Blue Rodeo "Me & Baz"

plus a random guy I met busking SWEARS he used to sell Baz (the chunkiest member) heroin. Do I believe him?

I. After

So 2 or 3 Sundays ago I’m singing a favourite song of mine in front of the LCBO, (which is where I make most of my $). It’s a Sunday. I’ve made about $80. It’s 4:30PM. I have 3 or 4 panhandlers staring me from up the street a bit, hating me for having got here before they did, but I got here an hour before they did. I didn’t sleep in and just waltz by at 3lm. I got here at 10 and waited an hour for the place to open. Stare all you want guys, I am working this LCBO from open to close. Too bad, so sad.

I've been late before to find a guy already seated on a milk crate holding a change cup. The busker code requires me to find another place, not just start playing where this guy was first. There's an LCBO near Greenwood, another near Victoria Park. People are ALWAYS telling me “why don't you go downtown? Where the REAL money is?”

Because NOBODY gives money downtown. On Parliament, a busker is a novelty, something different. Downtown we are a dime a dozen. Last spring I tried Queen & Augusta every day for a week. Where the KFC used to be. I did not make more than 10$ even once. I used to busk at the Northwest corner of University & Queen. There's a light there (University is the longest light in Toronto. I had to do a project on it once for my Urban Studies class. People have 30 seconds to decide whether to give. They don't give. I rarely made more than $20. Every time.

But Main Street Tim Horton's? $40-50 every day unless it's Sunday or Monday. Parliament LCBO on a Sunday? I've made $90 and $115 and change before. On a Monday I've made $50 before. So people: stop telling me to “go downtown.” Where the “real money" is. There is a panhandler every 3 feet downtown. A busker does not, simply cannot, stand out. If there is “real money downtown,” people are clinging real tightly to it.

The LCBO opens @ 11AM on Sunday. And they've recently raised their closing time by an hour. So I’ve gotta stand here & sing, play, busk, for 7 hours. 11-7. Like the opposite of that 7-11 place.

On days where nobody relieves me (relief being a friend who can just stand in place & hold my guitar so I don’t lose my coveted spot while I run to the back alley to piss.) I often go 7 hours without peeing. I think my kidneys are conspiring to kill me at this point. Lately I've been arranging for relief halfway through. Like a relief pitcher, someone to come at 3PM and relieve me each time. For the concrete I use a bathroom shower mat to stand on. Trust me. Stand on bare concrete or sidewalk every day for a week & tell me how your feet feel at the end of it. Like they're on fire? Massive pain? Almost unbearable? If you're a busker, invest in a nice thick bathroom shower mat. I had one anyway. A domestic remnant of marriage, now part of my busking toolkit. It rolls up easily & fits in my backpack, along with sunscreen, sunglasses, and water bottle. Trust me. Try it in your own bedroom sometime, standing & singing for 6+ hours. It WILL tire you.

ANYWAY this week I needed the $ this worked $50 and change for repairs & groceries. I made $115 and change is the most I have EVER made busking, eh? If only that were every day.

II. Before

A few weeks ago I'm at my usual spot and it’s 3PM or some shit like that & I’m doing “Me & Baz” by Blue Rodeo when an ancient man, I might have mistaken him for the immortal Wandering Jew & not been too far off so wrinkled were his tattoos.

Anyway the guy turns & goes “Woah! Blue Rodeo! Y’know I used to sell heroin to Basil?”

He wasn’t the immortal Wandering Jew though. He looked more like an immortal street thug. His tattoos hinted at a long prison spells and adherence to certain hierarchies of order until…BLAMMO, Ancient Tattoo Man takes all the money & drugs in the room, plus the initiative. He looked like Kim Coates if Kim Coates were older than a century, old enough to have pick-pockets @ the 1893 World’s Fair.

“Are you sure?” I said. I remembered Bazil being kinda overweight in the “Lost Together” video. But that was 1992.

He got in my face. No masks. “You callin me a liar?”

“No!” Just that Baz is the…fattest one in the band.”

“So?”

“So being fat ain’t a heroin thing.”

He sighed. “Y’know Hillbilly Heroin? OxyContin? Those people are all fat. Heroin chic only became a thing because the girls were already thin. Baz can be whatever size he wants & still do heroin. He still does it.”

