City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans

Paul Tough

The bar down­stairs at Wellington’s on Albert Street in Winnipeg wears its his­tory on the walls. It has a sunken dance floor sur­rounded by glow­ing pur­ple neon tubes from the club’s disco days. The fake spi­der­webs draped over the wrought-iron chan­de­lier near the bar are from when it was a goth place. Before that, twenty years ago, Wellington’s was where local punk bands played; there are prob­a­bly still some holes in the walls from back then. 

On the February night I vis­ited, Winnipeg was in the mid­dle of a mild spell, only a few degrees below zero out­side; T-shirt weather for Winnipeg. I was sit­ting at a square black table with a square black ash­tray on top of it, watch­ing a band go through their sound check. Behind me the bar­tenders were set­ting up, unload­ing cases of beer and jam­ming quick-pour noz­zles into bot­tles of whisky and rum. 

There were four peo­ple on stage, four white men in their late twen­ties and early thir­ties play­ing elec­tric gui­tar and bass and drums. The short­est and skin­ni­est one was stand­ing in the mid­dle, in front of a micro­phone, a gui­tar strapped around his neck. He was wear­ing a black T-shirt and jeans rolled up at the bot­tom in a sin­gle wide fold, like a farmer. His hair was dyed blond, or at least part of it was, and he had a smile on his face that some­times seemed con­fi­dent and some­times seemed ner­vous. His name, I knew from read­ing the back of the cd, was John K. Samson, and the band was called the Weakerthans.

At the back of the room the sound guy adjusted some knobs and the band launched into a song called “Left and leav­ing.” It starts with a finger-picked gui­tar and a sin­gle voice singing:

My city’s still breath­ing
(but barely, it’s true)
through build­ings
gone miss­ing like teeth

Back in my tiny apart­ment in New York City, those lyrics are writ­ten in ball­point pen on a scrap of yel­low lined paper and stuck to the side of my refrig­er­a­tor with a sou­venir mag­net of the World Trade Center. When I wrote them down and mag­neted them up last fall, it was because they felt to me as though they were about New York dur­ing its sea­son of loss, though even then I knew that they were not; they were about Winnipeg. Every Weakerthans song is about Winnipeg.

Winnipeg mat­ters to me because my sis­ter lives there. As I have moved from city to city and job to job over the last decade, she has stayed put, a min­is­ter and a home­owner, drilling roots down into the per­mafrost. Listening to the Weakerthans in my apart­ment last win­ter, I found myself want­ing to visit. Now I wasn’t cer­tain, sit­ting at my table watch­ing the band warm up, whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg. But I knew I was try­ing to fig­ure some­thing out about home: what it means to love or hate where you live, how to write about a place, how to claim a home with words.

Toward the end of my Winnipeg trip, I came across this pas­sage in a book by Joan Didion:

Certain places seem to exist mainly because some­one has writ­ten about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner, and one hot July week in Oxford I was moved to spend an after­noon walk­ing the grave­yard look­ing for his stone, a kind of cour­tesy call on the owner of the prop­erty. A place belongs for­ever to who­ever claims it hard­est, remem­bers it most obses­sively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, ren­ders it, loves it so rad­i­cally that he remakes it in his own image.

Reading that, I won­dered if my visit to Wellington’s was a cour­tesy call, too, though the owner of this prop­erty is still alive: in fact, John Samson is only twenty-nine. When the sound check was over, I intro­duced myself and asked if he had a moment to talk about Winnipeg and the Weakerthans and he said, all right, let me just get a light. We found a table in a back room that looked as though it dated from yet another Wellington’s incar­na­tion: it had mir­rors and pur­ple neon lights just like the dance floor, but all along the walls, up high near the ceil­ing, there were vaguely erotic draw­ings of car­toon cats with large breasts, wear­ing space suits.

I first heard the Weakerthans in the fall of 1999, when Dave Bidini, the Toronto author and musi­cian, gave me a copy of Fallow, their first cd. But I didn’t get excited about them until last year, after my friend Craig put “Left and leav­ing” on a cd he burned and sent me. I think the song meant some­thing sim­i­lar to Craig, a Canadian liv­ing in London, and to me, a Canadian liv­ing then in San Francisco and now in New York: it’s about the pull of home, and its equiv­a­lent push: about leav­ing and com­ing back and decid­ing to stay away. I lis­tened to it over and over.

My enthu­si­asm quickly snow­balled, the type of immer­sive musi­cal attach­ment that had hap­pened to me a dozen times before — with Prince, Bob Dylan, Jane’s Addiction, Lyle Lovett — but not for sev­eral long, vacant years: the kind of attach­ment where you play someone’s records into the ground, hunt record stores for obscure eps, search lyric sheets for hid­den clues. So it felt famil­iar, falling in love with the Weakerthans, although they are a band that almost no one I know has ever heard of, a band that mea­sures its record sales in tens of thou­sands, not mil­lions, a band from Winnipeg.

