Lenny Breau lunch

Ron Forbes-Roberts I heard Lenny Breau once, around 1975 at Nucleus, a club on Beatty Street. I remember nothing about that gig and it's possible there wasn't much to remember. By then Breau's playing was terribly erratic, the result of years of drugs, alcohol, etc. I was vaguely aware that he was considered a genius of the guitar, other players were in awe. Anyway, there was a lot of buzz about Breau's playing the Nuclues but it's a blur to me now. Sometime in the nineties (I think) CBC radio aired a multi-part documentary on Lenny, produced and narrated by Ross Porter. I only heard bits of that. A couple of years ago Danny Casavant laid a copy on me of the 2-CD set of Lenny with bassist Dave Young which he researched and helped get released. So other than that I remained an ignoramus re Lenny Breau till last week when I read this brilliant new biography, hot off the press, One Long Tune: The Life and Music of Lenny Breau by Ron Forbes-Roberts. It's not every day you read a great book and then have lunch with the author. It was a treat to hook up today with Forbes-Roberts and Dan Casavant at Rosie's in Yaletown where I enjoyed an excellent meatloaf sandwich. Danny Casavant I was reminded during our conversation of the time, circa 1957 when I was thirteen and started buying jazz records, that the prevailing wisdom in the mass so-called culture was that jazz = heroin. Musicians were junkies by definition and if I pursued my interest and love for this music that I'd be lost forever, dead of an overdose before I was out of my teens. Part of this popular delusion was that marijuana, heroin, sleeping pills . . . it was all the same thing.