Willie P. Bennett

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.

–John Milton

Willie P. Bennett sang about coming down from Thessalon, how Toronto was not his home, but Toronto was where he was born, in 1951, and Toronto was where I saw him play for the first time, at the Free Times Café in 1985, thirty people—tops—jammed into a room no bigger than your living room, all of them knowing what they were in for except me. All I knew about country-folk was through my Neil Young albums, and even that puny war was dearly paid for, believe me, no high-school girl willing to find out if side two of On the Beach—the slow side—was a turn-it-up turn-on, no radio station out of nearby Detroit disposed to extending their idea of heavy metal to a steel-guitar bar.

One of the things I wanted to do when I left home for university and Toronto was to go to an actual folk club and see an actual folk singer. I looked in Now magazine under the listing for Folk and picked the Free Times Café because it was near Spadina and College, two streets I at least knew the names of. I forget who I went with—it doesn’t matter who I went with—I forget who I went with because what I do remember is that on the way home back to my room in residence that night I had a song-buzzing brain and a self-financed, privately produced cassette tape that Willie sold for ten dollars at the end of the show out of the yellow cloth bag slung over his shoulder. It was self-financed and privately produced because, I later learned, the three albums he recorded in the seventies were put out by a small Canadian label that no longer existed, and by the mid-eighties, the darkest of the dark ages of popular music, anything un-synthesized and non-digitized was sonically suspect.

Anyone who I thought deserved him, I dragged off to see him. Girlfriends and friends became ex-girlfriends and strangers, but the years couldn’t touch the music; even Time, the biggest bully of all, can never touch the music. Good music, I mean. And even though a hundred-dollar cut of the door was considered a very good night’s take and it was usually only other musicians and freaks like me, who’d hunted down all of the out-of-print albums and traded bootlegs of folk-festival shows, who knew who he was and what his music meant, songs like “White Line” and “Storm Clouds” and “Down to the Water” and “Lace and Pretty Flowers” are as good as any of the best stuff John Prine or Guy Clark or even Townes Van Zandt were writing back then. And just because no one knows it doesn’t mean it’s not true.

He was sixteen years old when he dropped out of Danforth Technical School (now Danforth Collegiate and Technical Institute) and got his first job as a shipper-receiver and bought his first guitar and decided to become a folk singer, a fact so charmingly archaic-sounding, it could be the subject of a folk song. He eventually ended up in London, Ontario, in the early seventies where, more than Toronto, there was a lively folk and bluegrass scene. String-player extraordinaire David Essig, founder of Woodshed Records and the producer of the three brilliant albums Willie would record for the label, remembers how Willie “lived initially for a short time with Stan and Garnet Rogers in a one-bedroom apartment. Stan got the bedroom; Garnet slept on the chesterfield; and Willie slept on the floor in a broom closet that he outfitted as a makeshift bedroom.”

Playing around town and elsewhere, whether solo or with a progressive bluegrass aggregate known as the Bone China Band, Willie’s genuinely emotive singing (he always hit the high notes out of the corner of his mouth) and erudite yet earthy songs began to attract the sort of attention every genuine artist craves: life-altering adoration. Scott Bradshaw—aka Scott B. Sympathy, the Toronto folk-rock troubadour who helped keep acoustic guitars cool during the aurally ugly eighties—remembers how he “first heard Willie sing at the Snales Pace Coffee House on Talbot Street in London about 1976. I was nineteen or so. [From that point on,] I spent the next bunch of years trying to turn everyone I knew on to this talent. I remember buying . . . copies of Hobo’s Taunt [Willie’s second album] to hand out to friends.” A major-label, high-powered, big-budgeted publicist might make you popular, but disciples handing out your work for free will help make your art immortal.

