No pain, no gain
When Greg Macpherson plays, the only victim is
his guitar
 When
I sat down with Greg Macpherson, the first thing I wanted
to see was his hands.
He thought I was going to say something about them
being dirty, which he explained was from digging in
his brother’s garden. But no, I wanted to see
how much skin was left on his strumming hand. The reason
being he has, how to put this gently, a unique
way of playing the guitar. The best way to describe
it is, well, masochistic. The constant abuse that he
gives his hand when he furiously strumming his way through
another pain-filled song about the down trodden and
out of luck, using what looks like all of his back fingers,
has just gotta hurt and I wanted to check out the damage.
“After some shows last year this whole nail got
filed down in half. I’m a bit of a caveman on
guitar,” he explains as he shows me a surprisingly
well-intact index finger, which he then dismisses with
a bit of a wave. “Aw it’s just a little
pain, that’s what rock n roll is all about,”
he says with a laugh.
This high pain threshold is perhaps part of where he
can play the way he wants and is part of what makes
Macpherson unique. The Winnipeg singer-songwriter has
a well-established reputation for soul-baring intensity
in his music. He’s been compared to artists like
Bruce Springsteen in this sense, where his songs are
solid-workman like folky rock with a social conscience.
There’s one thing for sure, when you hear him,
he makes sure he grabs your attention.
For example, his cover of The Clash’s “(Daddy
Was A) Bankrobber” is a brand new interpretation.
Where The Clash’s version of this song about a
man who chooses a life of crime over a soul-destroying
existence working in a factory carried a slow reggae
dub vibe, Macpherson makes it sound like a different
song completely, giving it a more hostile, Billy Bragg-ish
tone, where the class consciousness rises more to the
surface. Maybe it’s because it’s easier
to envision the person singing that song being angry
and defiant, like in MacPherson’s version, than
laid back, taking a more detached view, like how the
Clash performed it. MacPherson said that entirely new
interpretation was intentional.
“When I cover songs, I don’t like to cover
them verbatim, especially, like, The Clash, they’re
such a great band, who am I to take a Clash song and
play it like exactly like they did?”
His current CD, Maintenance (G7 Welcoming
Committee), is a collection of songs that have an underlying
theme of working class struggle, either overt (“Company
Store”) or a little more subtle (“Slow Stroke”),
the songs aren’t blatantly political, but definitely
have a message that goes a little deeper, delving into
the experience of having bad luck and going though hard
times.
“I have to do things with substance, I feel like
I’m cheating myself and other people if I go up
on stage and bullshit my way through a show. Early on,
as a songwriter, I found that talking about issues,
talking about things that frustrated me allowed me to
play a show and connect me with my own idealism and
my own passion for life,” he explains.
-- Keith Powell
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