The word Winnipeg never appears any­where in the songs on the Weakerthans’ two albums, but the idea and the fact of the place infects them. The lyrics for Fallow are printed over a faint, close-up map of the city (you can make out the cor­ner where my sis­ter used to live, at Wolseley and Evanson, under “Diagnosis”); there’s the “all night restau­rant, North Kildonan” where “luke­warm cof­fee tastes like soap”; there are “clocks stopped at the cor­ner of Albert St.”; there’s the Disraeli Bridge, which takes you over the Red River to East Kildonan and which also ends up, in the song “Fallow,” right here:

Out under the Disraeli,
with rusty train track ties,
we’ll carve new streets and side­walks,
a city for small lives,
and say that we’ll stay for one more year.

Images of revi­sion and recon­struc­tion — of tear­ing up streets and pulling down build­ings and plant­ing a bomb at city hall and spray-painting con­struc­tion sites — are all over John Samson’s lyrics. It’s as if he’s say­ing that the only way to stay sane and stay put in a frozen, iso­lated, bro­ken– down city like Winnipeg is to re-imagine it, to rip it up and put it back together in your head.

Two nights before the Wellington’s show I had gone with my friend Miriam Toews to another Weakerthans con­cert. That week, at the end of February, was the band’s fifth anniver­sary, and they were cel­e­brat­ing by play­ing four con­certs on four con­sec­u­tive nights at four dif­fer­ent clubs. Miriam and I went to the first con­cert, at the Royal Albert Arms Hotel — which Dave Bidini in his book calls “the grotty, cursed Royal Albert Arms” — just a few doors down Albert Street from Wellington’s, past a tat­too par­lour and a Chinese restau­rant. It was the night that the women’s hockey team won the gold medal in Salt Lake City and Miriam and I waited for the con­cert to start in a cof­fee shop around the cor­ner and talked about that idea of remak­ing and re-imagining a city. The lyric that was buzzing in my head that night was from a song called “This is a fire door never leave open,” a song, like so many Weakerthans songs, about mem­ory and leav­ing and child­hood and silence (it talks about “forty years of fail­ing to describe a feel­ing,” which Miriam says is a very Winnipeg kind of expe­ri­ence). It’s a loud, fast, guitar-heavy song, and this is how it ends:

And I love this place;
The enor­mous sky,
And the faces, hands
That I’m haunted by,
So why
Can’t I for­give these build­ings,
These frame­works labeled “Home”?

Miriam and I had talked about the enor­mous Manitoba sky, its epic flat­ness, and how you can love a city and resent its build­ings, but I still didn’t get what those lyrics meant, exactly. So after Samson found a match and started smok­ing his cig­a­rette and we sat down under the porno­graphic car­toon char­ac­ters in the black light of the Wellington’s back room, that’s what I asked him about.

“That’s one of those lines that I thought I under­stood when I first wrote it,” he said. “But I keep chang­ing my under­stand­ing of it.”

He sat and thought for a few long sec­onds and then he started telling me a story about writ­ing another song, “Left and leav­ing,” the one with the build­ings that have gone miss­ing like teeth.

“I used to live two doors down from here, on Albert Street,” he said. “I had been away on tour and I came home and went up to my apart­ment, which at the time was just a big room with a bed in it. I was get­ting back after six weeks of trav­el­ling around and I was feel­ing really dis­con­nected to what my place was here, and there­fore what my place was any­where in the world.

“And I went out for a walk. It was a sum­mer evening. I walked down Albert Street and across Exchange Park. And as I reached the far side of the park — the site of a huge amount of his­tory, the place where the General Strike gath­ered in 1919 — there was a hotel that was burn­ing to the ground. People were just stand­ing around watch­ing. I kept try­ing to pic­ture what the build­ing had looked like. I couldn’t. It sud­denly struck me that I had never paid any atten­tion to this build­ing, but that I was pro­foundly sad that it was burn­ing down.

“And I think that that relates a lot to this place. It’s quite a meta — ”

He stopped him­self, uncer­tain whether he really wanted to use the word “metaphor” in the back room of Wellington’s. After a sec­ond he decided to press on.

“It is a metaphor for this place. Maybe a crude one. But it’s that idea that there are sto­ries and there are peo­ple in my life here that are like that build­ing. I think it’s the point of what we do: to try to express those sto­ries and to make the lives of those peo­ple rel­e­vant if we can. That ties directly into the idea of lov­ing this place and not being able to for­give the build­ings. Because they are imbued with such his­tory.”

