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STOMPIN’ TOM CONNORS, AN UNLIKELY CANADIAN STAR
There are gigs to play and the Maple Leaf to fly and there’ll be no fallsy-downsies in this man’s band.
When Stompin’ Tom Connors died in 2013, the media reported he had died of natural causes. He was, after all, 77 years old.
What the media did not say was that Tom — and everyone who met him instantly called him by his first name — smoked three and a half packs of cigarettes every day, and drank close to 175 bottles of Moosehead Ale every week.
Despite that, he never appeared to gain weight; one friend said he could have slipped through a drain grating but for his ever-present cowboy hat.
It was, in fact, something of a miracle that he lived as long as he did.
Back in 1970, I interviewed him for a now long-gone magazine, The Canadian Composer. It was the first cover story published on the man, and he talked about his poverty-stricken childhood, when he was shuffled between orphanages, group homes and ill-chosen foster parents.
As we walked around downtown Toronto, he showed me the greasy spoon at Sherbourne and Queen Street where he’d briefly been a short- order cook on the night shift, and he talked about his dislike and distrust of the police.
In his teens and early twenties, he was — to use his own words — a travelling bum. “I’d stick out my thumb for a ride, and if I couldn’t get one, I’d go to the other side of the road, and get something going in the other direction. Didn’t matter; you just kept going, looking for a bed for the night and a beer or two before you turned in.” Tom hitchhiked from one side of Canada to the other and back, and more than once.
Re-reading what I wrote more than 50 years ago, one line stands out: “Connors could, if he had to, catch a rabbit, kill it, skin it, cook it and eat it.” And he was, even in his early days, tough, stubborn, sometimes bitter and often cranky.
A career begins in a northern Ontario bar
By 1970, he was a decade (and an astonishing five albums) into a career that had begun in a bar in Timmins, a northern Ontario mining town.
Hitchhiking through town with his beaten up Martin guitar, he stopped into the Maple Leaf Tavern for a drink. Unfortunately, he was a nickel short of the price of a beer, but the bartender offered him a free drink or two if he played couple of songs. Tom recalled: “The bartender called the boss, and he came in and listened and he asked me if I’d like to sing at the hotel for a week, for money.
“So I started that night. No microphone, no stage; they just cleared away one of the tables in a corner, and they stood me there to sing. They gave me a bed and $35 for the week. And by the time I left 14 months later, they had a stage and a sound system and they were paying me $75 a week. And they was packed every night.
“Early on, they figured I was wrecking the carpet with my foot pounding out the beat, so they gave me a sheet of plywood to stand on. And that’s where my name came from.”
After he left the Maple Leaf Hotel, he began to play in other bars in northern Ontario — Sudbury, Wawa, North Bay, Kapuskasing — and built a following in small towns. Along the way, he wrote dozens of songs; some were stories, and all of them celebrated another Canada that the big city folk in Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal knew little, if anything, about.
Tom’s relationship with his musicians was remarkable. The first thing he asked a potential new player would normally be seen as a trick question: “Do you drink? Do you like beer?”
He explained that he wanted people in the band who drank beer, but that he did not need any “fallsy-downsies” who couldn’t handle their Moosehead.
If they were hired, they agreed in the contract to stay up with Tom after the gig, on a schedule with the other players — and drink warm beer, play chess and discuss subjects as disparate as world politics and numerology.
Some of the best young folk artists in Canada, including J.P. Cormier, Dave Gunning, Mike Plume and Tim Hus, apprenticed with him. They learned his enormous repertoire, learned how to play chess and croquet, and learned how to drink copious amounts of beer without getting drunk.
In the late ’60s and the very early ’70s, Tom and his band played well over 250 shows a year, often in small towns where you needed an ordnance survey map and a magnifying glass to find them. Word of mouth did the trick; an advance man would move ahead by two or three weeks, book a venue, run an ad in the local paper, buy some commercials on the nearest radio station, flyer the town, and promote the gig as a country music event for the whole family.
Stomping along on a sheet of plywood, he played in pubs and clubs, school auditoriums, small-town taverns, and occasional concerts in more formal venues. Canada was about to fall in love with the man.
Seen, sometimes patronizingly, as some sort of musical primitive who told Canadian stories in simple language, he earned his fame — and he stuck to his stubborn belief that being “Canadian” was special, and that Canadian artists should get a fair shot on radio, television and the media. He was, at the time, ahead of the pack.
This is the first of two Substacks about Stompin’ Tom — expect the next one in your mailbox is about a week!
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SOME VIDEO LINKS FOR YOUR WEEKEND
Here’s Stompin’ Tom’s tribute to Sudbury, the northern Ontario mining town. This was one of his biggest hits.
And here’s Tom’s tribute to k.d. lang — who else would rhyme k.d.’s name with orangutan? And, yes, k.d. makes a joyful appearance…
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That’s it for this week. Keep an eye out for more Stompin’ Tom, coming to your inbox in seven days. And there’s one more cheerfully outrageous story about Tom this week, in the part of this Substack for our PAID subscribers.
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