Eventually Ken Palmer, mandolin player and founder of the bluegrass Dixie Flyers (Willie played harmonica with the Flyers when he wasn’t gigging on his own), took over his management, and Essig and Palmer, friends as well as fellow pickers, decided to turn Willie’s fat batch of beautiful songs into 1975’s Tryin’ To Start Out Clean, even if that meant having to create a brand new record label—Woodshed—to do so. It was worth it for the sake of the music.

Music like “Music in Your Eyes,” a song so sorrowfully delicate it threatens to break down right before your ears before its rebirth in the blooming chorus, everything alight and music in your eyes. Music like “Country Squall” and “Down to the Water” and “Willie’s Diamond Joe,” melodious acoustic prayers for redemption, understanding, release. Tryin’ To Start Out Clean is no neo-folkie relic, however, the addition of the Dixie Flyers’ expert picking and plucking (abetted by producer David Essig’s warm mandolin and Ron Dann’s sweet pedal steel) infusing the entire album with an irresistibly affirmative zest that makes such convenient catch-phrases as folk or bluegrass or country (or any hyphenated combination thereof) meaningless. Oh, and the opening suite (“Driftin’ Snow” into “White Line” into “Me and Molly”) is the best album opener in the history of roots music—period—all of the hallowed household names in your CD collection not excepted. The LP ends with the title track (followed by a brief reprise of “Driftin’ Snow”), and just try not to tap your foot and join in on the chorus. Sole music for the soul.

Despite receiving some nice recognition from fellow musicians (Maryland’s Seldom Scene covered “White Line” on their Live at the Cellar Door album, as did, among others, David Whiffen, John Starling, and Jonathan Edwards), an unknown musician’s debut (albeit astounding) LP on an idealistic Canadian independent record label meant more hard slogging on the club and folk festival circuit and making up the monetary difference building docks on Georgian Bay, playing on other people’s records, and drywalling. There’s a 3:55-second snippet on YouTube of a wild-haired Willie and band (featuring an equally hyper-hirsute Ken Whiteley on mandolin) performing at Hamilton’s Festival of Friends in 1976 that conveys enough of the raucous joy they were clearly capable of delivering live to make you resent being merely virtually there. (The raucous joy wasn’t limited to the music they made. Musician Tony Quarrington, who would go on to produce Willie’s last album, Heart Strings, remembered following Willie et al at the Groaning Board in Toronto: “Willie and his band had been there the week before, and even though the gig was pretty well-paid, Willie and his cohorts drank so much on their tabs that at the end of the week they owed the club hundreds of dollars. Or maybe it was just Willie, and not the band.”)

Two years after Tryin’ To Start Out Clean came Hobo’s Taunt, this time co-produced by Willie and again containing a disc full of superlative songs and impassioned singing and playing, although on his second offering the newgrass emphasis was played down in favour of a stronger folksinger timbre with clear traditional country touches. Instead of being a concession to the marketplace, however (what marketplace? Country-pap queen Anne Murray’s fans weren’t going to be interested either way), aside from the spry opener, “Come On Train” and the simply gorgeous “Lace and Pretty Flowers” (which Willie wrote at the bequest of a couple of betrothed friends an hour before their wedding), the songs are slower, sadder, and even more meditative than on the debut, befitting the less lively arrangements. Also new were the horns supplied by Chris Whiteley and Tom Evans that adorned a couple of tracks, not pick-up-the-tempo, Saturday-night-happy horns, but heartrending, Sunday-morning-after horns. Listening to songs like “Storm Clouds,” which laments loss of nerve and wasted (chemical and otherwise) time, or the title track which bemoans a mind that won’t do what it’s told, or “Lonely Car Funerals,” which wonders who it was that died and why no one showed up to say goodbye, it’s easy to forget that Willie was only twenty-six years old when Hobo’s Taunt appeared. Among three million other useful things, art reminds us that insight isn’t proportionate to age, and that personal pain is the itch that helps make the impersonal pearl of lasting artworks.

