Strange Way to Live: A Story of Rock 'n' Roll Resurrection

This book is dedicated to my mother Marje and my sister Christina;

my daughters Carlin and Lauren;

and to Helen Parker, who came along at just the right time.

He that will write well in any tongue must follow the counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as the wise men do; and so should every man understand him, and the judgment of wise men allow him.

— Roger Ascham (1515–68)

For the composers and musicians, when we get a brilliant idea it is like reaching glory. That’s why musicians will never retire.

— Israel Cachao López Valdés (1918–2008)

Writing a Book

(May be sung to the tune of The Beatles’ Fixing a Hole)

I’m writing a book, where my brain gets in

And sorts my thoughts and memories

Where they should go.

Describing myself in a colourful way

And though it may be difficult

There’s a good flow.

And to me it really matters that I get it right

It takes so long to write

But moves along.

Conversational in tone

Careful not to whine or moan

Mention those who helped me sing the song …

Surprising myself with an excerpt or two

It’s funny when I see it now …

May it please you …

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Epigraph

foreword by lawrence gowan

foreword by pat stapleton

author’s note

prologue: almost the end

in the beginning

this is how it starts

sibby rules by baton

magic moments, or how i tied the threads together

follow the bouncing bean

back to the boots

preparing for luck

Follow the Highway ’til You Hit the Ocean, then Keep Going

ode to a firefly

the asylum beckons....

making coney hatch

hey operator

scream for me, seattle!

the evils of drugs, drink, and rock ‘n’ roll

let’s not get outa hand!

git on yer bikes and ride!

old road dogs

friction

why i quit coneying up

highlight reel

hmm ... what to do, what to do?

back on earth

chance walks into the room

staff? thought i’d die!

come on, you, get up!

the night i joined the guess who (sort of)

i was the devil’s accomplice

the night i joined april wine (sort of)

music solo, you can’t get under it

denouement

the smack-down

great hallucinations

surrender ... and driving force

my hands can’t feel to grip....

we’re on our way home

it’s a miracle!

there you go, then: goodbye, guess who

iceland it is, then

a new chapter in the old story

acknowledgements

foreword by lawrence gowan

Carl Dixon and I first met in January 1985, when I opened for Coney Hatch at The Misty Moon in Halifax, Nova Scotia. That was the first official Gowan gig ever played, and we hit it off well with the fine fellows of the headline act. I discovered that Carl (like myself) was not only a devoted musician but also an overlooked, undrafted hockey player. This cemented our bond immeasurably. We’ve shared the ice and stage for years since that first meeting, and he’s always proven to be a pal who knows how to pass the puck as well as make a guitar do what it’s designed to do. He also sings exceedingly well and maintains a head of hair that’s well suited to his vocation (see photos on pages 1 through 10,000). He’s built a fine existence that could easily have come to a sad conclusion after he suffered a terrible accident but he chose instead not to allow that dark day to redefine him. His own definition and sense of purpose were clearly intact long before fate attempted to shut him down. How he overcame that incident is a remarkable tale, and you should read about it. This book you’re holding is a perfect place to start that process, followed by an immediate trip to see and hear him play (either music or hockey, your choice).

If I were to attempt to distill the essence of Carl’s story, it would come down to the simple yet complex phrase: Keep going. That’s likely the essence of all great stories, though I can’t be certain since I’ve yet to hear them all. Keep going, and once you’ve done that: Keep rocking. In the ongoing story of Carl Dixon, that’s one of the main reasons he’s still alive.

P.S.: He has a legendary set of balls, which I understand are still intact.

foreword by pat stapleton

My three sons were all into rock music and loved Coney Hatch. It was 1992 and my boys encouraged me to join them at a fun night of hockey with a bunch of rock stars, including Carl. Those rock stars were very competitive on the ice. They were athletic, but being musicians they weren’t fighters, they were lovers. As a hockey player I’d describe Carl as a mean tryer.

I really got to know Carl later when he came to my farm. We walked across the field talking, and he was so engaged; he was like a sponge absorbing everything I said — and it wasn’t anything about hockey — it was about life. He was interested in life.

