I hope you have successfully navigated another winter season like the hero of The Revenant, as we push forward into the glorious spring of 2016 (speaking of The Revenant… the movie was pretty good, but have you read the book?! It’s incredible!)

Our family started the year with my wife successfully pushing forward our new little hero: on January 1, 2016, our daughter Grace Heather Lawrence came into the world in a planned home birth at our house in Vancouver. Grace is doing very well, and is now giving big smiles to her loving big brother Joshua.

With two kids under three at home, I’m in the midst of taking my longest break of my career from the CBC: an entire year of paternity leave! And while I temporarily miss the day-to-day honour and hustle of working at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I’m treasuring the time I’m spending with the kids and Jill. Just not right now while writing this.

Besides trying to learn how to be a better parent (don’t bring peanut butter snacks to the family drop in at the Community Centre!), I’m also ever-plugging away at my third book: the trials, travails, and treachery of 17 years in a touring rock ‘n’ roll band. I think I’m on my… sixth or seventh re-write?

Just like the tours, the book has been a slog, but it’s also been amazing to re-connect with all the musicians and mentors the Smugglers crossed paths with 20 years ago or more on the touring trail, while I try to piece together the stories like the time the Hoboken club caught fire (while we were in it), the time the Cleveland club flooded (while we were in it) and the time the Denver club erupted into a riot (while we were in it).

Since I’m still writing, the publishing date of the next book is moving target… will it be fall of 2016 or spring of 2017? I’ll let you know as soon as I know.

In the meantime, I continue to plunk out the Vancouver Shakedown, my weekly column for the Westender, Vancouver’s longest-running entertainment weekly. On any given week, the column tends to either delight or enrage.

And just because Jill gave birth to our second child doesn’t mean my ever-prolific wife is slowing down. On April 1, Jill Barber and her brother Matthew Barber release The Family Album, their first record together, a radiant mix of covers and originals, performed as beautiful folk duets.

Both Jill and I will be on the road this spring and summer… hope to see you around and thanks as always for your support!

Grant Lawrence Spring 2016 tour dates

Fri – Sat, Mar 11 – 12, Words on the Water Literary Festival, Campbell River BC

Fri – Sun, Apr 8 – 10, Okanagan Writers Festival, Penticton BC

Fri Apr 15, North Shore Writers Festival, North Vancouver BC

Sat Apr 30, Authors for Indies, 32 Books, North Vancouver BC (afternoon event)

Sat May 7, A Whisky Library, Lynn Valley Library, North Vancouver BC

Sat May 14, LitFest, New Westminster BC (afternoon event)

Mon Jun 13, Canadian Independent Music Association Awards Gala (CIMA), Berkeley Church, Toronto ON

Fri – Sat July 8 – 10, Elephant Mountain Literary Festival, Nelson BC

Fri – Sun July 15 – 17, Vancouver Folk Music Festival, Vancouver BC

Jill Barber Spring 2016 tour dates (all dates w/ Matthew Barber for the Family Album Tour)

Fri Apr 15, Arden Theatre, St. Albert AB

Sat Apr 16, Arden Theatre, St. Albert AB

Sun Apr 17, Eric Harvie Theatre, Banff AB

Thu Apr 21, Casino Regina, Regina SK

Fri Apr 22, West End Cultural Centre, Winnipeg MB

Sat May 28, the Great Hall, Toronto ON

(more dates to be announced soon across Canada and North Eastern USA)

When it comes to listing off renowned Vancouver bands through the decades, groups like Trooper, Skinny Puppy, the New Pornographers, Be Good Tanyas, or D.O.A. might spring to mind. The band that might not is the Evaporators. That’s a shame, because the Evaporators will always be on my list as one of the greatest groups to ever hail from our Terminal City. What might be more immediately recognizable to you is the name of the Evaporators’ lead singer: Nardwuar the Human Serviette.

Over the past several decades, Nardwuar has not only become one of Vancouver’s most unique citizens, but truly a Canadian treasure, mostly because of his incredible stockpile of highly researched and wildly entertaining video interviews with everyone from Snoop Dogg to Mikhail Gorbachev. On a Canadian level, his (mostly successful) attempts to get Canadian political leaders to play a ridiculous ‘60s party game called the “Hip Flip” is always amazing, and surprisingly humanizing.

But back to the Evaporators: Saturday, Feb. 20, 2016, marks the band’s 30th anniversary. It was on that night, three decades ago in the dusty gymnasium of Hillside Secondary School in West Vancouver, that Nardwuar and his band mates took to the stage for the first time, at Variety Night (a yearly talent revue hosted by our English teacher). The Evaporators performed three cover songs: “Shot Down” by the Sonics, as well as “Goo Goo Muck” and “Human Fly” by the Cramps.

I remember the night well, because I was in the audience. The Evaporators blew my nerdy teenage mind, and were the primary reason why I formed my own band a year later. To me, the Evaporators were the coolest of the cool, mixing ‘60s garage rock with ‘80s surf-punk to maximum effect. Nardwuar was the manic frontman. Back in ‘86 he rocked a brush cut, looking nothing like his signature tam o’ shanter-atop-the-Prince Valiant-haircut he’s famous for now.

