Gary McCracken’s music reached across Canada. His lessons stayed in Sarnia.

Gary McCracken played drums for Max Webster and taught music in Sarnia for nearly 30 years. Former student Emily Plunkett remembers the patient teacher she knew before she understood his place in Canadian rock.

Gary McCracken’s studio was lined with gold records. Emily Plunkett saw them when she began taking guitar lessons from him in Grade 10, but she didn’t yet know what they meant.

McCracken told her he had played in a band called Max Webster. Plunkett had never heard of it. She knew Kim Mitchell from Sarnia radio, but couldn’t remember hearing his former band on the air. To her, McCracken was the local teacher who helped her learn the songs she wanted to play.

McCracken died Sept. 17 at the age of 75. He had played drums for Max Webster, co-written and sung lead on “A Million Vacations,” and spent nearly 30 years teaching music in Sarnia.

Plunkett was playing bass in St. Clair’s concert and jazz bands when music teacher Al Weiss referred her to McCracken for lessons outside school. She studied with him for about three years, until she graduated.

She remembers a teacher who took her interests seriously. “He was so very patient and had a lot of cheer when trying to explain a concept or technique I didn’t entirely understand,” she told The Journal. He welcomed the music she brought to lessons and helped her find ways to keep learning when a question took them beyond what he knew.

After leaving Sarnia, Plunkett became a music journalist and photographer. One day in Ottawa, she heard “A Million Vacations” on the radio. The song brought back the gold records in McCracken’s studio and made her realize how little she had understood about his career while she was his student.

Max Webster had reached listeners well beyond Sarnia. In a tribute to McCracken, music broadcaster Alan Cross recalled looking up to him when Cross was a young drummer.

Plunkett wishes she had asked McCracken more about his music when she had the chance. That regret now shapes her own work. She pays attention to artists whose achievements may be more widely recognized elsewhere than in the communities where they started.

In 2023, Plunkett attended the event at Toronto’s Massey Hall where Max Webster was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. She photographed McCracken onstage with other Canadian musicians. By then she understood what those records in his studio represented, but she never got to return to him as an adult and talk about everything she had missed.

Plunkett said she has been away too long to speak for Sarnia’s current music community or measure McCracken’s full influence here. She knows what his teaching meant to her: he gave a curious teenager room to learn, long before she realized how much she could have learned from him.