editor’s note: St. John’s, Newfoundland, is home to The Scope, a biweekly publication that stepped up this year to help host the RPM Challenge from its neck of the woods in the North Atlantic. The Wire decided to take a look into the music scene in St. John’s and see how it compares to that of the Seacoast. The Scope will run a parallel article about Portsmouth’s music scene in its next issue.

Taking a stroll down George Street in St. John’s, Newfoundland, just about any music fan is likely to find something worth checking out. The street is purported to have the most bars per square inch of any road in the world, and live music is a regular feature at most of those establishments. According to local musicians, George Street includes venues geared toward folk, blues, jazz, hard rock, reggae and beyond.

“People here are really musical,” said Elling Lein, editor of St. John’s weekly publication The Scope. “They live it, they breath it and, of course, there’s no chance they’re ever gonna make any money at it.”

St. John’s is the provincial capitol of Newfoundland and Labrador in northeastern Canada. Located at the eastern tip of Newfoundland, it is supposedly the oldest English-founded settlement in North America. St. John’s and Portsmouth are separated by nearly 1,500 miles, which constitutes a drive of close to 30 hours, plus a slow ferry ride to the island. With a population of more than 100,000 people, St. John’s is about five times the size of Portsmouth. Newfoundland is in a time zone 90 minutes ahead of Eastern Standard Time.  

But, Portsmouth and St. John’s share a few common traits. Both cities have Atlantic shorelines, yielding folk traditions that stem from the songs of sailors, fishermen and dockhands. The two communities also share the historical context of being among the first North American regions to be settled by British colonists—another source of rich folk heritage.
In both communities, proximity to the sea has rubbed off on local musicians. A fitting example from St. John’s is Great Big Sea, one of the most commercially successful acts to come out of the city. The band helped solidify the island’s reputation as a hub for traditional and Celtic music.

“It’s talked about in the rest of Canada,” Lein said. “The Newfoundland music scene is talked about as being a really traditional music scene, and the big artists from here have some elements of traditional.”

Also like in Portsmouth, younger musicians in St. John’s have gradually diversified the scene over the years, helping it evolve beyond traditional music to embrace a range of genres. A wave of newer generation rock infiltrated the island in the late 1970s, and a spree of punk bands entered the scene in the mid-’80s. More recently, ska and reggae bands have established a solid footing. Jazz also maintains a strong presence, and Memorial University has introduced younger and more experimental artists in the electronic realm.

“The scene here is amazing. There’s so much talent here that it always overwhelms me,” said singer-songwriter Terry Rielly, who has been performing in St. John’s for close to 40 years. “Everywhere you go, you run into some people who are doing really good stuff.”

Rielly is a pianist, guitarist and singer best known to locals as The Teddy Bear Man because of the annual children’s concerts he performs. Although he has garnered a reputation for playing children’s music, he describes himself as a prolific artist who is willing to try his hand at just about every musical genre.

“I tell people I have a noisy heart, and if my heart has something to say, it’s often in a song,” Rielly said. “There’s lots to inspire me. Life inspires me. And if my heart gets inspired, then look out.”

Curtis Kilfoy’s band is about as far from children’s music as you can get. The guitarist, keyboardist and singer leads Mopey Mumble-Mouse, a five-piece punk band that has been performing in various holes-in-the-wall for about three years.
“We’re a punk rock band, but it’s kind of all over the place,” Kilfoy said, noting that he is also a member of hardcore punk band Skullface and Others.

Rielly and Kilfoy represent two separate but related aspects of the music scene in St. John’s. Although his tastes are eclectic, Rielly represents the traditional, and he has watched the scene that surrounds him slowly evolve through the decades. Kilfoy, who is 24, represents one of the sub-scenes that developed during those decades. Both musicians are part of an isolated musical community in which people actively play music with no expectations of fame or fortune.

“I don’t really go into it expecting it to pay off financially at this point. We can’t really effectively tour right now,” Kilfoy said.
Touring outside of the island is a major undertaking for bands in St. John’s. According to Lein, it’s about a 12-hour drive from St. John’s to the closest ferry that can transport you south to Nova Scotia. After sitting through a six-hour ferry ride, it’s another six hours by car to get to Halifax, the closest major city. That’s 24 hours of traveling just to get to the first significant tour stop. (Halifax is actually about 300 miles closer to Portsmouth than it is to St. John’s.)

“We’re up in the North Atlantic,” Lein said. “It brings a certain kind of quality to the music where we’re making music for ourselves. We’re not making it to sell millions of dollars of records.”

