I first encountered Mendelson Joe when he was with his group Mainline back in 1972; at the time, they had 2 hit albums (Stink and Canada: Our Home and Native Land) and a hit single on the charts ("Get Down To"). They were already legendary as being both a serious hard blues-rock band and for having raunchy lyrics. They surprised me that night for sitting down- and immediately all the high school kids sat down to- thereby defining the evening as a concert and not a dance. They stunned with their intensity (especially a 20 minute "Going to Toronto",) and I've never forgotten the eccentric precence of MJ that night: the way he talked, sang and played- his thinking- was like nothin I'd ever heard before. As the years went by, Joe left the group and struck out on his own- becoming increasingly feminist, humanitarian, stubborn and quixotic along the way. He also began (around 1976) to paint- in a completely natural, untrained way. I visited his first show and was impressed with the intensity of his vision- some were portraits, some were self-portraits, and some were landscapes. And from the beginning, a srong sense of social and political justice was present. Since that time, Joe has greatly developed his technique, both in clarity of vision and also in colour- and to see his canvasses in person is to be shocked by the intensity of the whole presentation- the colours and the thought of the art. For many years Joe has painted a series called "Working Women" which includes working women from all walks of life, and a book of this series will soon be released (around Novenmber 2004). This present book, Alien, is the combined autobiography/ oral biography of Joe, and like the man, it's stunning in its directness: Joe always tells the truth as he see it, calls a spade a spade, and damn the consequences; how many of us can say the same? He has remained true to his art, his principles, and his ideals. It has cost him: he lives alone, a virtual "hermit" (in his own words) up north in a log cabin; he paints, writes music and writes letters to newspapers: he is a hermetic social activist, and one of the country's artistic geniuses. It breaks your heart when Joe says "nobody has cared for the last 10 years whether or not I paint or do music", and he has been forced to make his albums available on his web-site, as tapes, and cds burned on a computer. But he still makes wonderful, uncompromising music, and unique intense art (a recent portrait of Dick Cheney may be the most incisively damning political painting he has ever done) and remains (along with artists such as Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young) an exemplar of the Canadian 60's generation who have stuck to their principles, dreams, and ideals, even as they become battle-worn. But Joe is special in that he is so direct and honest that people are often offended, and view him as cranky and condescending. However, I don't think this is quite true. Joe has a finely tuned "bullshi# detector" and won't tolerate fools, but I've spoken to him on a few occasions, and he was always unfailingly polite, direct and, strangely, a little shy. At an event in Huntsville (near where Joe lives) arranged by his art dealer, Karen Armstrong, to launch this book (Alien) I drove through a snowstorm from Toronto to get there, and as Joe singed my book, he asked where I had come from: when I told him, he said, rather sweetly, "You're crazy". At that time, I felt Joe may be the shyest guy I've ever met.

He's a bundle of contradictions: overbearing, shy, direct, polite, stubborn, sweet, intellectual, anti-intellectual, and much more. And all his art (his music, his painting, his interviews, his letters) contains all these characteristics, combined in a seamless whole. Missing him is your loss: there's not another like him.

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