Excerpt from Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) by Ray Robertson

November 5, 2025

Excerpted chapter “Handsome Ned” from Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) (2025) by Ray Robertson. Used with permission of Biblioasis.

Ray Robertson. Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars). Biblioasis. $24.95, 288 pp., ISBN: 9781771966559

Handsome Ned

The childhood shows the man,

As morning shows the day.

~ Milton

When my wife and I were in Serbia several years ago, the man who was hired to drive us around-an army veteran who still suffered from wartime nightmares and who worked very hard just to make enough money to live under conditions that many North Americans might be tempted to call "third world"-told us, "Smartest thing you ever did: be born in Canada." I'm not proud to be Canadian any more than I feel proud that I was born with ten fingers and ten toes. How could I? I didn't have a lot to do with it. I do feel fortunate, though. Lucky. Thankful.

In the same way, I don't feel proud that Handsome Ned­ who grew up on West German NATO air bases and in Stoney Creek, Ontario, but spent the most significant part of his life in Toronto, my adopted hometown as well-helped keep country soul alive in the predominantly aurally ugly 1980s, and whose music and story continues to engage and inspire, but I do feel thankful. We don't choose our parents or our birth certificates, but we do get to pick our heroes and what to live and die for. And because Robin Masyk wanted to be Gram Parsons, he became Handsome Ned, and his shows at Toronto's tiny Cameron House, the handful of neo-hardcore country and rockabilly records he released, and the alt-country radio show he hosted once a week were like holy water and a crucifix in a vampire world of Phil Collins and Kenny Rog­ers and Bryan Adams. Ned and his music set an example-for honesty, good taste, and devotion. That he's from around these parts? Well, I guess that's good, too.

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Robin David Masyk was born June 4, 1957, in Zweibriicken, West Germany. He and his brother were army brats (actually, Royal Canadian Air Force brats) who moved around a lot (the family would not come back to Canada permanently, to Stoney Creek, until 1970). His father was a big country-and-western fan, and his mother always had music of some sort playing around the house. In the fine documentary You Left Me Blue: The Handsome Ned St01y, his mother tells the filmmakers that her son once said, when he was only a child, that no one had ever heard of a cowboy named Robin. This is dedication and purity of purpose before it even knows what it is.

In the same film, according to his brother and sometime musical partner, Jim Masyk, Ned's true country-music epiph­any occurred when he heard Gram Parsons and the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo playing on a British pirate radio station when he was twelve or thirteen, definitely not your average teenybopper's usual musical pin-up. Parsons had -and still has- that kind of effect on listeners; he is one of those artists who may not be well known because of their uncompromising aesthetic, but those who do know them and their work know it extremely well and become lifelong enthusiasts. If someone was looking for an artistic role model, they don't come much better. Or, as a pharmaceutical role model, much worse.

Being that hip, that young, while growing up in the suburbs of Hamilton could not have been easy, so it's not surprising to learn that Ned dropped out of high school after grade ten and hitchhiked around a bit and read a bunch of writers, like Ker­ouac and Bukowski, who wouldn't have appeared on his high school English syllabus, even if he had bothered to show up, and listened and listened and listened to a lot of music. Judg­ing by the set lists of his first band, the Velours, which he formed with his brother at the end of the '70s, Ned had a nose for the real thing, irrespective of its genre, rootsy renditions of Velvet Underground and New York Dolls songs served up back to back with rockabilly covers.

He also knew what was going on in the burgeoning "out­ law" country music scene, literate-but-earthy musicos like Billy Joe Shaver and Jerry Jeff Walker providing excellent songwriting examples. He made a yearly pilgrimage to Texas to attend Willie Nelson's Fourth of July Picnic and to buy a new cowboy hat, and in the late '70s moved to Austin for a year or so, at that time the epicentre of all things outsider­ country cool. It was there that he and his brother cooked up the idea for the Velours, and when they moved back to Toronto in 1979, they were ready to country-rock and roll. And Robin Masyk became Handsome Ned, an appellation of his own making. At least he sounded like a cowboy now.

