A County Christmas concert

A taste of the Vinyl Café comes to Mount Tabor

It was a wistfully familiar tune that began an evening of song and stories at Mount Tabor Theatre on Saturday night during a fundraising concert for the Prince Edward Learning Centre. John Sheard and Dennis Pendrith, the so-called Vinyl Café orchestra, led off with the instantly recognizable theme song from the late Stuart McLean’s signature show. The concert was organized by Dave Ullrich, who is the online distributor for Vinyl Café merchandise and who had a long association with McLean. Ullrich invited Sheard to do a tribute concert to the Vinyl Café, and at the same have the official release of the Christmas in the County CD, which features original music by local County musicians. The format of the evening was similar to that of the radio show, with stories and music, but in this case rather that stories by McLean, they were stories about touring with McLean in the early days. Sheard had been with the shows from the beginning, and he has a deep well of material from which to draw. “Of all the years I spent with Stuart, it was those three or four early years that were the most fun, where you would pack everything into one little bag and there’d be three or four of us in a car trying to read maps,” said Sheard. “Stuart would end up playing to 3000-seaters, but they weren’t as much fun as being in those funky little towns.”

In the early days, McLean and his small group would do the live shows in community centres or school auditoriums that would hold at most 100 people. They would travel hours from one small town to another and McLean would always be attracted to the unusual and oddball little things, often taking a 100-mile detour as the fancy struck him. A listener once offered McLean a copy of John Diefenbaker’s last will and testament, so he and his crew drove a couple of hours to get it, and then McLean read the document out loud for the entire return trip.

The crew was spared from further readings when McLean absentmindedly forgot the will in the dressing room. On another occasion, the owner of a bed and breakfast—who was quite inebriated when his guests arrived—sent McLean a painting along with a bill for $350, after McLean expressed a cursory interest in it. Sheard said that McLean’s actual personality was almost exactly as he appeared on the radio. “People always want the dirt on Stuart, because they say nobody can be that nice, but he was pretty much how he presented himself. He wasn’t two-faced or anything.” He did have a few idiosyncrasies, like becoming completely enamoured for a while with the ukulele, or a phase where he would invite very young children to come up on stage, or having a one-sided feud with Randy Bachman over the name of his show, Vinyl Tap.

The concert on Saturday featured a number of local musicians. Lisa Bozikovic and Annelise Noronha did a Kenny Rogers/Dolly Parton duet of Christmas Without You, and Grace Bongard sang Blue Christmas. “Grace is amazing,” said Sheard “What is she, 19? The thing is with the young musicians, when their careers are on the rise, they are so thrilled at playing in front of an audience. She is so enthusiastic, and she comes in here and it’s so infectious, so how can you not love playing with her? And even Annelise and Lisa. We had a good time tonight.” The other guest artist was two-time Juno winner Matthew Barber. In addition to singing, he also played the drums during the other musicians’ songs. Sheard showed his virtuosity on the piano by playing a medley of 33 movie themes in five minutes, noting that anyone who recognized them all had probably spent far too much time in movie theatres. All the musicians appeared on stage for the final tune of Jingle Bell Rock.

The Vinyl Café held a unique place in the landscape of Canadian radio. The show’s popularity seemed to increase year after year. “Entire families would come to the show,” said Ullrich. “Young kids would come to the show, and as they grew up they would be as into the show as their parents were. I saw the audience growing year after year, particularly with live shows, and that’s what blew me away, and I felt a little bit of that here tonight.” In particular, it was the Christmas shows that drew people in. “Take one story, Dave Cooks the Turkey. That became a story that was woven into people’s lives, and it became part of Christmas,” said Ullrich. “And to this day people still have that connection, and it’s sort of a family connection that’s deeper than any kind of bond you can have, and Stuart was in people’s lives in that way.”