The drinking age in Quebec is 18, so it was a rite of passage for teenage Ottawa Valley kids to go drinking in La Belle Province.

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In 1992 I graduated from Our Lady of Sorrows, and started grade eight at Bishop Smith Catholic High School. When I first started at Bishop Smith, we were in a school that was originally designed to be an elementary school housing 300 students, which was being used as a high school with 800 students. The school had no cafeteria, most students had to share a locker and it had about 15 portables, which were classrooms in little trailers. In my grade eight year, every class I had was in a portable except for gym, home economics, shop and music. The portables were pretty awful, they were small, and were cold in the winter and boiling in the summer.

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My brother, who is two years older than me, had a few different paper routes throughout his young life, and my first entry into the working world was filling in for him when he had various sports practices after school. His absences tended to be during the school year, so I would always have to fill in during the coldest months. Petawawa doesn’t get Toronto cold, it gets a whole special version of -30 degree cold, which was awful. I also never really have been a fan of walking around, and the paper route that snaked through our quasi-country neighbourhood was a long walk, and would take me over an hour. Since I only filled in maybe four or five times a month, I wasn’t really making very much money doing it either. I dreaded the nights, that I would have to come home and do the paper route. I mean, it was my brothers choice to take on the paper route, why was I being forced to suffer?

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I grew up in the Ottawa Valley, mostly in Petawawa and briefly in Pembroke, before I left to go to school at the University of Guelph in 1997. I lived in Guelph for about a decade, and then eventually settled in Toronto in 2006. My parents and my sister still live in the Ottawa Valley, but I don’t go back very often, and when I do my visits tend to be short.  I very rarely get to explore where I spent my formative years, so when I saw that the new coverage map for Google’s Streetview encompassed most of that area, I was excited to relive those childhood memories.

I relish documenting stories of my youth, not because I think they are particularly merit worthy or interesting, but for whatever reason I feel like I there should be a written record of some the significant aspects of my life. Unlike my sister, I have never been much of a photo person. I barely have any photos of my school friends, sporting events, proms or the other awkward happenings of adolescence.  Every once in a while I feel the need to write about a particular experience in my life for posterity sack.  I don’t write on this blog very often, but when I do the articles are of this nature, like my five-part series documenting how I got into music, my first concert or The Bumble Bee Story.

As a web producer I also really like finding practical applications for web technologies and I love to embed things, so when I started typing addresses into Streetview, I figured it would be cool to combine my love of telling irreverent stories of my youth with embedded graphics. It is best of both worlds really.  So over the next week or so on the blog, I will be documenting my life between ages 5 & 19 in :

Stuart: An Illustrated History

Before you think that I am just another opinionated blogger, I should probably give a bit of my historical background in music, which gives me somewhat of an unique point to offer critical analysis of the Polaris Prize and the Canadian music industry.

I run a moderately successful independent record label that seems to have a growing profile. We are about to release our seventh record and we have been around for almost three years. The bands on our label tour nationally and internationally. Our records consistently chart well on campus radio. The records all seem to receive great critical acclaim and the positive support we receive from fans of our label is both overwhelming and humbling.

My entry point to the indie music scene was community radio, as a programmer and staff member at CFRU-FM in Guelph. In Guelph (and also a bit in Toronto) I also used to present shows under the name undertones (hence the name of the blog), I have done over 100 shows since 2002 including many bands that have become quite successful (including many Polaris nominees) including The Arcade Fire, Constantines, Unicorns, Joel Plaskett and Final Fantasy.

I am also really passionate about the community aspect of music and have been involved in spaces and projects like Wavelength and the Tranzac in Toronto.

I feel I have been exposed to a lot of sides of the music industry in my time, but for the most part always as an outsider. I never worked for Exclaim, CBC Radio, a music retailer, a booking agency, a management company, a record label, a promotions company – well you get the idea. I have been on the periphery of the music industry, but never an active participant. I don’t get invited to the parties, I don’t really know the major players, and I generally think the music industry doesn’t really know us.

For a sense of full disclosure, one of the albums that we released this year, made the Polaris long list but did not make it to the short list. This album was re-released by a larger label before the short list was revealed. Our critique of the Polaris Prize is not a response to this album not making the short list, I have been a loser all my life, I am quite good at it and I am content with my mantle full of participant trophies. But our brief flirtation with the Polaris Prize, did influence our perspective on it.

