Shakin' All Over Revisits Canadian Music From The '60s
Friday January 27, 2006 @ 07:30 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff
Nicholas Jennings
Canada's music scene is probably the hottest it's ever been right now, but today's stars owe a large debt to their predecessors who helped create a viable Canadian music industry and make this country the hotbed for talent that it's become. Shakin' All Over, a two-hour CBC-TV special airing at 8 p.m. on January 30, shines the spotlight on many of these pioneers.
The show is based on Nicholas Jennings' excellent 1998 book, Before The Gold Rush: Flashbacks To The Dawn Of The Canadian Sound, which chronicled the country's '60s musical revolution. Narrator Jian Ghomeshi and Jennings, who conducted more than 60 interviews across North America for the special, introduce you to a number of bands and artists who remain well-known today, as well as several you've probably never heard of unless you're a major Canadian music history junkie.
"Not many of these shows get made, and there's a good reason," says Jennings of the three years he put into the project. "They're so time-consuming and labour-intensive. To get as many artists and as many songs as we got into the show was a huge amount of work."
In addition to the usual suspects you'd expect to find, like The Guess Who, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, Shakin' All Over pays as much attention to relative unknowns like Vancouver's The Seeds Of Time, Ottawa's The Esquires and Montreal's Les Sultans.
"There was a mini scene in every major city that supported a healthy roster of bands," explains Jennings. "When you look closely at those artists, they were as much a part of the scene as the big icons.
"For every Randy Bachman or Gordon Lightfoot, there were all these other artists that they listened to and respected. We were able to make it like a love-in, where all the musicians talked about each other and what great songs their colleagues wrote."
Jennings also spoke to a variety of current musicians — including Sarah Harmer, Matthew Good, Hawksley Workman, 54.40's Neil Osborne, Barenaked Ladies' Steven Page, Sarah Slean and Sloan's Jay Ferguson — to get their perspectives on their musical forefathers.
"If you listen to records by The Ugly Ducklings or The Great Scots, they could almost be a hit in this day, because it's so contemporary with the revival of that sound by The White Stripes and The Hives," says Ferguson.
The special is brimming with rarely seen archival TV footage from Canada and the U.S., while some classic songs are given new life by modern artists to help bring things full circle.
If you miss the show on TV, Jennings says that EMI Canada plans to release it on DVD along with at least one companion CD highlighting some of the memorable music to emerge from the early days of Canadian rock.
"Canadian songs of the '60s stand the test of time," he insists. "Canada has always had the strength of songcraft."
—Steve McLean
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