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Ian Ridway's tribute to counter-cultural tribalism and the thriving West Coast music scene, A Carpenter's Tale (Deluxe Gypsy Books 2017), is designed to serve as a celebratory potpourri, more along the lines of a high school album than an attempt to win any literary prize or tell his own life story in any perceptive depth.

Ridgway's fascinating chapter on being one of the carpenters for Robert Altman's remarkable alt-western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (that was filmed mostly at Cypress Creek, on Hollyburn Mountain, in 1970, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie), comes closest to resembling a fulsome chapter in his irregular but charming book.

There's an uneven narrative that shifts between the perspectives of Ridgway, and his co-authors Jim Brown and current wife Pat Ridgway, and it's rare to find so many poor quality, b&w photos in a new book these days, but for anybody who was an active participant in the foment of idealism and hippiedom that exploded in B.C. during the 1970s and 1980s, A Carpenter's Tale will serve as a valuable and welcome delight.

The British-born teenage buddy of Long John Baldry while he grew in England arrived in Vancouver in the fall of 1965 as a trained carpenter and would-be musician and he immediately became immersed in literally building events and stages. We follow Ridgway from be-in to festival, from concert to Pleasure Faire; it's as if he is a Forrest Gump character who somehow participated in just about everything and met just about everyone.

Most significantly, Ridgway was one of the key characters and builders in the Maplewood Mudflats on the North Vancouver shoreline not far from Malcolm Lowry's more famous squatter's shack in Dollarton. Someone has suggested that possibly the same civic official who oversaw the destruction of Lowry's shack also oversaw the bulldozing of the mudflat shacks some thirty years later.

From listening to Joni Mitchell sing The Circle Game at an intimate gathering to his helping construct Habitat Forum to the first Greenpeace concert, Ian Ridgway was there as a seminal participant, never a mere bystander--obviously a bit of a charmer, but also a guy who could literally help to make things happen. The uninitiated reader who never met him grows to like him as his story loses momentum with some 21st century snippets. An index for this book could have literally included hundreds of names - and therein lies its value. This is a book about other people as much as it's the story of one man's remarkable life.

Anyone who can remember the Strawberry Mountain Fair of 1970, or the Mission Pleasure Faire of 1971, or the Mudflats Pleasure Party of 1972, or the Fine Arts in the Forum gathering of 1973, or the Paradise Bowl concerts of 1978, or the creation of The Western Front with Mr. Peanut and The Town Fool.... will appreciate this hodge-podge of a memoir and want to share it with others.

There is far too little literature about the epoch that A Carpenter's Tale chiefly examines, so hooray for this unconventional, do-it-yourself window on the world that a conventional book publisher most certainly would choose to pass on.

Ian Ridgway did it his way, imperfectly, and now literally thousands of people who are losing their memories of bygone eras can be grateful he did.