We could have talked for twenty-four hours. I told him I can’t be with you twenty-four hours a day but I’ll give you something that can, and gave him some motivational cassettes. The message was pretty clear: You become what you think about. Two years later he presented me with a new set of cassettes, because he had worn them out. He was starting to expand his own horizons.

Carl is a man of tremendous willpower. He’s very humble. He’s very genuine. I will have been away from Carl for two years and my boys will say, Have you called Carl? When I call it’s like we only talked yesterday. Relationships are like oak trees; you grow together or you grow apart and wither. My relationship with Carl has grown stronger — we’re probably closer now than he is with my sons, who introduced us.

He is blessed with a strong will. His I-will might be more important than his IQ. That’s what I saw, his I-WILL. After his car accident, in the beginning things didn’t look that bright. Then he willed himself back on his skates. I know for sure, there’s no doubt, it is his positive attitude that pulled him through. It was his internal wisdom that allowed him to do that.

Carl had some immense personal challenges. I learned as an athlete you never let on about your injuries. When you talk about conditioning … there’s a mental conditioning: you have to master your thoughts.

Too many of us as we grow up become unfocused. Carl’s focus is sharp. Carl knows where he wants to go and what he wants to contribute to society; he’s become his own man. He’s spiritual and humble but has great belief in himself.

Carl says he comes to me for advice and wisdom, but I think I got my wisdom from Carl.

— Strathroy, Ontario, July 2014

author’s note

So we have here a book under the authorship of Carleton Anthony Dixon. It was written to the best of my ability and according to my lights at this point in my life. Perhaps next year I might write it better, or differently. However, as I’ve been pointedly made aware, next year might not come to me (or to any of us).

It is instructive and enlightening to write your own story. I recommend everyone write his or her book. I personally haven’t written anything longer than a letter since I was in high school, so it required the marshalling of all my powers of memory, description, and erudition to get my book done. I’ve read plenty of ’em, though, so I hope I have some idea what one should look like.

’Tis a poor thing, but ’tis mine own. Some of you may find it absorbing; others may find it inadequate to your needs. If you find it’s not up to your standards, I strongly urge you to just put it aside. Don’t waste time or thought or energy in condemning the writer. He has told his story as well as he could.

We advance our species by sharing our knowledge and our experience. Whether we glean a profound truth, an amusing anecdote, or a repugnant episode from each other’s stories, it all adds to our trove of data. It’s what we do with our trove that is significant. What I offer you as a writer and an artist and communicator is an interpretation of my set of experiences and received data, filtered through my unique mind. With the words I write I express my truth as I see it.

In summation, I hope you enjoy my book. If you don’t, you could try my next one. Or you could write your own.

— Carl Dixon, September 2014

prologue: almost the end

Dammit! Idiot! Idiot! Stupido! This abusive self-talk, accompanied by the pounding of my palm on the steering wheel, rang in my ears in the early evening of April 14, 2008. I’d got lost again during evening rush hour attempting to drive out of Melbourne, Australia. A mere two nights remained of my already shortened visit with my wife and our younger daughter in the small town of Daylesford. We would have no more time together until their scheduled return home to Canada, more than two months hence.

That April day I’d driven the hour-plus in the morning to Melbourne to work in a small recording studio. We’d planned a beautiful evening back in Daylesford, a sort of joyful send-off. Sadly, my return was delayed as I somehow bungled the directions and got turned around not once, not twice, but three times in the attempt to navigate the Ring Road out of Melbourne. I felt keenly the loss of precious time from our special night and was becoming increasingly distraught.

At six-thirty I pulled off the road after another wrong turn and called my wife on the mobile for one more try at sorting out my directions. This time, with her calming voice, it made a little more sense. I think high emotion is a block not only to thinking clearly but to hearing clearly. There was a Bottle Shop across the plaza from where I’d stopped, and it seemed wise to take a bit of extra time to buy a nice bottle of champagne for our little celebration.

