The Vinyl Cafe: Go Vinyl or go home
Stuart McLean is a giant of Canadian Radio. He travels the country doing live broadcasts of his show, The Vinyl Cafe, with featured musical artists (which means ever-so-folky up and coming performers from the region he’s currently visiting). He broadcasts from the National Gallery, from century-old theaters all over the country–we don’t have much in Canada that’s centuries old–from Seattle and even, recently, from a passenger train on our balky and germ-infested national railway, VIA Rail. Folks and nuts aside, the heart of each broadcast is a story about a small town family whose affable patriarch is Dave, formerly a rock and roll roadie, now a husband, dad, neighbor and owner of a record store called, you guessed it, The Vinyl Cafe.
I download the Vinyl Cafe in totally free podcast form from CBC each week and listen to it as I ramble around Vancouver. Dave is a goofy everydad who gets into hilarious scrapes, inadvertently biting his dentist really really hard, laying waste to a holiday turkey every single Christmas, and–when fear of mortality bites him in his middle-aged kiester–test-driving a coffin. The stories are earnest, good-tempered, and heartwarming without being schmaltzy, and that’s just as true when they’re about Dave’s wife, mom, kids, and friends. They present a romanticized view of small town Canadian life. It’s one I see as a fantasy, for the most part, but hey! I like fantasy, and this version is no less delicious for being utterly wholesome.
My current total favorite story is on the newest CD, Out & About
If I wanted to start a big ol’ online scrap while trying to sell you on Stuart McLean, I’d say, “He’s like Garrison Keilor, only good.” But that’s not fair. There’s nothing wrong with Garrison Keilor, exactly; I just don’t care for him. But Stuart and he are very much in the same racket: they tell good-spirited and very human tales about people and their quirks. Loving the Vinyl Cafe is very much part and parcel of a grander affection I feel for a host of things created and nurtured by CBC Radio, which does a good job, on a shoestring, of giving the people of a really wide country a couple of things to have in common.
You don’t need to love CBC, or Canada, or even the Metropolitan Opera to love the Vinyl Cafe, though. You just need to be in the mood for a bit of a laugh.
You have a limited amount of time, so why spend it reading about things that suck or are only kind of okay? Favorite thing EVER is not a review site. We're unrepentant fans, and this is the stuff we love. Hope you like gushing, because we're about to embarrass ourselves.
I like the sound of it! Also, I love GK, I do, he wrote a lovely article about quitting smoking that encourages everyone to stop, and he has an amazing face. Still, I always feel that something fun is about to happen in Woebegone and… it’s always a little melancholy instead. Truth to tell, I’ve never managed to listen to one if his shows from beginning to end. (Shhhh! Don’t tell Public Radio!) Maybe Cafe is for me!
Cafe is for you. The stories are often splittingly hilarious. My dad once got a really expensive speeding ticket because he was laughing so hard he had no idea he’d stepped up to 200 km/hr.
I never heard that story about Dad!
Oh, but GKs Writers Almanac is fucking awesome.
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/
His lovely, kind voice reading a different poem very day and telling you about significant literary events for that calendar day is absolutely the best five minutes of GKs broadcast! Seriously, when I used to drive to work these would make me cry with alarming regularity – so much gentle, resonant decency, so much stand-up beauty, such fantastic poems.
I will check out the Writers’ Almanac soon, I promise. But don’t cry when you’re driving. ‘Cause, eeek!
I utterly adore the Vinyl Cafe Christmas album. The story about Dave cooking the turkey makes me laugh and laugh every time I hear it.
Is that the first one, where he has to schlep it to a hotel?