As it was in the begining...

Today I came to a huge personal revelation.When I left the sleepy hills to move to Montreal,I really didn't have a clear idea why I was doing it.Sure ,I wanted to be rescued from small town boredom by big city life.I could have found that anywhere.There were alot of people I knew living in Montreal.Good mates,and some became good freinds,but as they fell away and moved on,I remained.There was something I had to find here,something I was searching for.It wasn't a conscious thing,more of an peripheral itch.
I don't want to come across as if I have not enjoyed my 18 years here in Quebec.I've met a beautiful woman and been with her for 16 years.I have a good job which i find very gratifying.I've moved through several cliques of freinds and never had a problem being sociable,with french or english,hippie or tough.I love living here.I could just never figure out why.
For the past few weeks ivé been aboard the daunting task of filling up my 30 GB IPod.There is this old hold over mentality from mixed tapes and cdr's that you will always run out of space before you can finish your musical train of thought.No More.With 7000+ songs to play with all the essentials barely covered 3 gigs,then I started filling in album gaps,stuff that looks good if other people pick up your IPod,"Yeah,well,the thing about John Coltrane is...".What bullshit.Then you get to the point where you start to pick around for the quirky,dirty little secret stuff.I know Wall of Voodoo had more than one single,but monkey me if I can remember it.Alot of the mid to late eighties stuff I wanted I found on P2P sites.But some stuff I couldn't.I started making a list of things I felt I was missing and every day I would search the same nine or ten entries.From searching the list over and over I came to a realization.All of the artists on my list were Canadian.Most of them were from Montreal.
Thats when it hit me.Why I came here,what this music had in common.Brave New Waves.Starting in '84 or so,I started listening to the nations overnight radio show on CBC.Right away I fell into this show and its spirit.This was something that was not commercial,not censored,and aimed at that 15 % nerd share of the 15 to 35 year old demographic pie.If you wore something that identified you as different(skateboard,sketchpad,mohawk,camera etc.)you were tuning into the show.I would get home from school,do my homework and take a nap after supper so I could stay up til 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning.Then I would pop in a cassette to tape the next 45 minutes and listen to it on the bus on the way to school the next morning.
The host,Brent Bambury,was from my hometown and had one of those calming,hypnotic CBC voices.Once every couple of years he would come home and a beach BBQ would be organized.BNW fans were unique because they had a much wider social web than anyone else in high schools.Instead of the University radio format of a 2 hour block of punk,then 1 hour of hiphop,2hours of industrial etc,the genre was flipping almost as fast as genres were being invented in the 80's.If I was small town and wanted to hear some new Black Flag,I had to listen through Skinny Puppy and Joy division to get it.And I got it.I got it all.
What really stood out was the fact that while broadcast from Montreal,Brent,Ava Rave,KevinKamoda managed to highlight local acts as often as possible.but it wasn't just the music.It was the stories ..."As I was walking in to work tonight,..."or .."They'll be at Station 10 tommorow night.."There were weekend overnight shows as well called Nightlines,fron Winnepeg and later from Vancouver.Didn't have the same feel at all.
For me Montreal wasnt a music scene,it was a music family.Every artist spent as much time plugging other local bands as they did flogging their own product.Álmost as if all the bands in Montreal all lived in a big block apartment together that bled art and dripped party.
So now that I know what brought me here,the real search is about to begin.Scouring the Internet for whispers of S.c.u.m.,Genetic Control,the Asexuals,Three Oclock Train,Jerry Jerry,My Dog Popper,the Doughboys(at right) ,the Nils,Deja Voodoo(seen above),the Gruesomes,Ray Condo ...and many others.Those are just the ones that were already gone by the time I got here.
So now I have a new mission-to build a angloMontreal music archive of stuff from the 80s.It would have been so easy for these people to go and try to make it in T.O.But they stayed.And others came.By 1990-91 Montreal almost blew up.Seattle had better coffee and more overdoses.But it didn't have history.Or a voice in the night.