One of my favourite Weakerthans songs is about pol­i­tics, or maybe about the lim­i­ta­tions of pol­i­tics. It’s called “Pamphleteer” and it’s writ­ten from the point of view of a weary, dis­con­tented activist stand­ing on a street cor­ner at rush hour, hand­ing out leaflets. The song bor­rows nicely from the lit­er­a­ture of the left; it ends with the line “A spectre’s haunt­ing Albert Street,” echo­ing the first line of the Communist Manifesto: “A spec­tre is haunt­ing Europe.” And it quotes from the protest hymn “Solidarity Forever,” like this:

Sing “Oh what force on earth could be
Weaker than the fee­ble strength
Of one” like me remem­ber­ing
The way it could have been.

The quote is from “Solidarity Forever”— there’s a foot­note in the lyric sheet that says so — but what I love about it is the way that the lyrics sub­vert the anthem, so that it’s no longer about polit­i­cal strug­gle but about lost love.

I had to resist the urge to ask him for expla­na­tions of any more songs. When you’ve been lis­ten­ing to Weakerthans songs as much as I have, all you want John Samson to do, if you’re sit­ting down with him, is decode his lyrics, which tend to be allu­sive and elu­sive and ellip­ti­cal, full of unex­plained images of dead men’s neck­ties and snow fences and a puke-green sofa — but pre­sum­ably he’s writ­ten them ellip­ti­cally for a rea­son.

I had just read an arti­cle, in fact, about Neil Young at a tap­ing of the vh–1 show “Storytellers,” with Crosby, Stills and Nash. The idea of the show is that song­writ­ers tell the sto­ries behind their best-known songs. In the arti­cle, Neil Young is pac­ing the halls of vh–1 like a caged ani­mal, and he says, “I thought the song was sup­posed to tell the story.”

Neil Young is from Winnipeg, too. There’s some­thing muted in the songs of both men, though maybe it’s more implicit in Neil Young’s songs and more explicit in John Samson’s: the ache of silence and mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion, of leav­ing things unsaid and then regret­ting it later. It’s that “forty years of fail­ing to describe a feel­ing” that Miriam likes; in another song, rely­ing “a bit too heav­ily on alco­hol and irony”; in oth­ers, ref­er­ences to let­ters that aren’t sent and lists of things you meant to say.

An unmis­tak­able feel­ing of deep-seated civic regret flowed through my con­ver­sa­tions with both Miriam and John: a sense that when you live in Winnipeg, the city’s entire twentieth-century his­tory is present in every moment, from its golden age of promise and pros­per­ity as the rail­way– and-wheat hub of a grow­ing nation, to its cur­rent sta­tus as a mis­placed and impov­er­ished city, off the radar, what Miriam calls “the cold­est nowhere noth­ing mosquito-ridden bar­ren bleak and des­o­late city in the world — the punch­line of every joke about hell­holes.”

There’s some­thing mag­i­cal about a city in decline. Especially in mon­eyed times like these on a mon­eyed con­ti­nent like this one, cities like Edmonton and Buffalo and Pittsburgh and Winnipeg feel pro­tected from a cer­tain type of urban degra­da­tion: the era­sure that goes along with giant malls and theme restau­rants and off-ramps and lux­ury boxes at base­ball sta­di­ums, even as those crum­bling cities embody an appar­ently harsher, more tan­gi­ble decline.

What is hope­ful about those cities is that new and orig­i­nal art and ideas often grow in them in unex­pected ways. “There is a lot of poten­tial in places that are removed from the cen­tre of power,” Samson said. “I have this feel­ing that that’s where a lot of inter­est­ing things are going to emerge — things that have the poten­tial not to be sul­lied or defeated as soon as they’re cre­ated. They can be ignored for a while. They can hover in between.” In between suc­cess and fail­ure, I guess he meant; fame and obliv­ion.

At the same time, there is a small-town resent­ment that often gets expressed as a com­pli­cated kind of self-loathing. When I got to Winnipeg the day before the first Weakerthans show, I had picked up a few local news­pa­pers to see if I could read any­thing about the con­certs or the band, since I really didn’t know the first thing about them except for what was on the cd. There were a few arti­cles — a photo of the band appeared on the cover of the local weekly, and there was an inter­view on the arts page of the Winnipeg Free Press—and even though the arti­cles were gen­er­ally enthu­si­as­tic, there was an odd back­hand­ed­ness to some of the com­pli­ments, an sub­tle accu­sa­tion that maybe the band was get­ting a bit too big for its britches, doing four straight days’ worth of shows. “I can’t help won­der­ing if this February car­ni­val of sorts is really just grand­stand­ing — a way of demon­strat­ing a mea­sure of great­ness by see­ing how much the band can take on, and get away with,” the rock music colum­nist, James Turner, wrote in Uptown. In every inter­view I read, the band down­played the impor­tance of this four-concert home stand: In the Winnipeg Sun, Samson described the shows as “some lit­tle project, some­thing fun to do in February”; in Uptown, he said they were “not a big deal” and insisted, “We’re just doing this for kicks, man.”