None of the songs on Hobo’s Taunt are self-pitying paeans to then-fashionable singer-songwriter solipsism, nor do they have a depressing effect upon the listener. This is partly because of Willie’s always highly melodic songwriting, and partly because, like all good art, the songs explore melancholy and loss of meaning as opposed to merely reveling in them. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . recollected in tranquility,” Wordsworth claimed, and Essig and recording engineer Daniel Lanois and Willie recollected masterfully inside the tranquility of the Lanois brothers’ Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton.

A flawless, entirely filler-free first album is rare (Music from the Big Pink, The Violent Femmes, Willis Alan Ramsey, Paul Siebel, and maybe a few more), but not unheard of; after all, there’d been a lifetime to write and polish the songs and perfect the sound that comprises the inaugural LP. But when it’s time, a year or two later, to head back into the studio and do the whole thing all over again, the song quality tends, understandably, to drop off. Again, there are exceptions (the Band’s eponymously-titled sophomore effort, for instance), but the exceptions are even more exceptional the second time around. Willie not only managed to avoid the sophomore jinx with Hobo’s Taunt, but with his third album in just four years, 1978’s Blackie and the Rodeo King, he pulled off that rarest of musical career rarities (so rare, in fact, no others come to mind), a tour de force hat-trick. He was only twenty-seven years old, and there were more good songs to come, but it was the last time he’d bury one deep in the back of the net, no instant replay required.

Blackie is a continuation of the sound and sense of its predecessor: a primarily folk-based, country-rock palette augmented by astute dabs of Chris Whiteley’s trumpet and Essig’s mandolin, with lyrics highlighting the loneliness, uncertainty, and regret that come with belonging to the human species. Again, it’s not a lyrically morose or musically lugubrious listening experience—W.H. Auden said that if someone is writing a love poem, they’re thinking about their prosody, not the love object of the poem, and Willie et al were too accomplished as artists to overlook the importance of memorable melodies, sympathetic musical accompaniment, et cetera—but it’s obvious that around this time Willie was suffering through some serious romantic travails that were to his music’s, if not his personal life’s, benefit. (Willie’s heartache resources ran deep: was married and divorced, had girlfriends and breakups, and at the time of his death called Linda Duemo more than a girlfriend if not legally a wife.)

Both “Has Anyone Seen My Baby Here Tonight?” and “(If I Could) Take My Own Advice” bemoan the kind of love that revolves around women who the narrator knows are cheating on him, but whom he can’t help loving (and forgiving) anyway. The title track, a true story about two characters Willie met on a Greyhound bus trip from London to Hamilton, while ultimately affirmative in the way that the two outcasts in the song’s title look out for one another, is, after all, about a heroin addict and a dying drunk, while songs like “This Lonesome Feelin’” and “Standing By the Highway (No Place in Mind)” convey their emotionally isolated essences by their titles alone. Even the lone cover tune on the album, the indestructible “Stardust,” is about a love that used to be—today’s only solace coming not from a living person, but from the song that gets written about her. And “Pens and Papers,” distinguished by a moving Keith Whiteley organ solo, succeeds in upping the aloneness ante by starting off being about a failed love affair before turning into a disquisition on the artist’s ultimately futile attempt to make sense out of things like, well, failed love affairs. If Willie thought his ink was running in the rain at this point, with three dazzling albums to his credit, one shudders to think what he felt over the next dark decade.

Ah, yes, the eighties. You remember them: an epoch when otherwise-intelligent people routinely referred to Madonna and Prince as geniuses, and Born in the U.S.A was considered stirring roots music. Scott Bradshaw testifies to how “It was a tough go for a folk musician at that time. I was one of the only ones playing acoustic guitar on Queen Street in those days. Hard to believe now. I do remember drum machines and sax players were plentiful.” As an indication of just how far Willie’s already modest commercial standing had fallen, music journalist Chris Vautour recalled how

I first heard about Bennett when a band called Varis Tombley started playing an amphetamine-fueled version of his song “Blackie & The Rodeo King” in the summer of 1988. Later it turned out that a co-worker of mine was a friend of Bennett, so I asked my colleague if he could buy some records from Bennett for me. He came back and told me that Bennett didn’t even have copies of his own records, and that if I could find some, Willie would buy them from me.