That being the case, the RPM Challenge, which encourages musicians to write and record 10 songs or 35 minutes of original music in the month of February, sounded perfect for St. John’s. Lein helped found The Scope in the summer of 2006. He had spent previous months examining other North American alt-weeklies, searching for ways to model his incipient paper. When someone told him about The Wire, he got a few copies sent up and determined that it had the mix of community news and local arts coverage he was looking for. At the time, The Wire was in the midst of its inaugural RPM Challenge.

This year, The Scope decided to collaborate with The Wire to promote the 2008 RPM Challenge. About 50 bands from St. John’s have registered, and Lein expected that number to increase in the final weeks of February. “We have people who do things at the last minute here,” he said.  

Both Terry Rielly and Mopey Mumble-Mouse have signed up for the RPM Challenge and are well underway on their albums. They said they were attracted to the non-competitive nature of the challenge. Rielly revamped an old classical guitar to write a variety of blues, folk and country songs for a solo RPM disc. Kilfoy has been getting together with fellow band mates Tom Davis, Bart Pierson, Paul Tucker and Steve Aylward to improvise riffs and come up with new hardcore sounds.

“I’m not particularly interested in it as a competition,” Kilfoy said. “I think if it was a contest I wouldn’t do it.”

Rielly hopes that producing an RPM album will help him shed his reputation as The Teddy Bear Man for a little while and produce some material that is not necessarily geared toward children. He has become increasingly removed from the live music community over the years, and he would like to once again immerse himself in the thick stew of sounds that waft from George Street every night.

According to Lein, live music is integral to the survival of bars and pubs across St. John’s. Residents of the city are so hungry for live entertainment that bars must bring in musicians almost every night of the week to compete. There are also a number of music festivals in the city at certain times of year.

“There is the basement kind of crowd, but it’s also kind of a hyper-social city,” he said. “People love to go out and drink and tell bad stories and all that stuff, so they like each other’s company.”

Lein pointed to The Ship Pub, located on Duckworth Street, as a longstanding musical center in St. John’s. The venue (also renowned for its fish cakes) can hold a couple of hundred people and has been a popular musical destination since the 1970s.

Mopey Mumble-Mouse has been playing gigs lately at a joint called Turner’s Tavern, located on Water Street. There is a jam space upstairs from the bar where bands organize their own shows, making it a popular spot for alternative acts that fall outside the traditional arena, Kilfoy said. A handful of bars on George Street also welcome punk and alternative bands, he added.

But, the punk scene in St. John’s has encountered some setbacks, according to Kilfoy.

“The all-ages scene is almost dead. There was, three or four years ago, a hardcore punk scene that was just exploding. You’d have like 300 people at a show, which for here is just huge,” he said.

Punk rockers relied on venues that were open to all-ages shows in order to keep the scene thriving. Central to their efforts, oddly enough, was the Riverdale Tennis Club, which played host to a number of big punk shows. Other venues followed suit, but they quickly determined that all-ages punk shows were more trouble than they were worth.

“Somebody would just do something stupid at a show and we just kept losing venue after venue,” Kilfoy said.

Listening to him describe the situation echoes the sentiments of Seacoast music fans who still lament the loss of The Elvis Room—a loss that threw a major stick in the spokes of the all-ages scene in Portsmouth. Still, Kilfoy and his mates can rely on a decent turnout of 40 or 50 people every time they perform, and that’s enough to fill most of the smaller bars where they gig. At each show, a few dozen familiar faces inevitably turn out.

“It tends to be a lot of the same people coming out, and the majority of the audience is people who are also in bands who would play that type of show,” Kilfoy said.

Lein believes that younger generations of musicians are resisting the city’s reputation as an enclosed site for traditional music. “The younger you go, there’s more of a reaction against that. People don’t like to acknowledge their history, necessarily,” he said.

But Rielly feels that the St. John’s scene is endowed with an innate vibrancy that has never really faded. Bands have come and gone and the scene has adapted to the times, but a distinctly Newfoundland feel remains.

“I’d say (the scene is) evolving,” he said. “It’s like a tumbleweed that doesn’t look the same once it’s smoothed over a piece of ground, but it’s still a tumbleweed.”

As far apart as they are, the music scenes in Portsmouth and St. John’s are linked by the RPM Challenge and the discussion board at www.rpmchallenge.com. Kilfoy said he has enjoyed participating in the online community that interacts through the RPM Web site, uniting acts from Newfoundland, New Hampshire and around the world.

“I do feel like I get more of a sense of community from it compared to MySpace and other online communities,” he said. “This sets this common goal for you.”

To check out The Scope, visit www.thescope.ca. For more on the RPM Challenge, visit www.rpmchallenge.com.