A Criminal Mind

Gowan's masterpiece

I made it! I waited until the last minute and someone who was desperate to get something for their extra ticket sold it to me for $30! I was in the second row in the Gallery but the seat in front of me stayed empty the entire show. I learned a lot about using interpretive hands as a substitute for dancing through a show. The man has such energy even though he’s in his 60s by now.

I’ll have a lot more to say on the cafe post on Sunday, so let’s just get to this song. This was the big hit, the song that made him, the song that Styx heard that made them remember him, the song they’ve put into their set. It’s a long track, not written to be a single, but it’s so memorable it couldn’t be denied. It’s the song that grabbed me the first time I heard it and didn’t let me go.

I find the song fascinating. Gowan talked about how he came to write it:

I was at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) and there was a display on of the Canadian penal system. And they had transported a cell from the Kingston Penitentiary to the actual site. No one was paying attention to it. It was this weird kind of sideshow thing. People were walking past it and there was only this one guy there and he was a retired prison guard.

I got into the cell and closed the door and sat there awhile and suddenly thought of a melody I had kicking around for a couple weeks. And I had a conversation with the guard and he talked about the recidivist people that he'd known for years in the course of his career and he said basically, "They keep coming back. They're tremendous at covering it up, very innocent on the outside and claim they're the victim, but quietly they'll admit they really got caught for the right thing."

He said it's funny because there are so many sides to people. He said, "A guy may have been a murderer and after a few years a whole other part of his personality would come out and it's that side I got to know and I can honestly say a good number of them became friends even though I knew they were right where they belonged." So over the course of that conversation I thought, "This is a really unusual thing. How do I put that into a song?"

Tonight, it was accompanied by an incredible light show that this video manages to mostly capture. I was farther out and could see the whole thing - it really added to the power of the song. This sound isn’t the best but it’ll give you a good sense of what I experienced.

The original video is striking in its own right. Mixing animation and live action, this video came out before Take On Me made a big splash with it. In this one, the style is bold superhero. Created in collaboration with the man who created Canadian music video, the legendary Rob Quartly, it captures the compelling idea of the song. And for Gowan, it made him. It got heavy airplay on the fledgling Much Music and the rest is history. It uses the radio edit, which shortens the chorus.

Really hope you enjoy today’s Song of the Day. If you don’t…I just don’t know.

ETA: Here’s Gowan talking about the song in detail.