Lyricist and self-described writer of “flourishes,” Pye Dubois (born Paul Phillip Woods) is part of that rarefied group of wordsmiths that is otherwise not a performing member of the band at hand, in the fine tradition of Cream’s Pete Brown and John Perry Barlow and Robert Hunter, both penning words of wisdom for The Grateful Dead.
But Pye was there watching Max Webster live at almost every show, taking in the magic exchange that happens between band and fan and learning about life across Canada and the US, pouring his thoughts into some of the most treasured songs in Canadian classic rock history. As Dubois has stated, defending his constant travel with Kim Mitchell and crew, “If I’m not on the road with those guys, songs like The Party and Oh War! and America’s Veins don’t happen.”
But more pertinently, along with the rock ‘n’ roller lyrics and his commentary on American factionalism and consumer culture, Pye could write a tender—but always smart—love song, as well as paint colourful imagistic pictures that read like uninhibited fridge-mounted finger paintings, that is, before deeper meanings would inevitably emerge.
Additionally, like Stompin’ Tom Connors before him and Gordon Downie later, Pye used people and place names, adding to and enriching Canadian pop culture consciousness along the way (as well, his lyrics on the early Max Webster albums would be reproduced in both English and French).
For Max Webster, Pye is the penner of the lyrics for most of the band’s iconic, regular radio rotation songs, including Hangover, Toronto Tontos, High Class in Borrowed Shoes, Diamonds Diamonds, Gravity, Waterline, Night Flights, Paradise Skies and the band’s epic collaboration with Rush, Battle Scar. Every one of Max Webster’s albums, including the live record and hits compilation, are Music Canada-certified gold, with “A Million Vacations” certified as platinum.
Contributing to Kim Mitchell’s solo canon, Pye wrote the words for most of it, including smash hits All We Are, Go for Soda, Patio Lanterns, Easy to Tame, Rock n Roll Duty and Rocklandwonderland. Mitchell’s first four albums are all Music Canada-certified, with “Aural Fixations” going gold, “Akimbo Alogo” platinum, “Rockland” double platinum and 1986’s “Shakin’ Like a Human Being”—driven by the success of poignant Canadian treasure Patio Lanterns—certifying at triple platinum.
For esteemed Canadian progressive rock institution Rush, Pye co-wrote with the band Force Ten, Between Sun and Moon, Test for Echo and what is arguably the band’s biggest song of their nineteen-album catalogue, Tom Sawyer, from the “Moving Pictures” album, which has been certified as four-times-platinum in Canada and five-times-platinum in the US.
Last word goes to Dubois himself, who once mused in a letter mailed to the author of this Hall of Fame profile, “I knew always I was not untalented, but that said, I knew I was woefully unskilled. I went looking for art and I glimpsed it in the band. My search was half-hearted and never during the week! We rocked on the weekends, and I was never far from my select circle of buddies in the arts. I never had an epiphany or a muse on my shoulder. I stumbled one day and wrote this ‘poem’—I hate that word—causing consternation and incredulity. I wrote that?! Not possible. I think from then on I did not live vicariously—I discovered I had something to say and I would say so in my writing. As for myself and Kim, I don’t know; I think he might’ve intuitively enjoyed the humour, the density, the levity, the dexterity and the weirdness of it. Because it was really challenging to sing some of those lyrics and play the guitar at the same time. It’s almost magical what he did with some of those songs.”
Concludes Pye, from a different hand-written letter: “Why I did okay in the arts is that I refused to romanticize rock ‘n’ roll: a salient and invigorating stance. I was going to write lyrics with that attitude. I’m anti-romantic and anti-traditionalist; I wanted to write for the honourable mentions. The crowd! I figured anything goes; this isn’t what I do, this is what I am—I am a lyric. I am an honourable mention. The human experience of evocation and existing was no different to me than the human experience of dreaming. And besides that, I figured I had two great gifts; one, I have a great ear, and two, I cry with the drop of a hat.”
