Newfoundland music icon comes clean about his drug use and the pitfalls and joys of the entertainment business
By KATHLEEN LIPPA
The Express
April 12 – 18, 2001
ST. JOHN’S – As Ron Hynes talks about the dream, tears hover just beneath the surface of his sharply-focused eyes. He’s talking about his life and music when memories of the dream – which features him and a close friend, who is now dead – surface.
“To have had that dream…where we were both trying to do all this cocaine, and a breeze kept blowing it away. We couldn’t get the drug into us all night for the whole dream. And I woke up and I thought, ‘Jesus, is he actually still out there trying to save my life? And I went around for days convinced that he was. So I just kinda stopped. I said, ‘OK I’m gonna stop. I’m going to be clean. I’m going to be healthy and eat well and think about my children and stop being such a selfish, egotistical, arrogant, naive asshole.'”
But it’s a profession full of pitfalls, he says. You need personal power to survive inside of it. And lots of it. “On a daily basis. That’s the only way to survive this business. Nobody else can save you. You have to save yourself. Every day.”
For his friend in the dream, it’s too late for salvation. Cocaine helped speed his death.
But Ron Hynes knows it’s not too late for his own soul.
* * *
God only knows
What takes the petal from the rose
What makes the dark rivers overflow
What makes a lifetime come and go
—Godspeed, Ron Hynes
In a Duckworth Street cafe, Ron Hynes is talking frankly about his 35-year career in music and on stage.
Revelations of the darker side of it all only seem to mark a new chapter in the Newfoundland icon’s life.
“I have a lot of respect for life in general. And sometimes I don’t have respect for my own,” Hynes says softly. “It’s just the nature of the profession. There’s a lot of temptation out there. There’s a lot of pitfalls. You can be really successful in this game too early and not have really enough personal power. Life for me is about personal power. You have to acquire it and you have to know how to use it. There’s a lot of temptations out here. There’s a lot of drugs. There’s a lot of women. There’s lots of men. There’s lots of people who will lie to you. And you can end up lying to yourself.”
Hynes moved to St. John’s from Ferryland at 17, and says, at that time, “there was no one to tell you what to do. There were only local bands in bars that played cover tunes, that mimicked the folk scene. There was nobody there who could tell you how to approach a record company, submit a song, how to write a song. There was no school to learn. There was only the street. You just had to jump in with both feet and go for it, knowing nothing.”
It takes 20 years to learn how to write songs, Hynes says.
“Like it takes 20 years to learn how to be a great painter or dancer or anything. You can’t discount songwriting. It’s a wonderful art. It’s the most accessible art form on the planet, because it’s so changeable… it’s accessible to the common man on the street. But back when I was 17 years old and I’d just come to St. John’s, it seems like a long time to me now, over 35 years ago, there was nowhere to go. The difference is now you can practically go to school to learn how to be in the music business. That may not necessarily be a good thing. I think a lot of young artists coming up right now could use a little bit of the street.”
Hynes is glad local musicians often call him for advice. “But I’m not glad to help them because I feel I should be helping other artists. That’s egotistical and naive. I’m glad to help them because I want to see music and its ongoing creativity sustained in the province of Newfoundland.”
He says, like Ireland, our artists are our greatest resource.
“We have nothing else. They can get as good doctors here as anywhere in the world. But they will never get the artists or musicians that grow up in this province. Because they are really unique artists. So, I want to see that survive.”
Hynes glows when talking about the new film that’s been made about Sonny’s Dream, called Ron Hynes: The Irish Tour. It airs on ASN on April 23 – Easter Sunday.
The film covers the fascinating story of how Sonny’s Dream crossed the Atlantic Ocean and became a hit in Ireland — so much so, many Irish people think it is native to their land. Hynes doesn’t mind that, though.
“I’m not what’s important. The song is what’s important. Songs are about communication. You have to get something, you know? Man of a Thousand Songs has to transcend something, has to get something out of the listener — an intellectual response, or an emotional response, or it doesn’t work. That’s what’s important. I’m not going to stand up on a table and say, ‘Hey, listen, I wrote this song! I’ll sit back and see if they’re getting it. Do they get it, do they like it?’
“I love it when anybody records the song, no matter what version of the tune. Especially in Sonny’s case. I mean, it’s a bit of a fluke, a song I wrote in ’76 on tour with a theatre company in Western Canada, and it just got away from me somehow.”
The reason people seem to get the emotional intent of Sonny, Hynes speculates, is because it speaks to the human condition.
‘Things will be better. Things will be better tomorrow’
“It’s that feeling of isolation that he feels. There’s the mother figure which is a very popular universal figure. And it’s the human condition that everybody thinks further down the road things will be better. It’s 20 miles to town. Things will be better. Things will be better tomorrow.”
Peter Narvaez is a professor in Memorial University’s folklore department and has been a musician playing in St. John’s folk/rock scene for decades.
Sonny’s Dream, he says, became a classic because “the harmonic structure is simple. The melody is very strong. And the words appeal to people who have found themselves… growing up without a father around. That’s very common these days. It also reflects an economy where many people have been shifting around trying to get work.”
A song like Sonny, Narvaez says, “will always appeal to people. And they will have a very positive feeling towards the song maker before that person arrives on the scene (as in the case with Ireland), if it has been a song that has touched their heart.”
As his popularity attests, Hynes has acquired a following of fans. According to some industry observers, he’s also made a body of work that will last.
“He’s able to capture things extraordinarily effectively,” says award-winning Memorial University English Professor Shane O’Dea, a long-time admirer of Hynes’ work.
“I like his combination of lyric and music, which I think makes quite individual, very distinctive, and a very interesting presentation of real life situations,” he says.
“He seems to step beyond the perceptions of the ordinary country and western singers to reach a more universalist perception of things.”
Adds Narvaez “I think Ron is one of the great songwriters of the province. His songs have appealed because, like all good songs, they have a message that reflects people’s emotions. And his best songs are songs from the heart.”
We defy the centuries
We live the oldest of intensities
Laughter and misery
Out here between time and tide
Between tears and elation
—The Final Breath, Ron Hynes
Hynes says the key to songwriting is to be able to get outside of yourself.
“You have to be able to perceive how the rest of the world lives. How do all those people and positions, how do they all connect? That’s the secret to songwriting. You have to be able to do that. And then you have to be able to go home to your wife and children and be normal,” he says, starting to laugh.
While right now his career is skyrocketing, he admits his personal life is “a wreck.”
“It’s a fucking mess. I’m at the end of my second marriage. I’ve only seen one of my four children grow up. I have two grandchildren that I never see. You know? I have personal problems. I have money problems. I just have life problems. At the same time, I’m writing better than I ever have in my life. I just had a film made about my life. My professional life is sky-rocketing my personal life’s a mess. I’m a handful — a dangerous entity in the world. Have nothing to do with me!” he says, again breaking into a big smile.