Imagine if you will the cast of ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ Now try to picture Mrs. Howell. Try to envision her neatly pressed slacks, her modestly elegant shoes, her selection of blouses, her dyed short blonde hair.

Now imagine what she would look like if she had Mr. Howell’s face.

Got it?

Good. You now know what my grade seven teacher, Mrs. Hunter, looked like.

I thought of Mrs. Hunter on Christmas eve. I had gone to my dad’s place, and was about to turn in around midnight, but decided on a round of T.V. surfing. To my delight, I came across the 1951 classic ‘Scrooge’ just as it was starting.

‘Scrooge’ is a black and white British film that features Alastair Sim in the title role. There is a colourized version out there, courtesy of that jackass Ted Turner, but it is to be avoided. Charles Dickens’ tale is full of ghosts and spectres, and works better in stark, etherial black and white than when laden with the kind of pastel shades you would expect to find in some womens’ clothing store in Brentwood Mall.

I’ve seen the movie a few times. I’m always on the lookout for it around Christmas, mainly because of Mrs. Hunter. Just before the holidays she read ‘A Christmas Carol’ to the class. She didn’t read to us all that much. She generally left that task to the school librarian, Mrs. Lafavour.

Mrs. Hunter arranged her classes in boy-girl-boy-girl seating plans (I was placed directly behind class supervixen Sandra Ackland, which was a mixed blessing). She liked art, but scorned pictures with the colour green in them (purple was her favorite). She insisted her students adhere to the MacLean’s method of handwriting.

She was, on the whole, not to be messed with. When she read ‘A Christmas Carol’ we all listened intently. Each word was delivered with the benifit of decades of practice. Unlike Mrs. Lafavour, who seemed to be perpetually auditioning for a role in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ Mrs. Hunter emphasized only what needed emphasis. She applied theatrical tones sparingly and to maximum effect. She was an old pro.

After reading the novel, she let us in on a secret. There was a movie of the book that we could watch that was actually very good. Usually movies weren’t as good as books, and while one was better off reading Dickens’ story directly, one couldn’t go wrong watching this particular film. It was called ‘Scrooge,’ it starred a guy name Alastair Sim, and it was so good that Mrs. Hunter had been known to reschedule her Christmas dinners in order to watch it.

I remember catching Roger Ebert on T.V. once, trying to convince his viewers to see the film ‘Eve’s Bayou.’ He was pulling out all the stops; it was a great, important, heartwarming film...blah blah blah. Have I ever seen the movie? No.

But I watched ‘Scrooge’ the first chance I got. Ebert needs a Mrs. Hunter as a sidekick. If she told you to watch ‘Eve’s Bayou,’ you’d be down at the video store in about five seconds.

‘Scrooge’ is a short film, about 90 minutes long. It’s nicely paced, yet is full of flourish and detail. Alastair Sim is not a household word now, yet in his day he was one of the best the British theatre had to offer. He is, to paraphrase Tiny Tim, the best Scrooge ever.

I like the character of Scrooge. His behaviour is perplexing to others, but to him it is a necessary defense mechanism. Rolling Stones’ hanger on Tony Sanchez once said of Keith Richards that “like all rich people, he lived in fear of being expoited.” Before you judge Scrooge, try taking a trip to a place like India, and see how long it takes before you are haggling doggedly over cab fares and rickshaw rides, always against a backdrop of utter poverty, even though the sums in question add up to nickles and dimes once they’re converted from rupees to dollars.

The story of Scrooge continues to resonate partly because Scrooge’s society is essentially recognizeable. The industrial revolution has taken place, and Scrooge has gained wealth not from priviledge or title, but because he’s hard working and ambitious. The people around him are of the burgeoning middle classes, to use a stock history book phrase. The world of commerce in which Scrooge makes his living seems almost unchanged; buyouts, takeovers, alliances. Indeed, Scrooge and his business partner, Jacob Marley, rise to financial power after the principals in their company commit fraud. Enron, circa 1843.

Dickens’ Scrooge, though extreme, is not the goofy caricature of Canadian Tire commercials. His 'scroogeness’ was not always with him; he was once young, engaged, in many ways unrecognizeable from what he became later. But, as often happens with people, he drifted into a pattern of behaviour caused by his reaction to events and circumstances. The trips we take throught the past, present and future are meant to convey a transition. Scrooge’s estrangement from society came in bits and pieces; his behavior causing isolation, his isolation reinforcing the behavior.

