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Canwest News Service
WhenIcalledStuartMcLean at his Ontario home to chat about his popular CBC Radio show The Vinyl Cafe, I pictured him sitting in the homey kitchen of a rural cottage, perhaps on the outskirts of a pretty little town like Mariposa, or Orillia.
"I kind of live in the country," he says, "even though I live in the city." Two minutes walk from "the fishmongers and bakers and cheese stores" of Kensington Market in the heart of Toronto, McLean lucked into buying one of Hogtown's first laneway houses, on a dirt lane with a small pond.
The Vinyl Cafe is famous for its fictional character named Dave, who runs the record store of the radio show's title, and McLean has no doubt "he would fit in very much with this neighbourhood." Over about 15 years ( "We didn't keep good statistics at the start," McLean admits), The Vinyl Cafe has grown to become a low-key phenomenon, but it started out as a summer replacement show on Monday nights at 7 p.m.
"No one listens to the radio then," McLean says, "which was a great gift. It's great to be able to grow to understand what you're doing in a quiet way." It wasn't until the great Clyde Gilmour retired in 1997 and The Vinyl Cafe was handed his coveted weekend time slots on the CBC's AM and FM networks that McLean's show found firm footing.
Today he's criss-crossing Canada on the latest popular tour of a concert version of The Vinyl Cafe (reaching Vancouver at the end of the month); while McLean and his musicians now perform in some of the nation's biggest venues, the first such show took place in the much more modest confines of the 340-seat Glenn Gould Studio at CBC headquarters in Toronto.
"We'd go down every day to find out if anybody was buying tickets," he recalls. "We couldn't believe it when we sold the place out." Now he'll fill the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts — twice — and is looking forward to robust sales for Extreme Vinyl Cafe, the latest book about Dave and his family and friends to be spun off from the radio show. "I'm such a lucky man," he says. "I owe everything to CBC Radio–that's where I learned how to write, where I learned my values as a journalist."
McLean is especially thankful that he's never been forced to submit a written proposal of what he wants to do. "The best stuff, you can't explain what it is, it comes from the heart. When your heart speaks, sometimes it's through embraces and tears and laughter, and if you try to put the feelings of the heart into words, it doesn't work."
While we tend to view The Vinyl Cafe as something uniquely Canadian, its host notes that the show enjoys just as much attention in dozens of radio markets across the U.S. McLean adds that even his commitment to championing young Canadian musicians "who might not otherwise get airplay" is well received south of the border.
"People in America do write to us and say 'we love hearing this music that we otherwise wouldn't hear, and we love hearing about places that we wouldn't have heard about.'"
He's even happy to adapt the show so it's a little more user-friendly for Americans. "If I talk about Terry Sawchuk, the great hockey goalie, I'll just throw in the subordinate clause when I might otherwise have not done that."
Listeners love the way The Vinyl Cafe can offer slapstick one moment and serious discourse the next. McLean is especially keen to uphold civility in public discourse, and feels passionately that public figures such as politicians are often unfairly slagged in society.
"I know a lot of these people, I've talked to a lot of these people and, almost to a soul," he says, "I've never met somebody who has stood for public office who isn't sent there by the best motives. I might not agree with everything they stand for, or a lot of things they stand for, or all the things they stand for, but I think that, as a whole, we've been incredibly well served.
"I don't think it serves anyone to call them idiots. I think it serves us all to look at the way they do things and say it could have been done better, but to call names and be uncivil is really not constructive or helpful or even worthwhile."
pbirnie@vancouversun.com
At a glance
VINYL CAFE CHRISTMAS TOUR 2009
The Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts, 777 Homer
Saturday, Nov. 28 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 29 at 2:30 p.m.
Tickets $25 to $50, go to ticketmaster.ca or call 604-280-4444
EXTREME VINYL CAFE, Viking Canada, 265 pages, $36
