Born with a Tooth (5 page)

Other than the annual New Year's gigs, the Sisters hadn't played live much in the last number of years. Last winter, after a particularly brutal blizzard that had shut down the rez and kept almost everyone indoors for three days, Tina had shown up at practice with a sheet of paper. “I worked something out,” she announced, waving the paper. “In the last ten years we've played approximately forty-six hours in front of a live audience, including encores. That's about four and a half hours a year, maybe two gigs annually, on average.” Jenny and Anne and Bertha stared back at Tina, speechless. “I was shut in the house with Joe and the kids,” Tina said defensively. “I went a little stir-crazy.”

“So what you're saying,” Anne said, “is that, other than the annual bingo gig, we manage to play only once a year.”

“Not exactly,” Tina answered. “Back in '86 we played four shows in one year. But for the last five years or so, New Year's Day has been about it.”

“So what are you saying?” Jenny asked. “You don't think we should bother anymore?” Nobody answered. “Is your silence telling me you all want to quit?” she asked, raking the others with her eyes.

“Maybe not quit,” Bertha finally spoke quietly, looking tiny and round and meek. “But maybe we should try some new material or something. Punk's been gone for a long time. I mean, there aren't too many people around anymore who are into the two- and three-chord thing.”

“She's right,” Anne said. Tina nodded.

“Bertha means the three-
power
-chord thing,” Jenny said angrily. “Isn't that what brought us together in the first place? The angry force of rebellion? A kind of music that allowed anyone to play it? We didn't just learn three chords, we mastered them! Don't forget the glory days.”

“That doesn't mean we can't go in a new direction,” Anne said.

“Yeah. Look at Nirvana or Hole or Green Day,” Tina followed. “They've done something good without selling out.”

“They're a bunch of glam rockers, a bunch of poseurs,” Jenny mumbled.

“Maybe,” Bertha whispered, “we're just too old for this.” Jenny stared at Bertha holding her beat-up Stratocaster copy on her lap, fiddling with its volume knob. “I mean, we got families and jobs and stuff.”

“I'll tell you what,” Jenny said. “We stick with it through summer, and if nothing comes of it, if we don't get at least one really good bite by then, we can pack it up for good.”

“We get to experiment with new material,” Anne added.

“Definitely,” Jenny said. “But no Anne Murray covers.”

And so all that winter and into spring the girls practised more regularly. They tried new material, Jenny actually enjoying the challenge of testing her vocal range. Where before she'd had to rely on throaty chants pierced by howls and screams, now she was actually singing, making words
come out of her throat that an audience might be able to interpret. Bertha's guitar miraculously became rhythmical, to some degree, and she started experimenting with solos outside her holy trinity of chords. Tina sat back and stroked her drum kit with finesse, and Jenny could tell from her smile that playing the drums was a lot easier on her child-strained lower back than frantically beating them. And Anne — well, Anne was the real musician of the group. She played her bass with head down, her long black hair covering her face as she concentrated on crisp runs of deep notes, forging a steady and intricate rhythm that the band relied on. For months it was almost like the old days again, the Sisters eager to show for practice, creating new songs and fine-tuning, even slowing down considerably, their old ones.

But late spring brought a lag in energy. Everyone was busy preparing for the onslaught of the weekenders, and the old lackadaisical spirit returned. It might be Tina calling to say, “Julia's sick again and threw up on me, I can't make practice,” or Bertha announcing that she couldn't come because her husband was complaining that he wasn't seeing enough of her.

With Canada Day and the big Mosquito Beach gig only two weeks away, the Sisters had been slacking off. Not only that, Jenny thought. Soon, very soon, she was going to have to tell the others her little secret. She remembered putting together a tape of the band's new stuff early last winter and titling it
Return of the Sisters of the Black Bear
. She'd given it to Ma to send out to different clubs in Northern Ontario, and even a couple of the old ones in Toronto that were still around. But the bingo season was raging and Ma was on a very long winning streak. She was too busy to send the tapes out, or had just plain forgotten, every time Jenny enquired.

