Plays & Articles by John MacLachlan Gray


	I write about journalists because I was one, and because I have a liking for smart, curious, lowlife.

THE TREE, THE TOWER, THE FLOOD

				18 WHEELS
				I don’t know who would want to read a musical. On the other hand, I spent more time on the librettos than the tunes, which I usually wrote while riding a bicycle. So I tried to make it worthwhile with three essays on where they came from, so that the reader is in on something and the librettos make sense in their own way. People don’t think of musicals as being as “serious” as plays, but to me the musical is a play with poetry and music. The scenes aren’t bridges between songs, it’s the other way around. To me the singing of a song can be like a soliloquy from Shakespeare; a summing-up of something. Or it can be the moment where you drop the theme like a stone into a pond. Or it can suggest an environment, an era, a way of looking at things in a distilled way. 18 Wheels was my first musical, and it shows. A homage to truck drivers, country music, and the Canadian landscape. I wrote it in rhyme and with more or less continuous music, songs patterned after Red Sovine and narration in the style of Phantom 309. The musical is still performed, I think because it appeals to people who find plays embarrassingly voyeuristic. Outside the major centers, people are more comfortable with the oral tradition of the storyteller.
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ROCK AND ROLL

Rock and Roll is the most autobiographical thing I will ever write. It was made into a feature video,“King of Friday Night,” which was shot in my hometown of Truro, Nova Scotia. My 100 year old grandmother had a cameo role. Throughout the shoot I slept in the same bed as I did when the events (or events like them) took place.

In the mid to late 1960s I played Hammond Organ with the New Lincolns, a Memphis soul band (Wilson Picket, Aretha Franklin, Eddie Floyd) that packed them in every Friday night; yet as far as we were concerned everything worthwhile was happening someplace else.

I left the band in 1968, but ten years later we did a reunion gig and two thousand people showed up from all over. One couple flew in from Sweden.

That’s where the idea started, but of course fiction took over. For example, the town is not Truro but Mushaboom – the local synonym for nowhere. (In Ontario it’s Wawa; in America I suppose – What? Nome, I suppose.

In the first production of Rock And Roll, the part of the lead singer was played by Frank McKay, who sang lead with The New Lincolns, back then. He still performs the part now and again, twenty-five years later.

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DON MESSER'S JUBILEE

Don Messer’s Jubilee is a nationalist rant. Paradoxically, the villain is a national institution, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It’s about the fact that a colonized country is its own worst enemy. In the 1950s, a TV show out of Halifax called Don Messer’s Jubilee – a half-hour Of fiddle tunes and ballads – drew over 3 million Viewers, more than Ed Sullivan, about one in six human beings in the country. Canadians had gone through a depression and a war with Messer, and he represented something and they were grateful for it.Only, The Beatles and youth culture killed the show in the 1960s – it just wan’t cool enough for CBC execs. When I was a kid in Nova Scotia, Don Messer and the Islanders were the Maritime equivalent of traditional blues singers in Chicago. The band had been part of the landscape. Only, a time came when the landscape stopped looking so good to a new generation.Remember when Chicago blues singers were looked down upon as Uncle Toms by Black Power types? Well it was a bit like that. Like the CBC I rejected Messer because he didn’t reflect the way I wanted to see myself. He was too Canadian for me. How colonial can you get?There’s a song in Don Messer’s Jubilee called Never Trust a Corporation, which is good advice still.

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				HEALTH

AMELIA

BILLY BISHOP GOES TO WAR