Humble sister act at work


Despite high praise for the McGarrigle Sisters' latest album, the folksingers remain stubbornly out of the spotlight

Humble sister act at work

Kate (left) and Anna McGarrigle on Aug. 29, 1996.

Photograph by: John Mahoney , The Gazette

This story was originally published in The Gazette on Dec. 7, 1998.

Outside the window of the small restaurant where Kate and Anna McGarrigle have each ordered a creme de legumes soup and a salad to share, the rhythms of a Montreal November are palpable. Under gunmetal skies hinting at freezing rain, people march with purposeful briskness. Children run home to lunch. The local street character, a voluble rubber-faced fellow on a bicycle, chats with a passer-by in mid-intersection, large black dog stolidly by his side, cat in a carrying bag.

The restaurant, which unaccountably bears two different names (testament, perhaps, to Montreal's casual and continually evolving sense of identity), is in the dense urban neighbourhood of Outremont, around the corner from Kate's home.

Anna, who lives with her husband and two grown children an hour away in Alexandria, Ont., has driven in for the day. Kate's Outremont flat is clearly Anna's second home.

To observe that the two singing sisters, just 14 months separating them, are close is like observing that Siamese twins are joined.

"Anna!" exclaims Kate, the 52-year-old take-charge younger sister who retains the faintest trace of New York brassiness picked up during the brief period she lived there in the early 1970s. Her sister has ordered coffee. "How many have you had today?"

"Just one," says Anna in her quieter voice. "A little tiny cup."

"I don't believe it," responds Kate with resigned good humour.

The McGarrigles are on a brief break from the rigourous tour schedule that has zigzagged them across the continent, north-south, east-west, during the past six weeks. The tour is to promote the sisters' latest album, a startlingly original release called The McGarrigle Hour, which mimics an old-fashioned musical family get-together - with an extraordinarily accomplished family.

Kate's ex-husband, Loudon Wainwright III, is on hand, along with the couple's two children, 25-year-old Rufus Wainwright and 22-year-old Martha, both emerging artists in their own right. Anna's 19-year-old daughter, Lily Lanken, contributes, as well as Dane Lanken, Anna's basso profundo-voiced journalist husband. Emmylou Harris joins in on three songs (singing in respectable French on the Cajun Porte en Arriere), and Linda Ronstadt on one (an ethereal Gentle Annie, the Stephen Foster song that was father Frank McGarrigle's favourite).

Last month, Joe Breen of The Irish Times described the album as "an affectionate portrait of a family at song," wherein the sisters "infuse the proceedings with their trademark emotional intensity."

But emotion is only half their mesmerizing appeal. The rest lies shimmeringly in sound.

In the New York Times three weeks ago, Stephen Holden reviewed the Saturday-night concert the McGarrigles gave at New York's Town Hall - the same venue where Kate, who recently found the ticket stubs, went to see an emerging folk artist named Bob Dylan 36 years ago.

Along with Loudon Wainwright, who shared the stage with them, the McGarrigles, wrote Holden, "are virtually the only baby-boom folksingers left who continue to pour their lives into their songs without worrying about how they look. (They present) a moving portrait of a tribe of thorny, smart, gifted individuals muddling through life together, bonded by music and conveying a shared wisdom of the most convincing kind."

High praise for artists who remain stubbornly just beyond the spotlight of high-profile celebrity.

"We're not unhappy with that," says Anna, "though sometimes it would be nice to have a little bit more money." The sisters say they don't make enough to have such luxuries as a manager or road crew, so that they do all their own planning and, on tour, lug their own instruments. "But neither one of us is really terribly ambitious that way."

Says Kate: "I drive a Ford. I don't want a Mercedes. Having a lot of money - well, it can attract a certain kind of people that maybe we don't want to attract. This way, we're not vulnerable. People don't recognize us? That's fine with me."

Among the musical cognoscenti, however, the sisters are celebrated, even if some of the descriptions of them have gone slightly awry in the accuracy department. The Daily Telegraph's James Bennett calls the McGarrigles "French-Canadian sisters." Dublin's Breen credits their Irish-French background as the wellspring of their creative inspiration. New York's Holden describes their musical vocabulary as "a transcendent Americana."

The truth is, the McGarrigles are neither French-Canadian, nor French, nor Irish, nor American.

They are Montreal, pure and simple. Or - more accurately - Montreal, motley and mysterious.

To understand a little of the layered diversity of Montreal is to experience a little of the McGarrigles, from Anna's complex Heart Like A Wheel and Heartbeats Accelerating (both recorded by Linda Ronstadt) to Kate's luminous hymn to the restless soul, Talk to Me of Mendocino.

Kate and Anna are the natural product of a cosmopolitan, culturally rich city with a Gallic face and form that, especially in their younger days, also made generous room for a diverse and productive English-speaking community.

Born in Montreal, they moved with their parents and older sister Jane to the Laurentian village of Saint-Sauveur-des-Monts in 1946, when Kate was a baby. Their father, who suffered from emphysema, could breathe better in the country air and, being self-employed, could work just as well there. A community that was transforming itself into a ski resort, Saint-Sauveur, says Kate, was a surprisingly cosmopolitan mix of languages and cultures.

