Stuart McLean Rocks The House
I’m a sentimental guy. It doesn’t bother me to admit it. I like sob stories and little life moments full of big meaning. I have no shame about it. So Stuart McLean and his Vinyl Café radio show is right up my alley. Every weekend, the profoundly affable McLean creates an irony-free zone, a sort of cynicism-destroying bubble where weary postmodern minds can cleanse themselves. Maybe that’s all a bit too highfalutin for a review of a traveling variety show, but what the hell. If there’s anything you can take away from a Vinyl Café show, it’s that whatever you do should be done with the purest sincerity, no matter how silly it might come across.
McLean brought his bottomless well of sincerity to a packed WMCA last Sunday, and to be blunt, he SLAYED them. I’ve rarely seen such a positive reaction to something so old-fashioned that wasn’t balls-deep irony, but the whole crowd (myself included) totally ate it up. And it IS old fashioned; don’t get me wrong. McLean himself looks like he stepped out of a time machine. All his suit needed was a pocket watch and he would have been right at home in 1930, and I get the sense that he didn’t intend it that way. Stuart McLean just generally loves putting on a crazy, old-timey traveling show, and that joy shines through in every moment. His story readings were animated and popped with the boundless energy of a born entertainer plying his trade.
In between McLean’s segments, he presented a lovely trio of ladies called The Good Lovelies, who were recently nominated for a Juno. Normally I wouldn’t care too much about such a bogus award (NICKELBACK has won it, for Pete’s sake), but I can’t felt but feel happy for them, because they have the sweetest voices I have ever heard live on a stage. I actually couldn’t believe it. “People can’t sing like that in real life”, I kept telling myself, but there they were, proving me wrong. During their rendition of The Beatles’ “In My Life” (set over a montage of photographs from McLean’s youth), you could hear every heart in the room breaking all at once. No AutoTuned trickery or manufactured hit will ever match the simple power of pure human voices singing in harmony.
The musical segments (including a lovely piano interlude by Vinyl Café stalwart John Sheard) also revealed another side of McLean; the one that is totally in love with music. Sitting in his big old red chair, McLean slapped his knees and sang along like he had no idea a theatre full of people were watching him. He just didn’t give a toss. He let the music flow into him and move his limbs and that lack of self-consciousness fed the crowd, who by and large followed suit and moved with the music (though few went a long with the sing-a-long the Good Lovelies attempted).
At the end of the show, McLean and his musical guests led the theatre in singing “You Are My Sunshine”, which in any other context would be unbearable, but at THIS show, it felt entirely right and perfect. Eyes closed, singing in an imperfect voice made perfect with the joy of music, Stuart McLean, to paraphrase George Clinton, blew the roof off the sucker, and I have a feeling he’s going to do it again and again until he’s dead and buried, because it’s what he HAS to do. Like his mentor Peter Gzowski, he was born to do what he’s doing, and nothing gives him more joy.
And friends, that joy is pretty contagious.