For years, the Evaporators were essentially the underappreciated house band at all of Nardwuar’s legendary all-ages shows all over Vancouver. In 1992, they finally released a record: a punk-fuelled seven-inch EP entitled Welcome To My Castle. Their first full-length album wouldn’t arrive until their tenth anniversary in 1996: United Empire Loyalists, a vinyl LP that highlights Nardwuar’s obsessive love of Canadian history, coming complete with a massive foldout sleeve. They really started rolling after that, releasing I Gotta Rash in 1998 (a split LP with Nardwuar’s other bizarre band Thee Goblins), Ripple Rock in 2004, and Gassy Jack and Other Tales in 2007 (arguably their best, a salute to Gastown founder Gassy Jack Deighton). The songs on many of the records reveal a glance into the mind of Nardwuar: “Addicted To Cheese”, “I Feel Like A Fat Frustrated Fuck”, and “I Say That On Purpose To Bug You”, etc. The backing instrumentation by veterans of bands like the New Pornographers, Slow, and Destroyer is wicked.

Over their three intense decades, Nardwuar and the Evaporators have steadily evolved into absolute masters of live entertainment as well, often featuring in-set cameos by everyone from heavy metal legend Thor, to Scottish hit makers Franz Ferdinand, to New York party rocker Andrew WK. If you’ve ever seen an Evaporators show, say for instance in recent years at the Khatsahlano Festival, it probably took you hours to wipe the smile from your face.

Unfortunately, there won’t be a big celebration for the Evaporators’ 30th anniversary this month. Nardwuar is busy concentrating on something much more serious: recovering from a stroke he suffered in December, along with reparative heart surgery last month. The good news is he’s doing well, and promises new music from the Evaporators later in 2016. Long live Nardwuar, long live the Evaporators, and happy 30th anniversary, from a life-long fan. The Evaporators will always be on my list of Vancouver’s best-ever-bands.

Read more of Grant’s Vancouver Shakedown articles here.

“FUCK THE WOLF CULL”

The slogan was as unlikely as the location it was chanted in, over and over, by howling teens, as instructed by their on-stage leader of the pack. If you were at Miley Cyrus’s sold out Queen Elizabeth Theatre concert last month, or heard about it after the fact, you’ll likely be aware that the American pop star once again put BC’s controversial wolf cull centre stage, literally, by illuminating her backdrop with the hashtag #savebcwolves. Cyrus then filmed her audience shouting the afore-quoted phrase. She shared the video with her millions of followers from around the world.

What Cyrus may now wonder, as well as other wolf cull-opponents like Pacific Wild, a conservation group that has gathered over 200,000 signatures in opposition, is where to point the protest? Is it towards the ongoing five-year wolf cull in the South Peace and South Selkirk regions of BC, designed to protect rapidly dwindling woodland caribou populations? Last year’s cull wiped out 180 wolves, all brought down by sniper fire from helicopters, with many more wolves to drop this year and all the way through to 2020.

Or is it the new proposal (found by chance by a CBC producer in Kelowna) that was quietly rolled out by the provincial government in November? That proposal, if approved, recommends unlimited, year-round, completely open season, no bag limit hunting of wolves in the Peace Region. This is up from the previously allowed bag limit of three wolves per year per hunter. Why? The rationale in the proposal is as follows: “verbal reports from many stakeholders and First Nations…suggest that the wolf population in the Northeast appears to be very high, relative to levels in recent history. Increased wolf populations can have negative impacts on wild ungulates [deer, moose, elk, caribou] as well as cattle.”

If this all rings familiar to you, it’s because European settlers have been at war with the wolf ever since we set foot on this continent. Time and time again we blame the wolf for just about everything imaginable, yet time and time again critics and evidence will argue otherwise. In Alberta, the provincial government engaged in a wolf cull that began back in 2006, resulting in the destruction of nearly 1,000 wolves. The caribou population they were trying to save has stabilized, but not grown. It raises the ethical question of human beings playing God in nature: do we have the right to kill one species to save another, when the real reason woodland caribou populations are in a free fall is because of lack of habitat due to our encroachment through everything from highways to resorts to mining to deforestation to snowmobile trails?

Over time, it’s always remarkable how much changes, and how much remains the same. In other words, the BC wolf cull is misguided Canadian history repeating itself. In 1948, the federal government assigned a naturalist and soon-to-be author named Farley Mowat to the far north to investigate – surprise!– dwindling caribou populations, to see if the wolf was to blame. Mowat’s findings were negative, he was fired, and the wolf cull proceeded. I’ll leave you with Farley Mowat’s conclusions from his wolf study almost 70 years ago. It’s decidedly more eloquent than Cyrus’s 2015 howl, but just as biting:

“We have doomed the wolf not for what it is but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be: the mythologized epitome of a savage, ruthless killer—which is, in reality, not more than the reflected image of ourselves. We have made it the scapewolf for our own sins.”

Read more of Grant’s Vancouver Shakedown columns in the Westender here.