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On a Cold Road: Tales of Adventure in Canadian Rock; Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance.

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On a Cold Road: Tales of Adventure in Canadian Rock by Dave Bidini

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1998. 278 pgs.

Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance by Michael Barclay, Ian D. Jack and Jason Schneider

Toronto: ECW Press, 2001. 757 pgs.

"Sure you could hoist lagers with Pete Townshend, but you could do other things too, like play hockey with the Tragically Hip" (Bidini 55).

On the flipside of the dust jacket for Barclay et al.'s encyclopedic account of Canadian music between '85 and '95, Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance, Dave Bidini--music journalist and rhythm guitarist in perhaps Canada's most markedly Canadian contemporary rock band, the Rheostatics--offers readers the following counsel: "If you buy one book this year, buy this one. Provided you've already bought mine." While Bidini's remark betrays the wry and consistently amusing tone that characterizes his book, On a Cold Road: Tales of Adventure in Canadian Rock, his provisional endorsement rings truer than he might initially anticipate.

Bidini's book constitutes, on the one hand, a self-deprecating and often hilarious personal memoir in which he documents his band's experiences opening concerts for the Tragically Hip during a '96 winter tour of Canada he regards as the "biggest tour by a Canadian band in the history of music in Canada" (7). On the other hand, Bidini's book chronicles much more than his band's supporting role in this historical CanRock moment; by interspersing his first-hand observations of the Hip tour with a host of anecdotes by his CanRock forerunners, from well-known icons like Randy Bachman and Bruce Cockburn to lesser-known figures like Frank Soda, Bidini effectively reconstructs the Canadian rock experience from the '60s through to the CanRock renaissance of the late '80s and early '90s. Like Bidini's autobiographical romp across Canada, Barclay et al.'s extensive critical biography, which boasts meticulous attention to detail and reflects the depth and the breadth of its research, incorporates anecdotes and observations by an array of musicians involved,...

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