“What?” I asked, alarmed now. If the bass player for Canada's second most successful rock act cannot quit heroin, what with access to the best rehab facilities and everything, what chance does a normal addict have?

“He’s put a new wing on my fuckin house. Since ‘84. Him and Greg. In ‘88 Greg owed me so much I had to cut him off.”

“How much?”

“Thirty thousand.” It came out of him so fast it was like he couldn’t wait to tell me.Thirtythousand.“ So instead Greg gave me his brand new Mustang.”

My friends Carey & Spencer, their father owns a 50s Telecaster sold to their Dad, Ritchie, by…Greg Keelor of Blue Rodeo. This is a fact.

“Hang on!” I asked ancient Kim Coates and brought up the video of Blue Rodeo doing “Me & Baz” on Zoom or Va-Va-Voom or whatever the fuck it’s called. Look at the guy on bass on the dock. Looks like the host of a fishing show. Looks like a guy playing bass on his cottage dock in Muskoka. This man does not look like a smack addict. The video is at the bottom of this post so you can check for yourself.

That is Bazil Donovan, who has played bass for Blue Rodeo since their inception in 1984 after they changed their name from the Hi-Fi’s, which was their attempt at New Wave. Bazil Donovan is a chunky, middle-aged man who looks like he’s never tried anything harder than a Bud Light.

Bazil Donovan has been there in the band since the very beginning, though that fact has nothing to do with his consumption of substances.

In this “socially distanced” concert, he looks like your average Canadian Dad, not a guy who would ever, ever try heroin.

Then again, the song’s writer, Greg Keelor, has had his share of drug problems, chief among them opiate-related? In the mid-to-late 1990s, Keelor had an injury for which he could get as many refills as he wanted without consulting his doctor. Who knows? Maybe Baz joined in on the opiate train?) The song fit the timeline, being on a 1997 album. Just on the cusp of Keelor’s alleged injury & subsequent addiction to Percocet.

The shirtless old man in tattoos was so adamant I began to believe him. What did he have to gain from convincing me? A customer? I didn’t ask for, not want, H or fentanyl that day. It was a sweaty Sunday, I’d made my $60, and it was four mins to 6PM, LCBO closing time was upon us.

Why else would the song be called “Me & Baz” when everyone knows Blue Rodeo is fronted by Greg Keelor & Jim Cuddy? Maybe Baz is Greg's best friend in the band (which would up, not reduce, the chances of those two getting into the same drug. Either way, Bazil looks happy. He must enjoy his anonymity.

Most Canadians can identify a Blue Rodeo song but they wouldn’t know Bazil Donovan if he walked past them on the street (or Greg Keelor for that matter.)

Speaking of Keelor, he must have really pissed off Father Time somehow. He’s got diabetes, arthritis, tinnitus and its nasty cousin hyperacusis I also have these last two. It is awful. I have often wondered if that's why I took to opiates like a rug to a floor. I was so happy when my ex-wife turned out to be the kind who sleeps with white noise on, or a fan running.

Hope for either a tinnitus or hyperacusis cure is so distant they may as well be a mirage on the horizon. Doctors are not even using the right language when discussing tinnitus and hyperacusis. Check a pamphlet sometime.

They use words like “discomfort.“

Hah. Discomfort.

Loud sounds hit my brain so loud that I have to plug my ears for pretty much anything above yelling volume.

Smoke detector? Plug ears. Still hurts for hours afterwards. Ambulance? Plug ears. Pain. But the bane of my existence are fucking air brakes, cuz you never have any warning. You walking past a buss and suddenly a puff of compressed air is released so suddenly it feels like your brain is getting sucked into the truck, train, or bus, or whatever. It hurts so fucking much. Like being stabbed in the brain.

BUT…mild discomfort, say the pamphlets. As one advocate said “we are talking about ongoing, sustained pain here.” I'm paraphrasing now but how can we fix the problem if we're not even defining it correctly?

I was made fun of for wearing earplugs almost every time I wore them. To some afterparty thing at Salem Horror Fest 2018? Ok. I wanna be a good partner. But loud music means people can’t hear what you are saying, and vice versa. Which means they have to cup their hands and scream what they want to say directly into your ear canal and it hurts so fucking much.

Same shit happened when I went to the closing of a bar @ Queen and Leslie. EVERY SINGLE PERSON brought up my wearing hearing protection like I was personally about to give them HIV of the ear or something. I just wanted to be able to hear.

