The Bright Lights of Prawda
I live in Kenora, Ontario Canada, (about 45 minutes from the Ontario-Manitoba border on Beautiful Lake of the Woods and home of the 1907 Stanley Cup Champion Kenora Thistles – look that one up if you don’t believe me) and I play bagpipes. Now condemn me or love me – it’s your choice, but I do play them – a lot. I play with 2 pipe bands: the grade 4 competitive St. Andrews Pipe Band from Winnipeg and our local community band, the Kenora Scottish Pipes and Drums (of which I happen to be the current Pipe Sergeant).
Up until COVID-19 reared its ugly head, several other crazy people and I would travel from Kenora to Winnipeg every Wednesday for band practice. This meant a two-and-a-half hour, 220 km drive each way. Sometimes as many as 7 of us would make the journey – winter and summer - all for the opportunity to play our instruments and prepare for various competitions in Canada and abroad. In winter (which can last 7 or 8 months in our neck of the woods), the driving could be rather treacherous at times.
Almost exactly halfway between Kenora and Winnipeg is the quant community of Prawda. Although I have never explored the greater municipality of Prawda, we never miss an opportunity to stop at its most alluring feature: two gas station/restaurants on the Trans-Canada Highway. We stop going and returning, taking advantage of the washrooms and the cheaper Manitoba gas prices (usually about 10¢/litre – “cheap ‘Toban gas” from the song). On most trips we also encounter lots of deer and various other species of wildlife – some alive and some unfortunately splattered all over the highway.
The seeds of this song came about one dark and stormy winter night on the return trip from Winnipeg. A winter storm was threatening and there was a lot of low cloud cover. As is the case on the prairies, seeing things a great distance away is common and as we were getting close to Prawda, I could see the halo of lights from the gas station/restaurants reflecting onto the low clouds. I may have blurted out “ah, the bright lights of Prawda” to my passengers. That phrase struck me as a good hook for a song and I started to mull over some ideas. With an hour of travel still left and with the active participation of my passengers, various tidbits of the song were entrenched in my brain.
It took about two days of tinkering and the basic song was completed, but it still didn’t quite seem right. The chorus was repeated after each verse and it felt like there was something missing from the story. A few sessions with JK and I hammered out some new choruses which ended up being able to tell the whole story. However, unlike Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” and Ian Robb’s “Garnet’s Homemade Beer” – this is not a true story.
Once COVID is just a bad memory, I expect to be on the road to Winnipeg for band practice and will once again hit “The Bright Lights of Prawda”.