“God Bless us, every one,” is perhaps the most memorable line in ‘A Cristmas Carol,’ yet the story seems more secular than religious. There’s even something pagan (or maybe new age) about Scrooge being visited by a series of ghosts. The first is the ghost of the tormented Jacob Marley. Like Scrooge, Marley lived a life in isolation, always on the defense. On his deathbed, he summons Scrooge, and implores him to save himself. Marley has realized their mistake, but Scrooge was not yet ready to listen. When we see Marley’s ghost, anguished and weighed down by chains, he is not suffering a punishment delivered by God, but rather one brought upon himself. His chains are those of regret and remorse.

Alastair Sim is particularly fun to watch during the scene where Scrooge wakes up from his long succession of nightmares. He realizes he’s still got a chance at redemption, and bounds around like a child. The look of the film beautifully reflects the new dawn. Scrooge’s long, harrowing Christmas eve seems mostly dark. Christmas morning, by contrast, is vivid and bright.

In a sense, Scrooge’s redemption would not be as magnificent had he not wasted so many years. One can almost see him sitting next to Danny Bonaduce and Charlie Sheen on Oprah, telling her “I regret nothing, because everything I’ve done in my past has brought me to this point.” Scrooge is like Team Canada in the 1972 series against the Russians; the exhilaration of winning would not have been as potent had they not fucked up the first half of the series and the first two-thirds of the final game.

Of course, in hockey it doesn’t really matter if you wasted most of a game or a series. If you win, you win. Life is different. Once you’ve thrown away youth and time they’re gone, no matter what kind of comeback you pull off later. For all its hope and salvation, the story of Scrooge is a still a cautionary tale. Mrs. Hunter may have been right to make it a cornerstone of the school year, but the problem is, children don’t believe it can happen to them. Time is the last thing they worry about.

Perhaps she figured that her students would come back to the story later in life if she impressed it upon them firmly enough. Like great records, her lessons made sense over time. There were occasions when Mrs. Hunter herself seemed pretty Scrooge-like, but on reflection she was more like Scrooge’s ghosts; scary as hell, but usually right.

A new record has just come out by a band called Audioslave. They are being touted as a ‘supergroup,’ and feature the lead singer from Soundgarden teamed up with Rage Against the Machine’s guitarist/bassist/drummer. I’ve heard some of it and I like it. It’s right up my alley.

Rage’s guitarist, Tom Morello, is near the top of my list of guitar greats. He won me over with an album called ‘Renegades,’ which is actually a collection of covers done by Rage of other bands’ tunes, ranging from Volume 10 to the Stooges to the Stones.

I think it’s a brilliant album, but also illuminating in how it lays bare the similarities between styles of music one might think have nothing to do with each other. The riffs for rap numbers like EPMD’s “I’m Housin’” or Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man” could have been done by any hard rock band from 1966 to the present, and could have in turn been pinched from any blues great from Robert Johnson to Willie Dixon. ‘Renegades’ does a nice job of linking all this stuff together, most of it built on a foundation called the blues scale; a musical staple that forms the basis of blues obviously, but also of rock, and much of soul, funk, and rap.

The Blues--I’ll call it that for simplicity’s sake but I’m not just talking about the stuff you hear at the Yale--is like a language, with different dialects spoken by different ‘tribes.’ Robert Johnson recorded a song in 1937 called ‘Love in Vain.’ In 1969 the Rolling Stones did a superb version of the tune that is very much their own; it’s still bluesy, but with more rock and a touch of country. In some ways it’s hard to recognize, and yet you can still hear Johnson in some of the antique lyrics....

“I felt so sad and lonesome, that I could not help but cry.”

It’s absorbing to listen to the two versions back-to-back. To see how things changed over 30 years. To think that this language, spoken by some penniless, nomadic Southern black man living during the Depression came to be adopted by suburban English boys a generation later, who in turn cultivated their own idiom. And how far back did the roots of the song go before Johnson himself picked it up?

I love all this music. It is a language I love to immerse myself in. Not just music, THIS music. For the most part, if you can’t lay the blues scale on it in some way I start to loose interest.

