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When a worldwide pandemic cancelled all of their programming, Home Routes quickly adapted to the virtual world, introducing online renditions of their concert series.
Proudly presented by Home Routes: The Travelling Goodtime Medicine Show, a series of 5 concerts each featuring a variety of amazing Canadian talent
TGTMS Podcast - Episode 2
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[00:00:00] Jaxon Haldane: Hi, I'm Jackson Haldane. Welcome to episode two of the traveling. Good time medicine show podcast brought to you by the good folks at Home Routes.
If you missed episode one, we recommend circling back around and enjoying that first. We've introduced some characters who we're going to revisit, and our story will make more sense. If you listen in sequential order.
[00:00:35] The Pitchman: Fear not change , friends. Upheaval is the steady state of nature. The destiny of humankind. Charles Darwin believed it took thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of generations for evolutionary changes to emerge in the wild. But the modern belief is that huge changes can happen in just a few generations when necessity commands.
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[00:01:37] Jaxon Haldane: in March of 2020, the Wolf was at the door of Home Routes and evolution was in the air. After the death of Home Routes, co-founder Mitch Podolak in September of 2019, and with the sudden onset of a global shutdown effectively putting a pause on the live entertainment industry, Home Routes found itself in a bit of an identity crisis.
[00:01:56] Leonard: My name is Leonard Podolak and I'm the executive director of Home Routes / chemin Chez Nous. The fundamental mission of Home Routes is to create more meaningful work for folk musicians to create a simple model where an artist can tour a short, relatively small geographic space and have a critical mass of performances without too much travel and without too much overhead.
[00:02:23] Jaxon Haldane: But now touring and live music generally became impossible. And Home Routes programming collapsed like so many other planned events in 2020.. Ava Kabrinksy Home Routes general manager describes the situation.
[00:02:36] Ava: The first thing we did was canceled 22 artists' tours. That was very disappointing and heartbreaking to do with the rest of the, in the context of everybody's suffering and then Leonard and other people around just quickly came in.
Putting stuff online. And fortunately the production values have improved since then. Quite a lot, I would say with the, with the support of people like Graham Lindsey and Jason Arkley and
Kathy Crawford,
[00:03:10] Jaxon Haldane: Mitch and Ava's son, Leonard who had only recently joined the family business, suddenly found himself, piloting a vehicle with no fuel, no wheels and no road.
[00:03:19] Leonard: However, you know, just the idea of how would you know, how many details and what are all the things that you have to have and how does that all get planned out? And just as a kid, it seemed very daunting. And, and the part that really excited me was, was on the stage and that's where I want it to be. I didn't really picture myself getting on the side of the monitors, I guess you could say.
So they announced that there's a global pandemic and everything's got to stop. So. That point, there was a season and a half that was booked already. 12 tours that, that were set up in English and French. So I, I said, all right, we're not coming to this office anymore. And I said, we're going to do something online.
Home Routes was absolutely not equipped to just set up as a digital disseminator of, of, of music online at the time that the pandemic started, we, we just simply went with what we knew, which was that Facebook had this thing called live. And then if you clicked on the button, you can go live and broadcast so that's what we started with.
[00:04:39] The Pitchman: Yes, folks, keep moving, keep moving along. So much, great entertainment to experience. Step inside this tent here for a riveting spotlight on Goodtime Traveling Medicine Show musical feature artists, Ostwelve from the BC world music collective. Come right this way. Right this way.
[00:04:58] Ostwelve: Uh, my name is Ronnie Dean Harris. I've been known as a hip hop artist for the better sum of 20 years by Ostwelve and the ancestors know me as Malithuk and, uh, my family has come from Stō:lo/St’át'imc/N’laka'pamux territories. And I've been hip hop and media artists since I was about 12 years old. I grew up in the, uh, at a place called Albion in British Columbia.
That's in maple Ridge and the rest of my later years, uh, in the city of Vancouver. And right now I'm based in New Westminster. I'd been listening to hip hop since, you know, close to the inception. So, uh, my hip hop listening started, you know, with a lot of the really old school and that a lot of that sort of still lives within my being when I make music.
I think that was kind of an entry point for me for hip hop was like, You know, the summer of 1990 marked the, the Oka crisis that happened in Oka Quebec, uh, military like resistance, uh, by the . People of Kahnawake and Kanesatake by the Mohawk people, uh, to the military, they wanted to build a golf course in those areas.
