He just couldn’t stay away

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This article was published 24/09/2015 (3380 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’re among the generation of Canadians who grew up with Fred Penner’s Place, the now-iconic opening montage is imprinted in your brain.

We remember Fred Penner, the warm, kind-eyed children’s entertainer who actually talked to us — never down at us — traversing the Canadian wilds with a rucksack on his back and a guitar in hand. We remember him delighting in discoveries along the way, be they a frog or a bird. We remember him crawling through the hollow log, the one that would magically transport him to his sanctuary — and into our living rooms.

Every weekday on CBC, from 1985 to 1997, Penner taught us about the importance of kindness, reminding us to take good care of each other. He taught us about the life-changing power of music. He taught us how to problem-solve. Along with Word Bird, he helped us with our spelling and expanded our vocabularies. His fondness for bright sweaters taught us a thing or two about confidence. For 15 minutes — or half an hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays — we were part of the world’s most inclusive club. It didn’t matter if we lived in Winnipeg or Vancouver or Yellowknife or Halifax. Fred Penner’s Place was home to all of us.

Indeed, Penner loomed large in our childhoods. His lessons and songs stayed with us long after Fred Penner’s Place was unceremoniously cancelled in 1997 and that opening montage faded into nostalgia.

But Penner, now 68, didn’t disappear along with the show. In fact, Fred Penner is as culturally relevant today as he’s ever been — thanks in no small part to the kids who were raised on the TV series, which debuted 30 years ago this year.

These days, Fred Penner’s place is a charming — and very tidy — character apartment in Osborne Village. The esthetic is rustic Canadiana: tartan wallpaper, soapstone carvings, a chunk of amethyst, a banjo under the window. Photos of his four children, all grown now, line the walls. Four of his most recent awards — including his 2015 Juno for Children’s Album of the Year and his 2014 Western Canadian Music Awards Hall of Fame statue — sit on top of a low-profile wooden bookshelf tucked beside an upright piano. It’s not exactly the stuff of MTV Cribs.

Penner’s hair is silver now, but his twinkling eyes are still the same. We’re having coffee in his dining room. He’s sipping from what appears to be a vintage CBC mug. It’s a sunny June morning, and we’re reminiscing about the show I watched every morning before heading off to afternoon kindergarten in 1990. “I have something to show you,” he says, disappearing into a room. He re-emerges with Word Bird, his colourful puppet sidekick, and the rucksack from the opening credits. I’m as excited to see Word Bird at 30 as I was to see it at five.

As Fred tells it, Fred Penner’s Place began with a phone call. By the mid-1980s, Penner had already established himself as a children’s entertainer, with four albums — including 1979’s career-making debut The Cat Came Back — and North American tours supporting fellow Canadian children’s entertainer Raffi under his belt.

CBC Kids, then called CBC Children’s, was in the process of putting together a replacement show for The Friendly Giant, which starred Bob Homme and ran from 1965 until 1985, and was looking for a host.

“They called me up, out of the blue,” Penner recalls. It was the late Dodi Robb, head of CBC Children’s at the time and developer of iconic CanCon such as The Kids of Degrassi Street, on the other end of the line.

“She said, ‘Hi, this is Dodi Robb, we’ve been watching your progress over the past few years, and we think you’d be a great host for a new TV series,’ ” Penner says. “I had no inkling that this would ever happen. I said, ‘Well, fabulous — but what do I do, how do I do that?’ She said, ‘Well, think about it — what would you like to do if you had your druthers?’ ”

And so, he did some soul-searching, asking himself, “What is it in my memory of childhood that is valuable, that is important to me?”

What he remembered vividly were places — as well as a couple of chickens.

Penner was born in Winnipeg but, when he was about nine years old, his family relocated to Hull-Gatineau, Que., for a few years. His father, Edward, was in the army. One Easter, he purchased two chicks for a quarter each. “They had injected the eggs with dye so that the chicks would come out multicoloured. Weird thing,” he recalls.

One chick was red, the other was blue, and they grew up to be lovely hens. He came home one day to discover the neighbour’s cat had gotten at the red chicken.

“I took the responsibility of burying this bird,” he says.

He laid her to rest under the big, beautiful bush in the backyard, using a fossil — “a favourite thing of mine” — as a grave marker. That place became a sanctuary for Penner.

“Children, if I can extrapolate that to an entire demographic, need places where they can feel comfortable — whether it’s their bedroom or a living room or under a piano, a place where they can feel protected and completely in their own zone,” he says.

And thus, the idea for Fred Penner’s Place was born. Penner didn’t want to create a place that could be accessed simply by knocking on the door. Just as he crawled under a bush all those years ago in Quebec, he, too, would crawl through something to get there. Such as a hollow log.

“I can’t believe I got this philosophical about something like this, but life is a journey, obviously, so to get to Fred Penner’s Place would require travelling,” he says.

“Once you arrived at Fred Penner’s Place, you were protected.”

