Get on the Bus!
“Ain’t no streetcar, ain’t no subway car, it’s the Spadina bus!”
It occurred to me the other day that when I made my first City Music post last month, I never bothered to define what I hoped to achieve with the series. So here goes: “City music” is pop music with a distinct sense of place. While the literary and cinematic landscapes of our cities have been well-charted — think of the Montreal of Mordecai Richler and Michel Tremblay, or the New York of Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee — the musical landscapes remain, for the most part, terra incognita. So think of me as a navigator (half-blind, perhaps, but with a good sense of direction) who will seek out and record the places found in music.
With that in mind, I present to you two songs, one from Toronto, the other from Calgary, one from 1986, the other from 2002. Both are about bus lines: Toronto’s fabled Spadina bus and Calgary’s less-hyped but no less interesting number 2 bus.