The fact was my wife and I had ends to mend. There’d been months of forced separation as she chaperoned our daughter on the Australian set of the TV series Saddle Club, as required for our little girl’s new acting career. There was also a malaise in our then fifteen-year marriage, partly the result of my endless travelling as a professional rock ’n’ roller. This had been keeping me away from home fully half of each year. There was more wrong here than I knew, unfortunately.

I had sensed on my two prior visits to the set that for her, life on the other side of the world away from husband and home was actually a welcome change. When I turned up for those visits I felt, to quote a Fred Astaire movie, like something of an igneous intrusion in her freewheeling life around the TV production. On this third visit, though, I thought I had found a hope of renewal for our vows. April 14 was meant to be a tender, loving night to reflect that hope. For this brief time remaining, I just wanted to put everything aside and forget about the career, the ambition, and the spotlight I’d pursued for decades. All my life I’d been swept along by the trade winds of popular music. They were waiting to sweep me away again in a couple of days to the next show in America. This night was to be special ... if only I could find the bloody way there!

Angry self-recrimination was a bad habit of mine. To yell at myself was both an outlet and a form of punishment, to teach me not to make that mistake again. I realize now that it actually makes me weak and rattled instead. Though my drive to Daylesford was now finally on the right course, I continued to smoulder in self-reproach as I drove. About forty minutes later, there I was, far from home, this rock star in a strange land — a man who’d stood in the lights of thousands of stages around the world, now suddenly confronted by a blinding light far more glaring and ominous.

in the beginning

Let me tell you a little about what led me to here. I’ve been a professional singer and musician since I was sixteen. I’ve had some success, seen some things, and made a decent living, even a good living at times.

I come from a modest background, born in the northern steel town of Sault Ste. Marie in the last days of 1958. When I grew up in the Soo in the 1960s, the temperature always hit forty below in the long winters and stayed chilly in the short summers that came to that thickly forested country around Lake Superior. Idyllic, if you like that sort of thing.

I’m like most white North Americans, descended from Europeans who immigrated here to seek improved prospects or to escape calamity. My father, Ronald Francis Dixon, was born in Sudbury in 1925. Ron was the tenth of twelve children in a family of Irish-English descent, and the seventh son of a seventh son to boot. His father, John Albert, graduated in medicine from McGill University in Montreal in 1907. I was tickled to learn that, among other extracurricular activities, my grandpa was athletic enough to captain the McGill hockey team. Dr. John Albert Bert Dixon went on to a long career in medicine, notably as head of surgery at Sudbury General Hospital for twenty-two years. Bert also opened medical practices in the Ottawa Valley and on Manitoulin Island at different stages of his life. For a time, in the early years, he made house calls with a horse and carriage. Unsurprisingly, his role as physician in these small communities gave the family some slight standing.

My paternal grandmother was Agatha (née) Watters of Ireland. Agatha was a fierce Irish Catholic, which helps explain the twelve blessed arrivals to the Dixon home. I’m not sure of much about Grandma Dixon. She was trained as a nurse, but I don’t know if she worked in Bert’s practice. She was in her seventies when I came along. I was always a bit frightened of her when we went to visit.

My father told me that Dr. Dixon lost a large amount of money, the greater part of the family fortune, on a highly speculative mining stock investment during the Great Depression. This unhappy outcome reduced the family’s socio-economic standing, and on one or two occasions when my father’d had a few drinks, he would complain that he and all the brothers and sisters should have been rich.

The Dixon parents were strict with their children and kept things going with their huge brood along hard lines in those times of deprivation. They sent Ron to the CNE fair in Toronto, with its rides, midway, and variety shows, with a quarter in his pocket. Even in the 1930s there wasn’t much you could do with two bits. Make it stretch was the advice offered.

Bert and Aggie somehow found the money to place my father in a Catholic private school called Scollard Hall. They hoped this experience might lead him to God and the priesthood, or at least to taking life more seriously. The Catholic high school had rather the opposite effect, if it had any effect at all aside from instilling bitter memories. Ron used to threaten to send me to Scollard Hall on a few occasions when I showed signs of teenage rebelliousness or lack of seriousness.