(In a mild-to-loud environment, earplugs allow some with tinnitus or hyperacusis to actually hear the trivial bullshit you are bellowing into their ears. 99.99% of time? Whatever is said? Not worth it. Next time you see someone at a crowded event wearing earplugs, best bet is to leave them alone.

Ask anyone with tinnitus or hyperacusis how they feel about passing ambulances, if they are mild discomforts or ear emergencies to be avoided. Bags must be dropped, ears must be plugged, as the ambulance passes SO FUCKING SLOWLY & SO FUCKING LOUD it feels like you are being stabbed in the brain.

This is not “mild discomfort.”

It’s agony.

Wanna read a story about a guy who killed himself over it a combination of tinnitus & hyperacusis? Most people, like me, are blessed with both. So was he. But a particularly bad form of hyperacusis. Poor guy couldn't even listen to music. And yes, it's ironic, he used to be in a noise project Azure Plane. It’s right here. Click on this hyperlinked sentence. The story it has to tell is fucking brutal.

DiEmilio’s case was an extreme one, and the irony was not lost on him that he’d played in a noise group whose primary objective was to be as loud as possible. He disliked having visitors because the pain was all he could think or even talk about:

“He was smoking a lot of pot because it helped dull some of the pain," Chaiken says. “By the end, it was terrible, he just wasn't really there. The look on his face was pain, like if someone had a tooth pulled. He didn't want to be a burden. He was almost apologetic, like, 'I'm sorry this is happening, this is all I can talk about.'"

“Every sound hurts my ears,” Jason DiEmilio wrote just before washing down dozens of hoarded pills with beer in the bathtub of his Harlem apartment in October 2006. “The sound of flipping this page is too loud for me. It sends pain through my ears and brain.”

It can get better, as it did for Keelor, who is touring again, but he looks at least twenty years older than Jim Cuddy, the public face of the band (& with good reason).

Here’s Greg Keelor. 66 years old.

Here’s Jim Cuddy. 65 years old.

Greg Keelor is only seven months older than Jim Cuddy.

Among B.R. fans there are two camps. Cuddy v Keelor. I say we should all get along, but if I had to pick, my heart is with Keelor. He breaks my heart more (“Lost Together.” “Hasn’t Hit Me Yet,” “Side of the Road.”).

ANYWAY here’s my version of “Me & Baz,” a song about friendship and being on the road too long, and seemingly something more…“I don’t know if I’ll make it home alive” is one of the lines…

Seems kinda…serious? Like more serous than merely being on tour?

The song is from 1997 Tremolo, when the band was entering a commercial downturn, playing 400 seaters instead of 2000 seaters.

Playing Orangeville instead of Barrie.

Playing Yorkton in Saskatchewan instead of Saskatoon.

Playing Cowichan Lake instead of Victoria.

And playing a particularly disastrous show in Detroit, going on last after a teenage Battle of the Bands, an experience that caused Keelor to pen the rousing “What Am I Doing Here?”

But back to Baz. We know Greg was messed up, but was he on heroin in the 1990s?

Lotta people, especially doctors, keep it a secret.

Sometimes you turn to things. Maybe Baz got into H for a while. Ancient tattoo man was adamant. He was adamant that he sold Bazil heroin in the 1990s. After a while we drifted apart and I started jamming on “Ahead By A Century” which got. me a $10 bill.

Full disclosure: I did not ask the Ancient Tattoo Man if he had any H or fent for sale. I just listened to him & watched him leave, muttering to himself.

III: Now

Now I’ll post my atrocious version of “Me & Baz” (I don’t know what I was doing at the end & also sorry for the drum machine but sometimes you just need a backbeat & then afterwards if yr not sick of the song aleady you can bask in the gorgeousness of Blue Rodeo’s version.

I’m gonna go with my gut on Baz, btw. No.

He may have tried opiates for some kind of injury in the 1990s but not heroin & he, like Greg, was able to quit.

And now he sits on a dock in Bracebridge or Muskoka recording one beautiful song after another (via Zoom or some shit) with Canada’s best band:

PS: I just now got the double meaning of “I don’t know how I/Let the stakes get so high/And so did I.”

As in…I let the stakes get high…and then I got high. Hah. I get it. I get jokes. Here's Blue Rodeo doing it right. I'll never get tired of hearing Cuddy/Keelor in harmony.