Celebrating hockey with song
Annual concert is a paean to Canadian communities
“It seems like 90 per cent of NHL players come from small towns like Melville, Prince Albert, Foam Lake, Aneroid.”
DAVE BIDINI, MUSICIAN AND AUTHOR
LLOYDMINSTER, ALTA. — Thousands of miles from Atlantic to Pacific, Canada is girded by a narrow belt of population stretched thin across its vast landscape. Hockey is the common experience shared in every large city and small town along the way.
Bryan Trottier grew up playing hockey in one of those towns, Val-Marie, Sask. He went on to win six Stanley Cups, but last Thursday night, he was in another small Canadian town, stepping to a microphone with a guitar.
“It’s great fun to be part of a super evening of great music, super songwriters and terrific performers, and you folks add to our enjoyment,” Trottier told the audience of about 600 people at the community theatre here.
Then he started strumming, the band joined in, and the whole audience clapped along to Buck Owens’s Act Naturally.
Trottier was in Lloydmister, an oilpatch town of 27,000 straddling the AlbertaSaskatchewan border, as a hockey player and a country western singer, participating in Hockey Day in Canada festivities. Every year since 2000, Hockey Night in Canada, a program on the CBC network and itself a national institution that for generations has brought Canadians together before television sets on Saturday nights, has chosen a city or town to serve as the setting for a celebration of hockey’s place in Canadian communities.
In past years, it was places like Winkler, Man., Stephenville, Nfld., and Iqaluit, Nunavut. The festivities here stretched for five days. Townspeople skated with the Stanley Cup, met past NHL heroes, laughed along with the bombastic commentator Don Cherry at a sold-out banquet, and listened raptly to tales of the legendary coach Dick Irvin told by his son, Dick Irvin Jr., 81, who said he was “proud to be born in Alberta and raised in Saskatchewan.”
As i n recent years, the event included a concert of songs about the game by various Canadian artists. Dave Bidini, a Toronto-based musician and author, is the founder, organizer and bandleader of the show, called Stolen From a Hockey Card.
“For years in Canada, we’ve struggled to articulate this dichotomy — intelligent, capable citizens in love with a hard and violent, but beautiful, game — and this event allows us the chance to explore what is a very interesting dynamic,” Bidini said. “Also, if Brazilian soccer has samba, Canadian hockey can have its sound, too: electric folk music that can accommodate other forms when it has to.”
Last Thursday, Bidini sang The Battle of Alberta, in which the Calgary Flames-Edmonton Oilers rivalry, where “I was red and burning, and you were copper blue,” becomes a paean to the cities’ hockey fans themselves, “two stubborn northern lovers” united in glory and misery over the decades.
Jason Plumb, from Regina, sang a rousing singalong about Tiger Williams, the NHL’s career leader in penalty minutes, taking the ice and advising that “you might as well leave the box door open.”
Dave Gunning and David Francey sang A Game Goin’ On, a hoedown about townies headed “down to the rink, down to the pond, down to the river,” where an eternal hock- ey game was ever underway. Finished during last season’s NHL lockout, the song was recently voted the winner of the Hockey Night in Canada Song Quest, a search for “Canada’s next great hockey song” that drew nearly 1,000 entries last fall.
Amy Millan, a veteran of the Toronto music collective Broken Social Scene, sang dreamily of recreational players, who are happy getting stitched up after games in the park. Millan wore Darryl Sittler’s 1976 Team Canada sweater, drawing the oohs and aahs of the audience. Rollie Pemberton, a hiphop artist from Edmonton and Montreal, did Boys on the Bus, in which the championship Oilers of Gretzky and Messier became proud, boasting rappers.
Kris Demeanor, Calgary’s first poet laureate, sang the true story of the Avenue Grills, a 1930s Calgary women’s team denied the chance to play for the domin- ion championship because it lacked the funds to travel to Toronto.
Tami Holtby, from nearby Marshall, Sask., came out to a big ovation wearing the Washington Capitals sweater of her son, goalie Braden Holtby. In the 1980s and ’90s, she was the frontwoman of a Saskatchewan band, Tami Hunter and Walkin’ After Midnight, and was twice named the province’s country artist of the year. Her song Babies in the Game was about being a hockey mom, if the hockey mom sounded a lot like Patsy Cline.
“Whether they’re shut down in overtime or named the game’s first star, we were right there from the start,” she sang. “Even though we’re miles apart, they will always be our babies in the game.”
Throughout the evening, whoever spoke or sang identified where they were from, a function familiar to NHL fans, who can often name the towns their favourite players are from, the way football or basketball fans can name players’ colleges.
“It seems like 90 per cent of NHL players come from small towns like Melville, Prince Albert, Foam Lake, Aneroid,” said Bidini, who earlier in the week accompanied the former Maple Leafs star Wendel Clark to Kelvington, Sask., where they saw a moose at the pond where Clark learned to skate.
“In Canada, because players are mythic, so are their towns. They produced these huge national figures out of the wilderness.”
Trottier, 57, has been playing guitar and singing harmony since he was 14 on the family ranch, when his father, Buzz, strapped a bass on him and brought him onstage to join the family band. He played with his father, brothers and sister throughout his youth and junior hockey career in Saskatchewan and Alberta with Climax, Moose Jaw, Swift Current and Lethbridge; dabbled some while winning six Stanley Cups, two most valuable player awards and a scoring title in the 1980s and ’90s; and got serious again in retirement. At old-timers games, he sometimes skates out in full hock- ey gear with a guitar and then sings Johnny Cash.
“I love Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard,” Trottier said before the show. “They’re easy to play and fun to harmonize with. All that genre of the ’60s and ’70s, I’m all in. And a lot of newer stuff — Tim McGraw, Randy Travis, Alan Jackson. But all of those ballads are just fun to play because they’re three chords and a story.”
Trottier and the Bidini band had the audience bouncing to the Waylon Jennings-Willie Nelson song GoodHearted Woman and the Merle Haggard tune Mama Tried, which Trottier jokingly dedicated to Tiger Williams.
Then it was time for the show’s finale, which was, of course, The Hockey Song, by Stompin’ Tom Connors, the patron saint of Canadian country music, who died last year.
“Well, hello out there, we’re on the air, it’s a hockey night tonight,” the performers and audience sang.
From the back of the theatre, Lanny McDonald and Mark Napier emerged, two grey-haired Stanley Cup winners carrying the Cup itself.
The audience roared.