When word spread about the council accepting musical applications for Canada Day at Mosquito Beach, Jenny felt the baby of an idea being born in her head. The Sisters were slacking again, they needed someone to give them a boost. But when she listened to their new tape, she realized that they were far from ready. The band sounded slow and scared of the new stuff. The only highlight was Anne's talented bass bopping along through each uninspired song. So Jenny had dug through her tape collection and finally pulled out an all-girl band from the late seventies, a band with the atrocious name Girls' Night Out. They were happy and fluffy and sang in harmony. They'd made a minor splash and were long forgotten. They were horrible but in a sweet, girly way. Without thinking, Jenny dubbed the tape onto a blank one, dropped it in an envelope and scrawled
Sisters of the Black Bear Get Happy
across it, and sent it off to the council.

There was no way they would choose it, Jenny had thought. But she was pretty sure the old men and women on council would snap their fingers, maybe even try and whistle along to the music, decide not to give the Sisters the gig but write a letter saying how nice their new music was and maybe next year, blah, blah, blah. The Sisters would be inspired anew to keep playing.

But the council loved it. Things had progressed too far for Jenny to reverse them. The girls were just going to have to face it and play their own music. They were going to have to find some of the guts they had had in the old days, when the Sisters were a band to be taken seriously.

All of them called the first years of the eighties the “old days.” Punk rock had swept into Canada from overseas with the Sex Pistols, The Clash, the Stranglers, the Subhumans.

Seven Seconds and the Circle Jerks and the Dead Kennedys and dozens of others had poured into Canada from the south. Jenny still remembered the thrill of the four of them jumping into the car and making the drive down to Toronto to catch the blistering music and feel the intensity of angry youth expressing early-adult angst in little basement clubs.

The Canadian bands had begun making a stir in 1980. DOA and the Young Lions, the Day-Glo's and SNFU all made regular tour stops in Toronto, and even sometimes up in North Bay. “Oh, that Joey Shithead in DOA is so cute,” Jenny remembered saying often.

One late night, during the long drive home to the rez after an especially intense show, Jenny said, joking, that the girls should start a hardcore band. They all laughed.

“What would we call ourselves?” Bertha asked.

“How about the Deerslayers?” Anne said. “Or maybe Red Power.”

“Nah, I like the Scalp Sisters,” Tina said.

“No,” Bertha answered. “The Four Skins would be better.”

They had decided that night what instrument each would play, and suddenly the jokes had become serious. Within a month each girl had bought her own used, crappy instrument and they were practising in Ma's basement under the name Sisters of the Black Bear. Ma liked the idea a lot, but thought the music wasn't very pretty.

“We're not about pretty, Ma. We're about making a statement on the condition of Canada's indigenous people and especially its indigenous women, and that's ugly. Therefore the music is too.”

“But you're not ugly, Jenny,” Ma said. She didn't get it, but she'd been helpful in getting the girls their first gig at the hall.

Shortly after that, the Sisters made Ma their official manager. She had lots of cousins all over Northern Ontario, and they helped her find gigs for the band. Ma was very polite-speaking to Toronto club owners she didn't know, and Jenny was sure this helped the band get booked there too.

Sisters of the Black Bear had lots to say, and the songs poured out in their first couple of years. By tapping into native anger they found a deep source of creativity, Jenny thought. After all, Leonard Peltier was rotting in jail for crimes he hadn't committed. Indians all over North America were living in abject poverty. Teen suicides were way higher in Native populations than in any others in North America.

It wasn't until the band released its first tape in early 1981 that the Toronto gig offers started pouring in. After much debate, the band titled the tape
Sisters of the Black Bear — Welcome to the Maul
. Jenny considered every song a minor classic: “Blowing Up the Bingo Hall,” “Custer Wore Arrow Shirts,” “The Government Gave Dad a Bottle of Whisky for Christmas and All I Got Was This Lousy Smallpox Blanket” and “Who Has the Red Face Now?” All got lots of air play on college radio stations. For a while the Sisters were playing Toronto so regularly that they considered moving there. It wasn't only Jenny who felt swallowed up after a couple of days in the big city, though, and in the end everyone was glad they hadn't moved. As quick as punk came in, it began sinking, replaced by cheesy “progressive rock” and synthesizer music. But by that time the band was a part of the Sisters' lives, and they continued practising together in the hopes that one day punk rock would be recognized again.

