The Vinyl Cafe’s Stuart McLean opens up about his relationship with Dave and Morley
Stuart McLean laughs in the face of doomsday sayers, and he invites his listeners to do the same.
He welcomes each person who enters The Vinyl Cafe to ruminate on the good in the world and to remember that our friends, neighbours and families are all doing their best.
“There’s a lot on the radio and television these days that reminds us that there is darkness and evil around and that we should be suspicious, and that the world is dangerous; I want to say the reverse,” said the Canadian storyteller and radio personality.
McLean is best known as the host and author of CBC Radio’s longstanding show, The Vinyl Cafe. He’s the man whose soft, while slightly raspy voice passes over the airwaves each weekend, as he shares the stories of a fictional family that he’s grown to love as his “best friends.”
Those friends are Dave, Morley, Stephanie and Sam, characters whose lives have been shared on air and in McLean’s books for two decades.
After all these years penning the family’s tales, McLean said, to him, the characters “feel real.”
“That’s one of the reasons I keep writing,” he said on the phone from his Toronto home.
“If I stopped writing about them, they would cease to exist; there’s a reluctance to allow that to happen because I have a friendship or relationship with them. I want that to continue.”
It’s not just McLean who feels such a powerful connection, either. His stories resonate with listeners from across the country, who tune in each week to hear about the family’s latest exploits—whether it be a tale of Sam smoking his first cigarette and asking his mother: “am I going to get cancer?”or Dave blundering his way through cooking the Christmas turkey.
That’s why, for any long-time listener, it might be a surprise to hear that back in 1994, when the show began, Dave was only a minor character and Morley and the kids had only one appearance in the entire season.
“They weren’t even the major characters when we began. They were one of many characters.
“I didn’t create them with a notion that they were going to be my best friends 20 years later—I had no idea that I would even have anything to do with them 20 years later.
“They kind of elbowed their way to the front of the stage.”
McLean said he doesn’t know why or how Dave and Morley ended up there, but suggested, perhaps, their characters just felt the most real, the most rounded.
“It was like life. It was like I was meeting somebody at a party. The first time you meet them you don’t necessarily understand how important they’re going to be to you. You meet them and then you meet them a little bit more and a little more and slowly, as you learn more about them, you realize that this is someone you want to know more about; this is someone you want in your life.”
And, just as much as McLean wants Dave and Morley to be a part of his life, they seem to want him as a part of theirs as well. If that weren’t the case, the door to their lives wouldn’t open, as it has for so many years, allowing McLean to peer in and observe, collecting moments and tales to be shared through his words.
“In some ways I don’t feel like I’m deciding what happens to them,” said McLean. “It feels more like I’m tapping into their lives—that their lives exist apart from me and that I am given access to them.
“That sounds a little weird, but it’s kind of the case.
“By sitting down and writing I have the privilege of being able to connect to their lives, their beings.”
During the past two decades, McLean said one of the hardest decisions he had to make was whether or not to keep his friends frozen in time, like Charles M. Schultz’s Peanuts, or whether to allow them to age, like the rest of us.
“I created them at what I thought was the perfect age; the little boy was seven and the little girl was about 12. They were both in their prepubescent years. They were still in the innocent ages of childhood.
“I thought these were the perfect ages to write about. But of course after writing about them like that for a few years, I realized that I was going to run out of things to say about people that old and, anyway, people were going to tire of it.”
Taking a cue from Garry Trudeau, who wrote the comic strip Dunesbury, McLean eventually made the decision to take Dave, Morley, Sam and Stephanie out of the cryogenic freezer.
“I thought only by aging them would they stay relevant.
“It was a deliberate decision. It was a hard decision to make at the time; I was anxious about it and I had to force myself to do it. I knew intellectually it was the right thing to do, but I didn’t want to do it emotionally.”
Although happy with his decision—because it’s allowed him to write some of his favourite stories—McLean acknowledges that aging the characters means “hard times are coming.”
But, then again, he said, “maybe they shouldn’t arrive. That’s something else to think about; that’s something that fiction can give us. It can give us a fictional world where bad things don’t happen.
“There’s some role for that. It’s not a horrible thing to have a place that we can turn to where things are the way we want them to be, where the cruel wheel of time doesn’t weigh heavy.
“Maybe. I don’t know. That’s the big question that sits over me when I sit down to write these days.”
Nicole Veerman
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