Still, there were many stories of happy childhood memories. The task of raising twelve children must have been a strain, but my grandparents both lived long and well (to eighty-six and ninety-three, respectively). The family was a hierarchy; the eldest children were expected to manage the youngest and relieve Mama’s burden. Actually, this responsibility fell mostly to the daughters, while the eldest boys were out making their mark. Ron was tenth in birth order, and along with his little brothers Dick and Des was cared for by his older sister Mary. He always had a special love for Mary, as have I.

Many of the Dixon dozen served in the military in the Second World War or after. Ron, my father, was in line to be shipped to Europe with his army unit when VE Day arrived, thank God. When the VJ peace was signed on that battleship in the Pacific, my dad’s unit was again awaiting assignment.

There were ways in which my father could certainly be considered a sort of wizard, as befitting his seventh son status. Ronald Dixon was a brilliant, interesting, and artistic man who, alas, spent most of his life as the unwitting plaything of his powerful emotions. His working-life career was as wildly varied as his considerable talents and intelligence. Here was a man who was at different times an army officer, a miner, a logger, a steel plant worker, a radio DJ, a TV news announcer, a newspaper writer, an elementary school teacher and principal, a high school math, English, and art teacher, and a university professor in journalism. He was a poet, a writer, and a painter in oils, as well as an athlete and an animal lover. He was a gentleman with a refined sense of manners and gallantry. He would go to any lengths to entertain children. My own children adored him.

Ron’s restless spirit and relentless curiosity were part of the reason for his many lines of work. It also seemed to him that most people and most situations grew simply intolerable over time, and his efforts to raise other people to his standards of behaviour were not always appreciated. I guess he was a bit judgmental. This came out in his keen ability to home in on things that just weren’t right and then put that thought into scathing words. It was a trait that was to last throughout his life.

From watching my father, and from my own experiences, I’ve learned that emotion travels much faster through us than does thought. Strong feelings short-circuit the intellect and can leave even the greatest thinker trembling with misguided or misdirected anger. This was a frequent occurrence for my father. As one elderly librarian hotly upbraided him on the day after he’d made a fuss about something with her, "You were wrong, Mr. Dixon … and so loud about it too!" That line became a classic in our family.

His powerful emotions, which resulted in continual changing of jobs and homes, led my father inevitably closer to the fringe. Ron was well liked by many, and he often gave selflessly of his knowledge and ideas. At the same time he would be appalled time and again by the expressions of human nature and the ways in which people would often not live up to the highest ideals in conducting their affairs. Dad’s sharp tongue could be unleashed at unexpected moments, as his beautiful, polished manners gave way to a sudden torrent of outrage. He was a seeker of truth and beauty in a world populated with the unpredictable and unmanageable, the hell of other people. If I were to ascribe a thought to him, for much of his life I’d make it: Why do you all have to be like that?

A self-imposed distancing from his disappointing fellow humans led him into near-isolation in his last years. A man of so much brilliance should have been staying highly connected with society. He was unfortunately so frequently misunderstood (or, alas, sometimes understood all too well) that to engage him might turn upsetting for all concerned, including himself. It must have been difficult to navigate a world in which so few people were able to live up to one’s lofty standards. As brilliant and loving and sentimental as he could be, dear old Dad marginalized himself through behaviour that he was either unable or unwilling to control. That continues to be an important lesson to me.

Ron sure had a fun side, though. Put together quick wit, intelligence, energy, a desire to please, and a quirky outlook and you get a man who would constantly conjure up improbable things to say and do. My mother often says he made her laugh through their whole life together, and that talent to amuse is what made her stick with him. I guess it may be true when they say that’s what a woman really wants in a man: someone to make her laugh.

In his last years Ron was happiest with his books, making corrections to the author’s work in the margins, or painting oil on canvas, or working on supposedly impossible math problems. His mind was keen to the end. We lost Dad to a heart attack on December 29, 2009. He would have been eighty-five on the following June 13. I miss him every day.

