Bet Smith and The Currie Brothers Performing At The Sawdust City Brewery in Gravenhurst and That Has Became a Hometown Tradition

 Maybe It’s Not A Priceless Heirloom, That Will One Day Give Our Boys a Life of Wealth and Luxury, But It Will Be At The Very Least, Something That Took a Lifetime to Craft

The Currie Brothers Have Achieved, At a Young Age, a Level of Respect in Music, Their Old Dad Wished Longingly For As a Career Writer - But Close Only Counts in Horseshoes!

     While I’m writing today’s post for my newly established blog site, “The Birch Hollow Antique Press,” our sons Andrew and Robert, are once again setting up the stage, at Gravenhurst’s Sawdust City Brewery, for another performance with their well known local band, “Bet Smith and the Currie Brothers.” Once again, Suzanne and I won’t be in attendance, because we hear the boys play frequently each week, in their studio in our family run vintage music and antique shop, on Muskoka Road opposite the Gravenhurst Opera House, in the former building once occupied by the Muskoka Movie Theatre in grander days. We don’t want to take up seats when we know that there will most likely be a pretty good crowd out to see their return-visit show beginning at eight o’clock. They fondly refer to Sawdust City as their hometown stage, and have appeared there numerous times over the past few years, and have always enjoyed the experience, and the kind audience. Sarah Girdwood on bass and Bet Smith on lead vocals and guitar fill out the band, and have made it a highly recognized band throughout the region. They have released several exceptional albums in recent years, and have a loyal fan ship here in South Muskoka, and are also well received in the Huntsville area where they have been frequently featured on Hunter’s Bay Radio, and at numerous other venues in North Muskoka. Tonight they are looking forward to meeting up with old friends and contemporaries they haven’t seen since the Covid restrictions were first imposed. A sort of homecoming you might say, and all day long at the shop, in between streams of business customers, Andrew had been gathering up amps, microphone stands, drums, cables, guitars, amps and a lot of other technical bits and bobs I don’t recognize, that will make the show hopefully glitch-free, as far as electronics go.

     We are a close family, and we don’t have much choice either. We are business partners who have been sharing each others professional interests since they were old enough to make their initiating purchases of vintage instruments and vinyl as part of our antique enterprise, and truthfully, that began before they were respectively ten years of age. They are self taught musicians and have lived the musician’s life since their late teens. They’ve worked with some amazingly talented and accomplished musicians over the past decade, and have worked to exhaustion at times, balancing their business interests in music, with their performance commitments, and it is with this stressful combination of professional involvements, that I believe most folks who think they know them well, really don’t appreciate the full weight of the responsibilities they’ve taken on, or how it is they manage to finally relax at the so-called end of the day. Robert relaxes with a mug of beer at his favorite watering hole, which is of course, Sawdust, and scans the vintage record and old music gear sites, as a way of wrapping up the business portion of the day. Andrew works on guitar repairs, adjustments, and re-stringing, in his restored vintage trailer in the side lot of Birch Hollow, listening to music, or half watching a favorite video. Do they do anything else when not tending to customer demands at their shop, or in the studio recording some new musical project, or performing somewhere on stage with one or other of their bands or bandmates? Other than having something to eat, or sleeping? Suzanne and I know that our boys are full of industry and ambition, and seldom find a need to remove themselves totally from what they have grown up to enjoy and in their own way, celebrate.

     It’s not easy for me to drop my crusty demeanor, that I picked up from a dozen oldtime hockey coaches, like Don Thur, for example, who came down pretty hard on any player who wasn’t pulling their weight, and a thousand pounds extra, to win a game, a series, or a championship. I can remember arriving at the player’s bench after an injury, or what I believed was a significant injury, and getting the patented “Don Thur look,” which meant, “Funnel, suck it up and get back in the net; we’ll sew your leg back on at intermission.” I loved the guy, and respected all my coaches over the years, but by golly, their rough, tough attitudes kind of stuck with me when I became a parent, and actually, as the boys will attest without coercion, Dad still sounds like the bellowing, cussing, face contortionist,  Coach Thur, and that includes pre-performance pep talks like the ones I used to get before our hockey team hit the ice. Truth is, I even do the same before we open our shop each day, thinking that I can motivate them to endure the verbal body checks and insults they receive in retail scrums in this strange present tense. Suzanne tells me to be a little gentler and less aggressive with my reminiscent “hockey talks,” to both boys, but old habits and old influences are hard to dispatch; especially when, in many cases, they seem to work at strengthening the resolve to, as coach Thur used to say,”Get back in the game Currie. No one said this was going to be easy.” In all due respect to my old north-living friend, Mr. Thur, he has long been a role model for many different reasons, so I don’t want to suggest that his influences as a coach were detrimental to me, as a doting parent who happens to like hockey analogies; as it’s what I seem to know best as a source of inspiration.

     Suzanne and I are both enormously proud of our boys because they have never given up once on self-improvement; not because of our coaching, but because they have been determined to prove naysayers and critics wrong. They have both been hurt in the past by former associates who, for reasons unknown, decided they didn’t measure up as musicians and businessmen; yet it was this reality that served as a greater inspiration and motivator than anything I could have come up with from my dog eared play book.

     The boys are very unlikely to read this today or in the near future. It really isn’t meant for their eyes, or for their egos to feed from, but rather, as a long overdue message from both Mom and Dad, offering our belated and sincere apologies, if in their opinions, we hadn’t been abundantly forthcoming with praise previously. We just didn’t want to corrupt what efforts they were making on their own, to self improve, because it was the right thing to do in order to achieve objectives even we didn’t fully appreciate.

     The reason I began this blog site, which was in part, to act as catalogue of past writing and photographic work Suzanne and I have played around with, for all these years, knowing that sooner or later both of us would have to more fully retire from the active service in the creative arts. We both want our boys to know that while we weren’t the best at committing to concert attendance, we were sincere about our devotion to making a caring family, a solid family business, and an engaging, adventurous creative enterprise in four parts, to challenge the future instead of ever being accused of resting on our laurels. This file of stories past and present, represent a pretty fair archives of our own family circus, of which we extend whatever bounty prevails, and survives, as their inheritance, being a lifetime’s humble work enjoying Muskoka, and celebrating the good life in our hometowns of Bracebridge, Gravenhurst, and Windermere, and never, ever, wanting more than a happy and contented family life in company of oh so many friends; who have become in reality, our extended family through all our trials and tribulations; that were never really that bad at all.

     I hope Sarah and Bet, Rob and Andrew, have a good night performing at the Sawdust City Brewery, and when they take their final bow after the last encore, resolve quietly, with hands held, to stay together a little while longer, and keep up a tradition that has a sweet inner glow one can only truly appreciate when the gig is over, and the gear is all loaded back into the studio, and exhaustion sets in, but in a good way. The ember of inspiration that there will be another day, another opportunity, and the joy of a return engagement with old friends and new, in the golden halo of those compelling stage lights and an open microphone.

     The Currie Brothers. They’re our boys. They’ve earned their stripes.