This week, Candadian entertainment industry execs and famous musicians are holding a $250/plate fundraising dinner for Sam Bulte, a Member of Parliament who has worked for legislation favorable to their interests and proposes to do more of the same if re-elected. Margo Timmins, the frontwoman for Canadian indie-rock success story The Cowboy Junkies will perform.
Joey “AccordionGuy” DeVilla traces the history of the band that made Margo Timmins famous: the band produced its breakout album for about $250 (the same sum that industry people will put into the pockets of their chosen lawmaker), and subsequently relied on mix-tapes and word of mouth to build its audience.
But what Timmins and her ilk propose now is the indiscriminate prosecution of people who engage in the twenty-first century’s equivalent of tape-trading: file-sharing. Having made herself rich and famous by using low-cost copying technology and fan-evangelism, Timmins proposes to help make laws that will prevent other bands from doing the same.
The fundraiser for Sam Bulte being held tonight at the Drake Hotel will feature a performance by Margo Timmins. You may remember her band, The Cowboy Junkies, best known for their album, The Trinity Session. Recorded on a single microphone in the Church of the Holy Trinity for $250 (ironically, that’s the per-plate price of admission to the fundraising dinner at which Margo is performing tonight), this album was originally released on a small label and got its buzz based on word-of-mouth and thousands of mix tapes that teenagers — myself included — made for each other.
Back then, one way to declare your love (or at least infatuation) for a girl or guy was to make a “mix tape” of songs for her or him. If you were particularly creative, you’d embellish the tape with an artistic J-card (that’s the cardboard liner that went into the cassette case — here’s an example). The important thing about a mix tape was that it let you say things that it provided a kind of indirection — a way of saying things that you might not otherwise be able to say in a face-to-face conversation (instant messaging may be like that today).
Update: Adam sez, “the official Cowboy Junkies website hosts a forum specifically *for* trading bootlegs, and the Internet Archive hosts over 100 Cowboy Junkies live shows, along with a copy of their permission for them to be hosted.