Even if venues weren’t as welcoming and audiences weren’t as large, Willie still gigged, of course (sometimes in the company of Colin Linden and his scintillating slide-guitar and yelp-on-top background vocals), it being his primary income source, and continued to win new converts (like me) one underpaid show at a time. Live at the Nervous Breakdown, a compilation record recorded at a London, Ontario club you’ll have a hard time finding and which will cost you a small fortune if you do, includes a rare recorded document of Willie playing solo in front of a live audience around this time. His single contribution to the album, a typically poignant version of “Has Anybody Seen My Baby Here Tonight?”, is everything Willie live was like in his prime: nerve-end honest, yet somehow deep-tenor soothing. Rick Danko once described bandmate Levon Helm’s voice as something that heals people. Amen to that, brother, just be sure to add Willie P. Bennett’s name to that very short list as well.

Along with a few brave others out on the lonely acoustic trail, Willie continued to write, if (frustratingly) not record, introducing new songs into his already classics-packed sets. He also served as an inspiration to younger artists foolish enough to try and make a living giving the world the beautiful, affecting music it’s never really had much use for. After being stirred by Willie’s performance at Snales Place years before, Bradshaw later had the opportunity to come full circle and not only meet, but perform with his hero:

I first played with Willie in the mid-eighties at the Princess Theatre in Waterloo. I opened the show and spent a couple of hours before hanging at a pub and letting Willie know what a fan I was. For me it was like meeting Dylan or Neil Young. We played darts (Willie had his own darts in tow) and I beat him fair and square first game, which seemed to amuse him a bit. He didn’t hold it against me and Willie was warm and encouraging. He played harmonica on my first two albums and drove to Brantford for a cameo in a video we made. Always encouraging. We had the pleasure of Willie taking the stage with us on many occasions. During the eighties I booked Willie to play two nights at the Cameron House in Toronto, his first Queen Street gigs. I knew Willie would blow them away and he certainly did.

Yes, he did—I know, because I was there, having coerced a sort-of girlfriend and two of her friends into attending Willie’s first foray onto Toronto’s then (pre-Urban Outfitters, pre-Foot Locker, pre-Gap) most modish street. It was a good choice of venue, as Handsome Ned had been the Cameron’s in-House flag-bearer for the twangier end of roots music for years, so the regulars weren’t entirely unfamiliar with the strum of acoustic guitars and the wail of a harmonica, but it was, once again, Willie’s amazing catalogue of songs and his passionate vocal performance that won over the crowd. I think one of what’s-her-name’s friends even bought the independently made cassette tape Willie was selling at the show, the same one I had purchased a few years previous after my first time experiencing Willie live.

The Lucky Ones, as the 1985 cassette was called, was one side Willie solo, one side Willie with band, in retrospect probably as much a demo meant to interest record labels as it was a self-contained musical statement. Several of the acoustic songs were absolutely first-rate—the tender title tune; the resilient “Sometimes It Comes So Easy,” a frequent show opener during this time; “Rains on Me,” a drippingly melancholic meditation on despair; the uncommonly acerbic “Living in a Dirty Town”—and some were never recorded elsewhere, meaning only devotees like me get to hear them (it’s the sole reason I still own a cassette player; in fact, it’s the only cassette I own). Then there’s the other side . . .

“Patience of a Working Man” would live to find a place on Willie’s official return to recording after eleven years, 1989’s also-titled The Lucky Ones on Duke Street Records, but the problem wasn’t as much the songs (although “Heart Headlines” is almost as mawkish as its title, and “Our Love, Our Love” isn’t far behind), but the production, which borders on MOR mush, a sound as far away from the pristine picking of the three Woodshed records as the north shore of Hudson Bay is from downtown Nashville, where Willie would travel around this time to discover that many are called to Music City, USA to get rich selling their songs, but few are chosen. I play the first side of the cassette a lot. Then I rewind it.

