The Mythical CBC Interview

Click here to Listen to the 1996 interview in streaming audio.

This is a transcript of a CBC interview with Dave Soroka, on The Afternoon Show, April 18, 1996. Interview by Mark Forsyth.

Mark: You've heard of the magical mystery tour, how about the mythical coffee house tour? Dave Soroka of Grand Forks calls himself a rock n' roll poet, and when you don't have a record contract or a management company to do the leg work, but you wanna play, you create your own tour. And that's what Dave has done in the B.C. interior, and he is sharing his list of playable coffee houses with other aspiring artists out there, and we have reached him, on the road, somewhere near Bonner's Ferry Idaho, is that right Dave?

Dave: Well actually I got a late start today, I'm still in Washington, but I'm just about to cross the Pend Oreille river into Idaho, I'm in a town called Newport.

Mark: Are you gonna make it for your gig tonight, Dave?

Dave: Well I'll just phone 'em, I'll just tell 'em, you know, it's not a paid gig, they're not losing anything if I show up a little late. I'll make it.

Mark: So where did this idea of a mythical tour come about?

Dave: I was just a musician that had no place to play, and, so I started looking for open mikes, and, uh, that kind of thing, cafes around B.C., and started going out of town and playing, and found I had put together a list, and I realised that this was a circuit, y'know, that other guys could make use of this.

Mark: So you plotted it out on a map, didn't you, and you give names and addresses of places where performers can play free.

Dave: Exactly. Here and there they'll give you a little money, but that wasn't the point of it, y'know. They're not really overall paid gigs, y'know, a lot of them will give you a meal and a place to stay, but you make all those arrangements yourself, with the cafe owner. Y'know, the idea is, you can just sit down at the phone, and book your own little mini-tour.

Mark: What are some of the towns on this mythical tour?

Dave: Lemme see...Fernie...then up through Elkford and Sparwood, Golden, Nakusp...I dunno, Trail, Nelson, over into the Okanagan, north Okanagan's a rich area, there's Salmon Arm and Armstrong and Kamloops, and Ashcroft is a good little town. I don't have it right in front of me, but there's, there's quite a few more, and now there's gonna be a few down here in the northern states.

Mark: Dave, you've been at this for quite a long time, what keeps you going on a tour where you're lucky to break even, from the sounds of it?

Dave: It's an investment. I'm trying to create a career for myself, and so when you're out playing a coffee house circuit like this, the idea is, you don't just pull into town and play at the cafe and leave again. You could, but if your idea is to create a career for yourself, what you do is you contact the press everywhere you go, y'know, you talk to reporters, you tell 'em what you're doing, if they think it's colourful you'll get mentioned in the paper, if they wanna come down and watch you play. You might get a good review here and there, and after a year or so you've got yourself a little press kit, and you can start, y'know, getting yourself more promotion that way. You might end up doing concerts and stuff, which is what's happening with me.

Mark: What's your worst nightmare on the road, Dave?

Dave: (laughs) My worst nightmare? The empty hat. That's, that's the worst nightmare.

Mark: The empty hat? Okay.

Dave: Yeah, you, you sing your heart out all night, and then you leave the cafe with an empty hat, and that'll bring a tear to your eye. That's happened to me a few times. But, y'know, I've seen the hat overflowing with money too, I've seen where you couldn't see the hat for all the money in there, those are the good nights, you know. There's horror stories, road horror stories...I pulled into a town one time, did my thing, did my show, and then found out that the place I had lined up to stay had fallen through, and so I was stranded, and it was winter, it was last year. So I wound up driving, I drove about an hour and a half to the next town where I thought I knew some people, but they weren't home, so I wound up taking a hotel that night, and I spent more than I made in the cafe, y'know. I don't know...there's other things, there's all kinds of potential horror.

Mark: Well, there's obviously a flip side to it, or you wouldn't continue to do it, I would think. You must get some satisfaction out of lining up your own dates, and performing for people.

Dave: Well, definitely. Definitely. There's far more satisfaction, there's way more good than bad out here. The people that you meet, the scenery, it's fantastic. Learning to approach a completely strange room, full of completely strange people, when you're completely unknown. Learning how to walk into a situation like that, just strap on your guitar and play, and really put your heart into it every single time, night after night. Y'know, you learn how to do these things, you learn how to live on the road, perform on the road. Experience like that, you couldn't go to school and learn that stuff.

Mark: Dave, I'm gonna give your phone number here, if other aspiring musicians want to get this information...but why, why do you want to share this with them? This map, and the various contacts.

Dave: Well, it was sort of like, as I went around, putting the circuit together, I mean, it's not going to do much good for anyone if I just keep it in my pocket. I can work it, but it doesn't help anybody else. I thought it would be a good idea to spread it around. I got this picture of the interior of BC, y'know, with musicians out on the highway, driving or hitchhiking or whatever, and going from town to town, lotta music in the cafes. I thought it would be just a colourful kinda...see if we can bring back a sort of folk music scene, live folk music scene, maybe I could, y'know have some part in that. It'd be fun.

