Echo Beach

Far away in time

SONG: Echo Beach

ARTIST: Martha and the Muffins

ALBUM: Metro Music

YEAR: 1980

Dear Gen X brothers and sisters,

My name’s Sonny, and I’m a…Canadian.

I know. I know.

I should have told you before you subscribed. I feel like such a fraud now; like Tim Horton’s coffee, or Drake.

I wasn’t planning on mentioning my penchant for the metric system, but I was thinking of songs for this week’s Jukebox, and the one I kept returning to was recorded by a sextet of fellow Canucks. Therefore, in the spirit of full disclosure, I confess to you, beloved reader, that my blood runs rotten with maple syrup.

While you’re probably still reeling from this revelation, I swear to you on a stack of poutines that I shall never - and I mean NEVER - play a song from the catalog of Celine Dion.

OK, then. Bring on the CanCon.

What the hell is CanCon, you ask?

‘Can-Con’ stands for ‘Canadian Content’. It refers to the Broadcasting Act of Canada, which requires radio and television broadcasters to produce and broadcast a certain percentage of audio/video content that’s been created by Canadian citizens. This is meant to stave off the influence of our mighty neighbors to the south; to prevent Canadians from drowning in a flood of Americana.

The current laws of CanCon are:

• 35% Canadian content must be played on the radio

• 55% yearly or 50% daily (60% for the CBC) Canadian content must be shown on television

As for the internet, those rules fall under the Online Streaming Act; rules that are still being hammered out as of this humble writing.

Alrighty then. Is everybody clear on what CanCon is?

OK, I get it. Enough already about the Canadian government.

Let’s get to the main event. Let’s get grooving to this week’s addition to the Gen X Jukebox. Put your hands together for Martha and the Muffins!

Martha and the Muffins formed in 1977 in my hometown of Toronto, Ontario. They chose their admittedly silly moniker in retalliation to the angry punk and new wave band names that had inundated the scene. Martha and the Muffins managed to carve out their own unique identity in Canada, and achieved moderate international success throughout the 1980’s. The band’s history is far too lengthy to get into here, though it certainly is an interesting one, particularly the stint where they went by the name ‘M+M’. You can read all about it on their Wikipedia page.

For our purposes, however, we’ll be grooving to the band’s biggest hit: a dreamy, rhythmic trip back in time, all the way back to 1980, a time when artists could still afford to live in Toronto, when the streets were grimy and filled with music, filled with bars and headshops and record stores, before the downtown core had its soul sucked out and was transformed into a clusterfuck of corporate vanilla.

Echo Beach is the first single off Martha and the Muffins’ debut album, ‘Metro Music’. The song peaked at #3 in Canada, while also reaching #1 in Portugal, #5 in Australia, #10 in the UK, and #37 in America on Billboard’s Club Play Singles Chart. Echo Beach also won the Juno Award (Canada’s equivalent of the Grammys) for Single of the Year.

“People have been asking where is Echo Beach ever since the song was written and it’s a natural question. I just thought it up and it seemed like a neat name.”

- Mark Gane

Founding member Mark Gane came up with the concept of Echo Beach while he was a student at the Ontario College of Art. He was working at a factory to make ends meet, sorting damaged wallpaper from the undamaged wallpaper. The job was as mind-numbing as a Sarah McLachlan album, but it served as fertile ground for Gane’s imagination. He began to dream of various moments in his past, of times he’d like to live again. Echo Beach was born soon after.

I happen to love Echo Beach. I love it’s killer hook and it’s pensive tone, the pulsing rhythm and blaring sax and the way the chorus is repeated until the song fades out. I really hope you enjoy the song, too. Whatever you think of it, though, I’m hard-pressed to come up with a better example of the spirit of The Gen X Jukebox. Because that’s what the Jukebox is, brothers and sisters: a nostalgic trip back in time, a dreamy remembrance of music past, avenues that lead us to our own Echo Beach.

So bust out your denim and your leather jackets, your puffy sleeves and your keyboard ties, your Converse and your ankle boots, and travel back to sandy shores far away in time.