April Wine leader sets ‘the record straight’
Just Between You And Me is the truth according to Myles Goodwyn.
It tells the story of his band, April Wine, Goodwyn’s rise and fall within it, and arguably, the experience of many Canadian bands of the ’70s that later had some success.
The autobiography comes at a busy time in his life. April Wine is still gigging, albeit in the summer months. Goodwyn, now in his 60s, is finishing an album of self-written blues. He is about to release a novel, Elvis And Tiger, and he oversees a charity, Shoes for the Homeless. He’s not lacking for things to do, obviously, but he felt the need to “set the record straight.”
This means opening up about his alcoholism, two marriages and control over the destiny of April Wine.
“I just felt the time was right,” he reasons. “From diabetes to divorce, I survived all those things. I wrote this primarily for my children. Also, there have been a lot of things written about the band that aren’t true. For the fans, I wanted to set the record straight.”
As Goodwyn tells it, Just Between You And Me, is an invitation to get to know a band that seems to have kept its distance.
In 1969, when the band released its first album, April Wine was an anomaly. It came from the Maritimes, settled in Montreal, not Toronto, and signed with a Montreal independent, Aquarius. It just didn’t fit with the accepted Canadian stereotype, but despite achieving international success in 1977, it nonetheless had to overcome the growing pains of many driven Canadian bands.
“I don’t agree with that,” counters Goodwyn.
He doesn’t complain, much, about the “inferiority complex” that plagued the Canadian music industry. In Goodwyn’s book, April Wine was an immediate domestic success. “We started in 1969; CanCon didn’t come along until 1971.”
April Wine didn’t need CanCon by ’71, but the regulations, which forced radio to play a quota of Canadian music daily, helped.
“I think April Wine was misunderstood,” he continues. “There was always a mystique. We were in Montreal and didn’t socialize much. I didn’t do a lot of interviews. Maybe if we’d lived in Toronto …”
Things might have been different? Maybe. Goodwyn emerges in his book as driven and, as often is the case, his own worst enemy.
“When I wrote the book, I really tried not to be vindictive. I tried to take the high road.” he says.
“There’s so much I could have told but I didn’t. I just wrote what happened and moved on.”