Curtain Call: Wayne Chapman, Guitarist
The hurtin’ life of a Milton man
Wayne Chapman’s final stage was a warped square of plywood on the roof outside his $110-a-week rented room. He would strum his guitar, look out over the rooftops of Milton, and remember the glory days when he played with the legendary Stompin’ Tom Connors.
Last week, Mr. Chapman’s guitar was placed in his casket, a final tribute to a man whose life exemplified the hurtin’ ethos of country, the music he loved the best. Long divorced, the 52-year-old lived in a boarding house with 14 other men, many of them down on their luck. His previous residence was a room above a tavern. Mr. Chapman worked as a custodian at a car-parts plant, cleaning the cafeteria and changing toilet-paper rolls.
“He didn’t have much,” said Ken Murray, the superintendent of the boarding house. “But he was a good guy.”
Like Stompin’ Tom, whose experiences included hard labour, abandonment and poverty, Mr. Chapman was a genuine country music character, informed by heartache and loss. His possessions were limited to a few guitars and some beaten furniture. He had lived for a while in Georgetown, but moved to Milton after he was targeted in a series of robberies. His entertainment consisted of buying a case of Molson Canadian to drink with friends. He rode to work each day on a hand-me-down mountain bike he called “The Dirty Dawg.”
In Milton, he lived in a single room, where he cooked his meals in a microwave and washed his dishes in a shared bathroom. Unlike Mr. Connors, who lives in a comfortable home in a nearby township, Mr. Chapman had never made enough to escape the endless cycle of low-paid day jobs. But to country music insiders, his time on stage with Mr. Connors meant that he had been validated, if not financially rewarded.
Mr. Chapman’s death was a strange one. On Aug. 23, he came home from work, and went out on the roof with his guitar and a few beers.
His second-floor room was one of the hottest in the house. He liked to escape the heat by stepping out onto the roof through his window, where he would play Stompin’ Tom and Johnny Cash tunes on his weathered acoustic guitar.
This day, he was joined by one of his housemates, who shared a beer with him. It was late afternoon, and the weather was perfect. The roof was the size of an average room - it was a poor man’s deck, with a flat black top and no railings. As usual, there were a few yellow-jacket wasps buzzing around. The insects had built a nest inside a crack in the building’s brick wall, and had defied the superintendent’s extermination efforts.
Mr. Chapman hated the yellow jackets. Just weeks before, he had jammed a stick into the nest, against the superintendent’s recommendation, checking to see if a recent spraying had killed them off. It hadn’t. Now he was in a fighting mood. He fetched a fly-swatter and began swinging at the wasps. It was a bad idea. He had unwittingly triggered the wasps’ defence mechanism, and countless more poured out of the nest to help their embattled fellows.
Mr. Chapman soon found himself in a full-on battle, walking backwards and using his swatter to try to fend off the growing insect horde. In the room below, Mr. Murray heard his footsteps on the rooftop. “Jesus,” he thought. “I told him to stay out of there.”
There was a thud. Consumed with his battle with the wasps, Mr. Chapman had stepped off the edge of the roof and fallen six metres to the pavement. He was rushed to the Milton hospital, then airlifted to St. Michael’s in Toronto. He died of his injuries and a forensic autopsy was performed the next day. His death was ruled accidental.
“It’s a very sad case,” said Detective Murray Drinkwalter of Halton Regional Police.
It was the end of a sad life, whose highlight was a 1985 appearance on a Stompin’ Tom Connors album called Stompin’ Tom Is Back to Assist Canadian Talent. Mr. Chapman contributed two songs (My Home Town and The Bars of Vancouver) and was pictured on the cover, dressed in black jeans and a Stetson.
The album was propped on his coffin this week at his small funeral in Erin, Ont. Among the visitors at the funeral home, according to locals, was Stompin’ Tom, who dropped by to pay his final respects to a fallen musical comrade. Also there were his mother and some of his brothers and sisters. The family, along with Mr. Connors, declined to talk about Mr. Chapman, but others filled in a few of the blanks.
According to Fred White, his supervisor at the car-parts plant, Stompin’ Tom entered Mr. Chapman’s life when his father took in the iconic singer many years ago during a dark period.
“He came home one day, and there was this tall, skinny guy,” said Mr. White. “It was Stompin’ Tom.”
Mr. Chapman went on to perform occasionally with Mr. Connors, and never stopped talking about how amazing it was to play with a genuine musical legend. “To him, Stompin’ Tom was the second coming of Jesus,” said Mr. Murray. “He loved him.”
“A lot of musicians would give anything to play with Stompin’ Tom,” said Duncan Fremlin, a guitarist who used to tour with Mr. Connors. “He’s the real thing.”
His thoughts were echoed by Bob McNiven, a guitarist who toured with Mr. Connors in the early 1980s. “Stompin’ Tom is a legend,” he said. “To play with him was an accomplishment.”
Mr. McNiven, who now works for Statistics Canada but still plays in a country band called Whiskey Jack, has never forgotten the talent and commitment that Mr. Connors brought to his performances.
“He really meant it. He’d be singing, and there were tears running down his face. You’d look out into the audience, and they were crying too.”
Although he didn’t know Mr. Chapman (hundreds of musicians have toured with Mr. Connors’s various bands), Mr. McNiven said he felt a pang of recognition when he heard about the death last week. “He played guitar with Stompin’ Tom. I played guitar with Stompin’ Tom. In some way we were brothers. We drank from the same cup.”
Back at the rooming house where Mr. Chapman died, Mr. Murray also reflected on his companion’s life and times. “He didn’t have a mean bone in his body,” said Mr. Murray as he drank his fourth tumbler of Silk Tassel scotch. “He was a good guy. But he should have left those wasps alone.”
Mr. Murray, now 66, spent about 30 years as a professional country musician, playing in clubs and bars and, briefly, for a Montreal-based TV show. Like Mr. Chapman was, he’s divorced and lives alone with his dusty musical equipment.
“I’m a has-been,” he says. “We’re all has-beens here.
“Here’s to Wayne.”
This column was written by Peter Cheney of the Globe and Mail