Being a Canadian patriot can be tough on the old wallet. At least, that’s Jowi Taylor’s experience.
So far, the Torontonian’s effort to bring us Canucks together has cost him a cool $80,000.
Taylor has made headlines by spearheading the construction of a guitar the so-called Voyageur using 67 tidbits representing aspects of Canadian history. The acoustic guitar, secured in a canary-yellow case, is made from stuff like Pierre Trudeau’s canoe paddle, Paul Henderson’s hockey stick from the 1972 Russia-Canada hockey game, Maurice Richard’s 1955-56 Stanley Cup ring (a fragment of gold is embedded in the fretboard) and Haida Gwaii’s sacred Golden Spruce.
There’s even wee bit of Victoria in the Voyageur. Taylor obtained wood from antique doors that once gated Fan Tan Alley. In the old days, when police raided Chinatown gambling dens, they’d have to break down these doors. The commotion provided the gamblers with a primitive alarm system.
In truth, the Fan Tan wood occupies a humble place in the guitar. It’s inside, near the top of the body. But hey, we’re neighbouring a sliver of Lauren Harris’s window frame and a chunk of the Bluenose II … so, that’s pretty cool.
Taylor was in town this week to chat with school kids and do a bookstore reading. He has published a book on his guitar project, Six String Nation. I met him at Murchie’s on Government Street. The 47-year-old is chunky and jovial the sort of fellow you’d invite over to watch a football game. He wore bright red sneakers.
People seem to love Taylor and his patriotic axe. He told me one of the Murchie’s servers (all in their 20s, all wearing black) pretended to clean up in his area just so she could eyeball his guitar. Taylor let her play it. He took a photo of her with the Voyageur, which he showed me on his BlackBerry. Then he sent it out via Twitter.
Taylor is a former CBC radio broadcaster. He hosted such shows as Global Village, the Nerve and the Wire. He hatched the idea of an all-Canadian guitar after meeting luthier George Rizanyi. Obtaining the materials was challenging at first. It was difficult for outsiders to understand the concept.
“They’d think, ‘Who is this guy?’ ” Taylor said. “Is this going to be some sort of freak show?” After an article appeared in the Globe and Mail in 2005, one Canadian wrote in to say his project “was the ultimate in cheese.”
Still, momentum picked up after Taylor got hold of Trudeau’s paddle. He had initially visited Peterborough’s Canoe Museum, which houses Trudeau memorabilia. However, the museum had financial problems; when Taylor arrived, the doors were padlocked.
His luck turned after meeting Justin Trudeau on a CBC radio show. Justin offered to help Taylor. He gave him a broken paddle his father had left in the family’s summer cabin. And then a retired Canadian vice-admiral used his connections to cull a piece of decking from the Bluenose II. These two relics lent Taylor’s quest credibility after that, things got much easier.
The trickiest item to get was wood from the famous albino Sitka known as the Golden Spruce. The tree, located on the Queen Charlotte Islands, has been cut down. It’s still sacred to First Nations people, who wanted it left undisturbed.
David Suzuki helped Taylor get in touch with the Haida Gwaii folk. Finally getting permission to carve off a slice of the tree (which now makes up the guitar’s front panel) was the subject of a few years of debate amongst its caretakers.
At least the First Nations people came through. Taylor said support from the CBC and the federal government has been “appalling.”
For instance, the Italian government invited Taylor to appear at a festival in Northern Italy. Since he had been acting as a cultural ambassador for Canada, he applied to the Canada Council for travel funding.
When it was time to leave, Taylor still hadn’t heard back. He took a gamble and paid his own way. The Italians treated him like royalty.
When Taylor got home, he found two pieces of mail awaiting him. One “grotty, hand-scrawled envelope” contained a letter from the Canada Council denying him travel funding. The other, ironically, was a “beautiful” invitation to a reception honouring award recipients of the Canada Council’s Arts Musical Instrument Bank. Of which Taylor wasn’t one.
He has never received a dime of government funding, although Taylor and his all-Canuck guitar have perhaps done more to unite our great, big country than a dozen federal programs put together. Stephen Fearing, Colin James and others played it for 80,000 people at Canada Day celebrations in 2006. More than 8,000 Canadians have been photographed with the guitar and chatted with Taylor during this cross-country travels.
The CBC, meanwhile, expressed interest in having Taylor create a program on his project even signing a development deal. The corporation has sat on it for four years.
Says Taylor: “I’m $80,000 in debt with this project.”
Why do this? Taylor believes the stories and symbols we Canadians use to talk about our country Mounties, hockey, donuts, loons, beavers — are wearing thin.
“I just figured if people knew how interesting we actually were and had a sense of the depth and diversity of our story, it’d be a lot easier to know one another,” he said.
OK. Still, I couldn’t resist telling Taylor my wife would kill me if I spend $80,000 on anything, no matter how patriotic and altruistic my motives were.
Taylor replied that his wife, who’s employed by Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre, supports his noble if costly endeavour.
“She works in the arts like me,” he added, “so she gets it.”
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