FYI...
-Julius
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The Globe Review
Beyond the star-making machine Joni Mitchell's friend Don Freed has looked at
life from both sides now - and he's chosen his songwriting work with kids and
his Saskatoon apartment over Mitchell's mansion
SHEILA ROBERTSON
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
11/01/2000
The Globe and Mail
National
R4
All material copyright Thomson Canada Limited or its licensors. All rights
reserved.
SASKATOON -- Singer and songwriter Don Freed is a study in contrasts, like
the dappling of sunlight and shadow on a forest floor. He's been in the
spotlight, and shared it with such performers as Johnny Cash, but he also
likes his low-key life in Saskatoon.
He's been Joni Mitchell's consort for seven years, but they mostly live
separately. "It's easy," he says, of making a relationship work when she's in
a Bel Air mansion and he's in a little apartment in a Prairie city. "Neither
of us cohabits well. We're always working on something and we both need a lot
of solitude."
He adds, too, that Mitchell casts "kind of a big shadow to be in. She's a big
celebrity. We can be in the most obscure places for a holiday and it turns
into a walking autograph party." He's adamant about not being "thought of in
terms of somebody else. In order to do what I do, I've got to retain a sense
of self."
The project that's kept him rooted in Saskatchewan for the past eight years
is a songwriting venture with children in isolated communities. This month,
he's visiting schools in the northern towns of Creighton and Wollaston Lake,
adding more songs to his collection of several hundred. In the coming months,
he hopes to record 40 of these songs with the youngsters who helped create
them, then to release the work on his own Bushleague Records label next year.
When he gets together with Mitchell, "it's kind of interesting," Freed says.
"I might be dining with the King of Sweden and staying in a suite at the
Waldorf-Astoria, and a couple of days later I'll be sleeping on the floor in
some reserve, eating native M and Ms" -- his slang term for moose meat and
muskeg tea.
He allows he's become "more worldly" as a result of his relationship with
Mitchell. He points to a photo of her with Bob Dylan, whose songs he sang
along with his own when, as a skinny teenager, he began performing at
coffeehouses in 1965. "I took that picture, in Japan," he says.
Mitchell's mother, who lives in Saskatoon, introduced her to Freed in 1993.
"We'd both gone through a period of no relationships in our lives," he notes.
"I was getting older and I was worrying that I was so solitary and wondering
what kind of a relationship I could possibly have. It turned out she was
thinking along the same lines."
Shortly after they met, he moved to Los Angeles to be with her "and basically
sat around a pool for six months." He discovered "I can't do that."
Now they visit back and forth, but he's based in a tiny, third-floor
apartment on Saskatoon's west side, not far from the neighbourhood in which
he grew up in the fifties and sixties.
He lives simply. He has no car, and for years, he didn't even have a
television but, he admits with a smile, "Those winters can get awfully long.
I mostly watch nature shows, though." It's not that he doesn't enjoy the
limelight, says Freed, as he sips iced tea and plays with an unlit cigarette.
But he wants the real thing, not a reflected glow. He's finally finding a
sense of real achievement now in his multifaceted project with school
children.
"I've never been superfocused on anything until this," he says. His childhood
heroes were inventors and he claimed he'd become "either a scientist or a
hobo" when he grew up. As a troubadour, he's been closer to the latter. "I've
just meandered and written songs. Maybe it's my Metis blood, just following
the river, because all my relatives were voyageurs and traders."
At 51, Freed, who admits he was a "horrible" student ("If I was in school
now, I'd be taking Ritalin"), has finally found his niche in the classroom,
with animated students surrounding him and his guitar. But he's particular
about not being known as a children's performer. On his business card, Freed
describes himself as a "creative facilitator/performer."
In collaboration with kids in isolated communities throughout Saskatchewan --
where many share his Metis heritage -- he's created hundreds of songs
touching on their experiences and interests. The verses, some poignant and
others rollicking, are filled with ravens and sasquatches, bears and bannock.
