GEORGIA STRAIGHT /2008 By Ken Eisner - Listen to Barry here -
Barry Greenfield and I have a lot in common, although we only met recently. We’re both expats who witnessed the ass end of the 1960s up close, in interesting cities, and who dabbled in music on and off over the years while trying to do the family thing. About six years ago, when I bought my first guitar after a ten-year layoff, the salesman at Rufus practically shouted after me, “Just don’t quit your day job.”
Apparently, I was riding a trend increasingly familiar to former musicians my age, by getting back into a youthful passion on a more casual basis. If anything, Greenfield’s hiatus lasted even longer, although he never really stopped writing songs. So after he started recording again, in 1998, he had no trouble finding material for what now amounts to five CDs. The newest of these, Heavy Horses, has been released in time to find him playing in public again, recently in places as big as London, England, and humble as Duncan, B.C.
A burly, open-faced fellow who turned 56 December 10, the white-moustached Greenfield is a rough-hewn singer and guitar player, and his writing style is more intuitive and heartfelt than overpolished. But he’s no dilettante. He has co-written tunes with Randy Bachman and Andrew Gold, and his originals have been recorded by the likes of Annette Ducharme and Buffy St. Marie, with the latter getting his demo via Joni Mitchell—something he didn’t learn about until roughly ten years after the fact. In any case, he took time out to make a living, mostly as a freelance financial planner. And now that his daughter is at that leaving-the-nest age, he is pursuing the music career that got underway in the late 1960s.
The veteran singer-songwriter, as I learned in conversations on the phone and in a noisy Granville Street eatery, got the music bug while still living with his parents. Shortly after moving to Vancouver from a childhood spent in what was then, in 1967, called Rhodesia, the U.K.-born teenager attended his first rock concert: Herman’s Hermits, The Who, and Buffalo Springfield. It’s easy to see why hewould run out, get a guitar, and start banging away on it right away. A year later, after he had been working on originals songs for a while, he caught his idols, John Lennon and Paul McCartney on the Tonight Show promoting the first the Beatles album on Apple Records by announcing that their new, artist-run label was looking for fresh talent. His literal-minded response was to hop on a plane for London the next day, showing up at their Saville Row offices demanding an audition. (Hell hath no fury like a 17-year-old inspired to create.)
Today, Greenfield fondly recalls his brief meeting with Lennon—then in full crazed-rabbi phase and followed by a rapt entourage—but spent more time with Harry Nilsson and Graham Gouldman. The latter writer-producer, who had penned “Bus Stop”, “Heart Full of Soul”, and would go on to found avant-poppers 10cc, championed the young colonial, helping him place two songs that got covered by Brits. A contract was soon in the offing with industry giant EMI, but the unseasoned youngster instead returned to B.C. to finish high school and begin studying law. He kept up his interest in songwriting, however, and recorded his own version of “New York is Closed Tonight”, widely played across Canada in 1972. Ever the fan of place names, he came up with two more songs, “Sweet America” and “Canada Sky”, that charted that year. He subsequently went to Los Angeles to record an RCA album with top session players. By 1975, he was touring with acts as varied as Supertramp and John Lee Hooker. Then, after a festival show in the Okanagan, he packed his guitar and walked away from show business.
This decade, however, has found him summing up his life experiences on stage. “Growing up in Rhodesia had a huge impact on my life,” he recently told me, the wisp of a soft South African accent only occasionally colouring his speech. (His singing has the throaty rasp of a young Cat Stevens.) “It taught me a lot about racism and made me quite political. Also, having no television for all my childhood was a very positive thing.” Indeed, his songs are heavily flavoured by the concept of people, and politics, being the primary entertainment of life. Often, the message is direct, as on much of his previous record, King of the Wolves.
Some of his new songs, such as Landmines and Pink Ghetto, are self-explanatory, and The Road Home—which he’s currently shopping in Nashville’s country market, deals with the plight of soldiers returning from the debacle in Iraq. “This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for the last 25 years,” he explains. “There’s always a temptation to fit too much into an album, with too many styles and sounds. This one, which is just voice and guitar on every cut, sounds the same all the way through.” The new album is essentially a ruminative collaboration between Greenfield and David Sinclair, who has played guitar with Sarah McLachlan and k.d. lang, and produced Heavy Horses with a light touch. Like the others, it is available on cdbaby.com. Like me, he hasn’t yet quit his day job. But he has gone a long way towards rediscovering the green, eager teenager who dropped everything to meet the Beatles.