Mark: Okay, well, listen, I should let you get on your way there, I can hear the trucks warming up in the background...good luck there.

Dave: Okay.

Mark: Take care, eh Dave.

Dave: Thanks, Mark.


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Soroka's Blue Funk Colours Album
"Cup of sand" interview By Daniel Winters

Dave's 1997 album "Cup of Sand" marked a turning point in Soroka's career-and his life-rising out of a deep blue funk that left him with a dead feeling inside that he just couldn't shake.

"In the middle of March 1997, I got up one morning. I've never been able to describe or quite explain what it was that happened to me," said Soroka. "It was some kind of a breakdown. I'd been feeling real blue for a couple of months. Kinda dead.

"I kept waking up a dead man. I'd have to lie there awhile and come back to life as I woke up. But this particular morning, I woke up and I lay there and waited and waited.

"I got out of bed a dead man that morning."

Years of touring and beating the bushes in hopes of developing a faithful following had taken their toll. Soroka, who describes himself as the "most tenacious songwriter you'll ever meet," decided to do one last gig.

"I had a gig booked that night in Kelowna so I drove out and did it," he said. "It turned out to be one of my best nights in the cafe. I guess it was something in the way that I was feeling that came through."

He cancelled all of his future bookings and said to himself, "That's it, I'm off the road. I'm retired."

Instead of reaching for a bottle of anti-depressant happy pills to cope with his despair, Soroka wrote songs, spending three months in the studio.

"Cup of Sand is probably the most polished thing I've ever done and it's been the toughest, most expensive that I've produced," he said. "There's lots of passion and some pretty dark stuff on there. It's sort of like final words on several subjects."

From the first track on the recording, Going Down Slow, a song about people drinking themselves into oblivion, to the final track, One Stupid Song, about hurting so bad you don't care what happens to you, he taps into a rich vein of sadness tempered with dark humor.

"Overall, it's atmospheric-that's the way I would describe it. It's not something you would play in a bar where people want to hear something lively," he said. "Maybe late at night, when it's closing time and you're sitting by yourself at the bar; this is the music that sould come on."

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The Vancouver Province newspaper
By Tom Harrison

With the spare accompaniment of acoustic guitar and mandolin and the bluesy touch of harmonica and slide guitar, Dave Soroka creates an entire world populated by bums, drunks, misfits, and poets who achieve states of grace and dignity before the album's 12 songs are through. The sparse but atmospheric production puts Soroka's half-sung, half-spoken words out front, creating a confessional intimacy that is as imposing as it is haunting. Think Spingsteen and his Nebraska or Tom Joad LPs.

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The Music Matters Review
By Michael Devlin

Cup Of Sand starts out eerie, the fret-hand squeaks are louder than the notes being played on the guitar. Soroka's sound is so minimalistic that he seems to forget to play sometimes when he is singing. The half spoken vocals come in a voice that sounds like it is from the Leonard Cohen/Lou Reed school of singing and most recently from the last call at a naugahyde and duct-tape bar. As you listen, you wonder if this CD is scary bad or the work of a genius, there can be no middle ground. It does not take long to realize that this is one of the most intense and original sets of music that you will ever hear. This man packs raw emotion into each phrase and even the ragged drawn breaths between words. Soroka's songs often wrestle with darkness and despair, and like a man fighting uphill with his back to the abyss, are doubly noble for refusing to take that last backward step. A sense of urgency makes the humor and beauty found in much of this album all the more poignant. Though the songwriting is consistently thoughtful and full of surprises, two songs really stood out for me. 'The Empty Dungeon' is an over-the-top nasty songwriter's revenge on an ex, that somehow manages to hint at the depth of the original bond. 'The Twist Is You' is an ode to the power of love to forgive, give meaning and ultimately change a life.

Where the liner notes usually reside in a CD jewel-case, there is instead a numbered block print by Nora Curiston. I have number 248 of 500. I'm not sure what this means about the availability of this CD, but I highly recommend that you make good use of the contact information below.

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Penguin Eggs ezine
By Les Siemeniuk

David Soroka is a singer songwriter that lives, according to his bio sheet, in Grand Forks - a small town tucked in the Kootenay mountains of British Columbia"....in a shanty across the river from town". So I think, an outsider, a fringe player. David has been writing and recording songs for the last 30 years. So I guess I'm joining him in progress on a long journey. He had a bout of " I kept waking up a dead man". Aha - the album's really a therapy session. That explains the sparse instrumentation . Mostly guitar/ harmonica, a touch of mandolin. And the mood: it's dark, real dark in places. But on the whole it works.

Some songs are stronger than others - some judicious pruning would have helped - but then again, a man who sends out a song a month through his website can't afford to throw anything away. There are, however, some stand-out tracks on the album, particularly Call It A Day - a 7 minute and 48 second seemingly autobiographical song about life in a small town and the choices we make. It's haunting and lyrical and the time stood still while it was playing.

So Cup of Sand - a 3 am closing time kind of album with some flashes of brilliance from some diamonds in the rough. It's good enough to make me want to hear some of the thirty years worth I've missed.

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