Open Stage 

A small Ottawa café offers musician's common ground - an open mike - to share their passion with the public

(by Susan Lightstone, The Ottawa Citizen, October 13, 2002)

Tony Turner is a late bloomer. At 49, he recorded his first CD last spring. Though he'd played guitar since he was a teenager, he only got comfortable with his singing voice -- a velvety baritone -- two years ago. 

He's philosophical about it all, however. "The neatest thing about music is that you can just keep doing it. You can do it 'til the day you drop," he says. 

Tony can point, with precision, to the two moments -- 30 years apart -- which ultimately led him to Rasputin's.

"I was 10, at the cottage and listening to the radio all summer. It was 1963. It was the tail end of the folk movement, the big hit -- If I Had a Hammer. I loved what I heard." By the time he hit Ottawa's Woodroffe High School, he was playing guitar in a folk group. 

By the mid-70s, he was touring Alberta with a rock cover band. "We were never very good or very successful," he says of the band. "I don't even know why we went to Alberta. I think one of the guys had a girlfriend out there." After his short-lived rock career, he married, became a father and returned to Ottawa as an environmental consultant. 

At 40, he was hit by his second revelation. "What am I going to do for the rest of my life?" he asked. Music -- songwriting in particular -- was the answer. Tony became active in musical theatre and decided to join Writer's Bloc, a songwriters' collective housed in the Ottawa Folklore Centre. He is currently the Bloc's coordinator. He's always involved in the Ottawa Folk Festival. This year, he's contributed a song, Circle of Song, for the Folk Festival Choir. 

"A creative dam burst and songwriting became my passion," he says. "Rasputin's became my place to give birth to songs. The place where I could finally say -- OK -- that song is finally out of my head."

In the family circle of the open stage, he's taken the role of the mellifluously voiced balladeer, singing his story songs of boys who've fallen down sewers, farmers fallen on hard times, and the feathers and veils of burlesque queens. As for the significance of Rasputin's in his life. "I need the emotional support." For his song and for himself.