My biggest frustration with the Polaris Prize is that with each subsequent year as the profile of the prize has risen, the prize seems like it is being commodified and in the end only larger label releases get real consideration. For a prize that is supposed to be based entirely on artistic merit, small label releases never seem to make the final cut. With only one exception, none of the short lists have ever had a release from a smaller independent label.

I don’t expect that because a release comes out on a smaller independent label it automatically should have greater artistic merit, but I find it baffling that in four years that there hasn’t been a second small release worthy of inclusion on the short lists.

Over the years, from my odd perspective of somewhat of an outsider, I have thought more and more about this, and sadly I really think it comes to down to money and access to funding.

It is no secret that Canada is a big country. For an album release to truly have a national impact across the entire country a band has to tour constantly and hope to get a break and slowly build an audience, or have a larger publicity and promo push behind them, or ideally in most cases you really have to do both. Both options are prohibitively expensive.

For labels the size of my own, paying manufacturing costs encompasses the majority of our expenses, with our limited budgets it can be hard to offer much more to bands. Most of the money comes out of our own pockets and when you have record that doesn’t do well, it means struggling to pay rent, buy food, pay bills and put out other albums. All the people that I know that run labels of our size have day jobs, no other staff beside themselves and work out of their homes.

The bigger labels on the other hand have much larger promo budgets, often provided by Factor funding – which smaller labels cannot access – and permanent staff and spaces that can work a record.

Even on a smaller release a larger record label, can send out hundreds of albums out to bloggers, writers and media people. Theoretically every person on the Polaris jury list getting an album, right as it’s released and having an opportunity to listen to it is not out of the question. A smaller label can’t do this. We do runs of 1000 albums typically, if we mail out 300-400 of them (which is on the small end of the scale of album mail outs) that is a major loss for us, a loss that we can’t afford. Larger labels also can afford radio servicing and publicity teams to work the media outlets to cover and play their records. Rates for publicity work typically range from $2000-$5000 for a release. Again something smaller labels can’t afford. The larger label will also run ads. One smallish classified ad in just Exclaim costs about $1000.

A typical release by a larger independent label will have a budget of around $20-50k. Most of which is comes from forgivable loans from Factor.

A release from a smaller indie label might typically clock in at around $5k, often which comes from the personal finances of the owner of the label.

The impact of the larger label release is going to be much greater, on any potential jury. I don’t blame the jury members; they are getting better exposure to those records. But that exposure has a cost, a cost a smaller label can’t afford. Which means the smaller label release won’t get the same level of consideration.

I have heard rumblings that Polaris is working to try to find ways to get the jury better access to all the releases on the Long List, but no matter what they do, I don’t think with such a large jury list and the money at the disposal of the larger labels that it will ever be a level playing field.

Over the last few weeks during the lead up to the 2009 Polaris Prize gala, I read a lot of blog posts from jury members talking about releases that didn’t make the short list. The general consensus was that these releases (ours included) didn’t make the short list because they didn’t have a big enough push to promote them.

How are small labels supposed to achieve this push, without funding? If small labels can’t access Factor loans, because of their prohibitively high sales cutoffs, how are they to grow?

It is frustrating to think that releases from labels of our size, generally have such a large uphill battle to be considered for the Polaris Prize.

I feel the Polaris Prize has become just another part of the music industry that is increasingly disconnected from the full spectrum of music models that are used to release music in this country.

There isn’t really a serious discourse around things like Polaris or Factor that is inclusive of representation of this spectrum. It is not really in the interest of these bodies to have one, they are successful, and they serve their demographic quite well. But I always worry about what gets left out because of this attitude. What music doesn’t get the opportunity to reach a larger audiences, because it is not part of this world ?

When I talk to my peers who run labels like ours, these organizations are increasingly irrelevant to what they do, and I don’t think it needs to be like that, there can be balance in how they support all forms of Canadian music.

Labels, bands and music people at our scale are not represented in their operations, their boards, their parties and the scope of what they do.

Until they are, I don’t really expect much to change.

