Romantic Traffic
It is a song from 1984 by Toronto band The Spoons. It fills me with joy.
What does the song “Romantic Traffic” by The Spoons have to do with anything? Well, I’ll tell you…
A couple weeks ago I was invited to be a plus one at the Steven Page Summer Camp in upstate NY. It is a boutique little all inclusive live-in festival at the Full Moon Resort. I was Michael Arthur’s plus one, Michael who did the artwork for this Substack here. He is an amazing artist that studied under Al Hirschfeld, American caricaturist best known for his portraits of celebrities and Broadway stars. Like this one:
It was gifted to Michael by the man himself. At the end of his life, the going rate for a drawing was $30K. Michael has lamented quietly that he was born too late to become a rich man from drawing caricatures of people. We have also left behind the time of getting rich off poetry, like Rod McKuen. Yeah, we all got burned in our way. I barely caught the end of the ‘middle class musicians can make money’ era.
Michael regularly draws the performers at Levon Helm Studios (AKA The Barn) and also does this at City Winery in NYC for John Wesley Harding’s Cabinet Of Wonders. That’s how I met him and it was John Wesley Harding (AKA Wesley Stace, Wesley or Wes) that put him/us on the list for the Steven Page Summer Camp. Wesley’s Cabinets Of Wonder are always a pleasure. I’ve met so many amazing people doing them and it’s also a great way to see old friends. I’ve shared that stage with Colson Whitehead, Stephen Merritt, Eugene Mirman (who can always be depended upon for a killer Kaosillator solo), John Hodgman, Bridget St John and many many others. So that’s the set-up. We drive upstate. It feels like it’s a long ways away but it’s only 16 miles from my house. Many things hidden in these hills.
It’s a 4 day live-in event curated by and starring, of course, Steven Page from Barenaked Ladies. Other guests were Dave Foley of Kids In The Hall, comedian Dave Hill, musician Craig Northey of The Odds, John Wesley Harding of course, and The Trans Canada Highwaymen, a supergroup made out of Page, Northey, Moe Berg (of Toronto legends The Pursuit Of Happiness) and Chris Murphy (of Halifax legends Sloan). The Trans-Canada Highwaymen play old Canadian hits of the 70s along with old Canadian hits from the late 80s and 90s that they themselves had written. I knew Chris M and Dave H so I was looking forward to reconnecting. Two fun hangs, two funny people. The whole thing felt very Canadian, very friendly, very immersive. There was no line between audience member and performer. You could just sit next to Steven at dinner and no one would blink. A refreshing lack of ego. Every day was packed from morning to late at night. Dave Foley did a late night talkshow. Breakfast served from 8:30 to 10 AM. I was there for 9 hours the first day, just a few hours the next.
We arrived at the same time as Chris and Moe and went to see Steven do a little requests show. So intimate that one didn’t even have to raise their voice, you could just whisper “Brian Wilson” from your seat and be heard. He did an acoustic version of the BNL song “Maybe Katie” and I thought it sounded like Nick Lowe. It made me think that the band had possibly made his songs seem goofier than they were. Not a dig. He’s clearly an amazing talent, it’s all there with his voice and one instrument.
Before we went in, we were hanging at Wesley’s cottage. He had asked Steven if we’d ever met through the small world of Canadian rock. He said no but he remembered something that I’d said in an interview with a Toronto weekly in early 2001. Oh no, I thought, this can’t be good….
Mass Romantic had been nominated for the 2001 ‘best alternative album’ Juno. This one:
We won! But we hadn’t won yet, when I did the interview. They asked me what it felt like to be nominated and being new to popularity, not properly press trained, I did what any moron would do. I downplayed it, trying to explain that it wasn’t our world (Bejar wouldn’t even take his, I had to give it to his mother). Junos were for the big bands, like… who’s a huge Canadian band? Barenaked Ladies. Yeah, Junos are for the Barenaked Ladies, not us! No, I didn’t stop there, I explained that the Juno could really backfire on me if a girl saw it on my shelf. All my chances with her gone. It was a joke! All a joke, you see. It was hard to take any of it seriously. It all felt like it was suddenly handed to me and could be suddenly yanked away from me at any moment. So yeah, I seemed like a dick in the pages of Toronto’s Now magazine, and it appears that Steven had read it! He told Wesley about this but then, being a classy guy, remembered that he was asked the same question 10 years before, when BNL were the hot new Juno nominee. He replied that Junos weren’t for bands like them, they were for… I don’t know, who’s a huge Canadian band? Loverboy!
