A FAN’S NOTES

Hackney Diamonds

Oh, how the years fly by. Time passed is now so imprecise, fluid, receding and sometimes indistinct. I would have to consult my records in the family bible to tell you what year my mother Annette died. It was a New Year’s Day; I know that much. When I think about her now, I frequently summon that night in Montreal when I was visiting from Calgary sometime in the oughts and Mom and I went stepping out. We had a real good time together.

Perception isn’t everything so much as a reel of time reversing from fast-forward and sometimes becoming snarled in a creaky mechanism. The Montreal Canadiens play their home games in the Bell Centre. I have to remind myself that their “new” rink was inaugurated something like twenty-five years ago. When I escorted Annette there to see the Nashville Predators on a weeknight, the rink was even newer.

It was a big night for us. Annette had her hair done in the morning. Her fur coat came out of its storage bag in the closet. That shade of red lipstick I remembered as a kid kissed the Kleenex – mercifully, she didn’t spit on it afterward to wipe my face, Jesus, I was in my late forties or early fifties, after all. Mom wanted a hot dog and beer before we found our seats. God, she hadn’t seen the Habs skate since the seventies. My stepfather had had season’s tickets, great ones, down low in the reds in the old Montreal Forum; winter Saturday nights there were their happy social obligation. Annette’s mother, Marie, my Nana, had been a fanatic, a worshipper of Rocket Richard. Nana took me to my first professional hockey game in February of 1968, the Los Angeles Kings were in town.

My Nana and my Mom, and LA and Nashville both in garish yellow, synchronicity. When the Canadiens took the ice in those uniforms that predate the formation of the National Hockey League in 1917, I got a pleasant little chill up my spine even though I could only name three or four players on the club’s roster and was unsure of their sweater numbers. I watched Annette absently dab at her lips with a napkin: beer foam, lipstick and mustard. I understood Mom was back in 1975, ’76, ’77 or ’78 and enjoying the visit, all done up and hooked on a different man’s arm. Her favourite player back then was Yvon Lambert, as a scout Mom rated rugged good looks over skill.

The Canadiens were scarily good during those years and had been since the early sixties. So were the Rolling Stones. These are two heritage brands who excel at evoking their glory days, whether by elaborate pregame ceremonies or enhanced reissues of seminal albums. They are and will remain cultural phenomena, straddling both high and low, topics of heated debate in pubs and ivory towers. It’s hard to remember a time when the Stones released a really sticky, classic single and the Canadiens weren’t mediocre.

There was a time when the Canadiens held first dibs on every prospect skating in Quebec. Then came expansion and with it the draft and then the draft lottery. Rock music was once a legitimate countercultural force before it withered into an aged sub-genre of popular music. Industry business models for sports organizations and rock bands have been radically reconfigured since the seventies. Times have changed but the essence remains: the Canadiens still play hockey albeit with a lot less elan and the Stones, at their heart, are as Paul McCartney recently said, “a good little blues band” with an undeniable knack for Barnum and Bailey big top self-promotion. The 2023 corporate tongue is a jigsaw of glass shards, not liquified or blown up this time around and around. Buy the merch; buy the good old days.

Yesterday I told my neighbour Ted over the fence that the new Stones single “Angry” had just dropped mere hours ago. He said, “I didn’t know that.” I replied, “Why would you? You have a life.” Yeah, I still get that old, familiar new Stones tingle and I’m grateful for it although, admittedly, that feeling has diminished exponentially as I’ve aged. The “Angry” video is essentially a three-minute shopping channel ad for their back catalogue. The song is decent enough, a lot like the Habs not deploying the neutral zone trap, refreshing riffology. It bodes well for the rest of Hackney Diamonds because to me a main ingredient in the Stones heady brew is what young people today refer to as deep cuts, the rest of the album. “Recent” examples would include “Back of My Hand” from A Bigger Bang, “Always Suffering” from Bridges to Babylon and, oh heck, let’s go all the way back to “Baby Break It Down” from 1994’s Voodoo Lounge.

I hope Hackney Diamonds will not be hackneyed. I don’t consider myself a sad sack completist with a dauber ready to play “their best since…” bingo, but I suppose I am what I am. Still, Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, Springsteen’s Letter to You and the Who’s WHO were all fine late career releases. And I’ve enjoyed each one at least a few times. They’re never my first, second nor third choices when I’m in the mood to listen to those artists. Those albums are musical Yvon Lamberts, that is to say, just good enough to be in chronological order alongside the greats.                   

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.