• • •

The show was a hit, featuring a who’s who of Canadian entertainment. Filmed in Winnipeg and Vancouver, executive producer Randy Roberts, director Phil Kusie and head writer Pat Patterson were among those who helped turn Penner’s dream into a reality.

The pace of the show was rigorous. Because of the massive set requirements, the crew was forced to bang out as many shows as they could in a month before the set had to be struck to allow for other productions. They’d spend a month writing and shooting and Winnipeg and a month in Vancouver.

“The workload was huge,” says Roberts, who worked on the show until 1992. “I think three 15-minute shows a day was our goal. Fred worked his tail off on that show. We all did.”

“It was a very intense process, certainly,” Penner says. “It was a complex dance we were all involved in. I relished it.”

Still, speed could not come at the expense of precision, especially on a show with the reach Fred Penner’s Place had. By 1989, the show had been picked up in the U.S. by Nickelodeon, where it ran until 1992. Penner was addressing millions of North American viewers — an estimated 55 million, in fact.

“It was a very carefully thought-out show,” Roberts says. “Here were three white guys who were married with kids, presuming to figure out who the audience was. We worked a lot with the writers on this. You make certain presumptions about who’s watching the show. Do you say, ‘Are you watching with your mom and dad?’ Well, that kid could be an orphan. Kid could not have any parent. Kid could only have a father, or a mother. We had to temper all that stuff. And we also had to think very carefully about the impact of the words. Are we preaching? Gradually, it found itself.”

There was the occasional misstep. “There was an episode where Fred decided you can see the stars, and he picks up a walking stick to use as a telescope,” Roberts recalls. “The (episode) was done. And we’re sitting around later on and we realized, ‘Oh no — we just taught a kid to put a stick in his eye.’ So we went back and fixed that up.”

Of course, music was the foundation on which Fred Penner’s Place was built. Here you had Penner, an accomplished singer/songwriter, backed by old-guard jazz musicians, including Reg Kelln and Ron Halldorson, as well as the show’s music director, Dave Jandrisch. Penner would often write songs the night before or on his way to the studio. Jandrisch would chart them and, while Penner was in makeup, the band — affectionately dubbed the Enchanted Forest Players — would run them. “They were very spontaneous as well,” Penner says. “Our work together was so exciting.”

The music on the show went through a transition. In the 1980s, they had the freedom and flexibility to cover any song they wanted. “There was this unwritten law that because it was children’s TV, you didn’t have to worry about royalties because it was for a generation that would grow up to appreciate it,” Penner says. “We were drawing songs from decades before. It was wide open. I was learning all sorts of intricate guitar patterns.”

By the 1990s, the music business shifted and was concerned about “getting every penny from every possible source,” as Penner puts it. It would be too costly for CBC to pay out royalties, so Penner began writing more original songs for the show. “It was a good internal process for me to go through.”

But, as Roberts notes, the music was always sophisticated, which squares with the show’s brand. Fred Penner’s Place was never meant to be silly or condescending. Kids were shown the respect they deserved, and their intelligence was never insulted. Maintaining quality was paramount. Both Penner and Roberts recall reworking scripts if they didn’t strike the right tone.

“I was very aware of that line,” Penner says. “I can have fun, but when it gets into a silly vein, then I felt something in me that said, ‘No, that’s not right.’ Hopefully that’s what made the show as strong as it was.”

That and the fact Penner took his young audience seriously.

“The awareness, from my point of view, came from the fact that the camera that was on me constantly was the eye to the hearts and souls of hundreds of thousands of people,” he says. “I felt I had a responsibility. The philosophy I carry with me is never underestimate your ability to make a difference in the life of a child.”

It’s a philosophy Penner has carried with him since his early 20s, when he lost his 12-year-old sister, Susan, to complications associated with a heart murmur. Susan had Down syndrome, and music was her greatest love. He saw first-hand the power it had.

There’s no question the show’s resonance can be credited in large part to the music. It certainly left an impression on Winnipeg singer/songwriter JP Hoe, who grew up with the show.

“His world meant a lot to me,” says Hoe, who now has a small son of his own. “I was already connected to music as a kid, and this was the only show I could find that had music. He just seemed like a nice, normal guy. He didn’t look like a TV actor. There was something special about the way he connected with people. It’s so easy to remember him, because there was nothing else that compared to him. And the more I learned about the show — the fact that it was shot here, the fact that he was from here — it became more sentimental and important to me.”

For local children’s performer Aaron Burnett, Fred Penner’s Place was a pivotal influence on his career. He had spent most of his working career as an elementary teacher, usually grades 4 to 6, and wasn’t into most children’s music at the time because it appeared to be too ‘cutesy.’

“Then along came Fred who talked to kids like real people instead of trying to be ‘cutesy’. The 12 years that Fred spent on CBC gave everyone a different look at what music for kids could and should be. Fred and Raffi set the bar for all of us who followed.”

