Mathias Kom of the Burning Hell blames Kingston.
Thirteen years ago, when I was busy learning about Shakespeare and nearly failing chemistry at KCVI, I never imagined I would be homeless-by-choice at 30 years old and spending most of my time playing music for what is hilariously called a ‘living’. The ways we arrive at different places in our lives are often obscured by the nostalgia of hindsight, but I can more or less trace a direct path from my salad days in Canada’s first capital to my current state of music, malnourishment and relative happiness.
It all started with my mom and dad, just like I did. Growing up listening to my parents’ bizarre record collection of klezmer, Bach and the Beach Boys, and hearing my dad play old Mickey Katz songs on his childhood guitar instilled me with both a love of music and a deep suspicion that playing music full-time was probably the best and most ridiculous way to spend your life.
So I decided I wanted to be an architect. I was even good at drafting in high school. Then I discovered a) that architecture required obscene amounts of mathematics and b) playing the electric guitar required only a poor fashion sense and a sweet distortion pedal. And so my hair grew long, but not in a hippie way. This was the 90s, after all. I rocked out, alone at first, and then with friends. We had bands, and they were amazing and terrible, the way all high school bands should be, and they all had fantastic names: Loathsome Toad. The Laundry Dogs. The Billingslies. I think I only ever played three actual shows in high school, the most memorable being in the KCVI gym, one of the ‘Rock Against Oppression’ concerts which had something to do with anarchy and wearing anarchy t-shirts and making out in the smoking section. We played poorly.
Musically, however, Kingston brought me a lot more than an appreciation of bad guitar tone and three-chord songs about being misunderstood that nobody could understand. It was around grade 11 or twelve that I met the then-barefoot and busking Jill Staveley, and she was all Irish and hair-wraps and sandalwood and dangly earrings and Cranberries songs, and despite how averse I was to all of those things, something about her made me want to get to know her better. And to learn to play the tin whistle and wear a jaunty little wool cap.
So Jill and I started hanging out, and I really did learn to play the tin whistle, and I really did wear a jaunty little wool cap. We used to go busking down on Ontario Street when the bars got out, and meatheads from the university would stand around us and make us play Tragically Hip songs and sing along in their brash voices that sounded like brand new SUVs running over frail philosophy students. And drunk tourists from across the lake would ask us for ‘real Irish songs’ and tell Jill that she should put some shoes on and wasn’t it just fabulous that Kingston had so much music and didn’t we sound just so Canadian?
I never did figure out what ‘Canadian’ sounded like, though I did understand why tourists would get the impression that Kingston was music-crazy. I mean, really – there’s an Irish pub on every corner! Stop in for a pint of Guinness and a session of Real Traditional Irish Music! Fancy some jazz? We’ve got jazz! Feel like legitimizing and dignifying the street musicians you would normally look down on for a few days? Come to the Buskers’ Rendezvous! Oh, colourful Kingston. Musical Kingston. Too bad tourists never go to shows in the KCVI gym.
Eventually, I left musical Kingston for Peterborough (another ‘musical’ town, I always think of Peterborough as Kingston’s poorer, trashier cousin that drinks vodka coolers behind the convenience store and is way more fun to hang out with). I traded in my electric guitar for a ukulele, and I kept writing three-chord songs about being misunderstood that nobody could understand, except that on the ukulele they sounded quirky and stupid rather than just plain stupid. I wrote a lot of those songs.
I spent the next half-decade doing what you’re supposed to do when you’re young and naïve in Canada: I traveled to the places that people travel to, I got a mediocre liberal arts education at Trent, I taught English in Korea to pay for my mediocre liberal arts education, and I complained about everything. Then, thanks to an almost-useless MA and a stint back at Trent dutifully marking essays and telling fresh-faced history students about the lasting impact of the French Revolution, I realized that the only thing I really enjoyed in my life was playing the ukulele. The ukulele, after all, did not complain about the marks it received on its terrible essay about Genghis Khan and his ‘amazing horse-riders’. The ukulele never winked at me in a smug way as if to say ‘what, you’re almost 30 and you don’t have an RRSP?’ The ukulele never judged me for my aimlessness, and I, in turn, never judged the ukulele.
And so I quit my job, just like Old Man Luedecke does in that Old Man Luedecke song ‘I Quit My Job’, and since then I’ve been spending my life in the best and most ridiculous way I know how. And sometimes when I’m on stage now I think about standing on Ontario Street at two in the morning playing Celtic music with Jill for a bunch of smashed Americans, and then I look over at Jill on stage next to me and I think ‘Wow. It’s a really good thing I stopped playing the tin whistle.’
So thanks, Kingston. I should have listened to you a long time ago.
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