In 1988, while Willie was busy in the studio finishing up the mixes on his Duke Street comeback, a friend and I, who I’d successfully converted into a Willie fanatic, attended one of his shows in Toronto’s east end (I forget where exactly). I also forget the circumstances of the gig, but it was something along the lines of Toronto Live Music Week, with different performers playing all around town at a variety of venues. Brad had never heard Willie play live, so I was excited for both of us, sharing things you’re proud to know about being something you do as a useless undergraduate in lieu of actually doing things you yourself are proud to have done. We got to the bar early, eager to get a table up front near the small stage, and were on our second drinks when I noticed something was wrong.

By this point I’d attended five or so of Willie’s shows, and chatter amongst the crowd while he was performing wasn’t one of their characteristic features. Willie was doing his usual outstanding job up on stage, but the audience seemed more interested in each other than in what he was up to musically. Then I caught on: as part of Toronto Live Music Week, or whatever it was called, pass-holders were allowed to venue-hop from event to event, to sample, buffet-style, who was playing and to linger or amble along as the mood struck them. For the majority of attendees that night, the mood was Saturday-night chatty, maybe just a little more of this particular serving of song and then a pop down the street to see what was cooking there. I was annoyed, even embarrassed, but Willie was angry. At first he put his fury into his playing, singing the low and high notes with extra urgency, slamming his strings and blowing his harp with increased intensity. In return, the audience simply talked louder.

At one point, I heard myself say toward the stage, “I guess they figured they bought their tickets, they can do whatever they want,” and was surprised to hear Willie answer back that if that was the case, then they could have their money back. Emboldened, Brad and I made sure to hoot and holler and clap our hands red after every song. Discouraged by the rest of the audience’s response, Willie began to drink bourbon between songs. The liquor blotted out the boors in the audience, allowed him to concentrate on making the music, which was as magical as always, with the added bonus, on our end, of making him drunk enough that by the end of the night he accepted a couple of bedazzled university students’ invitation to come back to my house in Kensington Market and keep the party going.

There, it wasn’t long before his guitar was unpacked and his harmonica belt laid out on the cracked glass coffee table and Willie played for us all night long, right through until unwelcome morning. He led the way in drinking up every drop of alcohol we had in the house, including one of my absent roommate’s bottles of cooking sherry, and smoked all of his cigarettes and then all of Brad’s, and when the dope dealer and his emaciated, coked-out girlfriend from three doors down knocked on the door at three A.M. and wondered if we were having a party, smoked all of his hash; but what he mostly did was play all night, playing as if he were performing at a packed Massey Hall and not for two awestruck U of T philosophy students and a couple of clueless drug casualties just happy not to have to get high alone. What I remember best, though, is after we first arrived and were sitting around the kitchen table drinking beer and listening to one of my many Kitchen Tapes (mix tapes I made of favourite artists that were to be listened to while getting drunk at the kitchen table), I thought Willie would be thrilled to hear, sandwiched between a Pogues song and a Tim Hardin number, one of Willie’s own tunes come blaring out of the cheap boom-box speakers. When he proceeded to talk right through it, and I asked him what it felt like to hear his own music in such good company, he said it was flattering, of course, but that it didn’t make him feel like it made other people, like myself, feel. For him to feel that good, he had to be making music, not listening to it. It wasn’t long after that that we moved into the living room and out came the guitar.