By 1981, the band, with a new drummer and bassist, changed their name to the Sidewinders and got their first break. Speaking to the authors of the invaluable history Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance, 1985-1995, Ned's brother, Jim, remembered how "Steven Leckie [lead singer and founder of seminal Toronto punk rockers the Vile­tones] went nuts over us and blessed us, and then we started opening for the Viletones. We started taking their audience and pretty soon we started headlining. We were packing Lar­ry's Hideaway, and it was the Demics' [another pioneering Toronto punk band] and the Viletones' audience that came to see us. We were the new punk in a way. We cranked it up, it was more rockabilly and fun, and less snarling and spitting." Musical fashions come and go, but energy and integrity never go out of style. Ned may have never been seen onstage (and rarely offstage, for that matter) without his trademark cowboy hat and chunky sideburns, but the Sidewinders were a fast and fun band to drink and dance and get up to no good to, so ditch the nose ring and the mohawk and grab your partner and let's have another beer and hear another hurtin' song.

Two things happened in 1982 that would enrich the remainder of Ned's short life and help define his legacy: (1) he began hosting his weekly radio program on Ryerson Pol­ytechnical Institute's CKLN, the Handsome Ned Honky Tonk Hardwood Floor Show; and (2) he launched his weekly Sat­urday matinee at the Cameron House (which frequently extended into the evening). The gigs are legendary, and the radio show was important, and both happened because Ned made them happen.

Not long after he was a guest on another CKLN program, Ned talked his way into securing his very own show and began broadcasting his Cosmic American Music message to the world (or as far as CKLN's signal would reach) every Tuesday, the dusty voices of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers and Ernest Tubb alive and well, thanks to Ned, on downtown Toronto's airwaves. He also played lots of records by newer, lesser-known artists who passed the Ned sniff test. To listeners like me, besotted with country-rock but finding little to no evidence in the record stores or on the radio that anybody else was, it was consoling to know that you weren't alone. That you weren't wrong to care about the Flying Bur­rito Brothers and Dillard & Clark and the New Riders of the Purple Sage. The first time I heard Steve Earle's music was on Ned's show.

The Cameron House was an old bar with new owners who were receptive to local musicians looking for a place to play (Toronto at that time had very few venues where bands could perform original music) and who might be able to draw more than the existing, primarily geriatric clientele whose idea of a good time was sipping seventy-five-cent glasses of draft beer all day. Not that flogging the idea of country music to the bar's owners -and other Queen Street West habitues- was an easy sell. Talking to Post City journalist Ron Johnson, Blue Rodeo bass player Bazil Donovan remembered that Ned said "he wanted to do country music matinees, and at first we scratched our heads and told him they play country music down the road in Parkdale. He was like, 'No, I'm doing cow punk'."

Yes, he was: whenever he stepped on stage, whether at the Cameron or the Horseshoe or anywhere else around town, you could count on Ned providing punky energy and good-time irreverence combined with dependable country­ music melodies and plenty of dynamic twang. Ned was a very physical performer- sweating underneath his ubiqui­tous cowboy hat, straining for the high notes and the low notes both- and, with his big smile and bigger charisma, he was hard to take your eyes off. Like Gram Parsons before him, another magnetic Pied Piper, Ned wanted everybody­ the old and the young, the punks and the drunks, the already country converted and the merely country curious -to hear the music he loved so much, and that he knew everyone else would love, if they would just give it a try.

Eventually, Ned's brother recalled, 'There was this whole scene built around Ned. You could depend on him being there [at the Cameron] every Saturday, and you knew the faces. I can't imagine how many people he knew. Once he met people he remembered them. He was very street level -'Hey, you coming out to see me?'- just a promotional machine."

Ned didn't know who I was, but that was okay, because I knew who he was. I was a four-eyed philosophy undergrad­uate from a small town living in the big city for the first time, and he was Handsome Ned, the only guy on Queen Street West who wore a cowboy hat and the first person I'd ever encountered outside of books who also believed that Gram Parsons meant more than whatever was in the Top 40. Once, though, drinking beer with a friend and listening to the Cam­eron's jukebox, which was as wonderfully eclectic as Ned's musical taste, he caught me staring at him leaning against the wall sipping his own bottle of beer. Before I could lower my eyes and look away, Ned touched the brim of his cowboy hat with his right hand and nodded. I think I blushed.

