The Fickle Fenger of Fate

From the mouths of children

When Andy Warhol said all of us would enjoy our 15 minutes of fame, he was smart enough to leave the "when" part up for grabs. And a good thing, too, for had Andy augmented his prediction with a statute of limitations, you would not now be reading yet another yarn about the improbable fame of alumnus Hans Fenger (BA'71).

Hans who?

Well, if you were at SFU in the fall of 1966 you just might have known the friendly, fast-talking, hip-looking Hans. Just 19 and hungry for some of that vaunted university action, Hans soon enough found himself gravitating into the Peak offices, and even sooner enough found himself talked into becoming a theatre critic by the paper's then editor, Michael "Mad Scot" Campbell.

Over the next two years, Hans also picked up a rep on campus as a damn good musician, teacher-taught on piano and guitar, with a fair voice that he stubbornly kept trying to wrap around Dylan songs. He was cool. It was also the classic arts degree dodge: use your university time to hone a skill you can actually use when you finally graduate.

By the time he did bust out, Hans was already in a band called Black Betty. They played almost every seedy place in Vancouver. And no doubt had a bam-alam time. The fun changed in 1972, when a baby boy put the kibosh on Hans, and Hans had to put the Oshkosh on the baby. Time to make some regular bread, but what to do? He had been teaching guitar, so he trundled back to SFU and emerged in 1974 with a teaching certificate. And a gig teaching elementary school music in Langley.

Frightening as that school district must have been to an hirsute rocker, Hans found a sympathetic ear within the administration. He was given carte blanche to musicate his junior charges any way he wanted - which was good, because as Hans later admits, "I knew virtually nothing about conventional music education, and didn't know how to teach singing. Above all, I knew nothing of what children's music was supposed to be."

Freaky. But let's not forget, Hans is a kickass SFU grad armed with a BA which was granted during a time when students could actually fail. And not sue. So, given a vacuum of supervision and a pressure to get those kids warbling, Hans does what any good SFU grad would do: he makes it up as he goes along. Finding nothing but bland in the usual children's songbooks, Hans decides to teach them the stuff he likes: Eagles, Bowie, Beach Boys, Fleetwood Mac. The kids are agog.

By 1976, Hans has them rockin' round the clock. And it might have stayed like this, Top 40 in the back forty, except for the aforementioned Warhollian twist of fate: "One evening I just mentioned to my friend Greg Finseth that it would be fun to record my students. They had just performed a spring concert and so they were reasonably tight on the material. Greg came out. We did it all in one take - no mixing - I then thought it would be fun to press it."

The record was cut. Relatives listened politely. And then the album was buried in a bag inside a box buried in the back of the basement. Eons pass. Pop music becomes corporate production. Then, like Gollum finding the Ring of Power, a collector of obscure records named Brian Linds finds a copy of the album in a Fraser Valley thrift store. He sends it to an obsessive collector of outsider music in New York named Irwin Chusid, who plays it on Incorrect Music, his wacky radio show. His audience also loves it, so much so that Irwin decides to re-release it on a Dutch label called Basta, and tracks down Hans to get the scoop and do a deal.

The CD was released in 2001 as The Langley School Music Project, subtitled Innocence and Despair, and is subsequently lauded by big-time critics all over. That means the United States: the New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune. Even Rolling Stone And the CD? Apparently, it's still selling out faster than a figure skating judge.

Cool story, eh? And even if it did take a 25-year wait to grab those 15 minutes...well, Hans isn't complaining. aq

Hans Fenger will be at the Alumni Association annual gathering (yes, it's a party) May 30 at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue. Be there!

When he's not listening to a nine-year-old sing Desperado, Rick can be found trading bootleg records at www.rickmcgrath.com.

Illustration by Robert Edwards