Friday, October 3, 1997 — North Share News — 25

The Artist 2 much 4 U

Pop icon’s bad-ass sound splits the Garage

MAN, check out that beautiful black cat: he’s humping that big ol’ purple piano.

And then, over there, an umbrella in the dark, and another and more, all washed in purple rain, deep inside GM Place.

Lithe body draped in pastel orange, spinning, shimmy shamming it and boom, again with the splits and then 2 run up the octaves with voice as supple 2. the body.

And sheesh, that bass totin’ Rhonda Smith in the tight mint dress with the sprayed on go-go boots has some really fine legs that just won’t quit. And the colored girls go doot-di-doot all night long.

Cuz it’s a New Power Generation funky holy roller coaster and it’s a big, bad-ass sound.

2 much u sexy mother.

He calls: V-A-N-couver. The dress-up crowd is sho 2 like it. They say back, V-A-N- couver! Daddy Pop is in da house. The Artist has got the shiny ladies and fellas on a

string.

Auditioned for the King, but there are only rrinces in the world, he says.

Ya, right on Symbol Man. The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, reduced to a computer font, expands on stage to

[ils of excess plaque the

From page 23 . which began more than 40

ears ago at the Daily Colonist in Victoria.

In fact, if not for a small miscue during his gig as the paper’s record reviewer, the What ifs? could have dealt with jazz, rock-and-roll and disco.

What if Jim Taylor had liked The King?

“Elvis Presley came along, and I was into jazz,” he says of a fateful review. “He put out a record called Heartbreak Hotel and I wrote a column and said he wouldn’t last six months.”

The music world’s loss was the sport world’s gain.

But even the sport’s world, and its storied tradition of great writers, can’t seem to hold back the barbarians at the door. Take onc look at the sport pages in Vancouver's dailies and it is clear style over substance is the game plan.

“I really think that nobody laughs any more on the sports pages,” Taylor says. “Sports pages now are numbers, and I don’t like numbers. I’m a words guy.”

Evidence of the dumbing down of the sport pages can be found in the columnists The Province picked up when Taylor left for Sports Only in 1995. In place of a writer who offered some of the best writing in any section of the paper, the paper hired TV and radio sport per- ‘sonalities to weigh in weekly with their insights. And though each is quite capable in their bread-and-butter medium, these talking heads turned typists would probably tell you a dangling participle can be fixed with arthro- scopic surgery, and a double entendre is a Montreal Alouettes blocking scheme.

Taylor agrees that professional sports is in a sick state. Bur he has a remedy.

“You could fix it very easily, but it would be illegal,” he explains. “If all the owners got together and said ‘Okay, we’re not paying any- body in the National Hockey League more than a quarter of a million dollars.”

life of professional sport

“Hey, you’re 19 years old, youre coming out of Yorkton, Saskatchewan, you’ve matriculated on the bus to Melford. You gonna turn down a quarter of a mil- lion dollars a year?

“It’s all relative. Why do you have to have six million dol- lars. I mean why is Kevin Garnett insulted. Because we’ve allowed him to be insulted.”

Taylor icts this thought settle for a few seconds, then grins and says: “I’ve gor to be care- ful. Like (Province columnist Jim) Coleman says, at age 85,

‘don’t become an old fart.”

He’d be the first to admit he’s lived a charmed life (the title alone of his new book speaks to that), but tragedy has visited. Back in the seventies his daughter Teresa was paralyzed in a skiing accident in Manning Park. Feeling helpless as his daughter lay in a coma, Taylor did the only thing he knew: he wrote about it.

“After the accident she was in a coma for a long time, and we knew she’d need a speech therapist (to relearn to speak). Doctors came to me and said that the health department had put a part-time speech therapist in to ‘assess the need’ for speech therapy in the hospital.”

When the therapist concluded that rwo full- time therapists were needed, the hospital fired her. “And the doctors said to me, ‘Could you write a story?’ They said they’ve got all the facts and figures. I said I’ve gor something better. Pve got a little girl who used to ride a horse. I went in to talk to (Sea publisher) Stu Keate and he gave me a whole page.

“I was shameless. I balled for a weekend writing it. We ran pictures of Teresa riding a horse and I wrote an open letter to the health minister and it started off, When my little girl cries there is no sound, only tears. I know she’s in there somewhere. And they’re telling me it costs tuo much to bring here out.”

The hospital hired a speech therapist.

And Jim Taylor kept on writing.

become the consummate per- former he cannot deny.

Thank U Creator. What if God was One of Us

New power soul blasts Joan Osborne’s_ mighty missive. Wear the Jesus vibration. It imprints the skin. The Artist says God made him the man he is. All the young dudes. We can love.

Wow, the guitars — squig- gly, curly things. He works them hard and they squirm and whine and spit notes like Hendrix on speed. berry Beret, Little Red Corvette, Jam of the Year.

It’s a hip-hop circus and then it’s just a lite guy and a piano and a surfeit of pure pop. He strings out fragments of magic riffs we’ve heard. He’s a lounge act staking his territory, warming to the groove, testing the room.

And then its’ Diamonds and Pearls... “I am here 4 u, love is meant 4 2...”

— Michael Becker

Keith A. Cameron

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