a fake address; from the days when he ended up at an orgy with a taxi driver; or played in a folk band.
But he always knew he had a voice. “I sang in class, out loud, all the time, I’m told,” he wrote in the book.
There’s a play on words here — talking about his literal singing voice, but also the power of using your own voice.
“I think people should sing every day. I think we’d have a more productive and happier and healthier environment on this planet if everybody sang every day.
“But it’s mostly coming face to face with yourself. Hearing your own voice in the room. Hearing your own power. Hearing the things the world tries to take away from you.”
He also gave Bunny and Janie a voice, by telling their story, I point out.
“To the best of my ability,” he acknowledges. “I’m the last man standing here and it’s up to me to tell the story.”
He learned that — it was confirmed that — he was adopted by happenstance one day in a limousine. Someone who’d known his family when he was a kid said she remembered when he was adopted.
Janie, of course, was his biological mother. His father, as it turns out, was Louis Beauvais, a married man with a family.
Lazare, whose home he’d gone to for Christmas and who he’d always known as “Uncle John,” is really his grandfather.
Turns out, Wilson has 75-per-cent Mohawk blood running through his veins.
How do you connect with, become part of, insert yourself into, reimagine yourself in, a family as something different from the way anyone knew you? “You gotta have respect.” He pauses. “You learn it playing in barrooms and being a travelling musician. Because you’re the carny and you’re always the outsider, you know? So if you’re selling dope underneath the locals’ noses, you gotta be really cool about it, you gotta be respectful,” he laughs, at the craziness of that world, of being respectful when you’re dealing drugs.
“And you also gotta be respectful about who it is you’re thinking of going home with. All that crazy s---? Those skills served me well in the refined circumstances of meeting family for the first time.”
And, he says, it’s a story that’s still being written.
“It is realizing what I knew I should be a part of that I never was, the fact that (during the Oka Crisis in 1990) my brothers, Christopher and Kyle (Beauvais), made out their wills, picked up automatic weapons and marched out to the woods to (potentially) die in a war that I was at home in Hamilton listening to on the radio and watching on The National.
“If I’d been born five hours east of Hamilton, if I’d been raised on the reserve, that might have been my life, you know.”
Or he might have been one of the Mohawk ironworkers in New York that helped put up the World Trade Center, or helped clear the rubble after 9/11, the way his brothers were.
But then, he might not have such beautiful scars.
Wilson manages to pick just the right anecdote to sum up a personal feeling, at the same time as capturing a broader cultural moment