A much-requested song, wherever he goes, is Me and My Skunk, from Pinehouse
Lake. At school assemblies at Turnor Lake, the students sing their song,
about catching suckers at the bridge. Freed is now doing his last songwriting
workshops in northern schools, sponsored by Saskatchewan Education and the
Ile-a-la-Crosse school division. Ultimately, the songs and accompanying
material in Cree, Dene and Michif (a patois of Cree and French) will be part
of the provincial school curriculum.
Freed has hired a professional fundraiser to secure the $125,000 necessary to
produce a double album, Our Very Own Songs. If all goes well, he'll release
it and an accompanying songbook and a CD-ROM next fall. There are also plans
for a Web site, connecting these youngsters with children around the world.
Sure, he agrees, he could ask Mitchell to bankroll this ambitious project.
"But I wouldn't want to do that," he says firmly.
It's the time in Saskatoon's Cosmic Pad recording studio with engineer Ross
Nykiforuk, that will be expensive. "Bed tracks" of the songs, containing only
the instrumentals, will be sent to the schools so that the youngsters who
wrote each song (or their younger siblings) will be able to rehearse. Later,
Freed and Nykiforuk will record the vocals with the children before taking
them back to the studio for mixing.
While it has afforded him only a "meagre" living over the past eight years,
this work is a calling to Freed. It represents a fusion of impulses and
incidents he initially couldn't understand.
Some of the early breaks in Freed's career came through his serendipitous
association with Johnny Cash. When he attended a Cash concert in Calgary in
1968, he was picked as a quintessential fan by a crew making a documentary
about Cash and ended up being taken to Nashville for more scenes. Not long
afterwards, Cash invited Freed, the hometown boy, up on stage at a Saskatoon
concert to sing a couple of songs. Ironically, the documentary was panned
when it came out a year later, but Freed got a favourable mention in the New
York Times. This led to a personal management and recording contract for the
young musician in New York City.
Strangely, though, all the while he was a fledgling songwriter in New York in
the early 1970s, he felt compelled to work in northern Saskatchewan -- a part
of the province he'd never visited.
Instead, he returned to Saskatoon and embarked on a career singing in bars
and producing his own recordings. His first, in 1981, was Off in All
Directions, a reference to his diverse musical interests, that embraced, then
as now, country, folk and pop genres.
He had a revelation in 1989, discovering his Metis ancestry at the funeral of
his great-aunt in Duck Lake, Sask. He had thought he was French and Swedish,
but now he learned, for example, that Gabriel Dumont was a great-great uncle.
He was still avidly researching his roots when another northern community,
Labrador's Davis Inlet, dominated headlines in 1992, following the tragic
suicides of despondent young Innu. "And every cell in my body said to do
something, to create a positive story."
In the early seventies, he'd visited a friend at a fly-in reserve in the
north. "I noticed how great the kids were, walking around with their arms
around each other in little clusters. They weren't whiny, bratty,
mean-spirited kids."
With the arrival of television, they began comparing their lives to the
glamorous worlds they saw on the screen, he says, "and their self-esteem just
plummeted. I knew there was a lot of positive energy up there and I wanted to
go up there and get it."
With the blessings of the Saskatchewan education ministry and the Northern
Lights School Division, Freed arrived in Jans Bay, population 100, in 1992.
He'd never performed for children and had no children's repertoire. However,
he says, "If the heart is in a sincere place, it finds a way."
He began by singing Old Macdonald Had a Farm, and it went on for 45 minutes
"because they wanted every animal in creation in there . . . a raven, a bear,
a moose. They wanted their own world reflected in the song, and that told me
a great deal."
Freed himself secretly started writing stories at age 7 and songs a few years
later. He'd write one line on top of another, a code to ensure nobody else
could read it.
"I'd stay up all night and hum under my pillow, and go to school every day
sleep-deprived." He savours the irony in "taking the same energy that made me
a bad student back into the classroom and doing this project.
"If someone had come into my classroom when I was in Grade 2 and said 'We're
gonna write a song,' I wouldn't have had to write one line over the other."
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