I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BIG SMOKE-“Clothes” (Moose: The Compilation, 1991).

Back in the 1990s, it was common to buy a compilation or soundtrack or even a band’s album based on one song.  Only to then find that you didn’t really like anything else on it.

Maybe that single sounded like nothing else on the album.  Maybe the movie was almost entirely one genre, but they had that one song that you liked over the credits.  Or maybe the compilation was for something you didn’t know, but a song you really wanted was on it, too.

With streaming music that need not happen anymore.  Except in this case.

I bought this compilation, used, recently exclusively for one song, Rheostatics’ “Woodstuck.”  It’s a goofy song and this is the only place you can get the studio version.  The actual compilation was not well documented, so I didn’t know what the other bands on it might sound like.  It turns out to be a compilation for Ontario based Moose Records which specialized in Rock, Folk, World & Country.  They put out another compilation in 1992 and that’s all I can find out about them.

Big Smoke is NOT the hip hop band Big Smoke.  This song opens with a slinky lead guitar and then a stompin two step.  The song feels country in the music but the vocals are rock.  There’s a cool mysterious menace to the song that I quite like.

Leader singer Steve Woeller has apparently done a lot of things since, although there’s not a lot about him per se.

[READ: July 20, 2019] “Nettles”

Wow, this story went in some unexpected directions.  And it was fantastic.

It begins in the present with the narrator remembering an incident in 1979 when she saw a man eating a ketchup sandwich at a friend’s house.

Then it flashes further back to her childhood.  She lived on a relatively small far that had its own water supply.  Even though they had enough water, her father wanted the well dug deeper.  The well-driller, Mike, brought his son (also Mike) who was about the same age as the narrator.  The Mikes were living in a local hotel while drilling wells in the area.

The narrator and young Mike hung out and played all the time together. They would spend a lot of time down by the river and she tells of a memorable incident where all of the local kids played a “war” with the clay by the river.  It was almost a snowball fight but with weapons made from the clay and mud. The boys were the soldiers and the girls were the nurses.  She was Mike’s nurses and she ensured that he was “healed” by wet leaves which she placed on his forehead and stomach.

They returned home and the adults were shocked by the filth.  Someone comments that they were going to get married someday, but the narrators mother didn’t like that talk.

When the well was finished, Mike and his father moved away–he had wells to drill elsewhere.

Jumping back to 1979, the narrator talks about her friend Sunny.  They had been friends in Vancouver and were pregnant around the same time so they could share pregnancy clothes.  I loved this description of why they both left for the east coast

Sunny had moved with her husband and her children and her furniture, in the normal way and for the usual reason–her husband had got another job.  And I had moved for the new-fangled reason that was approved of mightily but temporarily and only in some special circles–leaving husband and house and all the things acquired during the marriage (except, of course, the children, who were to be parceled about), in the hope of making a life that could be lived without hypocrisy or deprivation or shame.

She talks about her life in Toronto–the man that she had begin seeing, the amount her girls hated being in Toronto and away from Vancouver and how much she wished her writing would improve.

Then she visited Sunny’s house in the countryside outside of Toronto. Sunny’s kids were playing in the front yard.  When the narrator brought her bag inside Mike was standing there making a ketchup sandwich.

Sunny an her husband were surprised at the coincidence but the narrator was sure that she and Mike felt it was a miracle.

They all had dinner together and the narrator and Mike caught up on the past.  She told about her girls not wanting to be around. He told about his wife and his own kids (so there was no immediate romantic entanglement).  But she still felt very charged that he was in the house.

Indeed that evening, while she slept in the guest bedroom (where Mike slept the night before) she imagined all night that he would come and be with her.  He never did.

But the next day while the family went swimming, Mike said he wanted to go to the local golf course–he was in town to golf after all.  The narrator went with him and when a rainstorm unleashed a deluge, they hid in the bushes trying to get away from the storm.

Once again, they were wet, covered in leaves and very close together.

This reconnecting was interesting d exciting, but when he tells her a secret that he has been harboring, the bottom of the story drops out from underneath them all .

Wow, Munro knows how to pack an unexpected punch.