And here we are, Jenny thought, come full circle.

The band had their chance to make a statement again, in front of a really big crowd of kids and adults who needed a lesson. She felt stronger telling the Sisters what she'd done.

“You did what?” Anne asked, the night after the emergency meeting, back again at the rehearsal space.

“I gave the council a tape of somebody else's music.”

Bertha gasped. Anne's and Tina's mouths dropped.

“Well, we'll just have to tell them to find another band,” Anne said finally.

“I say we play and we play hard, just like we used to do,” Bertha said suddenly. Everyone looked over to her, standing up now, strapping her guitar on and turning up the volume knob.

“Yeah!” Tina shouted. “We've got new stuff. We'll play that along with our best old songs. We'll kick ass.”

Jenny hadn't seen those two so excited since the night of the show eleven years ago where the whole club had become a giant mosh pit. Tables and chairs were smashed that night; the audience bruised and battered themselves. The police eventually arrived and shut the show down. The band had never been happier.

“What do you say, Anne?” Jenny asked. “If this isn't punk guerrilla tactics, I don't know what is! This is the statement we've been wanting to make again all these years.”

Tina, Anne and Jenny stood together, looking down at her. Anne eventually nodded, then smiled, picking up her bass.

“All right,” she said. They were back in business.

“Old Jeremy on the council told me you girls turned a new leaf,” Ma said to Jenny over their daily coffee a week before the gig. “He says you're actually making real music now. You didn't say nothing to me about this, Miss Two Bears.” Few
could pronounce a name like Jenny Tobobondung, never mind remember it, so back in the old days the girls had replaced their Ojibwe names with shorter, more memorable monikers: Tina One Bear, Jenny Two Bears, Anne Three Bears, and Bertha Four Bears. It had been a sign of solidarity.

“Well, Ma, the music is a little different now.”

“You're not going to go smashing Bertha's guitar on stage for her again, are you?” she asked, looking worried over her cup, her grey frazzled hair sticking up out of her head. “I still remember that show in Toronto a long time ago, when Bertha tried to smash her guitar. But she was too small so you had to do it for her. You girls missed three shows trying to scrape up money to buy a new one.”

“No, I won't smash anything, Ma,” Jenny answered, sipping her coffee. “So what exactly did Jeremy say about our music?”

“He says it's real pretty, and you all harmonize real nice together now, and it reminds him of music again.”

“It'll be a good show, Ma. A nice show. Don't worry.” The Sisters' new material was plain bad — atonal and uninspired. Jenny didn't know what they were going to do.

“Wear something pretty for me,” Ma said.

The days before the gig flew by too quickly for Jenny. The four of them spent every hour they could find in the practice space, but still they sounded bad. “Too much distraction!” Jenny found herself shouting one afternoon to the rest of the girls after Bertha's four-year-old rode his tricycle across Jenny's mike cord, catching his pedal in it and ripping the mike from her hands. Tina tried to turn the problem of having kids in the rehearsal space into a creative coup by getting them to sing along on certain songs. The idea sounded brilliant, but
persuading any of the kids to contribute more than monkey sounds or farting noises proved impossible. Jenny was sick with worry, wondering how she'd ever managed to nail herself into this particular punk rock coffin.

Ma kept the Sisters filled in with early phone reports of crowd size out at the beach as they huddled at her house, trying to psych up for the show. The first band, a pop rock trio from Barrie who called themselves the Brews Brothers, were set to go on in a half hour, followed by a Gordon Lightfoot–inspired balladeer named Serious Henry, backed by his middle-aged band.

Ma's calls from the pay phone at the beach were beginning to grate on Jenny's nerves. “Jenny? It's your mother. My guess is that there's two hundred people here now. Did you fix your hair nice?” A half hour later the phone rang again. “Jenny? It's your mother again. I had little Frank run around and try to count heads. He says over three hundred weekenders are here, not including locals. What did you decide to wear?” When the phone rang once again, Jenny couldn't hear her mother very well over the din of the Brews Brothers and the screeching crowd. “Over five hundred,” she heard her mother say. “Get down here quick.”