And so it was, you know, the first time of my life that I witnessed like, uh, like an uprising of people for indigenous rights and title. And I, you know, I was coming of age. I was like 11 years old. So I was, I was just old enough to sort of understand a bit what was going on. Definitely old enough to be really frustrated by it, old enough to experience, uh, the prejudice and racism from it.
But not old enough to be a warrior or to go out and be on those front lines at that time. So listening to the groups like public enemy, poor righteous teachers and others that had a same conscious message I found a lot of similar connections that sort of activated me to use hip hop as a form of expression. But for me, it's about the message, especially sometimes it's more about the message.
So if I've gotten this idea and that I want to express, I'll just lay a simple beat down and leave it that way. And then like the way my life works now, I'll always have space for like other players now to come in. So, um, from touring for the last, whatever, half decade or decade or so, and like meeting amazing artists like the BC world music collective and other artists that I've been working with, I could always leave a space or someone could create a wave and I can ride it and get my message out there and sort of land it in heart fields in a different way than, um, direct activism will do. You know, there are some artists that are, you know, putting some messages up there, but a prevalent, conscious hip hop message isn't marketable in this world.
So I find that, you know, I've, I've done a lot of the heavy lifting musically myself, and just obviously also the save money just had to just get my own sound out. It's created my own beats or worked with producers who have similar values. But when I work with live artists, I'm able to sort of like, there's an alchemy that happens that sort of transcends that energy.
So if you listen to a lot of my earlier stuff, it's sort of based on very like intense, very urgent, sometimes dark sounding beats that, you know, come from the energy in which I'm creating. But let's say I take that same energy of anger and, and oppression and, and a search for justice. And I put it over like a reggae beat or uh, dance all beat or, you know, some sort of Latin style beat and it kind of raises the vibration of it. And I find it easier to land in the Hartfields of people. So what are the most common things I hear when I play with like the BC world music collective or some of the other bands I sit in with is that it's like older people will come up to me like, oh, I've never liked hip hop or rap until today.
Right. And I'm just like, ah, I got you. Right. I got you. I always say that if I can't wrap it, I can't understand it. Right. It's, it's been how I've interpreted reality for more than half of my life. So like, I can take in all this data, but until I can write it into a 16 bar verse that I can spit, I, I don't know if I fully understand it.
The 2014 or 2015, I was asked to go to the Vancouver on music festival and, uh, sit in with the BC world music collective. Forced me to kind of get out of my comfort zone of just playing over beats. Right. Like, cause I usually just press play on my whatever phone or laptop, press the play on that wave and ride it and try to get my message through.
But at this point I was able to kind of connect with people that would come from various backgrounds, um, from around the world who bring their own stories of struggle and their own stories of survival and sounds of survival. And so, uh, we've been really able to sort of create some beautiful things together, and I'm very proud of the work we've done and are doing and want to do more of and, um, you know, opening eyes to different music markets, as well as different, uh, social justice values and political viewpoints and, uh, sort of sharing our message of, uh, you know, of interconnection and inter inter- activation with the crowds that we can be with. And, you know what, I reach a totally different audience than the, like the nightclubs and the festivals I've been to.
It's a fully different audience. And so, um, when I'm trying to like get what the message is that I'm carrying out. I want to meet different people. So, uh, it's been a really, really valuable experience for me personally, we were involved with, for the traveling good-time medicine show as part of Home Routes, we went out to blue frog studios in white rock, which is an amazing venue, but also has like a Primo sound studio in there so they can, you know, capture these amazing performances.
And so, uh, we went and spent a day of rehearsal and a day recording, and, you know, it was a good time. Celco Machado was back. He had taken some time off with the BC world music collective work. It's always amazing to hear him on stage and to have that full sound that we have. It's the most normal I've felt in a long time, uh, doing, um, doing music.
You know, it's been, uh, you know, this, uh, this whole pandemic last two years, it's kind of kept us all apart. And for me, like music being on stage, it's the happy place. And so, uh, being with the crew. Uh, coming together on these tunes that we've created together, um, and that we share together has sort of been the most normal, that felt in a long time.
And I'm really happy and I'm really proud of the work we do. And I I'm looking forward for people to know.
