In my effort to publish more posts to this site, and to move past the cleverism of my early link-laden style, I am going to start simply placing links to (and archival copies of the text of) the obituaries of notable people. The obituaries that I have learned much from. The obituaries of people who I believe should be heard from, if even in death.
Hugh McIntyre was a maker of noise music, an influencer of great artists, and a public librarian. A common man who lived a remarkable life.
HUGH McINTYRE, MAKER OF ‘NOISE’ MUSIC: 1936-2004
A lifetime member of the Nihilist Spasm band, he played a home-made bass that looked like ‘a stick of wood with strings on it,’ writes SANDRA MARTINBy SANDRA MARTIN
UPDATED AT 11:24 AM EST Friday, Dec 24, 2004
Hugh McIntyre worked as a public librarian, but his life belonged to the Nihilist Spasm Band, a London, Ont., group dedicated to making “noise” music. The group has met as regularly as a ticking metronome to play their home-made instruments on Monday nights in various London hot spots for the past 40 years.
Mr. McIntyre, along with the late artist Greg Curnoe, was one of the band’s eight founders. He played the electric bass, an instrument that looked like “a stick of wood with strings on it,” according to sculptor and band member Murray Favro.
As for their music, Mr. Favro said: “We improvise. We start with chaos and patterns come out of that. It sounds very loud, very chaotic, but when you get used to it, people like it.”
Somebody who liked it very much was musician Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. “All these people who sort of put themselves on stage and want to be super rock stars,” he said in 1999, “there’s no way they can ever attain the majesty that Hugh has on stage.”
A big man, who must have weighed 300 pounds, Mr. McIntyre had piercing blue eyes a flowing white beard and a shy quiet manner — until you got him going, that is. Then he could talk for hours on any subject that interested him. He was extraordinarily well read on any number of topics and he had an encyclopedic memory.
The world was basically divided into friends and the rest — people not worth wasting time on. If he liked you, there was no end to his generosity. The writer Isabel Huggan, who grew up in London, met him through Mr. Curnoe.
In a memorial to Mr. McIntyre, she recalled showing him some early poems she had written back in the mid-1960s. “These are really pretty bad,” he told her in what she described as a “tone of such regret and such affection that I still regard that moment as the best rejection I’ve ever had. Slowly we went through the poems and he showed me what utter crap they were, and yet he did so without discouraging me from ever writing again.”
He was not only the bass player, in many ways he was the base of the band, establishing the closest thing to a regular rhythm and wielding a stopwatch to cut numbers off abruptly that he feared might otherwise reach a logical musical conclusion. His discipline made it a better band than it would have been otherwise, believes Art Gallery of Ontario curator Ben Portis who insists the band is “among the best in the world.”
Another fan was the group REM, who asked to play with them when they stopped in London on tour this past November. It was the last time Mr. McIntyre, who had been suffering from the complications of diabetes and congestive heart failure, played in public.
Hugh McIntyre was born in St. Thomas, Ont. He studied philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, earned a degree in library science from the University of Toronto and worked as a public librarian for 30 years before he retired in 2001.
Mr. McIntyre was as a key figure in the “anti-Toronto, anti-American, putative anti-centre of the world” ferment of London in the 1960s, according to Mr. Portis. As a founder (With Mr. Pratten, Robin Askew and Tony Penikett) and publisher of Twenty Cents magazine, he helped launch “one of the first ‘zines, a forum not only for the essays and rants, drawings and doodles of notable London artists and their friends, but an early venue for such future distinguished authors and poets as Michael Ondaatje and Denis Tourbin. He filled his role with an amateur aplomb — high standards intoned without anyone being allowed to take themselves seriously either.”
Teacher Bill Exley, another founder of the band, recalled that a group of friends — all in their early 20s — including Mr. Curnoe, John Boyle and Archie Leitch (who left the band after a couple of years because he wanted to be a “real” musician) had rented a communal cottage in Port Stanley in 1965. Band member John Clement would have been there, but he was away. They made a silent movie called No Movie and decided they wanted a soundtrack. They bought kazoos on the boardwalk, recorded themselves and ended up not only with a soundtrack but a band.
It was Mr. McIntyre who named the band. He’d been reading about early jazz and blues and discovered that groups in New Orleans that played on home-made or found instruments were called spasm or kitchen bands. In writing about the NSB, Globe music columnist Carl Wilson said, “They looked back to 1913 when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring enraged his audience, when Futurist Luigi Russolo published his Art of Noise manifesto in Italy, and Marcel Duchamp composed his first piece of music using games of chance.”
The band recorded a number of CDs over the years, toured Japan in the mid-1990s and played at various venues in the United States and Canada and were the stars of the No Music Festivals from 1998 through 2003.
Mr. McIntyre never married and he had no children. The band members and their extended families were his kin. All of them who could get there gathered around Mr. McIntyre’s hospital bed to usher him out. “Goodbye old friend, say hello to Greg for us,” Mr. Patten said at the end.
Hugh McIntyre was born in St. Thomas, Ont. on Sept. 30, 1936. He died of heart failure in hospital in London, Ont. on Dec. 6. He was 68. He is survived by one sister and the members of the Nihilist Spasm Band.
Bell Globemedia
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