No one becomes famous -even virtually unknown­ outside-of-your-hometown famous, like Ned was -without wanting to and working hard to get that way. In Have Not Been the Same, Blue Rodeo's Greg Keelor claims, "Ned was the king; he was the scenester"- for example, organizing the Handsome Ned Picnic on Toronto Island, his own annual Willie-style musical bash (without an event permit or a liquor licence, of course). "Every Saturday, at his fantastic matinee," Keelor continues, "he just played on and on until the band [slated to follow Ned] that night had to say, 'Get off!" In the You Left Me Blue documentary, Handsome Ned's bassist Rene Fratura remembered how "he was Handsome Ned from the moment he woke up, walking the streets, he did the gunfighter thing every day, marching up and down the street, greeting bands, greeting people, there on Queen Street, I'm Handsome Ned, howdy, howdy, howdy, this band's playing there, this band's playing there, we're playing here. See this guy at seven, see that guy at nine, then wind up at the Cameron House at eleven if you really want to hear something."

That Keelor and plenty of others have maintained that Ned's pioneering, proselytizing presence laid the infrastruc­ture for the eventual alt-country boom downtown that included bands like Blue Rodeo, the Skydiggers, and the Cow­boy Junkies is undeniable, but Ned did what he did because it was the right thing to do, because people needed to hear his music and the music where his music came from. All the best, most effectual magnanimity is born of near-fanatical egotism. Jesus saves because that's just what Jesus does.

None of which would have mattered if Ned had not possessed such an eerily echoey voice, a deeply powerful instrument that sounded like Carl Perkins or early Elvis after they'd popped a couple of Bennies. It was no gimmick, and neither was the band's sound, which was tight and muscular, but capable of smouldering subtlety if the song demanded it. Ned's voice contained none of the corn-porn self-parody or southern-accent fakery that many rockers intentionally or unintentionally adopt when slumming in the world of C&W. (It is to the rest of the Rolling Stones' considerable credit, for example, that the insufferably artificial Mick Jag­ger didn't always ruin their occasional forays into country music, as on "Factory Girl" or "Dead Flowers.") Anybody can get up on stage after a few drinks and warble a little country karaoke, but only a real artist can pull off something as vocally demanding as the old country song "Ghost Riders in the Sky." It takes a Johnny Cash or a Handsome Ned to sup­ply the necessary spooky sonority and acrobatic vocal skills that a song with this many precipitous register changes demands. This is not someone trying to sound like some­ body else -this is someone trying to sound like the voice they hear inside their head and heart. Handsome Ned's lead guitar player, Steve Koch: "He had an amazing voice, a really great set of pipes. Sometimes I wonder if it really comes through [on recordings], but he could sing louder than the average guy, had great sustain and really good control. It's an honest kind of sound. He talked the same way he sang. There's nothing fake about it, and people liked that."

As a songwriter, early tunes such as "Rockabilly Girls" show the promise that would be fulfilled with classics like "Put the Blame on Me" and "In Spite of the Danger." "Rock­abilly Girls" is the sort of song that Marshall Crenshaw might have cut -clean and crisp and pleasantly hummable, if slightly nostalgic in both topic and musical texture. In 1983 Ned and the Sidewinders (who would disband not long after­ ward) released a single, "Put the Blame on Me" b/w "Cryin' Heartache Misery." The B-side is a clever amalgam of early Elvis, early Conway Twitty, and a whole lot of Sun Studio­ inspired production magic. It's a good little song that a hardcore honky-tonker from the '50s, someone like Webb Pierce, might have covered and turned into a minor hit, but "Put the Blame on Me," while still an echo-drenched slice of neo-rockabilly, has such smart lyrics and such a catchy cho­rus, it's simply irresistible. It is also admirable that the songs were not reverbed into irrelevance in the mixing stage, as were so many of the records released by 'Bos underground roots-rockers like Lone Justice or the Beat Farmers or the Del Lords. If Ned had lived past thirty, he might have done well financially by providing songs for mainstream country artists, like fellow alt-country outsider Fred Eaglesmith has done. Although the more-than-likely mushy, mainstream results would have certainly soured some of the obvious appeal of the cash infusion.