Wesley said to not bring this up with Steven, and I stayed true to my word, though I’m writing about it here. Yes, I see that. When he walked off stage, after his requests show, I introduced myself, we exchanged pleasantries. I told him that version of ‘Maybe Katie’ reminded me of Nick Lowe. We are friends again!
There was something about being with all those Canadians, in particular a band that was covering our classic pop hits, it made me want to talk about Canadian music. Living in the USA, there was rarely a time when I could talk about that shared experience of growing up with Canadian pop culture. That old “Can-Con”, Canadian content, enforced by law! I got to talk with Dave Foley and Craig Northey about Max Webster and Triumph and, of course, Rush. Someone brought up the song ‘Closer Together’ by Quebecois band The Box. Was never a huge fan of the song but I remembered it from Much Music (our MTV) and it was like a time machine transporting me back to the 80s. I hadn’t thought of them in forever. A flood of youth and memory. Now I love it, I love that song. The one that REALLY brought me back was ‘American Singer’ by Bundock, another Quebecois band who had a video hit with this tribute to Jim Morrison (I think):
American legend, American prayer, American singer…
Bop bop bop!
I asked Chris Murphy what songs they had planned for the next TransCanada Highwaymen LP. This was all so I could yell out my own suggestions. My number one? ‘Romantic Traffic’ by The Spoons!
This is the song I’ve covered here. I love this song. I was the right age for this, 15 or 16 when it came out. Firmly in the ‘new wave’ camp. The video set in the Toronto subway, The Spoons in all their new wave glory. There was something that really clicked with me. Produced by Nile Rodgers, he saw them open for Culture Club and wanted to work with them. A mammoth sized hook, with ‘doo doo doo’ doing a lot of the lifting but closing together in tight perfect harmony. Something so innocent about it. I was at the edge of things, the idea of ‘romantic traffic’ new to me. Knowing it would get messy, that I might get destroyed by it, but sure, let’s do it. Let’s fall in love. I love this second verse:
She's changing lanes, a bit too slow
Someone hits her from behind
And she finds new love
In romantic traffic
A place where dreams turn off and on like the street lights
If it wasn’t so earnest, I would say that it reminds me of Sparks. “Someone hits her from behind and she finds new love”? Surprised that got past the Canadian censors. No, it’s about traffic!
Now all this time later, I have been through all of it, and yes, a lot of that romantic traffic was bullshit and it wrecked me but I did it anyway and I’d do it again, all that. What read as a cool new possibility in the mid 80s, now reads as nostalgia for that time of endless possibility. Just like that line from Jonathan Richman’s ‘That Summer Feeling’:
Do you long for her or for what you were?
So I took ‘Romantic Traffic’ for myself. The T-C Highwaymen can have some other Spoons classic like ‘Nova Heart’ or ‘Old Emotions’. I loved their set. In particular I loved The Pursuit Of Happiness songs from Moe Berg. I remembered those songs from the late 80s, ‘She’s So Young’ and ‘Hard To Laugh’. He was a famous Todd Rundgren obsessive and TR produced the records. Canadian music was not the coolest thing back then and I was cheering for the good bands. More good music, I always say! Steven Page did a set where anyone that wanted to could be in his choir. They practiced for 4 hours during the previous days and 40 of them sang joyously together with Steven on the final night. It was joyous, moving, inclusive, a reminder of the power of music and community. A little oasis, separate from the ugliness of the world.
(A minor quibble but… Minneapolis’ Bill Sullivan (of the fabled 400 Club) once told us of “The Schmenge Rule”. It was: if there are more people on stage than there are in the audience, the show is cancelled. In this case, I understand why they broke the rule and I’m letting it slide.)
Chris M high-fiving the entirety of the audience during Sloan’s ‘Underwhelmed’ was a highlight. A song that is 33 years old. Holy shit. We’re getting up there. Speaking of that, here we are, 5 of us at least, going gentle into that good night AND raging against the dying of the light. Not mutually exclusive. A Kid In The Hall, a Sloan, an Odd, a New Pornographer and the conspicuously not-Canadian Dave Hill.
OK, that’s enough of that. Song on the other side of the line. ‘Romantic Traffic’ by The Spoons.
Do do do do do do do do.
Do do do do do do do do.
Romantic Traffic.