[00:11:24] The Pitchman: Again, my good people. Tickets are available for the Traveling Goodtime Medicine Show's BC world music collective livestream performance via side door, go to home routes.ca that's H O M E R O U T E s.ca and on with the story.
[00:11:43] Graham: So it must've been a 6:00 AM start. I've loved doing all of the most insane stuff that we can possibly do because we can do it.
And because we can do it really, really well. And that was definitely a series of three shows that we did really, really well. And they were the very first right out of the gate with home routes. They were the first three zoom shows that we did.
[00:12:03] Jaxon Haldane: Graham Lindsey is the technical wizard behind Home Routes, online operations.
He first teamed up with Home Routes to present three online concerts for this guy, James Keelaghan
[00:12:11] James: yeah. It was really to kind of premiere the fact that Home . Routes was going to be in on this so we, you know, go big. So, you know, so we'll broadcast it to three continents.
[00:12:22] Graham: Yeah, go big and stay home
[00:12:23] James: and stay home.
Yeah,
[00:12:27] Graham: I think it was 19 hours. We did three shows? Two in the afternoon, it was the show for Europe.. And then eight at night, it was a show for Canada and the U S and then, because James has a big following in Australia and New Zealand and the area, um, you know, it was the next morning. And, and yeah, it was, it was, it was a marathon session, but again, it's, it's all the fun, crazy fun stuff that we can do. Right at the very beginning of the pandemic, everyone was learning how to do things. What we were doing two years ago was incredibly revolutionary because, you know, we were doing the same things as everyone else had been doing all along, but we were all forced to do it from our own homes. People've climbed a mountain before, but we've not all had to climb that mountain in our I'll call it pajamas.
[00:13:11] James: Yeah. And I, and I remember talking to JP Cormier at one point and, you know, he was saying, "you know what's the most important thing?"
And I said, well, I mean, now that we're all streaming, I think it's got to look good and he goes, bullshit. It's got to sound good. Says that's the most important thing. Don't care how it looks. He says you're never, you're never going to get any more handsome Keelaghan so it's going to sound good. You know,
which is true now, I think the sound is spectacular now.
[00:13:42] Graham: I think before I joined, so I'm taking zero credit for this before, before I came on board, the turnaround time from when the, when all the tours were canceled and all artists were told, you know, really sorry, this isn't happening right now to when Rick fines went online with his first live stream show was two days.
Nobody else did that turn around in zero time like that. No, organizationally speaking, I'm sure. I'm sure there were artists who went online and started streaming, but as an organization to, to put on the online folk festival that they did, that we did, um, you know, was absolutely amazing. Every step of the way has, has been so, so groundbreaking,
[00:14:20] Jaxon Haldane: Groundbreaking, indeed.
And this new digital infrastructure will only support and enhance the experience of live touring. When home routes host network is safe to return to hosting. Speaking of which if you've become intrigued by the house concert experience and would like to join the Home Routes family of music, lovers and community builders, go to Home Routes.ca for more information.
in our next episode, we'll look deeper at the live music experience and at a philosophy that led to humble revolution.
[00:14:54] Leonard: You know, growing up in the business. And my dad also growing up in the business, too, saw what a good vibe music brings in a house when there's live music being played in a house, and there's a party going on.
It is one of the most wonderful. And so that was a major inspiration for Home Routes.
[00:15:14] Jaxon Haldane: If you'd like to explore the music of Home Routes and the traveling good time medicine show, we've created a playlist of featured content available for listening on Spotify and apple music. Just search for the traveling good time medicine show playlist, follow and press play.
Now would also be a good time to go purchase your tickets for the traveling good time medicine shows streamed events. There are four shows remaining. Remember, you can buy them as a package or take them on individually. The next show is April 8th, featuring the BC world music collective. And you're not going to want to miss that one or any of the rest of them.
Visit Home Routes.ca for tickets and more information. I'm your host Jackson Haldane. Our producers are Jordan Moore of The Pod Cabin and Tim Fraser of the Murdoch Podcast Network. Our executive producer is Jason Arkley of Home Routes and a big shout out to our staff, Leonard, Ava, Kathy Graham, Briana, everyone working so hard at the office.
Thanks for. The banjo music you're hearing in the background was played by the one and only Mitch Bartolic recorded in the early two thousands.
Thanks to factor in the Canadian arts council for funding this project, and to you for listening. Tune in next time for another dose of the traveling good time medicine show podcast. .