When The Lucky Ones was released a year later, my happiness that there was a new Willie album to buy was undercut by it having to be this particular album. It’s not a write-off—Willie was incapable of an insincere vocal performance and the lyrics are authentically lived-in, if less richly resonant than on his Woodshed records—but it’s not quite right, either, the production too rooty-toot punchy here (as on the horn-heavy lead-off track, “Train Tracks”), too string-section schmaltzy there (as on the closing number, “Andrew’s Waltz”). There are a couple of songs that don’t get suffocated in the production—the newgrassy “Don’t Have Much to Say” and “Ain’t Got Notion,” in large part because neither has reverbed drums on them, the blight of most albums recorded in the eighties—but on the whole, The Lucky Ones sounds like Willie and his producer Danny Greenspoon attempting to sound like what was on “new country” radio at the time (particularly painful is the needless, stiff remake of “Tryin’ to Start Out Clean,” all of its delightful jaggedness polished smooth). Looking back, you can always tell on which albums an artist was attempting to sound “contemporary:” those are the ones that always end up sounding dated.

More welcome was a 1991 compilation (Collectibles) of selected tracks from the three Woodshed albums brought out by the short-lived Dark Light label, an attempt to make some of Willie’s long out-of-print seventies music available to a brave new CD world. It was a valiant enterprise and it included revealing song-by-song reflections from Willie himself. It too was out of print within a few years. His Dark Light follow-up, 1993’s Take My Own Advice, was basically The Lucky Ones Part Two: a couple of glossy remakes from the back catalogue; a good song or two (“Step Away” being the standout) overwhelmed by inappropriate (read: “up-to-date”) production touches, a few songs that, in their grating sentimentality and lyrical obtuseness, it’s hard to believe came from the same pen that wrote “Storm Clouds” or “Country Squall.”

When I moved back to Toronto in 1997 after living in the American South for four years, I was shocked to spot an album called Blackie and the Rodeo Kings: High or Hurtin’ on the CD rack at Sam the Record Man. He’s dead, I thought, unaware, in that innocent pre-internet age, of the tribute album Canadian musicians Colin Linden, Stephen Fearing, and Tom Wilson had recorded, not for a dearly departed Willie, but for a master songwriter still alive but unacceptably unknown by most music listeners. The trio’s versions of such Willie standards as “Faces” and “Come On Train” didn’t add anything to the originals, but were energetically performed and imbued with the deep respect the artists clearly shared for Willie’s work. As for Willie himself, I discovered he wasn’t deceased, but was something almost as bewildering: a Flying Squirrel.

In one sense, Willie’s longtime (fifteen years) tenure as a multi-instrumental sideman and backing vocalist to another elite Canadian songwriter, Fred Eaglesmith, made sense. To begin with, it was obvious that Eaglesmith knew he had something very special when Willie took his place on stage with him every night, which perhaps was quietly rewarding enough. Recounting the first time they played together, “We were at a festival one time and he said, ‘Hey, can I play harmonica with you today?’” Eaglesmith remembered. “And I said ‘Really, you want to play harmonica with me?’ and he said ‘Yeah,’ and he never left.” In addition, Eaglesmith routinely played two-hundred-and-fifty shows a year, so Willie was able to put some money in the bank for one of the first times in his life, a not insignificant development for someone approaching middle age. He was also on record as saying he was tired of chasing after the brass ring of solo success, was weary of a recording industry that valued all of the lowest things the highest.

“Willie was bored with his own career,” maintained Washboard Hank, the dynamic human percussion section who anchored Fred’s band during its touring peak, “and he was having lots of fun playing with Fred and he was developing his own totally new sound on the mandolin. In a way it was a free ride: lots of gigs, steady pay, interesting places to travel to, and no worries.” On stage, it was obvious that Willie revelled in being a full-time musician highly valued by both Eaglesmith and his large and adoring audience of “Fredheads” for his innovative mandolin playing (I, for one, had never heard a mandolin played with the aid of a tremolo pedal before) and signature harmonica work. The albums he appeared on as a member of the band, particularly1994’s Live at the Paradise Hotel and Lipstick, Lies and Gasoline from 1997, are among the best of Eaglesmith’s career.

