Nothing but the stark truth in Ron Hynes book, biographer says
Heather Barrett and Stephanie Tobin | CBC News | Posted: May 11, 2016 8:30 PM | Last Updated: May 12, 2016
Q&A with the author of One Man Grand Band: The Lyrical Life of Ron Hynes
A book about the life of Ron Hynes has been on the shelves for a couple of weeks, but was officially launched in St. John's Tuesday night.
Sandy Morris played at the launch concert for One Man Grand Band: The Lyrical Life of Ron Hynes at The Ship, a former stomping ground for his former Wonderful Grand Band mate.
Author Harvey Sawler was also there, helping launch the book he wrote, which includes interviews with Hynes and dozens of others.
Sawler spoke with Heather Barrett for CBC Radio's WAM last weekend. Here's some of that interview.
Q: In the book you describe some meetings with Ron Hynes about this project in very vivid detail. Can you explain what that was like?
Ron was on substances at the time, I think. Everything's out about Ron, so there's no point in holding back on some of that stuff, it was quite out there after he passed away. But at the moment that I started the book in June of 2014, he was definitely not in his best phase.
He came out of that and was in great shape after that and was doing gigs all over, but during that time when we were introducing ourselves to one another I was actually driving him around the Maritimes from one gig to the other for a few days and he just wasn't really into doing the book and he let me know in no uncertain terms that he wasn't at that time.
As things moved along and he got to know me and he straightened out a bit, everything became very copacetic. By the time we were in the final throes of doing the book, he and I were — I wouldn't say we were close, in the way that he is with Grand Band members and things like that, but we were as close as I could have gotten to him as a biographer.
Q. Your book certainly doesn't sugarcoat who he was, but you also talk about his art and talk about what Ron describes as the three Rons. Why was it important for you to show all the sides of Ron Hynes?
I think everybody around Ron, including [his agent], including Ron, including anybody that was interviewed, wouldn't have wanted to see a sugarcoated Ron. The only book I think those people I interviewed — and I think it was about 35 or 40 — the only book that I think they saw coming out about Ron was one that was full of the truth.
But the truths are … you know, they're so varied. He was what he was, and there's no way that he would have wanted this to be a biography that was anything but stark truth.
Q. Tell me a bit about the relationship you observed between Ron and his longtime friends and bandmates.
I think the most telling part of that is they nursed him through all of his cancer. They protected him, they took care of him, they drove him back and forth to the clinic from Ferryland or when he was staying at the Delta Hotel when he was really at the height of his treatment.
They were people like Boomer Stamp and Whitey and Greg [Malone] and others who were putting spaghetti in a blender and feeding it to him on a spoon. I mean, what more can you say about how dedicated they were to him? If they had been other than who they are and the history they had with the Grand Band, a lot of people would have washed their hands of him at different times, but none of them did.
Q. You approach a lot of Ron's music and a lot of his relationships and a lot of the unspoken knowledge people in this province have of Ron Hynes as an outsider, with fresh eyes. What strikes you, as someone who came to Ron Hynes very recently, about all this?
I don't know how to say this other than this way … he's sort of a stereotype of Newfoundland, but he's totally not the stereotype of Newfoundland. Canadians have stereotypes of Newfoundlanders, and Greg Malone talks about that in the book.
Ron talks about how he just detested the term "Newfie," for example, so I think that it was that he broke through the stereotype and his material is richer and deeper than what the stereotypes offer, even though the stereotypes are golden in themselves. But he was definitely the contemporary bard.
Q. What do you think his legacy is going to be to the rest of Canada?
What's surprising is when you're talking about Ron Hynes, outside of Newfoundland and Labrador, there's a very sort of limited community as to everybody who recalls his name, even though most people who know music will put him immediately in the strata of Stompin' Tom Connors, Gordon Lightfoot, Gene MacLellan and that crowd, but people who don't know his name really don't know who he is.
But when they get introduced to him, it's a whole different thing. One of the best ways to exemplify that is Jason Wilber, who was a guy from the States, ended up just catching Ron at the Ship one night a few years ago and thought he was just going to hear just another guy playing, but as the show started this guy was shocked, he was stunned at the quality and the depth of the lyrics, and he actually wrote a song himself called Watching Picasso, which is talked about quite extensively in the book.
He never heard of Ron before, but he was immediately in Ron's world when he heard him, and I think that would be the case of other Canadians — or non Canadians — if they had the chance to hear him.
This interview was edited for length and clarity