Strange Way to Live. Carl Dixon
but steady path forward. I’d kept playing guitar a bit, teaching myself as I could and, singing along with records or the radio. I eventually found other musicians to play with when I was sixteen and started performing in bars. I got that job, playing with twenty-five-year-olds, because I could sing. The catch was that I had to be able to play guitar as well. Never mind that I’d neglected my instrument for a long time and only remembered three chords; I bluffed and said, “Oh yeah, I can play guitar!” and then ran home to practise madly and catch up a bit. I was prepared just enough and had the accompanying desire that got my foot in the door. I’d lied, but I was in my first band! That was the start of everything.
In time I moved on from that band to others and kept on working and improving. Yet for all this low-level emulation of my musical heroes, I didn’t really believe that I could be one of “those guys.” It seemed as if they must all dwell in a magical dimension on the other side of the radio/record company machine, far removed from the world that I inhabited. I imagined they’d be thinking great thoughts and living sun-kissed lives of bringing joy to the world. (That’s what music means to me: bringing joy to the world.)
Being from the woods of northern Ontario, I couldn’t imagine myself in that magical dimension. I didn’t ever picture making a career out of music. It may seem odd, but I never thought of a musical “career” at any time. I just wound up having one because I kept on doing musical things.
sibby rules by baton
A big part of my development as a musician and as a person came through my involvement with the high school concert band. After my ninth-grade year in Collingwood, where the emphasis in music class was on the marching band, my family moved again to Barrie, where I began school in September. Being new in town, I could choose which of the town’s three high schools to attend. I chose Barrie District North Collegiate, luckily, as it turned out.
An energetic young woman named Sharon Sibthorpe taught the music program at North. “Sibby” was the guiding light of the music room. Her keenness and enthusiasm for music in all its facets and details was contagious. She touched the students with her zeal for accomplishing things together as a band as well as individually. It wasn’t necessary to hard-sell us on improving our playing skills; a mood of freedom and possibility accompanied all things “North Music.” As a new program, North Music was free to be anything it wanted, not constrained by years of tradition or habit. We were the underdogs in town, the upstart school band with no history, no awards, and no traditions. That left it up to Sibby and the kids who signed on with her to blaze a new trail.
A word from the music teacher
As a new teacher in the early 1970s who was asked to resurrect a dying music program, I depended on my students to get me through the long days. Their spirit, determination, and talent continued through those early days and over the thirty years that followed. Carl exemplified the student who made each day memorable.
I think you have to know that every girl at Barrie North, especially the flute and clarinet players, had a crush on Carl. The long blonde locks, the athletic good looks, and being a member of the track team, Carl had a winning combination. However, it was Carl’s gentle and caring spirit that really made him special. He always had his opinion but was willing to hear yours too.
He played drums in all of the ensembles and over his years at North worked and received first class honours on his Grade 8 Percussion exam. Carl in his last year was Concert Master of the band, a position elected by the students.
I think it is safe to say that in band, through the trips, the rehearsals, the concerts, you learn skills for life. Working as a team towards a goal, travelling across a country together, laughing and crying, struggling through and then mastering the music, were all part of the music experience. I, and the band of the early days, will never forget when a band member died suddenly. Carl and his friends were the pallbearers at that funeral. It went beyond the music, but the music is what brought them all together.
The memory of switching an entire concert program so that the track team could be there to perform is one for the books. The switch from track uniform to band uniform can be done in five minutes flat, I believe.
Every teacher is proud when their students do well in life. Watching Carl’s career soar, watching him come back from the horrific accident, listening to him play last year in his community wind ensemble; all proud moments.
Thank you, Carl, for being such an important part of my musical adventure.
Sharon
Intent on the timpani part, 1975.
Photo: Barrie Examiner
I wasn’t sophisticated enough then to give it a name, but I can now recognize Sharon as the first positive-thinking role model I’d encountered outside my own family. Sharon swept her students along with her toward a “never settle, always keep improving” approach to music education. I thrived in that environment as my latent musical ability was expressed through all manner of percussion instruments. I’ve observed over the years that every organization is a reflection of the man or woman at the top. The organization’s methods, strengths, and weaknesses all result from the energy of the person in charge and from the worth of the central idea. In this case the idea was for young people to improve themselves through playing music. With that powerful idea in place, all our organization needed was the right person to encourage those young people toward the worthy goal. Miss Sibthorpe was the right person.
Under Sharon’s influence I blossomed and grew in confidence and leadership. She encouraged me but also didn’t give me a skate when I screwed up. I missed turning in a major essay in second term one year and watched my report card mark drop from a 90 to a 67. I learned that lesson. It’s not enough to play the instrument well; you have to know the history and theory too. Oh yeah, and do the work!
magic moments, or how i tied the threads together
Important formative moments occur in all our lives; some swim into view for me as I cast an eye over the years. In my experience, the learning that comes from the pursuits of music and sports/fitness crosses over in complementary fashion.
Sault Ste. Marie was a nice place to grow up. My parents bought a little bungalow in a subdivision, still in the building stage, and my dad asked the developer please not to bulldoze the trees in our lot the way all the others had been. We had the most popular yard in Manitou Park as a result. Around us were many young families, and we lived across the street from the newly built school, so I had many friends to play with, along with access to a playground, safe streets, and nearby forests where we’d run around all day long. Lakes were close by for summer swimming and snow fell in legendary amounts in winter. There was a reasonable degree of prosperity in the little city of seventy-five thousand because of the Algoma Steel mill and its unionized workforce.
There was an outdoor skating rink a block away every winter, which lasted for months in that climate. It had a wooden shack with benches where you’d sit to tie up your skates and a woodstove with a grill where you’d put your snow-encrusted mittens to dry while you got in from the cold for a few minutes. There was a homemade broad wooden snow scraper for clearing the ice, and all would take their turn in pushing it. The rink was a great little gathering place. I wanted very much to be a good skater like so many of my friends, but my dad was discouraging about hockey; he thought it was for the lower strata of society.
Thus I fell behind my chums and for a time would only go when the rink was empty because I was embarrassed. My grandparents flew up to visit us, and I recall Rudi going out on the ice in his galoshes to take up the goalie stick and tend goal in a pick-up shinny game. I was very proud of him. Grandma Hella bought me my first hockey stick, to my dad’s dismay, from a gas station on our way to drop her at the Sault airport. It wasn’t until I moved to Haliburton at age