By: Cameron Carpenter

Label:
Goose Lane

5/14/15/51/58/70/86. Winning lottery numbers? The secret to Lost? Nope. That’s how my Top 10 faired in Bob Mersereau’s much-debated new coffee-table book, The Top 100 Canadian Albums. Mersereau, a respected East Coast journalist and radio personality, polled close to 600 artists, managers, agents, journalists and other assorted industry types and asked them to choose their top 10 Canadian albums (Live and Greatest Hits albums included, oddly enough) and rank them from one to ten. Their #1 album received ten points, #2 nine points, etc. Take all of the responses, do the math and Bob’s your uncle: the Top 100 Canadian albums.
You can’t really debate the choices in this book, as they are nothing more than personal opinions. However, when reviewing the final list, a lot of interesting observations can be made. Thirty-six of the albums were released in the seventies; only one album— The Goldberg Variations by Glenn Gould— was released in the fifties. Neil Young accounts for eight albums in total, including the number-one pick, Harvest. Other multiple honourees include Gordon Lightfoot with five nods, Joni Mitchell with four (including official runner-up with Blue), The Tragically Hip, The Band, and The Guess Who, all with four, and Sloan, Leonard Cohen, Rush and Quebec folk-rockers Harmonium with a hat-trick of selections.
Interspersed throughout the book are a series of themed individual lists. Teenage Head’s Gord Lewis picks his top 10 punk records (which happen to include two records from my top 10 which didn’t make the overall top 100: Pictures Of Health by The Headstones and the eponymous debut by The Diodes); Randy Bachman chooses a dozen Canadian guitarists, Neil Peart picks ten influential Canadian drummers and others choose regional albums from such areas as Cape Breton, Newfoundland and Labrador, Manitoba, Quebec, and the Prairies. Even Michael “Bubbles” Smith— former bassist of the most excellent Canadian powerpop band “Sandbox”— weighs in with his top 10 (Rush #1, of course).
The top 10 albums feature 3-page Mersereau-penned essays along with full album graphics, artist photos and interviews (where granted). As the list moves on, the essays shorten and the albums become somewhat more obscure.
It was nice to see some totally overlooked classic albums make the list, including the brilliant Miss America by Mary Margaret O’Hara (#32) and Cyborgs Revisited, the posthumous album release from Hamilton’s Simply Saucer (#36). Sinead O’Connor told me on her first promotional visit to Canada that she never would have had the courage to record her debut album The Lion & The Cobra if she hadn’t head Miss America. Also, one of their long-ago promo visits to Canada, I made Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore a compilation cassette of Canadian punk rock and he was thrilled that Simply Saucer was included. Speaking of our effect on foreign artists, I seem to recall a few conversations with Mark Slaughter about the brilliance of Max Webster’s High Class in Borrowed Shoes.
There are rumours of a follow-up book of the top Canadian songs of all time, which I know will paint a dramatically different landscape of our musical culture. If you have a music fan in the family you could do a lot worse than putting this well-crafted book under the tree.