When I asked Samson about those inter­views, he laughed right away and nod­ded his head. Of course it was shtick, he said. “That’s play­ing the Winnipeg press game. There’s a self-deprecation inher­ent in any­thing you do here. You can’t just go out and say, ‘We’re fuck­ing awe­some.’ That’s one of the things that I find beau­ti­ful about art and music in big­ger cities. You’re allowed to have a per­sona there. I would never be able to have a per­sona here. I’m a hay­seed.”

I asked him if he ever thought about leav­ing Winnipeg, and he answered, “Of course. I’ve always had the urge to leave. I still have it. In fact, it’s become more a part of me than an urge. It’s a fact of who I am now, liv­ing here, that I don’t want to be here all the time, because some­times it’s not a great place to live. It is a small town and it has the men­tal­ity of a small town, but with all the social and eco­nomic prob­lems of a big­ger city.”

It’s the deep­est rela­tion­ship you can have with a place, I think: hat­ing it and stay­ing. It’s the flip side of offi­cially sanc­tioned civic pride — some­thing I’d seen plenty of, liv­ing in Toronto— which always feels light­weight, defen­sive, insub­stan­tial: a cheap sub­sti­tute for a real rela­tion­ship with a place. Samson may think about leav­ing, but that only makes him more at home here: every­one in Winnipeg thinks about leav­ing, all the time.

A few hours later, the Weakerthans took the stage again. Wellington’s was sold out and pretty packed, but even packed it only held three hun­dred peo­ple, tops. The band started off by play­ing every song on Fallow, in order, which was an inter­est­ing idea, but which had the effect of sub­du­ing the crowd a bit; we wanted to hear the band’s more recent songs.

After Fallow they left the stage for a while, and then came back for an encore. They passed around a bot­tle of fifth-anniversary cham­pagne to the fans up front and they handed out curl­ing tro­phies to var­i­ous peo­ple who had helped the band — the direc­tor of their video, the two young girls who do all their pos­ter­ing — and then they started to play some new songs.
I was think­ing about Winnipeg as I lis­tened, of course, because of the band but also because I was leav­ing the next day to go back to New York. I was think­ing of some­thing Neil Young says at the begin­ning of “Journey Through the Past,” his song about leav­ing Winnipeg and mov­ing to the United States: “This is a song about a home.” And I was think­ing about a quo­ta­tion by Alden Nowlan, the New Brunswick poet, that the Weakerthans use as an epi­graph in the “Left and leav­ing” lyric book­let:

for those who belong nowhere
and for those who belong to one place
too much to belong any­where else.

From the stage, John Samson said he wanted to play some­thing brand new, a song called “One Great City!” after the slo­gan adopted by Winnipeg a cou­ple of years ago, which still appears on high­way signs as you approach, always with excla­ma­tion point included. The song was arranged for a sin­gle gui­tar, a sin­gle voice, and hand­claps, and it started out with an image of a dol­lar store where

The clerk is clos­ing up and count­ing loonies.
She’s try­ing not to say
I hate Winnipeg.

Weakerthans songs don’t usu­ally have a cho­rus, but this one did: “I hate Winnipeg.” The song alter­nated between the cho­rus and these lit­tle vignettes — the golden statue that sits on top of the provin­cial leg­is­la­ture look­ing out over the city, “watch­ing the north end die”; a car stalled in the turn­ing lane in front of you — and each time the cho­rus recurred, more of the audi­ence would join in, and we’d sing it louder and louder each time. By the time we got to:

The Guess Who sucked
The Jets are lousy any­way.

“I hate Winnipeg” was prac­ti­cally a shout.

After a few more new songs the band left the stage and I thought they were gone for good, but then they came out one last time and made my day by play­ing “Pamphleteer” and then end­ing with “This is a fire door never leave open,” and when they sang about lov­ing this place and the enor­mous sky I knew what they meant, and when they got to won­der­ing why they couldn’t for­give these build­ings, these frame­works labelled “Home,” I thought I might know what they meant by that, too.

After the con­cert I said good­bye to John, who apol­o­gized for play­ing so long, and then Miriam and her hus­band Cassady drove me home in their mini­van, and they apol­o­gized for own­ing a mini­van. A few hours later, at the air­port, I felt the wind and real­ized that it had finally turned cold, seri­ously cold, Winnipeg cold, the kind of cold I couldn’t take for more than a few days, let alone months. It was 6 a.m. and pitch black. I hugged my sis­ter in the wind and waved as she drove away, back into the frozen night of her home­town, and then I walked into the ter­mi­nal and flew south to mine.