Great Big Sea’s Doyle reminisces
Alan Doyle recalls Great Big Sea’s early travels in engaging memoir
A visceral shudder came down the line from St. John’s as Alan Doyle recalled one of his lowest moments on tour with Great Big Sea.
It’s recounted in the singer’s new book, A Newfoundlander in Canada: Always Going Somewhere, Always Coming Home. The engagingly conversational memoir follows Doyle and his bandmates as they discover the country at large for the first time on tour, punctuated with trips back to Newfoundland. There’s a sense of adventure, of learning about a land that, as Doyle says in the prologue, was uncharted on a map he filled in as a young boy: “Outside of my own province,” he writes, “I wrote about 10 names and drew one tower and a mountain range and a Habs logo.”
One of those adventures involved the band members gorging themselves to the point of shame on an avalanche of free Cadbury Creme Eggs as their van shuttled them across Canada. Doyle said he included it to depict the cabin fever in such close quarters — “you make stupid decisions because you’re bored out of your mind” — and you can sense the mania as a hitchhiker climbs in on the frostbitten road to Winnipeg, only to flee the candy-wrapper-strewn vehicle and its grizzled passengers at the first opportunity.
“There’s a few characters that come up in the book who I’d love to shake their hand and go ‘hello,’ ” Doyle said. “I hope they come up to me and go, ‘I was the dude in the van.’ ‘No way! How’s it going?’ ”
Now as then, Doyle displays a limitless curiosity and desire to engage. Nowhere in A Newfoundlander
in Canada does he sound tired of exploring. Every region brings a new revelation as the Celtic/traditional quartet members find themselves unexpected, but proud, ambassadors for Canada’s most remote province.
“I was fascinated with what people were like in different parts of the country,” Doyle said of the group’s first travels, “and I assumed they would be completely different. I talk about Saskatchewan, for example. I roll into Saskatchewan, and it looks nothing like anything I ever saw. … (But) the closest sentiment I felt to Newfoundland in my entire trip across the country was there. Because the people, they’re workhard, play-hard, problem-solving, do-it-yourself kind of people.”
Doyle writes of Great Big Sea’s early-1990s audiences with great affection, be they celebratory crowds looking for a reason to drink or a daunting herd of potential converts.
A show at Toronto’s legendary Horseshoe Tavern was flooded with expat Newfoundlanders who, Doyle writes, were “singing traditional songs from home for the first time in their lives ... The quote from the guy who ran the Horseshoe was, ‘When we have a band from Edmonton, all the Albertans don’t show up. But we have you guys and all the Newfoundlanders show up,’” he said. “I still smile when I tell that story, because it was a big deal — for us and them, I think.”
Conversely, he recalls a mismatched bill on which Great Big Sea faced a university audience waiting for raucous rockers Junkhouse in Prince George, B.C., and his revelation after the fact that “if we can play that gig, we can play any gig.
“I’m not sure diehard country fans in the south of the U.S. would listen to much folky music from Portland,” Doyle said, “whereas guys from northern B.C. who were there to see a hard-rock band very quickly gave an ear to another part of the country that had fiddles and whistles in it.”
Doyle’s journeys “also made me look at my own backyard completely differently,” he said. “Sometimes it was as simple as understanding really clearly how far away from everything we are. We try to diminish it as Newfoundlanders and as islanders — that it’s no trouble to get here and no trouble to get off, that it’s easy. But it’s not!
“There’s this romantic notion in a certain era of American film … ‘If I could just make it out of this town in the midwestern U.S. and make it to one of the cities.’ What is wrong with you? It’s 40 kilometres down the road! You could walk tonight!”
Doyle hits the long road from St. John’s for book events this fall, and again in the new year in support of his third solo album — his first to be recorded since Great Big Sea’s official retirement. Cut with his live band, the Beautiful Gypsies, at Bryan Adams’ Vancouver studio, the collection captures a joyous spark that was rare enough for Doyle to give a nod to the experience in the title, A Week at the Warehouse.
“It was an old-school way to make music: put a band in a really good room, set them up, press the red button and have them play stuff from beginning to end. Not a lot of people are making records that way these days.”
He credits top-tier producer Bob Rock — whose encyclopedic credits range from Jann Arden to Mötley Crüe — with providing “a real sense of fearlessness to just go for it. And teaching you to trust in the band you have behind you and the things we’re doing, and don’t have the whole thing planned before you go in.”
Having accomplished his mission of simply capturing “the sound of us set up with microphones in front of us playing,” Doyle approaches his tour with a new set of songs built for live performance. And is he ready to face smart-aleck fans bearing gifts of Cadbury eggs?
“I never thought about that. Oh no! I still can’t look at them, man. They still give me the heebie-jeebies. It was a real test of human willpower and I failed so miserably.”