Myles Goodwyn’s rock band April Wine has sold millions of records worldwide. He’s won six SOCAN Classics Awards, and earned the SOCAN National Achievement Award in 2002, as well as the East Coast Music Awards’ Dr. Helen Creighton Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. April Wine were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame at the JUNO Awards in 2010. In 2009, at Canadian Music Week, the band earned the Lifetime Achievement Award and were inducted into the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame in 2009. Here, in an excerpt from his 2016 memoir, Just Between You and Me, Goodwyn describes the band’s decision, taken at its origin, not to perform any cover songs.
With April Wine, the idea that we would play only original material and not other bands’ tunes right from the get-go is true, kind of… at least, I think so. Jim [Henman, bass] remembers that we wanted to do only originals. He said he didn’t think I would want to join the new band otherwise. I believe Ritchie [Henman., drums] feels the same way in that we decided to do only original tunes and no cover tunes. But David [Henman, guitar] remembers things a bit differently.
David recalls that we had our first rehearsal in his mom and dad’s basement in Lower Sackville [Nova Scotia] and that our plan was to be original, but to play it safe and still do cover songs. The decision to go entirely original happened – or at least was put forth – when they heard me play a riff of a song I was working on. He says they were floored by how heavy it rocked, and that was the inspiration for the declaration by all of us that we would, henceforth, be a 100 percent original group.
“We sat down and Myles started playing a riff he was writing, and right away, the four of us looked at each other and said, ‘Okay, that’s it… no cover songs! This is what we want to do.’ We were so excited by this riff; it opened up all the doors.”
This is the way I remember it – David’s version. As a new band, April Wine needed to build a repertoire from nothing, so doing a mixture of original and non-original songs made sense. That was the initial plan, but that changed after I played an idea I had for a new song at that early band rehearsal.
The bottom line is that April Wine decided to perform only original material, and therefore, in the beginning, we didn’t have 90 minutes of original music for a concert, or even enough for several sets working in clubs. We needed lots of songs in order to make a living as a live band. We didn’t have lots of songs in the beginning, but we did have some.
Ritchie Henman says the band was pretty clearly defined from the start. “David and I were the avant-garde side of things, Jimmy was going to contribute the folky aspect, and Myles was going to keep us grounded in rock ’n’ roll.”
I thought of April Wine as a rock band. I wanted to play music that was rock, and it didn’t matter to me at the time whether it was a fast tune or slow tune, heavy or otherwise, as long as it was in the rock vein. But I think I was the only one who felt the direction should be that simple.
I thought this new band was worth a try, as I wanted no part of a cover band. In my entire career, to date, I only spent approximately one year playing in a cover group professionally, which I consider an accomplishment of no small claim. I wasn’t great at learning other people’s material, I don’t think. I didn’t mind giving a song I liked a new arrangement, but re-creating a musical piece, note for note, was not my cup of java.
April Wine played original material all right, and the new material was the result of the diverse influences and writing styles of David, Jim, and me. Ritchie would later recall in an interview with Music Express magazine that “the sound of the band then was very heavy, very complex, a hybrid of a dozen different styles filtering through three very different songwriters. Definitely a band with no direction.”
I disagree that early April Wine was really heavy, although I concur with Ritchie that we were without a unified direction. We never really did find common ground during our short time together.
Singer-songwriter Pierre Lapointe was one of the first to stay at the SOCAN House in Paris, a private apartment in the ninth arrondissement, near the Pigalle metro station, just a stone’s throw from the legendary Moulin Rouge, La Cigale, Les Trois Baudets and “guitar street.” “I frequently stay in Paris, and I know that accomodations are the most expensive part of those stays,” he says. “Revenues aren’t always the main reason that makes us want to spend some time in Paris. So knowing you don’t have to worry about the cost of accomodations in your Parisian budget is extraordinary.
Toronto-based singer-songwriter Royal Wood stayed at both the Nashville and Los Angeles SOCAN Houses in 2016. To him, there’s nothing more important than co-writing constantly, and networking, to quickly develop one’s career: “To make it in this industry, you need to be highly creative,” he says. “But you also need your music to land in the right hands and be able to count on a team you believe in. Good music without a solid team, sadly, won’t help you pay the bills. As my father would’ve said: ‘It’s like winking at a cute girl in the dark. You know you’ve done it, but she doesn’t’.’
For Montréal electro-pop band Le Couleur, their stay at the Los Angeles SOCAN House was an occasion to collaborate with Eric Broucek, a renowned mixer who’s worked with several DFA Records artists (LCD Soundsystem, Shit Robot, The Juan McLean). As Le Couleur’s manager Julien Manaud, of Lisbon Lux, explains, “Our goal was, on the one hand, to finish the mixing of the Pop album in the studio, while also starting to develop a network in L.A. I attended a SOCAN party where I met quite a few people. Among them was American agent Pete Anderson. We stayed in touch for several months after that. He really enjoyed Beat Market’s Sun Machine album, and set up two showcases in Los Angeles in January 2017.”
Aside from his solo career, singer-songwriter Bobby John is signed with Les Éditions Bloc-Notes Musique and has invested a lot of energy in co-writes for other artists, such as Serena Ryder, Olivier Dion and Maxime Proulx, to name a few. He stayed at both the Nashville and Paris SOCAN Houses in 2016 in the hopes of creating contacts in the U.S. and in France, and to check out the local music scenes. “When I went to Nashville and Paris, I had the chance to explore the musical universes of those cities, and I met incredible people who inspired several songs,” he says. “New technology is a great communication tool, but it’ll never replace the creative energy that happens when two songwriters work together in the same studio. That, in my opinion, is how the best collaborations and solid relationships are built.
Paul-Étienne Côté has won several SOCAN Awards in the National and International Television Music categories and is the founder of Circonflex, a musical agency. The prolific composer stayed at the Paris SOCAN House mainly for networking purposes: “The SOCAN House is ideal: it’s Pigalle, it’s central. It’s like living in Montréal’s Mile End, but times 3,000. It’s perfectly located amidst the best venues, terrasses and bistros, and it’s next door to the ninth, second and tenth arrondissements. All of the Paris music industry is a stone’s throw away. I would use the Vélib [a bike-sharing system] to travel everywhere I needed to go from the SOCAN House. I even went all the way to Clichy on one of those bikes because the SOCAN House truly is near everything (but also because I needed to burn all those calories from charcuteries, foie gras, baguettes, escargots and babas au rhum).
In 2005, after a busy year that included the world premiere of a major commission for