“Fred is a true mentor,” says Winnipeg singer/songwriter Scott Nolan, who has become a friend of Penner’s over the years. “The lessons he taught us still apply 30 years later. (He’s) a dependable hero, a proper example and friend to everyone. This is completely off point, but Gordon Lightfoot has been quoted saying Fred could beat him in a fight, and that doesn’t look too bad in the ol’ biography, either.”

Penner remembers the day the show was cancelled in 1997. Peter Moss had taken over as the creative head of Children’s and Family Programs at CBC, and it was clear he was ready to move in a new direction with CBC Kids.

That’s not unusual for someone in a creative or artistic director role, Penner acknowledges. “They want to make it their own.”

Fred Penner’s Place was renewed on a year-to-year basis, so there was always a certain air of uncertainty at the end of a season. But midway through the 1997 season, the decision was made to cancel the show.

“I remember I got to the studio that day and the director said, ‘This is it.’ We went in, we rehearsed the songs, then we did the episode,” Penner says. “It was lunchtime. I went back to my dressing room to work on songs for the afternoon. I’m sitting working on music, and the director comes in and says, ‘What are you doing?’

“ ‘I’m getting the songs ready for the last shows.’

‘No, that’s it. We’re… done.’

“Oh.”

And just like that, after 12 years and over 900 episodes, Fred Penner’s Place was done, never to be seen on TV again. One day it was on the air, the next day it wasn’t.

Penner, who was made a member in the Order of Canada in 1991 for using music to educate young children, still has trouble with that part of the story. He says he had signed a buyout clause that would have allowed CBC the opportunity to use the program for seven years without having to pay residuals. The clause was instigated three years before the show ended, which means CBC could have aired the shows for another three or so years without paying anything. For whatever reason, the Corp. chose not to.

Fred Penner’s Place wasn’t the only thing going on in Penner’s career at the time — he was still recording and releasing albums as well as touring — but the cancellation was still a blow.

“After that amount of time and that level of commitment and that much creative energy, here it was, this juggernaut of my career just stopped instantly. There’s no illusions here — I had a great run and certainly no sour grapes on that, but still it was like, ‘Why is this happening?’ ”

Now, Fred Penner’s Place lives on in YouTube clips. The set is gone; the log — which was carpeted, by the way, to make it easier on the knees — was dismantled long ago.

And the kids, well, they grew up.

• • •

In the mid-2000s, the emails started coming in.

The kids who had grown up with Fred Penner’s Place were now in university, and they were wondering what happened to the man who crawled through that hollow log and helped shape their formative years. They remembered Penner’s songs, of course — The Cat Came Back and Sandwiches are two enduring favourites. But mostly, they wanted to know how he was doing.

In 2008, one such email came from a student at McGill University in Montreal. Penner suggested the student get his student union to invite him out. And so, a Friday afternoon gig was set up at Gert’s Student Bar. Penner didn’t know what to expect. He certainly didn’t expect what happened.

“As we were getting closer to the room, there was this din,” Penner recalls. “You could feel the vibration, the excitement. We came around the corner and this place was overflowing, it was jammed.”

Several hundred people had squeezed into a venue for 100. Penner wove his way through the crowd, greeting his old fans. “Hi, here we are. You’re all grown up now. It’s nice to see you.”

There were tears, there were hugs. For over two hours, Penner played his most famous songs and told stories. Like the cat, Fred Penner came back. But then again, he never really went away.

“It was really a lovely affirmation that this whole trip had made a contact,” he says of that first university-pub show. “I don’t take any of this for granted.”

The university-pub circuit has been good to Penner. It was familiar terrain; after all, before he was a venerated children’s performer, he was a singer/songwriter working the bar scene. One of the most surreal gigs for Penner was selling out the Pit Pub at the University of British Columbia, a 400-seat venue usually reserved for Canadian indie rock acts. “Here’s lonely Fred Penner up there singing The Cat Came Back and they were riveted,” he says.

“That opportunity for me, to reconnect with my audience, is so valuable for me as a performer. And I think it’s really important, if I can say that, for the audience to have that sense of reconnection with that vulnerable time in their existence, which is often forgotten once you become an adult.”

The demand for Penner remains high. His summer was filled with festival dates, including sets at Dauphin’s Countryfest and the Hillside Festival in Guelph Lake, Ont. At the latter, the Fred Penner autograph line was the site of a marriage proposal. When it was announced earlier this year he’d be the host for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize gala in Toronto, which took place Sept. 21, the news was met with a flurry of excited tweets. He’s got a bunch of projects on the go — including, he hopes, a new album.

If you ask Hoe, there’s lots to admire about Penner’s career trajectory.

“He’s got the career that, if you don’t envy it, I don’t know what you’re going for,” Hoe says. “It’s about longevity and impact. He can’t be stopped. Even when you think it’s a valley in his career, he’s just ramping up.”

For Penner’s part, he’s excited to continue to scale those peaks and wander those valleys.

“The journey continues,” he says with a smile.

Coming up: The Fred Penner Family Concert will be held Dec. 19 at the Burton Cummings Theatre. He’ll be performing with a full band and special guests, including Al Simmons.

 

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti