The 500 - #88 - At Folsom Prison - Johnny Cash

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by New York-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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Album #: 88

Album Title: At Folsom Prison

Artist: Johnny Cash

Genre:  Country, Rock

Recorded: Folsom State Prison, Folsom, California

Released: May, 1968

My age at release: 2

How familiar was I with it before this week: Somewhat

Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #164 - dropping 66 spots

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Cocaine Blues

I thought I knew this record. I certainly knew a lot of the songs. Folsom Prison Blues has been part of the Johnny Cash mythology for as long as I can remember, and Cocaine Blues wasn't unfamiliar territory either. The late Reverend Freddie and the Distillers, whom I wrote about in my Hank Williams post, used to perform both songs regularly. So when At Folsom Prison came up on my journey through The 500 Greatest Albums list, I figured this would be one of those records where I would be thinking all week about an angle to write about. Then, I fell into a research rabbit hole.

The more I read about At Folsom Prison, the more I realized how little I actually knew about it, even getting the title wrong for years. To me, it was "Live at Folsom Prison", which seems perfectly reasonable since it is, after all, a live album recorded at Folsom Prison. Except it isn't called that. The title is simply At Folsom Prison. No “Live.”

Folsom Prison, Folsom. California.

My mistake is an example of the tiny musical corrections this project keeps handing me – such as learning I've spent decades adding “The” to Eagles, Ramones and Pixies. None of those bands includes the definite article in their moniker.

I also had this image in my head of Johnny Cash essentially arriving at Folsom with his band and playing a concert for the inmates one evening. In reality, it was much more of a travelling country show. Carl Perkins, the man who wrote and first recorded Blue Suede Shoes, was there, as were The Statler Brothers; Cash's band; The Tennessee Three; and June Carter. In fact, those artists performed two concerts at Folsom on January 13, 1968, one in the morning and another a few hours later. Most of the performances from the first show appeared on the original album. Not bad for a morning shift.

Cash performing at Folsom Prison.

I knew June Carter was there because you can hear her voice on Jackson, her duet with Cash. However, I hadn't really thought about where the pair were in their lives at that particular time. We tend to look back at their story, knowing how it ends. They became “Johnny and June”-- one of those couples whose names seem naturally attached to one another. By the time I knew who Johnny was, June seemed inseparable from the image of the man himself. Indeed, they married -- but that wasn't the situation when they walked into Folsom that January morning 58 years ago.

Johnny and June.

Johnny had married his first wife, Vivian Liberto, 14 years earlier in 1954, and they had four daughters together. As Johnny's career took off, however, life on the road, his escalating drug use and his growing relationship with June helped tear the marriage apart. Walk the Line, the 2005 biopic with Joaquin Phoenix as Cash, Reese Witherspoon as June and Ginnifer Goodwin as Vivian, makes that troubled triangle one of the central stories of the film. By the Folsom period, Johnny and Vivian's marriage was over in everything but the legal formalities, while his relationship with June had become the central focus in his life.

Movie poster for Walk The Line.

In fact, James Mangold’s film Walk the Line begins with the Folson Prison concert. We see Cash backstage at Folsom before the movie moves backwards through his childhood, his first marriage, his early recording career, his drug problems, and his complicated relationship with June.

Joaquin Phoenix as Cash in Walk The Line's Folsom Prison.

Eventually the story swings back to Folsom, and we see Phoenix's Cash performing for the prisoners. The film, therefore, treats the concert almost as the destination. But it didn’t mean Cash’s turbulent life had come to an end. Just that events continued to unfold – but without Vivian.

Cash with his first wife, Vivian Liberto.

The movie covers Cash’s famous proposal to Carter on a concert stage in London, Ontario – interestingly only a few kilometers from where I wrote this post.

Mural depicting Cash's proposal on the exterior of
Canada Life Place in London, Ontario. 

Another fascinating aspect of the Folsom shin dig was the emergence of Glen Sherley, a musician who became part of the Cash legend.

He didn't come through the Folsom gates with Cash, Carter or Perkins. He was already on the other side a resident serving time for armed robbery. By 1968 he had spent considerable portions of his life as an inmate in the California prison system where he honed his skill as a songwriter.

One of Sherley's compositions was called Greystone Chapel, a song inspired by the chapel inside Folsom itself. He managed to have the song recorded, and a cassette tape found its way to Reverend Floyd Gressett, a minister who worked with prisoners and also happened to know Cash.

Greystone Chapel inside Folsom Prison.

On January 12, 1968, the night before the concerts, Cash listened to it, loved what he heard and decided he wanted to perform the song the following morning. He stayed up late that night learning it.

The best part of the story is that Glen Sherley apparently knew none of this as he took his place among the inmates to watch Cash perform, completely unaware that during the previous night one of the biggest stars in country music had been sitting in a motel room learning his song.

Sherley in attendance at Folsom Prison show.

Sherley watched as Cash tore through songs about prisons, trains, murder, loneliness and bad decisions, many of them describing lives that the men sitting in front of him understood well.

Near the end of the concert, Cash introduced another song and explained that it had been written by someone right there inside Folsom Prison. Then he said the man's name: Glen Sherley.

Cash shaking hands with Sherley.

Cash's bass player, Marshall Grant, later recalled Sherley essentially melting into his seat as the prisoners around him erupted. Suddenly, the guy sitting among them wasn't simply another inmate. Johnny Cash was standing onstage about to sing something he had written.

Because Columbia was recording the concert, Sherley's moment didn't stay inside Folsom. Greystone Chapel became the closing song on At Folsom Prison, meaning that this unknown prisoner's composition travelled beyond those gates even while its writer couldn't.

You'd think that would be the wonderful little piece of trivia at the end of Glen Sherley's story, but it wasn't. Sherley kept writing behind bars, and in 1971 another of his songs, Portrait of My Woman, was recorded by country star Eddy Arnold. Arnold didn't bury it on an album either. The song became a single and the title track of his Portrait of My Woman album. Sherley also got the extraordinary opportunity to record an album of his own while incarcerated at Vacaville, Prison. The Folsom prisoner whose song Cash had unexpectedly performed was slowly becoming a legitimate country songwriter without having built anything resembling a normal life outside prison.

There seemed to be a remarkable redemption story forming, and Cash tried to help make it happen. When Sherley was paroled in 1971, Cash didn't simply congratulate him and move on. Sherley became associated with Cash's House of Cash publishing operation and eventually joined Cash's touring organization.

For a while, the story must have seemed almost too perfect: an imprisoned songwriter has one of his songs unknowingly passed onto Johnny Cash; he hears Cash perform it inside a prison; has another song recorded by Eddy Arnold; gets released and finds himself welcomed into the professional country-music world.

Unfortunately, real life refused to provide a Hollywood ending. Sherley struggled badly outside prison. Years of incarceration hadn't prepared him for the schedules, expectations and pressures of life on the road. His behaviour became increasingly unpredictable, his relationship with members of Cash's organization deteriorated, and eventually that extraordinary second chance fell apart. His music career faded, his personal life deteriorated and, in 1978, Glen Sherley died by suicide at the age of 42.

Sherley's story changes At Folsom Prison for me. The mythology of the record naturally revolves around Johnny Cash walking into that prison dressed in black, facing a room filled with inmates and delivering that famous introduction, “Hello, I'm Johnny Cash.” That's the image that survived, and Walk the Line helped introduce it to another generation. But what I hadn't appreciated before digging into this album was how many other stories were unfolding in that room.

The 500 - #89 - Dusty In Memphis - Dusty Springfield

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by New York-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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Album #: 89

Album Title: Dusty In Memphis

Artist: Dusty Springfield

Genre:  Pop, R&B,  Blue Eyed Soul

Recorded: American Sound, Memphis, Tennessee

Released: March, 1969

My age at release: 3

How familiar was I with it before this week: One Song

Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #83 - rising 6 spots

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Son of a Preacher Man

Like some people of from my generation (perhaps many), my introduction to Dusty Springfield came in 1994 when I saw Quentin Tarantino’s modern masterpiece, Pulp Fiction. Springfield’s Son of a Preacher Man plays as a very stoned Vincent Vega, John Travolta’s effortlessly cool hitman. Vega is assigned by his boss, Marsellus Wallace, to take Mrs. Wallace, out for dinner while he is away. But this is Pulp Fiction, and Vega, and the audience, know there is nothing simple about spending an evening alone with the boss’s wife, Mia.

A heroin-buzzed Vega (Travolta) arrives at the home of his
boss, Marsellus Wallace, in Pulp Fiction.

The movie is classic Tarantino who has always expertly woven perfectly matching songs into his films. From Dick Dale’s frantic surf guitar Misirlou blasting over the opening credits of Pulp Fiction to David Bowie’s haunting Cat People that accompanies one of the many suspenseful sequences in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino doesn’t only use songs as background music. He uses them almost like characters, forever attaching them to the scenes in which we hear them. I will certainly never hear Stealers Wheel’s Stuck in the Middle with You the same way after seeing Reservoir Dogs in 1992. What had been an impossibly catchy piece of early ’70s pop suddenly became the soundtrack to one of the most disturbing scenes in cinema.

Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) menaces a bound police
officer (Freddie Newandyke) in Reservoir Dogs.

Tarantino is famously obsessive about music, but Martin Scorsese has been doing something similar for even longer -- loading movies with songs that forever become identified with particular scenes. I started thinking about all the music I had discovered, or rediscovered, through the two movie giants and remembered a hypothetical question I once saw posted on social media.

Imagine you’ve been given the chance to inherit one of two record collections. There’s just one catch: you have to choose. Do you take Quentin Tarantino’s collection or Martin Scorsese’s?

Tarantino’s collection would be the more unpredictable of the two. I imagine crates filled with ’60s and ’70s soul and R&B, surf rock, garage rock, funk, psychedelia, country, rockabilly and forgotten pop singles, alongside shelves of old movie soundtracks and strange curiosities picked up in record stores over the years. There would be plenty of recognizable names, but the real fun would be digging through the records with unfamiliar titles. Tarantino is clearly drawn to songs that have slipped out of the cultural conversation, only to give them a remarkable second life by dropping them into exactly the right scene. His collection wouldn’t simply be a history of popular music. It would be a history of the weird corners and forgotten side roads of music history.

Scorsese’s collection, on the other hand, would be enormous and deeply rooted in the history of American music. I also imagine it meticulously sorted and on display on well-built shelving units in a large, dust-free room. There would be shelves of blues, early rock and roll, doo-wop, R&B, soul, jazz, folk and country, followed by seemingly endless stretches of the rock music that has populated his films.

Certainly, he would have most of the records on The 500 list, including those by The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Cream and Frank Sinatra. He would even have some Kanye, having used the song Black Skinhead in The Wolf Of Wall Street. But I suspect his collection would extend well beyond rock and roll into classical music, opera, traditional Italian music and old standards. Where Tarantino’s shelves might reward you with some forgotten 45 you never knew existed, digging through Scorsese’s would feel like opening a musical history book, one in which blues leads to rock and roll, rock leads to Dylan and The Stones.

A quick check with artificial intelligence gives Scorsese a convincing lead. Across his 26-film directorial catalogue, he has used music by 32 artists who have at least one album on The 500. Several, including Dylan, The Stones, Beatles and Cream, appear on the list multiple times. Tarantino’s movies feature only 17 such artists, although that comparison demands an asterisk. Scorsese has simply made more movies and filled them with far more music. Put together a playlist of songs from Scorsese films and you would sail past 300 tracks; do the same for Tarantino and you would land somewhere around 127. This isn't counting Scorsese's documentaries or The Last Temptation of Christ, which includes an additional 21 tracks by 500 alumni Peter Gabriel.

My friend Jeff was visiting us at the cottage this weekend and, during a post-dinner walk, he and I arrived at the same conclusion. We would much prefer Tarantino's collection. As Jeff put it:

"Quentin's collection would be so eclectic and filled with obscure records I have never heard of. Sure, Scorsese's would have all the classics, and because he knows the artists he would have some cool rarities and live albums. But, other than those, I have most classic records in my collection already. I would love to dig through Tarantino's crates."

Among them would certainly be Dusty in Memphis. It is exactly the kind of record Jeff and I were talking about, one I probably would never have thought to seek out had Tarantino not introduced me to Dusty Springfield through Pulp Fiction more than 30 years ago. Son of a Preacher Man is a gem, but Dusty in Memphis delivered far more than that signature song.

