Music: DeCroo Releases Allegheny, BC

Renowned Canadian songwriter Rodney DeCroo is launching his debut collection of poetry, Allegheny, BC (Nightwood Editions, $18.95) in Vancouver at the Little Mountain Gallery on 26 Avenue and Main St. on Saturday, September 22. Doors open at 7:45pm, show starts at 8:15. Rodney's performance will feature poems from the book, as well as his music. He will be joined by Doug Andrews, the Minimalist Jugband, Torsten Muller and Christine Rose. Tickets are $10 at the door.

Allegheny, BC is an unsettling collection in which Rodney DeCroo delivers raw footage of a childhood marred by violence, sudden uprootings and abuse. It is a vividly gritty tour through his troubled past in a small coal town, the bush of northern BC and the bars, strip clubs, seedy hotels and bleak streets of both large Canadian cities and small, isolated towns. Sobering and straightforward, the poems are fiercely potent. DeCroo's raw language and stark vision of reality will stick with you, as will “a nausea-twist in your stomach” and “the smell of/ tobacco, sweat, beer and coal dust.” It is a collection that reveals, with urgent intensity, the shape of a life in an abrasive world.

This book expands upon the lyrics in DeCroo's latest album, Allegheny, and broadens the harrowing narrative of his past. The book and album, together, are a reclamation project, an imaginative remembering through the savaged places of the human heart into a state of beauty and acceptance.

Rodney DeCroo, who is headlining the event, will be performing his poems and songs. The line-up also includes: Doug Andrews from the band, The Circus In Flames, who has shared the stage with everyone from the Ramones to Raffi to Ramblin' Jack Elliott; The Minimalist Jugband—with a look that is part scarecrow, part Johnny Cash, and part hillbilly evangelist—who stares out at the audience with a wild look in his eyes as he plunks a wash tub bass and recites poems about wearing a pair of dead man's pants, his inability to distinguish between a raven and a crow, or anything else that happens to capture his imagination; Torsten Muller, an internationally renowned free music/ jazz improviser and acoustic bassist who has performed concerts all over the world with a diverse array of gifted improvisers; and Christine Rose, whose songs are lyrically driven, aiming for honesty and poetry, and finding the melody on which to hang the words.

For more information about Rodney DeCroo, go to www.rodneydecroo.com