Alan Doyle’s memoir focuses on upbringing rather than Great Big Sea

TORONTO – No matter how far Alan Doyle strayed from his uniquely enchanting hometown of Petty Harbour, N.L., he had his book to whisk him back.

The Great Big Sea frontman spent years working on his memoir “Where I Belong,” scribbling during long road trips, sluggish sound checks or airport lounges the world over. Ultimately, a book that was originally intended to encompass the entirety of the 45-year-old’s life instead focuses almost exclusively on his pre-20s upbringing in the small fishing town.

He just found that he couldn’t stop talking about Petty Harbour.

“I assumed when we started that we would eventually make our way to present day, but the time I got finished adding up all the stories I wanted to tell … I mostly told the stories about growing up in Petty Harbour,” said Doyle this week during a promotional trip to Toronto.

“The most pleasing thing about it is that it made what would have been lost time very useful: airplane rides; on the bus; sitting in a movie trailer on set. … For most people, that’s probably the most daunting thing about starting a book — they worry about how much time it will take. I was just like, thank God it’s going to take a long time. I have to fly to Sydney, Australia twice this year so I’ll write seven books.”

Well, he started with this one: an ode to a happy adolescence spent in an environment quite unlike any other.

Doyle’s cheerful childhood certainly wasn’t rooted in any financial prosperity. One of four kids, Doyle was born into a tiny home on the eastern-most coast of Newfoundland. The house had no bathroom and no plumbing. His parents would bathe the family with river water, collected in a plastic bucket and heated on the stove.

In the book and person, Doyle recalls his austere surroundings with nostalgic fondness.

“I had somewhere to pee,” he pointed out, laughing. “We had water — in a bucket, but so what? That whole part of it was a revelation in my adult life. In retrospect, we had less than perhaps North Americans my age had but I never spent any time thinking about what we didn’t have. We had more than enough for me.

“I found that a lot of the families in Petty Harbour lived like that,” he added. “It wasn’t a well-off place, but we were all content enough.”

Still, Doyle went to work young. At 10 he was already immersed in the wharf, rising early each summer day and heading to the harbour to cut cod tongues (considered a delicacy in parts of the world) then hawking the bounty to various vendors around town. (Doyle’s book helpfully includes a step-by-step guide to extracting a cod’s tongue, though he also admits that the practice once gave him “odd nightmares.”)

As a 10-year-old, hanging out with rough-and-tumble guys in their 20s all day was “intoxicating,” Doyle said. This was the time before the Canadian government’s 1992 moratorium on the Northern Cod fishery, and Doyle’s town was “booming.” For half of every year, the fish plants were full of people and the towns along Newfoundland’s coast bustled with movement at all hours of night.

Much of the book is devoted to Doyle’s wistful recollections of growing up in that environment — and its many opportunities for innocent hijinks — but he notes looking back that it might be a bygone era for a reason.

“I’m sure it was constantly dangerous,” he said, laughing. “I was 10 going around with a sharp knife and a bucket on the wharf. I wouldn’t let my son do it now for all the millions in the world.”

Though he calls the day of the cod ban “the darkest in modern Newfoundland history,” he stops short of judging whether the decision was the right one.

“What do I know about marine biology?” he said. “I play the mandolin for a living.”

As much as Doyle cherished his hometown, as a teen he itched to reach beyond its borders. At 18, he hopped on a plane for the first time and finally saw a city bigger than St. John’s: London. Visiting his brother Bernie at school, Doyle remembers being lost in the blur of Trafalgar Square on a weekday, bobbing through an “ocean of people,” never farther from home.

“It was like Narnia. It was like an acid trip. I’ve never been so freaked out in my life,” he recalled. “I’ve been a sucker for travel ever since.”

Given his modest childhood lifestyle, it was strange for Doyle when Great Big Sea finally started to generate an income.

He’d been playing in bands since he was a teen thrashing away with his uncle Leonard. Later, he performed hundreds of gigs in bars around Newfoundland in a variety of bands (including a comedy duo called Staggering Home, whose lyrically “heinous” parodies would put Doyle “out of the job” if video ever surfaced, he swears).

He formed Great Big Sea with Sean McCann, Darrell Power and Bob Hallett in the early ’90s, and it wasn’t long before the sunny Celtic-rock trio found an audience: their eponymous debut went gold while 1995’s “Up” and 1997’s “Play” were both multi-platinum.

For the first time in Doyle’s life, he had money, and he wasn’t sure what to do with it.

“I can just remember going home from a meeting one time — after having been paid $250 a week all year — with a cheque for $40,000,” he said. “‘What am I going to do with $40,000?’

“Even when I had no money I had more money than I needed,” he added. “Good times — that’s what I use all my money for. I drive a 2006 (Toyota) Matrix. … I don’t have any watches. But I’ll fly my buddy down if there’s going to be a hockey game next week.”

Doyle put out his first solo album back in 2012, but says that this memoir represents the most vulnerable offering of his career.

Public readings have proven particularly daunting, Doyle laments.

“Freaks me out, man. I’d rather sing a thousand songs to a thousand people. ‘This is why I like my mom.’ It’s weird,” he said. “All my other performances in life, you always have something to hide behind, right? … You’re not hiding behind anything here. ‘Here’s my (guts) on a plate. Enjoy.'”

So he’ll wait to see how this book does before committing to doing another one — perhaps a book exploring Great Big Sea’s run.

And yet, while “Where I Belong” isn’t a traditional rock memoir, Doyle says it ties into his music career to a greater extent than it might initially seem.

“Without being aware of it, my young life almost perfectly prepared me for the greatest job anyone could have ever been offered,” he said.

“All the stuff that happened to me in my little tiny fishing town and my little altar boy life, all of a sudden, it’s like, man, I’m perfect for this job. Every question that was asked of me I said, yes, of course I know how to do that. Of course I can do that.

“‘This is going to be really hard on the road.’ What? We have a toilet. This is easy.”

— Follow @CP_Patch on Twitter.