Dusty in Memphis was the result of Ms. Springfield crossing the Atlantic in search of the music she loved. Already one of Britain’s most successful singers, Springfield travelled to Memphis in September, 1968, to work with legendary Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler and the musicians at American Sound Studio. Memphis was one of the beating hearts of American soul, and Springfield wanted to step inside that world rather than simply imitate it from England. What emerged was a remarkable collision of British pop sophistication and Southern soul.

International cover for Dusty In Memphis.

The record was not a big hit when it was released but over time, its popularity grew. This was especially true in the early ‘90s when Tarantino put Son of a Preacher Man on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. It was a delightful listen while preparing for this blog. How much more frequently I would have played it had I actually inherited Tarantino's record collection? Probably not much more often. After all, QT would have gifted me so much to explore, I would likely be overwhelmed (and delighted) for months.

How about you?

Whose collection would you want, and why?

The 500 - #90 - Talking Book - Stevie Wonder

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by New York-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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Album: #90

Album Title: Talking Book

Artist: Stevie Wonder

Genre: Progressive Soul, Funk, Soul, Jazz

Recorded: 4 Studios - New York, Hollywood, Los Angeles, London

Released: October, 1972

My age at release: 7

How familiar was I with it before this week: Fairly

Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #112 - dropping 21 spots

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Superstition

There are times when sticking to your principles can be a real pain. Case in point, Stevie Wonder recently announced that he and his band are going on tour, and not just any Stevie Wonder tour. He is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life, with dates in New York, Chicago, and Detroit, a city a mere 200 km from my home. As of now, though, there is no Toronto date. No Montreal date. In fact, no Canadian date at all.

Detroit is tantalizingly close and, under normal circumstances, my friend Terry and I would be checking the calendar and figuring out dinner options in Motown. But these are not normal circumstances.

I've decided that until relations between Canada and the United States improve I'm going to avoid travelling to the U.S. and spending my money there. I don't pretend that missing a Stevie Wonder concert will register as the faintest blip on the American economy. My principled boycott won’t make anybody in Washington lose sleep. It's simply something I feel I need to do.

Let me be really clear: This isn't about Americans generally but their current federal government. Over the decades, I have met many wonderful Americans, some of whom I’m honoured to call friends. Additionally, I love visiting the United States where my godmother has lived for many years. I've crossed the border hundreds of times, attending concerts and sporting events, or just sightseeing and shopping. The accumulated memories of these visits have found their way into more than a few of these blog posts. Heck, my wife and I got married in New York City in 2006 and more than 40 members of our family and friends joined us, some extending their visit for a whole week.

Me and my lovely bride - August 18, 2006 in Battery Park, NYC.

My frustration is with the current American administration and, in particular, the way it has insulted and inflicted economic damage on my country, let alone the harm it has wreaked upon its own population.

Donald Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of Canada becoming the 51st state and mockingly referred to our former prime minister, Justin Trudeau, as a "governor." He has also transferred the slight to our current prime minister, Mark Carney.

More recently, he signed an executive order instructing the American government to refer to Lake Ontario as "Lake America." That one strikes particularly close to home. Ontario isn't merely the name of the province where I live. The name has Indigenous roots and was being used centuries before either Canada or the United States existed.

Lake Ontario Map from 1774, two years before U.S independence.

Then there's the ongoing argument over trade. Trump decided not to renew the USMCA in its current form and has criticized what it sees as shortcomings in the treaty.. How ironic considering the USMCA was negotiated during Trump's first administration and he hailed it as "the best agreement we've ever made."

Trump, flanked by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto
and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, signing
the USMCA agreement in 2018.

Our current prime minister, Mark Carney, recently summed up the problem rather neatly when he said: "We've recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognized that sometimes its signature was written in pencil." When a deal negotiated and celebrated by the same president can suddenly become a deal his administration no longer wants to stand behind, Carney's pencil metaphor seems particularly apt.

So, for now, I'm staying on my side of Lake Ontario and remain hopeful about two things. The first is that relations between our countries thaw, that the anger and insults stop, and that good neighbourly relations are restored to the way they have been for centuries.

