Cigar Box Banjo (10 page)

But there was one call I didn’t want to make, and that was to my friend Kotzma. I knew Kim was—as I suddenly was— dealing with eternity sitting on his doorstep like a rolled-up newspaper. I postponed the call for far too long, three weeks or more. But that was a mistake, and I knew it seconds after Kotzma answered the phone. He was, as always, full of good advice. “Tell the people you love that you love them,” Kim said. “Every chance you get. End every conversation with ‘I love you.’ Except, you know, when you’re talking to someone you don’t love.”

Even so, after that I missed many of his phone calls, and I was not good at returning them. It’s a lame excuse, but my life got rather out of hand. Undaunted, Kim would leave his regular message: “I was thinking about you, hope you’re doing well. I love you, and we’ll go from there.”

One night my phone rang at two o’clock in the morning. I was in bed, on the houseboat, and I noted the number. I thought, “Well, Kim’s had a tug or two too many on his tequila bottle. I’ll call him back in the morning.” But I didn’t. Instead, I went out to a recording studio with Porkbelly Futures to start work on our third album. So it was not until dinnertime that I listened to the message. It was Kim’s wife, Deborah, and she was informing me that Kim had passed away that day.

1
My brother has never, in his life, had a job other than playing the bass as a soloist or in various orchestras and chamber groups. I myself have had several jobs. For example, for a while in my early twenties I was a tire-stacker. There were these tractor tires, and they needed to be shipped to various parts of Canada, so it was necessary that they be stacked in freight cars. My partner and I stacked ’em right to the top of the car, which I think made for a fourteen-tractor-tire-deep stack.

2
As things turned out, it was the rather archaic-sounding “aurum metallicum.”

3
Which, to me, meant only one thing: suicide chicken wings were back on the list!

4
It likely wasn’t Edison, rather a representative of the Metropolitan Phonograph Company, which is why I referred to it as a “legend.” Legends are, of course, always better than the truth.

5
Edison (if not Edison, then the well-fed white man in charge of things) didn’t sell cylinders to the general public, of course, but rather to exhibitors, who would then go across the land setting up “phonograph parlors.” People would listen through acoustical ear tubes and pay a fee for the privilege.

6
The harmonica, I mean. Let me get a little technical. Pedantry is, after all, the function of footnotes, and it’s not like you’re reading them anyway. There are various types of harmonicas. There are the great big contraptions called “chromatic,” because a little button on the side allows you to play half-tones. The kind popularized by Paul Butterfield et al. are smaller instruments designed to play in a specific key. There is a letter imprinted on the metal, let’s say, G, which means that if you simply stick the thing in your mouth and blow, you will sound a melodious G chord. However, blues guys play “cross harp,” that is, they sound the tonic by breathing in. That way they can perform all sorts of mouth and throat manoeuvres that would be unseemly in many other situations but allow the notes to be twisted and flattened in a soulful manner. So a G harmonica is actually a D blues harp. Get it?

7
Indeed, he had the beginnings of a moustache, twenty-odd whiskers acting in valiant concord. As Kim matured further, his moustache essentially became a homunculus, a creature that had grown happy and plump in the warm air wafting down from Kotzma’s nostrils.

8
Oh, I forgot to mention something during the nutrition section earlier: Christina outlawed beer. Good luck.

9
In fact, this is the first plank in the platform of my somewhat idiosyncratic musical-healing therapy.

10
It would be unfair of me not to mention that Marty, Jill, and Dorothy made a great many, maybe even most, of these phone calls.

CHAPTER
4

W
OODY GUTHRIE died of Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder. The disease is progressive and fatal, and Guthrie was hospitalized for the last decade of his life. One of his regular visitors at the Brooklyn State Hospital was a young musician from Hibbing, Minnesota, who idolized Guthrie and the things he represented. As
Time
magazine reported in November 1963, “The tradition of Broonzy
¹
and Guthrie is being carried on by a large number of disciples, most notably a promising young hobo named Bob Dylan . . . He dresses in sheepskin and a black corduroy Huck Finn cap, which covers only a small part of his long, tumbling hair . . . He delivers his songs in a studied nasal that has just the right clothespin-on-the-nose honesty to appeal to those who most deeply care.” Bob Dylan is going to turn up at key points in this narrative, as you will see, and this is an appropriate moment in my own musical history to bring him in.
²

My friend Bobby G. and I entered into a brief business partnership when we were approximately twelve years old. I was twelve years old, anyway. Throughout my life, it’s usually been the case that my friends are a little older than I, and I suspect this was the case with Bob. He was much taller, for one thing. He was much taller than most people, and there seemed to be no end in sight. Bobby’s body quivered and sprouted upwards, as in those time-lapse photography segments depicting a tendril struggling toward the sun. He was curly haired and perpetually wore a loopy grin, as if he knew where something kind of disgusting was buried. But he was a nice guy, one of the nicest guys I’ve known in this lifetime, and the business partnership we formed was never fraught with any kind of suspicion or tension. Mind you, it was short-lived, and there was very little money involved. Sixty-nine cents, if I remember correctly, which is what a forty-five cost in those days.

Some of you may recall forty-fives, which were delightful in every way—discs of music seven inches in diameter, slipped into a plain paper envelope, with a circle cut out of the envelope so that the pertinent information on the label could be read. Except for that damn centre. Remember? The little records had a hole in the middle an inch across. That had something to do with some fucking competition between Columbia and RCA. I don’t even pretend to understand it. All I know is that it meant you had to go out and buy a piece of plastic, a “centre,” as we Canadians would have it, in order to make the thing fit onto the turntable’s spindle. (You could try to place the single on the turntable freehand, with geometric exactitude—but that method ensured, almost without fail, that the chart-toppers you were listening to wowed and drawled most unmusically.) Come to think of it, this may have been the origin of the partnership I established with Bob G.: he owned one of those yellow plastic centres.

Assuming that to be the case, on the day in question, Bob ponied up thirty-four cents and I made up the difference, giving us the requisite sixty-nine cents. My other contribution was my enthusiasm, because the whole thing was my idea. We took our sixty-nine cents and purchased “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Dylan had been a constant in our household for two or three years. Tony brought home his albums—I recollect
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
in particular, with its iconic cover, Dylan walking the streets of New York with a girl clinging to his arm—and my father judged them not to be too bad— at least, he allowed them to be spun often and loudly. Dylan played folk music, simple and unadorned. He spat out the lyrics with smirking insolence, but this never seemed to deprive the words of their importance. It was the sixties, and the times were a-changing; people believed that the course of events could be redirected by the common will, and that this will could be affected profoundly by the song. By the protest song, to give it a label that today possesses a heartbreaking quaintness. Protest songs were so prevalent back then that they blasted through the air during the barbeques hosted by my parents and their friends, adults and teenagers alike singing along with zeal and piety.

I’m hard-pressed now to tell you exactly why I campaigned for Bob and me to purchase “Like a Rolling Stone.” The song was just beginning its ascent of the music charts. It would eventually reach number two in the U.S. of A., the first popular song to break the three-minute rule.
³
Indeed, it smashed that rule to smithereens, being six minutes in length. I hadn’t heard “Like a Rolling Stone” on the radio. I didn’t have a radio. (There was some sort of receiver integrated into the hi-fi system in the living room, but it’s not like I could take that to bed with me and try to pull in “Abilene,” and that’s the purpose of a radio, isn’t it?) I suppose I might have gathered from overheard snippets of conversation between Tony and his friends that Bob Dylan had done something inappropriate. That he’d gone too far, in many people’s view. I’ve always been intrigued with people who go too far. At any rate, that Saturday afternoon Bob G. and I took the bus to Eglinton Station, and then a train south to the Dundas subway station, where we effected the purchase at Sam the Record Man. We got back on the subway, rattled north, and took the bus back to the suburbs.

Bob had a kind of a den set up in his family’s two-car garage. He had a turntable on his father’s bench-saw, a speaker wire leading to a couple of cabinets suspended in the corners. Many of my friends were good at making speaker cabinets. Of all the differences between my daughters’ generation and my own, this often strikes me as the most dramatic. We wouldn’t have wanted to put anything called “buds” into our ears, no matter what kind of fidelity they promised. Rather, we enjoyed pulling paper cones and dusty magnets out of derelict consoles, slapping together a housing out of plywood, and settling the surround into the baffle as best we could. Bob G. possessed some talent in woodworking, so his cabinets didn’t rattle even when we cranked the volume really high.

And we cranked the volume
really
high. We listened to that song maybe seventy-eight times in a row. We took turns picking up the needle and placing it back on the spinning disc. We didn’t say anything to each other, but occasionally we’d look into each other’s eyes, checking to see if the other guy was going through the same thing.

To this day, I can’t hear the opening strains of “Like a Rolling Stone” without experiencing a thrill, a realization that the world is suddenly about to become far more interesting than it was just moments before.
⁴

I DON’T really have a clever segue into my new thematic material here, except that “Like a Rolling Stone” is, in my estimation, a great song, and it was on that day I decided one of the things I wanted to do with my life was write a great song. I can’t say that I’ve done so, but I have taken a couple of good shots.

After the reception of the dread Dire Diagnosis, I began to think about the work I’d be leaving behind. I asked myself, “If I were to die tomorrow, would I be satisfied with my output?” Surprisingly, I thought my ten novels were fine. I felt no great urgency to start scribbling the masterwork that might ensure my immortality. None of my novels was particularly successful.
⁵
Still, I liked them well enough. I worked hard at them, and they are, for the most part, what I intended them to be. Likewise with my five books of what I sometimes refer to as “whimsical non-fiction.” This memoir was uncompleted, and I was contractually obligated to submit a second draft, so that was on my to-do list, as I’ve said. There were also a couple of television projects I wanted to push as far as they could go, because I thought they were worthwhile and might provide some money for my family.

But my songwriting, that was a different story. I actually felt like I was maybe just getting good, that I was getting close to a place inside me where the words and the music could be easily accessed. I had become interested in combining musical forms with longer narrative, and without really being aware that I was doing so, had composed some
recitatifs
and
singspiels.
I was very proud of a couple of these,
Friendly!
and
Hey, Hollywood.
One of the things I liked best about these songs was that they were true, by which I mean factually precise and germane to my life. It comes back to what I was saying near the beginning of this little volume, that songs should be
about
something.

One song running through my mind these days is “Tom Dooley.” I suppose it’s natural, under the circumstances, that I should be drawn to a refrain like “Poor boy, you’re bound to die.” I listened to that song a lot when I was a little boy, and it scared me shitless. Something truly wicked had happened up there on the mountain. “Tom Dooley” is based on the misadventures of a womanizing, banjo-picking Confederate soldier named Tom Dula, but the point here is not the song’s historical accuracy. The point is that the balladeers used dark colours on a big canvas.

Here’s another way of saying that. The musician Lou Reed, as a university student in Syracuse in the early 1960s, entered the sphere of influence of Delmore Schwartz, poet, alcoholic, and habitué of the White Horse Tavern.
⁶
Reed thereafter decided that the Song should have every bit as big a realm as the Novel, as great a scope. Lou Reed’s songs are informed by a novelist’s bravery and recklessness, and that’s the spirit I determined I would emulate in what songwriting work of mine there was to come.
⁷

I felt there was a song I needed to write, a song that would address, somehow, my bumping up against Death’s Door. A phrase entered my mind. That’s an accurate statement, since suddenly there were three words in my head that hadn’t been there before. They weren’t the culmination of any cud-chewing; those three simple words arrived all by themselves. We could debate whether they were shoved forward, like small children, by the bureaucrats in some buried mental department. Or maybe inspiration is divine. I’m hedging my bets at this point. But those words—“all the stars”—came to me with unexpected clarity, and I believe I actually pulled on my chin as I wondered, “What’s that supposed to mean?”