Some of Willie’s older fans, however, wondered if he was selling himself and his talent short, trading in the stress and strain of an ultimately more fulfilling solo career for the congenial anonymity of sideman status. Maybe it was part of a bigger philosophical impulse to further erode his earthbound ego, a process that began when Willie became interested in Buddhism (“He had some scriptures that he would quote now and then,” Washboard Hank recalled, “but he was not attracted to the religion so much as the philosophy”). Greg Quill, a fellow musician and longtime Willie supporter (he wrote about him more than once for the Toronto Star and provided the liner notes to Collectibles), admitted that he

was always mystified about why [Willie] gave up his own career to play harmonica and mandolin in Fred Eaglesmith’s band. Nothing against Fred—he’s a spectacular artist, genuinely talented, a hard worker and unique—but so was Willie (well, maybe not such a hard worker). One summer about 10 years ago, I was performing at Fred’s annual fundraising picnic camp, and bumped into Willie backstage. He was putting new strings on Fred’s guitar. He did it before every performance, he told me, without explaining why. No one replaces strings after just one show, and most guitarists hate new strings. It was not something he’d been asked to do, he added, in case I got the wrong idea. I gathered it was some sort of Buddhist/Taoist exercise in humility and service to a friend. He admired Fred’s fierce independence, his determination to live and work his own way, off the established music grid. He loved the gypsy caravan life, too, skipping from one gig to the next, never sure what was waiting at the end of the day, never standing in the spotlight, but helping make Fred sound better than he might have. That’s probably the most admirable quality a musician can aspire to: selfless musical generosity.

Slumping baseball players will tell you that even if you’re not hitting very well, you can always play good defence.

Washboard Hank remembers Willie as a mesmerizing performer right to the end (even in his reduced role as sideman on another man’s songs), as well as a beneficent teacher; and, like all of us, someone not above needing to be occasionally reminded of a few elemental lessons.

Playing with Willie was hair-raising, the hair on your neck would stand up when he would play a passage that was just so impossibly perfect. There are moments like that in all great art—with Willie it was every night. Of course he was a total pain in the ass when it came to sound checks, sometimes they would take three hours. He reveled in his position of total power and would tell the sound man to adjust a certain frequency and the sound man would shove a dial and Willie would know by ear what dial he had shoved, and then say “not 570, I said 560’’ or something like that. As a roommate he was very respectful and aware. At first he would lecture me on being “mindful” and eventually I became better behaved. We would talk a lot about spiritual stuff and philosophy. Willie seemed to have a natural intelligence and he would ponder things. Sometimes a conversation would have huge gaps in it and we would talk about something over a number of days. I would ask a question and the next day out of nowhere he would answer it. Willie would sometimes get drunk and act in a very un-Buddhist fashion, he would not be mindful. This would be my chance to protect him and try to keep him out of trouble. I would have given my life for him because I loved and respected him.

Still the occasional modest solo show when not touring with Eaglesmith (and probably too much and too hard—he was the oldest member of the band by far); a collection of pleasantly unexceptional, primarily acoustic, all-new songs recorded with a variety of friends and admirers (1998’s Heartstrings) that was middling enough to win a Juno Award for Best Roots/Traditional album; rumours of a collection of stunning originals taped live from the floor, no overdubs, just Willie and his guitar and harmonica-in-a-rack, recorded in Winnipeg in the last year of his life; then a heart attack that finally got him off the road; then another one a few months later, February 15, 2008, that put him on the one road that no one ever travels back down.

I can still remember the thrill of listening to my new secondhand copy of Tryin’ to Start Out Clean for the first time, incredulous that this remarkable music could have existed for so many years without me knowing about it. I remember Willie leaving Brad and me behind on Spadina Avenue after we’d walked him from my place in Kensington Market to the 7-11 so he could buy a fresh pack of cigarettes, the taxi pulling into the sunny Saturday morning traffic, Willie rolling down the back window to give us a raised-thumb goodbye.