At the moment, I'm not terribly optimistic. Yet I wonder whether Stevie’s touring team may look at his schedule and think: “You know what? we haven't scheduled Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal.” Odds are Terry and his wife, Heather, would happily join Angela and me on a road trip if seeing Stevie was in the mix.

And with that, I’ll climb off my political soapbox to reflect on Stevie Wonder’s second record of 1972, Talking Book. The first was Music Of My Mind, which was released earlier that same year.

A second hit record in one calendar year sounds impressive enough. Then I realized that these were his 14th and 15th releases by an artist who was just 22 years old.

Twenty-Two!

When I was 22, I was still living in my parent’s basement. Sure, I was going to University and had a couple part-time jobs, but no one is talking about my creative output and groundbreaking innovations 50 years later…and I have the benefit of sight.

Me at 22, lifeguard by day, Pizza delivery driver by night.

We have actually been here before. Back in December, 2022, when I was still pushing my way through #285 on this decade-long journey through the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, I wrote about Music of My Mind. In that post, I spent some time on Stevie’s remarkable childhood and his emergence as the extravagantly talented “Little Stevie Wonder.” More importantly for what was coming next, I wrote about his discovery of the enormous TONTO synthesizer, created by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. Stevie had become fascinated by synthesizers, and Cecil and Margouleff would work with him through some of the most creative years of his career.

Side Note: Margouleff is the guest on the accompanying episode of The 500 Podcast and, while promoting his autobiography, shares his experiences working with Stevie as well as a comprehensive look at that revolutionary technology. For music engineering or synthesizer nerds, it is a rewarding deep dive.

Another mind-blowing realization comes when one remembers that Wonder is not just a singer and piano player. On both of these 1972 records, he wrote the songs, produced the albums and played virtually every instrument himself. The music, the lyrics, the arrangements, the keyboards, the drums, the harmonica and ideas to create those strange new synthesizer sounds were pouring out of a kid.

Wonder in studio recording Talking Book.

There is something almost Mozart-like about him. Not because their processes were necessarily the same, but because I find the idea of all that music existing inside one person's head fascinating. Stevie couldn't sit at a piano with a blank piece of manuscript paper in front of him and casually scribble down an idea in the conventional way. He had to hear it, remember it, build it, play it and communicate it. Melody, harmony, rhythm, words and arrangement could all exist in his imagination before the rest of us ever got to hear them. Thus, the album before Talking Book was aptly named Music Of My Mind.

And, incredibly, Stevie was just getting warmed up.

Music of My Mind and Talking Book kicked off what is now widely referred to as Stevie Wonder's classic period, five critically acclaimed albums released in less than five years.

• Music of My Mind (1972) (#285 on The 500)
• Talking Book (1972) (#90 on The 500)
• Innervisions (1973) (#24 on The 500)
• Fulfillingness' First Finale (1974) (Grammy Award for Album of the year
• Songs in the Key of Life (1976) (#57 on The 500) and Grammy Award for Album of the year
  

That's not merely a good stretch. That's an athlete entering the zone and then somehow staying there for five seasons. Imagine a ballplayer hitting .350, winning the batting title, coming back the next year and doing it again, then looking around and deciding he might as well steal some bases, hit a bunch of home runs and win the league MVP a few times while he's at it. Stevie was on one of those runs, like Gretzky, Woods, Jordan, Williams, Ali or Brady, whose greatness literally became the expectation.

Originally, this was going to be my angle for this blog. I was going to investigate other artists who had enjoyed an incredible run of consecutive releases. In fact, I’ve been researching and mulling it over for a few weeks. Then Stevie announced his tour, without a Canadian date, and my frustration sent me in a different direction. Oh well. I’ll save that topic for either Songs In The Key Of Life or Innervisions, in 2027, which should coincide nicely with the start of the next U.S. presidential primary season. By then, perhaps I’ll have two things to look forward to: Another great Stevie Wonder album to write about and the possibility of a rapprochement in Canada-U.S. relations. And renewed trips across the border.

Help me out if you can?

What is your favourite four- or five-album consecutive run by a musician or band?
It doesn’t need to be critically acclaimed, just your own personal list.