A lack of money was one of the reasons the Sidewinders left Ned temporarily without a band. It was the classic country­ rock conundrum, going all the way back to Gram Parsons' unending troubles with the recording industry: record labels like their artists to slot into easily defined genres, and rock­abilly -and honky-tonk-inspired, contemporary, acoustic punk didn't ring cash registers in any label executive's head. Undeterred, Ned formed a new band, the Handsome Neds, as well as piloting side projects like the Cajun-inspired Handsome Ned and the Hayseed Hellions.

In 1985, the Handsome Neds released "In Spite of the Danger" b/w "Ain't No Room for Cheatin' (in a Song About Love)." The flip is another honky-tonk weeper that you're too busy tapping your toes to and singing along with to get too sad about, but the A-side is something else entirely, certainly Ned's finest moment on record. "In Spite of the Danger" is recognizably classic-country influenced, but the moody, minor-key melody, electric guitarist Steve Koch's jangly lead, and the general forebodingness of both the song's overall sound and its thoughtful lyrics (reputably about an affair Ned was having) push it way beyond its influences. It sounds like Roy Orbison sitting in with Chris Isaak's band at a honky-tonk, but it also sounds -still sounds -absolutely contemporary. It also resembles Isaak's equally moody and echoey hit record "Wicked Game," which wouldn't appear until four years later. A lot of the posthumously released material that make up the studio portions of The Ballad of Handsome Ned and The Name is Ned compilations are ener­getic, honest, engaging neo-rockabilly and hardcore country, but would have been best enjoyed with a bottle of Black Label and the dance floor only a short stumble away. "In Spite of the Danger" is the kind of song that other people cover and keep singing long after you're gone.

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On January 10, 1987, the night before what would have been the five-year anniversary of his Saturday matinees at the Cameron -and a week before he was scheduled to begin recording his first full-length record- Ned, who lived in one of the Cameron House's upstairs rooms, was gone, victim of a heroin overdose at age twenty-nine. Koch: "Nobody likes to say it, but there were dope problems, which leads to 'not getting paid' problems. We were losing a bit of focus as to what's important." Interviewed by Liz Worth for her Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond, I977-I98I, Chick Parker, guitarist for the Ugly, among other Toronto punk bands, recalled how, unfortunately, "the last time I saw [Ned], he ripped me off on a junk deal. But that's what happens. Junkies steal, they lie, and that's it."

I read about Ned's death in The Strand, Victoria College's student newspaper. Making the experience even stranger, I was eating lunch between classes at Ned's Cafe, Vic's com­muter cafeteria (even though it was named after the poet and Victoria College alumnus E. J. Pratt and not, of course, Hand­some Ned). I was twenty years old and not used to people dying, particularly of drug overdoses. People in books, like Gram Parsons and Hank Williams, sure, but they weren't people, they were myths. But Ned was someone you'd see around town, someone who seemed as permanent a part of the local landscape as the Brunswick House or Honest Ed's department store. And now he was gone.

Ned. A dead junkie. It didn't sound right. It wasn't right.

Why would someone so full of vision and vigour do something as stupid as stick a needle in their arm? Was he pissed off that bands that used to open for him had scored major-label deals while he was still surviving month to month? Who wouldn't be? Was he experimenting, like a lot of young people did and still do? Why would he be any different? Was Ned following the Gram Parsons script a little too closely, messing around with dangerous pills and powders just like ol' GP did, because that's what outlaws do? If so, he wouldn't be the first person to get what he wanted because he wasn't careful enough about what he asked for. Just like his hero. We forget sometimes that our idols have idols, too, and Gram Parsons' was Hank Williams, who checked out at age twenty-nine, the same as Ned when he died, from a morphine-induced heart attack in the back of a '52 Coupe de Ville. Williams put morphine in his veins because of a chronic, crippling back problem; Parsons did it, in part, because Hank did it, but with the same result, overdosing in a Joshua Tree hotel room at twenty-six years old.

Feel bad for Ned's family and friends -and for us, for the music we never got to hear and the shows we never saw -but don't feel too bad for him. The high-school dropout from Stoney Creek, Ontario, wanted to grow up to be like his heroes. He did. He was. He is.

Ray Robertson is the author of nine novels, six collections of non-fiction, and a book of poetry. His work has been translated into several languages. He contributed liner notes to three Grateful Dead archival releases: Dave’s Picks #45, the Here Comes Sunshine 1973 boxed set, and the From the Mars Hotel 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, he lives in Toronto.