Speaking English at home (their mother, Gaby Latremouille, was part-francophone but had been raised mostly in English), the three girls attended French-language school, becoming fluently bilingual. They also took piano lessons from the village nuns for $4 a month.

For secondary studies, Anna and Kate came into the city and attended Town of Mount Royal Catholic High School, where Kate won the math prize, having been the only girl allowed into the boys' trigonometry class. She followed that with engineering studies at McGill, transferring into science after two years and earning a BSc. Anna, who took secretarial studies at the Mother House, the business school run by the sisters of the Congregation de Notre Dame, also studied at Montreal's prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Meanwhile, from early high school days, they had been singing - Kingston Trio covers at first, then obscure turn-of-the-century material from the American South - and began to appear regularly on the city's folk scene, from college shows at Loyola College to performances at a tiny Cote des Neiges coffeehouse that many consider the cradle of Montreal folk.

Before falling head over heels into a life of music, Anna worked half the year at secretarial jobs and created art the other half. Kate got a job in 1969 as a systems analyst in an office on Sherbrooke St. "I was there for, what, three weeks? And then Anna came over one day with a couple of friends, and she said, let's go to lunch. So we went to lunch, and I just never went back. I left my umbrella, a raincoat."

That was the Montreal that poured itself into the McGarrigles: a heady mix of two languages, different cultures, nuns, religion - and gender-separated schools, a strong sense of community, Sherbrooke St., the comfort of family (like so many in Quebec, English and French) composed of all kinds of wildly, wonderfully impure strands of laine - and an enthusiasm spawned by Expo 67, with its atmosphere of creative openness that made everything seem possible.

That, and the influence of the sisters' remarkable mother, another bedrock Montrealer/Montrealaise to the core.

"Gaby had her opinions," says Kate fondly. "She was very smart. And she had a wicked sense of humour."

Given half a chance, Kate and Anna will regale listeners with tales of the formidable and fun-loving woman who died in 1994 - of her attachment to leftist ideals, the offshoot of her father's union activism, and how she passed them along. They talk of her spirited friendship with the late May Carter, the fun-loving former head of the Sacred Heart nuns and sister of Toronto's more sober-sided Cardinal Emmett Carter. They talk with unabashed admiration of how their mother, as a young woman, taught a lesson to a lecherous boss with dishonourable intentions.

"He was a married man who kept a 'tootsie' in an apartment downtown," explains Kate, "but he was always coming on to Gaby, who was about 21, 22 at the time. At one point, she said, she opened her purse and gave him five bucks and said, 'Go on, (So-and-so), go on down to The Main. Have one on me.' She said he never bothered her again."

The McGarrigle Hour features a couple of songs devoted to the clan matriarch. Anna's daughter, Lily, sings Alice Blue Gown, a song of antique sweetness that her grandmother Gaby used to perform at parties in vaudevillian high camp. And Kate joins the Wainwrights - her son and daughter, as well as her ex-husband - in a memorably moving rendition of Irving Berlin's What'll I Do, which Rufus sang at Gaby's funeral to Jane's accompaniment.

But besides ethnic and linguistic environment and family influence, there is a third element to the McGarrigle mix. Montreal is an island city, literally and figuratively.

Surrounded by the waters of two rivers, it is also an island of French in a North American sea of English - or, depending on your state of defensiveness, a tiny anglo outpost in Quebec's vast francophone territory. In either language, there is an informing sense of apartness, a condition of insularity that has prevailed to some extent in the McGarrigles' career - because there is no getting around it: in big-market terms, the sisters' appeal is indisputably marginal.

"The McGarrigles," laughs Anna, "are the R. Murray Schafers of popular music."

"Our career happened by choice and by chance," admits Kate. "I think in order to have a career, you need a career plan: You get to this level, you get to that level, you have your nose job at this place, you have people who design your image. We never really had a particular plan."

They still don't, beyond continuing to do the creating and performing they have always loved.

Anna does confess to a few nagging concerns about aging.

"Sometimes I think, when we're out on the road, maybe we shouldn't be doing this. Maybe we should be letting some younger person be up on the stage."

"Well," muses Kate, "one thing music should be is sexy. That's its basis. And after a while, you stop being sexy. I mean, you're not out there to wow them." Maybe, she says, you shouldn't keep doing it if you're no longer seductive. "I don't know what kind of songs one can sing about then," says the woman who wrote I Eat Dinner, possibly the loneliest song about middle age ever composed. "Is there a market in the geriatric ward?"

Anna mentions the bitterness that infuses Grace Slick's recently published book about the unkind fate awaiting aging women in the music world. The sisters' conclusion seems to be that, while Slick has been pretty crass about it, there may be some justification for the bitterness.

"Whereas," says Anna, "we've just kind of hobbled along." They laugh, a spontaneous chorus of good-natured self-deprecation, though anyone else would be quick to observe that their hobbling has had a most sublime grace to it.

Outside, the local street character has gone his garrulous way. Kids hurry back to afternoon classes, their faces ruddy in the pre-winter chill. The traffic moves in a steady flow along nearby Park Ave.and pedestrians keep their heads down against the wind, marchers to the November-gray version of the city's distinctive rhythms.

Bundled up, Kate and Anna McGarrigle step outside and join the familiar urban chorus.



Photograph by: John Mahoney, The Gazette


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