The 500 - #91 - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - Elton John

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by New York-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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Album: #91

Album Title: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Artist: Elton John

Genre: Multiple

Recorded: Château d'Hérouville, Hérouville, France 

Released: May, 1973

My age at release: 7

How familiar was I with it before this week: Deeply

Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #112 - dropping 21 spots

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding

When it comes to writing about Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, I find myself paralyzed by the tyranny of choice. I suspect this feeling will happen more frequently, as we head into the final 90 records on this list. These are some of the biggest albums of my lifetime and I am deeply familiar with so many.

When I reflect on the more than 50 years Goodbye Yellow Brick Road has been in my audio orbit, so many ideas come to mind.

• I could write about the Elton John obsession that consumed me in the mid-1980s when I steadily purchased almost every studio album he released during the previous decade.

• I could write about how this particular record dominated my headphones for months at a time when, turning 20, I felt that I was leaving youth behind and figuring out how to navigate a world of greater responsibility. 

• I could write about the powerhouse songs from multiple genres that are packed onto this two-record set – American, Blues, Funk, Country-Western Ballads, Dance Hall Ragtime, Reggae, Gospel and ‘50s Rock and Roll Revival. As well there’s every kind of rock – Hard, Soft, Blues, Pop. Folk and Progressive/Symphonic.

Instead, I'll simply say that Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is my second-favourite Elton John album. Well, it is pretty much tied for first with Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, which I wrote about roughly a year ago.

What Goodbye Yellow Brick Road does contain, however, is my favourite Elton John song. Or perhaps more accurately, my favourite Elton John songs, as the album opens with the instrumental Funeral for a Friend, which flows seamlessly into Love Lies Bleeding. For me, those two tracks have always been inseparable. Together, they create one of the greatest album openings in rock history.

As a teenager, I assumed Funeral for a Friend was simply a cool title. It sounded dramatic, mysterious and epic. Four decades later, it resonates far differently.

The irony wasn't lost on me this weekend as I prepared to write this post. I spent several days revisiting Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, listening to it repeatedly in the mornings before my new class of Grade 7 students arrived. Sadly, I was also mentally preparing to attend the funeral of a friend.

When I first fell in love with this record, funerals belonged to another generation. They were for grandparents, elderly neighbours and distant relatives. Friends weren't people whose funerals you attended; they were events waiting in the future. The older I get, though, the more I realize that funerals for friends will become an increasing facet of my life. A song title that once seemed cool now carries a weight that I once never considered.

The friend I was saying goodbye to was Joe, the father of my wife Angela’s goddaughter, Siobhan. Angela has been friends with Siobhan’s mother, Heather, for more than 30 years. While not her biological father, Joe was part of Siobhan’s life since she was little and built a wonderful relationship with her -- as evidenced by the many pictures of the pair, camping, fishing, playing or dressed for Halloween that are on display around the family household.

Over the last decade, Joe and his family became familiar faces at our Christmas and Thanksgiving gatherings. He was one of those genuinely sweet, gentle people who made every room a little warmer simply by being present. The kind of guy my British cousin would say is “a good bloke”.

The thing I always looked forward to when hanging with Joe was talking hockey and music. We shared a devotion to the London Knights Jr. Hockey Club in our town, and had remarkably similar tastes in the listening habits of our youth. In fact, many of Joe's favourite albums are coming up soon on the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums list, including Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon. He was also a fan of Rush, so that was an easy connection when we first met.

Some of his favourite CD's were on display at the
funeral home. He and his daughter can be seen
in the photo at the back at her recent high school graduation.

Last Saturday, my wife and I filled a funeral hall with his family and friends. Unsurprisingly, many kind words were shared, reinforcing the things I already knew about Joe – his kindness, his gentle nature, his passion for music and sports and his deep love for his daughter.

When I was 16, Funeral For A Friend seemed like a dramatic title for a rock song. It belonged to a distant future that I could not imagine. Friends were permanent, weren’t they? The people in my orbit would always be there. At least that's how it felt.

Now I understand the title differently. Not because it is about death, but because it is ultimately about the people who make our lives richer while they are here. Joe was one of those people. He was a good bloke, a devoted father, a hockey fan, a music fan, and someone whose company I genuinely enjoyed whenever our paths crossed.

Joe Quigg (Obituary here) 

Rest in Peace, Joe