But if I were to run things (which I don’t) I probably would make some changes some of which fall outside of the mandate of the Polaris Prize:

-    make the Jury pool smaller, I think if you had 30-50 really quality jurors instead of giant mass of 150ish, smaller releases might not get lost

-    have a critical discourse that is open to smaller labels and people involved in music projects connected to emerging music scenes. It might not make sense to have someone involved in a smaller label on the Polaris board, but maybe ask someone who from an organization like Wavelength or smaller bookers to participate.

-    Invite smaller labels to the party, it probably would have been interesting for smaller label people to get to mingle with the typical industry types at the galas and launch parties. There is already too much separation between these worlds. I say invite 50 less suits, and invite 50 people who work on smaller scale music projects in the community.

-    open up access to Factor loans to smaller labels, at a level comenserate to their size. Smaller labels don’t need access to the like the $50k that larger labels typically get, but smaller loans of like $2-5k for labels that have track record of several releases that have sold over a 1000 copies distributed nationally, would increase the impact that these labels could have.

I have never been a gardener. When I lived in Guelph, I was surrounded by gardeners. I even lived at a few houses with gardens. Like most people my age I dabbled in eating food from the ground, but had never took on the task of growing said food myself. When people used to suggest taking up gardening my typical response was, “Take that granola shit outside, hippy.”

But when I purchased a house that had a garden space, I felt it was my civic duty to grow something in it. Gazing out into the backyards of all my neighbours, they were all growing vegetables in their gardens, and I have never been one to purposefully look out of place.

My previous anti-gardening stance had left me with very little knowledge on tilling the soil. When I am presented with a task that I need more information about, my typical response is to search the Internet for pirated books that I could download on said subject. I bet you didn’t know people pirate books on the Internet? Well they do. I found a Gardening for Dummies book. I took possession of my house in mid-May – late in the gardening season, so I didn’t have time to read the book completely, I skimmed over it quickly and concluded that gardening really couldn’t be that hard.

My first task was to go to the nearby Zellers and buy some gardening tools. I bought a mini shovel, mini weeder and some other mini tool, which’s purpose still eludes me. I also bought some miracle grow and a watering can. I then removed all the overgrown weeds from the garden. In addition to weeds, I also found several random objects in the garden, including five bricks.

After deweeding the land, I set off to the local mall again, which conveniently has a small garden centre in its parking lot. Like everything else in the local mall, the garden centre was of low quality and was staffed by indifferent workers. Since it was late in the growing season, my selection of plants was somewhat limited but almost everything was on sale.

In the end I decided to buy Zucchini, Eggplants, Onions, Leeks (I have always loved Leeks, I was even given them as a birthday gift once) and Tomatoes, all in plant form. I also bought some packs of seeds for various herbs.

Leeks about to be eaten

That very afternoon I planted all of the plants in the ground, closely following all the suggestions on the packages regarding the required distances between plants. I have never liked being in crowded spaces or being jostled, so I couldn’t subject my plants to that either.

The Spread

For the first part of the summer I diligently watered the garden, when it looked too dry. I regularly, deweeded.  Every once in a while I gave it a shot of Miracle Grow. For the first month, the plants looked pretty sickly and I had all but given up on having a bounty of vegetables by fall.

In early July however, the garden started to show signs of life. The first recognizable form of vegetable life came from the Zucchini plants. Before I knew it the little bastards, were sprouting everywhere. By the first of August, I had Zucchini’s that were the size of a newborn child. The only issue was that some form of animal seemed to be gnawing on my zucchinis. I assume that it was teenagers.

Teenagers !!!

The tomatoes have started to grow as well but they have generally been pretty unwieldy. I have yet to master how to stake the tomatoes, and most of them still remain green. The ones that have converted to a redish colour have also been eaten by something. Most likely teenagers.

The onions and leeks grew a bit but they never looked significantly like onions and leeks. I lost track of where all the herbs were and I think they have may have been tossed out during weeding.

Recently the eggplants have started growing. I hold out hope, that the eggplants will continue to grow and they will be my one vegetable that does not get eaten, by someone other than me. My current plan is to make Baba Ghanoush out of them.

Generally, I have considered this year to be a practice run for next year’s harvest, when everything will be significantly planned out and well executed.