The Weakerthans Shall Inherit The Earth

Winnipeg, Manitoba
49° 53' North; 97° 10' West

I am no longer the young man I used to be.

But this afternoon I took off from work, hopped on my bike, and headed down to 4th Ave. to find an album for a friend.

Well, a relative and a friend, actually.

The younger me remembers West 4th Ave. in Vancouver as a scratchy, get up early at the crack of noon on a Saturday after posing punk at the SBuddha the night before, kind of place where you went to buy albums by 'The' Somethings and/or Anythings at Quintessence Records.

Which is long gone now. But Zulu is still pretty cool and despite the high whipper-snapper quotient they don't give middle-aged folks a hard time when they stroll in and ask for old Pointed Sticks EPs. And besides, my daughter likes to go there to play Pong after we buy Chumbawumba CDs.

Anyway, today I wanted to find the disc by the Weakerthans that has that tune about hating Winnipeg on it.

But I couldn't remember what the song was called, so rode up the street to the Magic Flute and bought a very different CD for my Dad for Christmas instead. Well, maybe not so different, except in genre.

Then, tonight for some reason I ended up at Warren Kinsella's blog. Don't know why really; maybe it had something to do with the oblique Snowman and Falcon reference involving another Mr. K. from earlier in the day.

Anyway, W.K. has this riff on songs about Winnipeg and a link. So I followed, and there it was. It's by John K Sampson and it's called 'One Great City' and it's a masterpiece, ironical or not.

And I'd forgotten - this Sampson guy is a genius, and everything a Real Canadian should be.....

....which was another of the 'The' Bands from Quintessence days gone by.

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Update: Darn! Had it wrong. Should have been 'The Young Canadians' which was Art Bergmann's post-K-Tels vehicle. 'The Real Canadians' was a similar era Trooper single (sheesh, thought that group had been expunged from limbic system). Get the whole story, sans Ra McGuire et al., from local media maven Michael Klassen here.