John Mann remembered: A whirling dervish onstage, wise, gentle and kind
Credit to Author: John Mackie| Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2019 02:56:35 +0000
Spirit of the West made some great records. But the band’s real forte was live, where singer/guitarist John Mann would careen about the stage like a man possessed.
“Somehow he learned to keep his guitar playing reasonably steady while he was whipping around like a whirling dervish,” marvels bandmate Geoffrey Kelly. “Which is not easy, I couldn’t do it.”
Mann’s energy would ignite the audience, which would go completely nuts.
“We actually broke two floors in Canada,” recounts drummer Vince Dietrich. “One was in Bala, Ont., in cottage country. We had the people going up and down so much that they had to stop the show and reinforce the floor with wood.
“The other one they made us stop. We were in Quebec City. They were certain that the floor was going to fall right through this 450-year-old building and (the building would) just collapse.”
Mann could do gigs like this because he was in tip-top shape, the fittest guy to come out of Vancouver’s music scene in the 80s and 90s.
“You’d see him whizzin’ around town on his roller board,” said Paul Hyde of the Paylola$. You’d think: “What, does he think, he’s 15 still?”
But Mann spent most of the last decade battling serious health problems. In 2009, he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. But after treatment, he said in 2011 he’d made a full recovery.
Sadly, in 2014, he announced he had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He died Wednesday afternoon at the Yaletown House care home, where he’d lived the past couple of years. He was 57.
“He died how he lived, surrounded by family, friends and music,” said his daughter Hattie.
Spirit of the West frontman John Mann on stage as the band plays at the Commodore Ballroom, April 15, 2016.
John Fraser Mann was born in Calgary on Nov. 18, 1962, and grew up in Winnipeg and North Vancouver. His first artistic love was acting.
Kelly said his wife Alison and Mann were both theatre students at Langara’s Studio 58. “My wife brought John to my attention. I was playing a little bit of music with Jay Knudson, the other founder of Spirit of the West. We were just kind of hacking away in our living rooms and open mike nights here and there, not really doing anything serious.
“But once we met John, it felt like this tornado had come into our little folky world. He loved folk music, but he was more of a punk rocker who loved folk music.”
The trio started off playing “weekend hobby” gigs on the Gulf Islands, but quickly realized they had something unique. Encouraged by friends and family, they quit their jobs and built up a following the old-school way, playing live.
“They honestly had no idea,” said Dietrich, who joined the band several years into their career. “They were just doing it for a lark, in a lot of ways. They didn’t know they were doing it the hard way — they didn’t know anything! They just got some chords together, some guitars and flutes and just made (stuff) happen.”
“There was no big game plan,” Kelly confirms. “We were not savvy at all about the world of music, or the business world of music.”
But it worked. The band straddled both the folk and college radio worlds, and songs like Political, The Crawl and Home for a Rest helped them earn a loyal following.
Mann eventually returned to acting as well, working in theatre, TV and movies.
“He did a lot of acting,” said Hyde. “A lot of assassin jobs. He got one job where he was on top of B.C. Place with a rifle as a bad guy.”
John Mann.
Hyde produced the second Spirit of the West album, Tripping Up The Stairs, and remained good friends with Mann.
“John was always on the right side of everything, you know,” said Hyde. “It doesn’t matter what it was, he was always on the right side of it. That’s what I really loved about him.”
A lot of people loved Mann, who was one of the sweetest guys you could ever hope to meet.
“He was a bit of a Buddha,” said Dietrich. “Wise and gentle and kind. It’s a nice combo. He didn’t put on airs. He was so down to earth that was almost his shtick, the anti-rock star in a way.”
He was also a devoted family man, married to actor and playwright Jill Daum. The couple have two children, Hattie and Harlan, who have the last name Daumann, a combination of their parents’ surnames.
Mann and Daum were upfront with Mann’s dementia — Daum wrote an acclaimed play, Forget About Tomorrow, about a woman learning to cope with her husband’s early onset Alzheimer’s.
In 2016, Spirit of the West embarked on a farewell tour that was filmed for a documentary, Spirit Unforgettable, by Pete McCormack. Mann’s dementia had really progressed at that point, but Kelly said somehow he rallied to play some remarkable shows at Massey Hall in Toronto and the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver.
“He seemed to sense the occasion, even that deeply into his disease, which was amazing,” said Kelly. “(It took) so much courage to walk out onstage, not knowing if your mind is going to let you down or not. I can’t imagine that — he was incredibly brave.”
Spirit of the West in 1988. From left: Geoffrey Kelly, Hugh McMillan and John Mann.
Mann in 2002.