The Awakening Postmortem

The Awakening Postmortem

Sorry to have left you on a pretty sad note. Breaking up is, as they say, hard to do!

Mike had written a comment on my last blog posting that brought to mind something I had forgotten, that being that our manager Glenn tried to get us to play one last gig together at the Kingdom Bound festival in August of 1989. There was no way that would have happened. Perhaps years later, it might have occurred to Mike and Al that they might have liked one more chance to play with the old mates, but when the wounds were so fresh and raw, there was honestly no possibility of us doing that gig so soon after the breakup.

Mike had his other band on the go at the time, and as he's mentioned before, being in that band was so much more fun than it was being in The Awakening. I think I was feeling a similar way about my life outside of the band at that time.

When it all came down, there was a lot of guilt and hard feelings that surrounded us all in the aftermath. I felt bad for Al. He loved being in the band, and quite frankly had to put up with a lot of crap being in it. Besides his obvious role in the band, he would be the guy who would have to deal with a broken down cube van late at night after having worked all day at a gig, quite possibly knowing that he'd be up at some insane hour the next morning working his day job. He certainly held a burden that nobody else in the band had to worry about.

And yet for Al, this must have been a really sad realization for him to confront, that for all the good and bad, he was not going to have this band to play in any longer.

Andy and I already had full-time jobs working at Cedartree Recording studio and even back in those days, Andy had aspirations to one day have his own recording studio. Mike had various other interests musically and had good outlets to explore them. But Al must have felt pretty abandoned by the whole affair.

So as the weeks and months passed after our final "band meeting," there was no shortage of bad will towards each other. Sometimes it would come directly, but more often it would come second or third hand. I used to have a friend who was semi-well known for being a bit of a gossiper and a blabber mouth. On a few occasions, he would share with me the things that Mike was saying about Andy and I to friends in his circle. I would sometimes offer a retort that may or may not have gotten back to him! It gets pretty juvenile sometimes, but that is how most break-ups go. Trust me... I've been married and divorced. It doesn't matter how mature you think you are; when a major relationship implodes, it can bring out the best AND worst in all of us!

I have mentioned before in these postings that leading up to the breakup, Andy and I had no definite plans to work together. It was sort of inevitable that it would happen, but we hadn't really talked about possibilities. We both worked at the studio and had access to it whenever its schedule had a hole, but in terms of starting a new band, that was not on our minds during this time period. We just knew that it wouldn't be long before we started working together on something new.

It might have been all the bad energy that sprang forth after the band broke up, but ironically, it didn't take long for Andy and I to re-group and start the next phase of our career. Andy was never one to sit around and wait things out. I honestly have no memories of us planning anything. All I know is, at some point later on in 1989, we had a new demo recorded at the studio and began the process of creating a new band to play with.

The initial songs Andy and I worked on included some unfinished Awakening material. At one of our last practices, we recorded a run-through of a song tentatively called "Surfin' Tailpipe," but the song never came together before the band broke up. That song would eventually become known as "The Beauty Of The Night." We worked on that song, and probably 3-4 other Awakening ideas before we tried to write new songs.

At some point through all of this, I decided that I did not want to be a keyboard player anymore. Perhaps the years of over-playing with The Awakening had just burned me out!

I switched to bass guitar, and in the studio I still handled the keyboard parts, but we were scaling that sort of direction back a bit.

We did a demo near the end of 1989 or early 1990, which would have been done entirely by Andy and I in the studio.

At some point, Andy began putting together a new band. He called upon our old friend Glenn Koehler (former Awakening manager) to be our keyboard player. Andy and Glenn called an old friend from their Humber College days - Clarke Williams - to play drums.

I remember meeting Clarke for the first time when he came to Cedartree to meet us and do a session. I guess this was his audition, so the pressure for him was on. Clarke was a really laid-back guy and came more from the jazz world than the rock world, so he was pretty out of his element.

Without telling the entire story of the 1990's in this chapter (!!), this nucleus stayed intact for a few years under the name Echo Park, before Andy and I again chose to throw it all away and start again. We did a few gigs as Echo Park, and continued to do lots of recording together, but for guys like Clarke and Glenn, it was pretty discouraging spending so much time in a studio and so little time in front of an audience. They decided it might be best to move on.

So Echo Park ceased to exist by about 1991-92.

The next version of this band was Andy and I with drummer Gord Stevenson, and that provided the foundation for what would eventually become One Hundred Days. This was the band, under various memberships, that would keep Andy and I working together throughout the 90's.

More on those days in another blog perhaps!

So to wrap things up regarding The Awakening - it is safe to say that the 4 of us never regained the kind of friendships we had while we were together. It wasn't so much because of bad feelings, because all of those bad feelings eventually passed. It was more because of our lives all going in different directions. Al eventually got married and moved away from town. Mike moved into various areas using his many facets of creativity, from art, graphic design and music. Andy DID get his home studio going in the early 90's, and to this day, he records a number of album projects for other artists from the comfort of his own home. When my career with Andy came to an end by the year 2000, I also started to move into new areas. I began doing a lot of side-man work for a number of Country Music artists, which allowed me to tour, and for the first time with good income, my own bed to sleep in and good meals!! I started doing a lot of composing and scoring work too.

These days, Andy has been hiring me to do keyboard parts for the albums he produces at home. Because of modern technology, I can do these parts from my home studio and then send him the finished files. So we see other a lot more often these days, but we honestly hardly saw each other from 2000-2006.

I have bumped into Mike at various places over the years, be it the local mall or a Starbucks. We are really looking forward to re-connecting regarding all of these old Awakening memories in coming months. I haven't seen Al in years, but thanks to Facebook, I can keep tabs on him and wish him well, even if just in a virtual sense. I think the last time we were all together at the same place was in 1990 when I got married to my first wife. There might have been one other time shortly after that, but I don't recall for sure. Mike asked me to play piano at his wedding, and I assume that was in the mid 90's, so that's probably the last time I saw Al.

I hope when this is all said and done, that we can all get together and catch up on years and years of old times.

Good friends, each one, and although our journey ended early and shifted the course of our futures, I have no regrets.

I want to take a second to thank you all for reading these blogs. It really has been therapeutic for me to write them. I know that I've been writing these from my own recollections, and nothing in here should be consider a definitive Awakening history. It's just one of the 4 accounts of it. I have spent many years of my life looking back at that time period with varying degrees of regret and even embarrassment. I don't live in the same world that I did in the 1980's, and musically, intellectually and spiritually, I am not at all the same person (and let's not kid myself... I put on a few pounds!) But allowing myself to go back and remember has been a wonderful thing for me, and I thank you all for indulging me in this opportunity.

I'll write more as I think of more to write, and I hope at some point soon, we can pool all of our resources together to put some unreleased Awakening material out into the universe, and perhaps bring together some of the old masters and make them sound beefy and wonderful.

For those of you who carried our music with you through your lives, we thank you.

Thanks so much. You are all wonderful people and should be given awards or at least ice cream sandwiches!

Cheers and salutations...

Ian - July 17/09