I don’t have a lot of good stories about the Rheostatics. I have never been a particularly good fan, haven’t followed the projects of the band members, don’t even have a copy of Double Live or The Story of Harmelodica. Hell, I bought a ticket to see the Rheostatics in Kingston once, and then forgot to go. (Oddly enough, that wasn’t the first time I forgot to go to a show—I made the same mistake a year earlier with Sarah Harmer. That was a fun Sunday morning in the residence cafeteria.) But even I understand the significance of today’s date: March 31, 2007, our first day in a post-Rheostatics world. Yesterday night in Toronto’s Massey Hall, the Rheos played their last ever show with the original trio of Dave Bidini, Martin Tielli and Tim Vesely intact, thus bringing down the curtain on a storied career spanning three decades.

1996 was the year I started listening to different radio stations, the year I started buying CDs, the year I stopped being that kid that just listened to whatever Dad listened to on the radio because he didn’t know any better. The summer before I’d embarked on a mix tape project to collect all my favourite soft rock hits from CHFI-FM, the adult contemporary station in town. Two months later I bought an Alanis Morrissette CD and never looked back. After spending a couple of months with the likes of Oasis and the Gin Blossoms, I jumped radio stations again, started listening to alternative rock, and suddenly entire worlds opened up. I’d entered the magical era of mid-90s alt-rock radio, a time precious to absolutely no one except the people who were in grades 9 through 11 at the time. And it was in that climate that “Bad Time To Be Poor” entered my musical lexicon, one random song alongside other Canadian semi-classics like the Odds’ “Somebody Who’s Cool,” By Divine Right’s “Come For A Ride” and Treble Charger’s “Sick Friend Called.”

The difference was that where most Canadian alt-rock at the time was pretty breezy and fun—the video for “Come For A Ride” has the band, including a young Leslie Feist, barreling down a snowy hill on inner tubes and dreaming of giant donuts—”Bad Time To Be Poor” had weight to it. Written in response to the administration of the Ontario Harris government that ruled during the latter part of the decade, “Bad Time To Be Poor” was a lament on the plight of the young and impoverished the Harris government had left out in the cold with their cutbacks. Listening to it on many a winter evening trundling home from high school, unaware of the song’s political import or the iron fist of the Harris government, lines like “It is a bad time to be poor, and feeling winter through a crack in the door” still left their mark. “Bad Time To Be Poor” would pop up several more times; the following year a rearranged version appeared on a Toronto compilation to fight the amalgamation of the municipalities that made up the core of Toronto (you can find that version on Sweet Static). The song also appeared on GASCD, an album put out in late 2001 in support of the anti-globalization protests in Quebec City in April of that year.

In honour of the Rheostatics and their impact on Canadian music, a bunch of Canadian artists recorded covers of Rheostatics songs and put out an album on Zunior.com for download. The Weakerthans chose to take on “Bad Time To Be Poor,” a fitting choice for the socially conscious Winnipeg band. It also includes the likes of Weeping Tile, the Wooden Stars, the Barenaked Ladies and Cuff the Duke, among others. $8.88 gets you the MP3s, while $6 more also gets you a limited-edition CD in the mail, and all the proceeds from sales of the MP3s goes to a charity of the Rheostatics’ choosing.