I have often felt that learning and spreading this language is a valid pursuit. Maybe even something more than that. The 'Renegades' album takes it’s name from a song called ‘Renegades of Funk’ by Afrika Bambaataa. I like one of the lines in it:

“Now renegades are the people with their own philosophies
They change the course of history
Everyday people like you and me”

The last line is especially great, as it offers everyone a chance at something more than banality. There’s an unsung quality to the blues. Like folk, it offers the possibility of a kind of stardom without limelight, and the possibility that you can build on the language and create a dialect of your own.

But there’s another old songwriter I like. His name is Robert Burns. He has a line in a poem that, roughly translated, laments that we need someone to “give us the power to see us as other see us.”

That line came to mind over the past week. A relatively insignificant event transpired, and I won’t go into great detail, but will provide a brief summary. A gig was set up with three bands. On the evening of the show the gig gets cancelled. Some incovenience was incurred. For our part, we had turned down at least two other opportunities, and had to scramble to notify those who we knew were coming out that night (and judging by a rather irate message in our guestbook were not entirely successful).

Immediately the blame was assigned. At first on myself, which I bitterly and...how shall I put it...snarlingly refuted, and then on others, back and forth, up and down, all fucking over the place. All over a show in a pub by three bands few people know.

I suppose people have a great need to express themselves, and when that gets stifled they feel frustrated. In fact, the debacle I’ve just mentioned hinged on a band breaking up over the matter of which members’ songs would get played and who would sing them. Whether anyone else on the planet was listening to the songs was not the point. When someone needs to say something, and they can’t, they get upset.

When you use music as your language, the possibilities for rancour are greater, as you can become more dependent on others to say what you need to say. That dependence breeds resentment. The problem is, when things deteriorate it no longer matters whether it was over anything significant. The bitterness that builds along the way becomes the cause.

I have often found it curious to observe the musical behavior of Rob 'The Mule' Hughes. He has for some time painstakingly created albums on his own. He makes them all by himself. He releases them to about 20 people. And that’s that. They’re good records; I keep going back and listening to them, anyway.

Rob has always steadfastly refused to have any part of the “get your stuff out there” credo that I and most others have adopted as our mantra. I’ve never really asked him why. He’s a fundamentalist of sorts, but not a missionary. And it’s not that he needs everything his own way. When he makes his own records, they sound exactly as he wants them to, and yet when you play in a band with him it’s all good. Any idea is valid, any style is welcome. Just don’t send any of it to the local radio station.

Why is this? Is it because he figures that you have to keep this craving to express yourself in check to a point, or it will get the better of you and the way you deal with the people around you? That once you get beyond the basic purity of musical expression the rest can only be a distraction, or even a toxin, keeping you from further creativity?

I’ve always found it exhilarating to be spreading the musical gospel as I see it, even if I’m the equivalent of some kind of missionary preaching to a handful of disciples on the fringes of civilization. But at some point maybe you stop even being that. You become like Aguirre; you’ve wrecked everything and you’re floating around on a river in the jungle hectoring a bunch of monkeys.

You’re less and less in command of any language. You’re under the command of an addiction. Everything else suffers. I’ve rarely been as unhappy or as incomplete in my life as during those periods when I’ve been most immersed in music. You need more and more of it. You neglect things and people you shouldn’t neglect. Your behavior is destructive. Occasionally, when you step out of this opiatic place, you realize that you’re just like a junkie, encrusted in the same dissolution and decay as any addict, consumed by only one thing. The only option is to fix up and go back in.

Unless you break the habit completely. This language sounds sweeter to me than ever, but I worry that it’s just a Sirens’ song, and that maybe it’s time to salvage what I still can of the rest of myself.

"...it's curious that 'Stoked' (credited to Brian) sounds almost exactly like the Stones' 'Stoned', released half a year later, with the only difference that the Beach Boys sing 'stoked' and Jagger sings 'stoned'. Who did they rip off? The poor guy is left uncredited on both versions."

From a web review of the Beach Boys' "Surfin' U.S.A." album. Nothing I like better than a rock 'n' roll songwriting mystery.

And speaking of of the Stones, it turns out that Bill Wyman, not Keef, was behind the Jumpin' Jack Flash riff.

I've got to start my own songwriting bureau of investigation. Kind of like that Kenneth Star thing in the States that went on forever and exposed the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. I would have the judicial power to summon witnesses and such. Hmmmmm....