My Effin' Life by Geddy Lee

Author:Geddy Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

We had little choice but to tour abroad constantly. It was so hard in those days for Canadian artists to enjoy cross-border recognition that many like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and the Band fully decamped to the USA. A few, like Gordon Lightfoot, April Wine, the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, were somehow able to score international hits while sticking resolutely to home, but without the benefit of Top 40 radio exposure we had to play countless gigs south of the border, opening for whoever we could, trying to build a fan base in the Midwest that we hoped would expand to the coasts by word of mouth.

Most of the other Canadian bands I can think of didn’t have the will, the connections or the good fortune—not to mention Ray’s dogged determination to keep us working in the States—to succeed that way. It’s not that as a nation we lacked talent. Part of what’s always limited so many Canadian acts is the harsh geographic reality: ours is a vast country with a proportionally tiny population, mostly in our six or seven cities huddled along the 49th Parallel. You could drive for days between them before you’d find a venue bigger than the local community hockey rink, while by contrast I was always amazed by the number of Americans who lived and worked in sprawling suburbs or smaller towns, filling out the in-betweens; there we’d play rural towns that were barely on the map but had 10,000-seat arenas. Musically speaking, that meant Canada was a nation of regional enterprise without the economic concentration or the flag-waving fervor to grow bigger.*

Before the seventies, Canadian media suffered from a small-country mentality: lacking cross-country awareness and a sense of national pride, radio stations favoured music that was big elsewhere, taking notice of the scant few homegrown bands who’d won approval abroad but depriving others of the oxygen they needed to grow in the first place. To rescue Canadian artists from this vicious circle, our government decided it had to build a cultural wall between us and the States by imposing “Canadian Content” regulations on domestic radio and television operators: as of 1971, a minimum of 25 percent of all music played on our stations had to be Canadian Content, or CanCon for short, as defined under the MAPL system (pronounced “maple,” get it?). The acronym stood for four criteria of Canadianness, at least two of which you had to meet in order to qualify.

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