My mother, Marje (Mar-yeh), is the polar opposite of my father in many ways: cool, calm, composed, enduring, stoic, but also extremely intelligent, with a surprisingly wicked sense of humour. She quietly set about making a solid home base wherever my father’s fancy led us. Mom also set about becoming a reliable and substantial force for earnings and savings power. Marje is remarkable for her capacity to analyze a situation and find the smartest solution. Her knack of climbing smartly in every new workplace that our travels took her seemed so normal, I thought everybody was like that. An early example of a working mom, she knew how to budget, cook, raise children, and keep a marriage together while going to work every day and exceeding expectations. I owe to my mother’s example whatever I have of sticking to things and of enduring, whatever happens.

My mother’s family is Estonian; they fled from their homeland on the Baltic Sea during the Second World War, when the Russians invaded for the second time in modern history, in 1944. My grandmother Hella Magi was born 1911 in Voru, a small town near the Russian border. Her maiden name was Jaason, an educated family we would now call upper-middle-class, with a large lakefront property as well as a farm on the other side of the lake. Her father, Juhan, was a banker and a director of the local arts council.

Estonia had been under Russian rule for two hundred years, but the collapse of Czarist Russia after the 1917 revolution was the chance for the little country to declare its independence, even though Communist sympathizers agitated in their midst for alignment with the revolution. The small but determined Estonian army repulsed a Red Army invasion in 1919. After a year of fighting, Russia signed a peace treaty in 1920 in which it gave up any future claim over Estonia’s territory. This left Estonian Communists seething with resentment, awaiting the next chance. Juhan Jaason would pay dearly for his prominence in free Estonia when the USSR invaded in June 1940.

My maternal grandfather, Rudolf Magi, born in 1905, came from a small village called Pormanni. It no longer exists, having been bulldozed during one of the Soviet collective farming or industry schemes. After completing his studies, Rudi made his way to an education in military college, where he became the youngest cadet ever to graduate. His first posting as a young officer took him to Voru, where he met Hella at the local music and dance hall. Married in 1931, they had three years’ honeymoon, in Hella’s words, until the arrival of their first son, Rein, in 1934. Then came Tonu in 1936 and finally my mother Marje in 1938.

Rudi went to Officers Higher Military College, where he earned a captain’s rank. He served in the Estonian army in that rank until the end of the Second World War.

My Grandma Hella (Jaason) Magi is one of my heroes in this world, a survivor and thriver without equal. In January 2011 I attended her hundredth birthday party and performed a song for her with my daughter, Lauren Hella, the great-granddaughter named for her. My elder girl Carlin helped Lauren read the birthday greetings from the Queen, the prime minister, and various other dignitaries, including the president of Estonia.

Hella often regaled me with stories of the family’s escape from the Russian invasion. In 1944 the Germans were losing the Eastern Front to the strengthening Russians. Rudi saw the threat looming, and in concern for the safety of his children he managed to get a secret letter to Hella in the south, urging her to leave Estonia with the kids as soon as possible. While the Russians were entering the northern part of Estonia above Lake Peipus, she gathered up her three children, including my mother (then six years old), and they were able to evacuate on one of the last trains leaving Voru.

Hella could have gotten her mother out before the Russians arrived, but her mother, Elisabet Jaason, felt she was too old to start over in a new country and refused to leave her homeland by getting on that train with them. My grandmother had already seen her father and her brother, Juhan and Juhan Jr., arrested by the Russians during the first Soviet invasion in 1940 and sent to slave labour camps in Siberia, where they subsequently died.

Like most Estonians, Hella knew that worse was to come under a second Soviet occupation. Only Communist sympathizers were pleased to see the Russians return. Hella waved goodbye to her mother and ensured the safety of her children and herself by getting on that train.

In the end Elisabet was not singled out for persecution under the Soviet regime as a former capitalist. Marje tells me her grandmother had been kind to the Jewish people in Voru and helped some of them to live through the Nazi occupation. She and Hella both believed that Elisabet was so kind, generous, and good, she charmed even the Communists.

The Magi family’s boarding of the troop train was followed by a week of rough travel on changing trains in order to put safe distance between themselves and the Russian advance. My mother remembers riding in open cattle cars with other refugees for parts of the journey. The family sometimes slept in fields beside the tracks while awaiting the next train’s arrival. There’s a lovely story of the day when Marje lost her dolly somewhere on the train and all the German soldiers helped her look