Review by Mike Gange

The Top 100 Canadian Albums

By Bob Mersereau

Goose Lane Publishers, $35, 214 pages

Record albums are about to become senior citizens. It was in 1948 when 33 1/3 rpm recordings were introduced to the marketplace. The record companies coined the term “album” back in the 1930s for the way they packaged 78 rpm recordings like photo albums, but the term stuck with the-then new medium. Although today’s albums are more likely to be pressed directly into CD format rather than vinyl, the term still represents a collection of work from the artist or group, although it may not all be the same theme, recorded in the same session or even composed in the same era.

In the past sixty years, with a thousand or so albums released every week, you would think someone, somewhere, somehow, would have attempted to determine the best of Canadian albums. Certainly, there is such a book for Britain‘s best albums, and there are more than a few for albums from the States. Billboard magazine and Rolling Stone magazine regularly put out a “Best of…” list, in book form. But in Canada? Nada.

That’s where Bob Mersereau comes in. Bob is an Arts Reporter for CBC Television in New Brunswick. He has written thousands of music reviews, and when he says an album is golden, it is. Bob knows music. He has a good ear and a long memory. When he looked around and realized there was no Canadian book on the Best Albums in Canada, he decided to fill the void. He contacted nearly 600 Canadians from across the country, all of whom have some expertise within the Canadian music scene: musicians, radio station personnel, music producers and music critics. He asked them to select the ten albums they thought were the best, and then using a mathematical formula called a Borda count, he gave 10 points to the number one choice, 9 points to the second choice, etc. His panel, he writes, included college radio fans, younger music fans and older veterans, anglophones and francophones, and is widely multicultural.

He gave the panel this stipulation: “to be considered Canadian, …a solo artist must have been born in Canada or have moved to this country before making the album in question. Bands had to have a majority of Canadian members when making the album. This means the Band with four of its five members born in Canada was eligible, but Crosby Still Nash and Young, with only one member was not,” he explains..

What Bob got, then, is a uniquely Canadian book. It is a consensus of nearly 600 voters, as only a Canadian could do. There is bound to be some disagreement with the results, but generally speaking, it is a snapshot of what these music business insiders think are the best of Canadian music. And the results will have you re-evaluating your own collection and wondering what you are missing. At the back of the book, Mersereau has included a check list of the Best of Canadian albums, so readers can drop hints about what they are missing in their collection.

Mersereau’s The Top 100 Canadian Albums includes those artists and bands pop music fans would expect to see: Guess Who, Neil Young, The Band, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and the Tragically Hip, but there are some surprises too, such as Stan Rogers and Glenn Gould, among the top 100.

However, this is not just another “Best of …” list of albums. Mersereau has done a lot of research for this book. For example, he includes fresh interviews with the artists, about what they were thinking as they were creating their album. Sprinkled throughout are the artists’ views of who most influenced them in their development. Names such as Ronnie Hawkins and Daniel Lanois come up repeatedly as sources of influence. Its also clear that Mersereau sat down and listened with fresh ears to every one of those albums, because he makes knowledgeable comments about the vocal abilities, musical instruments and arrangements for each album. He picks out which songs of the album really stand out, and then he goes into an explanation of why it is so good. He has dedicated a separate page to each album and appealingly used full colour reproductions of the album cover in the write up.

What this book doesn’t do, though, is make mention of the Juno awards, given out for the best in Canadian music, or the Canadian Content cultural policies that propelled the Canadian music industry in the mid and late 1960’s, making it mandatory that Canadians get to listen to Canadian artists on the radio. Nor does it ever track which albums are the best sellers, which would be another indication of their ranking within the Top 100.

You may disagree with the choices in The Top 100 Canadian Albums, but when you finally get this book in your hands, you will wonder why it hasn’t been done before. And you’ll have to get this one for your collection, whether you have been around as long as the 33 rpm, or only as long as the CD.