Cigar Box Banjo (14 page)

We went down into the basement, and Danny picked up his own guitar, which was a nylon-stringed instrument. This was a bit odd and unexampled. To my mind, nylon strings were used to play classical music and had very few, um,
practical
applications. Dan had also grown out the nails on his right hand, and with these effeminate extensions he plucked at his guitar, arpeggiating. (In those days, I would strum. I was beginning to experiment with Travis picking, but I had never seen anyone do this, the picking hand hovering over the strings. Everything the kid did was strange.) “I’ve been working on the song,” Danny announced. “Want to hear what I have so far?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, listen.” He ramped up his spirited little arpeggiat-ing. “
Christmas comes once a year, now’s the time to be of good cheer
.” He continued in this jaunty vein, rhyming words colliding with each other like bumper cars. I didn’t know what to think. This was really terrible, this whole enterprise was doomed to—

Then Danny burst out laughing. He pointed at my face, whooping with delight, and after a few seconds, just as I was about to join in, he stopped abruptly and said, “Okay. Let’s get to work.”

Well, we did in fact write a Christmas song, of which I can remember very little. Years later Danny reminded me that we had argued over which phrase was correct: “giving and taking was a beautiful thing” or “giving and taking were a beautiful thing.” I can’t remember if “giving and taking were beautiful things” was in the running, but it clearly should have been. At any rate, our song was a big success at the Christmas assembly, and even though there was no A&R (Artist and Repertoire) guy from a major label ready to sign us to a big contract, we decided to form a duet, which we called Quarrington Hill, just as Martin and I would later form Quarrington/Worthy. This doesn’t represent any egotism on my part—or, let’s say it doesn’t
reveal
the egotism we all know to be there—since Quarrington is a bulky name and would sit oddly on the other side of the couplings.

Danny (he achieved fame as Dan, of course, and what I call him is Dan-Dan) and I wrote a few songs together, and we both penned a couple of originals. (Again, gone from the memory banks.) Quarrington Hill also did a couple of covers, one of which I
can
remember, “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens. This song is a dialogue, with Stevens singing the older man’s part in a lower register and going up an octave to portray the rebellious offspring. I would sing the father’s role, and then Dan-Dan would come in and carve my ass in a beautiful silver voice tarnished by painful emotion. In terms of making
me
look good, this song was a misguided venture, but it always went over very well. Not that Quarrington Hill played that many places. We did manage to convince a bar on Jarvis Street (never the most wholesome avenue in Toronto the Good) to let us play nightly, and after dinner I would borrow my father’s car, drive over to pick up Dan-Dan, and drive downtown. This arrangement lasted a week or so before the owner asked Dan-Dan how old we were. “Seventeen and sixteen,” he replied blithely.

“Butbutbut,” the owner stammered, “this is a
bar.
”

“Oh.”

Danny was much more ambitious than I, and a much more talented performer, and after a few months Quarrington Hill ceased to be. Quarrington went back to the basement, and Hill became a very famous Canadian songwriter. He achieved international fame as the singer and co-writer of “Sometimes When We Touch,” a song that, while some may find it overly earnest, packs an enormous emotional wallop. Dan had first written the words to “Sometimes” at age nineteen, along with a chord structure and a melody that are lost to oblivion. This is perhaps the neatest and clearest form of collaboration, one party handling the music, the other the lyrics.

LIKE GEORGE Gershwin and his brother Ira.

The Gershvins, having emigrated to New York from Russia, decided that their bookish and bespectacled older boy, Izzy,
³
should have music lessons, so they bought a piano and had it installed in their second-floor walk-up. Before Izzy could lay a finger on the instrument, his little brother Jacob came running into the room and, kind of miraculously, pounded out a passable version of a current popular song. (He had learned to play, it is said, by staring for hours at a friend’s player piano.) Ira went back to his books, and Jacob—who called himself George—went on to demonstrate a fierce brand of musical genius. He was interested in all sorts of music, from popular song to classical European stuff to the avant-garde.
⁴
At the age of fifteen, George got a job as a song plug-ger down on Tin Pan Alley. This was an area of Manhattan, mostly on West 28th Street between 5th and 6th avenues, where there was a concentration of sheet music publishers. Tin Pan Alley blossomed in the last half of the nineteenth century, before the coming of the radio and the phonograph, when musical entertainment at home meant sitting down at the piano and doing it yourself. The odd name of the place supposedly stems from the fact that there were hundreds of tinkling pianos sounding in dissonance. George’s first hit— “When You Want ’Em, You Can’t Get ’Em, When You’ve Got ’Em, You Don’t Want ’Em”—violated a basic Tin Pan Alley dictate, which was to keep the title short.

Ira worked in his father’s Turkish baths and continued to read his books. But George Gershwin—once he changed from “Gershvin” to “Gershwin,” the entire family followed suit—called upon his brother for help when he began writing for the musical theatre. The boys took their show to Broadway.

George usually came up with the music first, at least, the initial musical seed. Ira laboured long and hard over the text. He would sometimes stay awake all night, struggling to find just the perfect word. The music to what would become “Embraceable You” so daunted him that he had to check into a hotel for three days to work out the lyrics.

Another famous site of collaboration was the Brill Building, located at 1619 Broadway Avenue, with its offices leased to music publishers, composers, arrangers, and recording engineers. Musicians loitered around the lobby, hoping to be hired to play for a demo. That was the actual Brill Building, but when people use the term they are mostly referring to a neighbouring building at 1650. This is where Aldon Music kept its offices, and it was Aldon Music (run by Don Kirshner and Al Nevins) that had the most successful stable of songwriting teams, none of its creators older than twenty-six years of age: Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield; Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman; Gerry Goffin and Carole King; Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart; Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

Arguably the most influential was the team of Leiber &Stoller (Jerry and Mike, respectively), who pioneered a lot of revolutionary ideas we now perceive as commonplace. They incorporated teenage slang into popular music (“Yakety Yak”), championed “girl groups” like the Shangri-Las, and, as producers, used orchestration, strings, and such to enhance rhythm and blues. In doing so, they influenced a weird kid who liked to hang around the place, Phil Spector.
⁵

Great songwriting teams are book-worthy subject matter all on their own, so I’m going to limit myself here to things you might find interesting. (Which is to say, I suspect you might not know these things, so you have to suffer through this pon-cey delivery of the fruits of my research.) For instance: Gerry Goffin and Carole King were a married couple, responsible for many songs identified strongly with a female mindset: “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” for one, and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” But King supplied the music to these co-compositions, and it was Goffin who supplied the lyrics. Carole King, as you know, went on to find great success as a solo performer. Her album
Tapestry
was one of the best-selling LPs of all time. You remember
Tapestry
, don’t you? It was the album that everyone’s girlfriend liked.

There was another very successful married-couple/writing team; indeed, they met at 1650 Broadway Avenue. Barry Mann had already written or co-written some hit songs
⁶
by the time he met Cynthia Weil, an aspiring actress. Together they wrote such classics as “We Gotta Get out of This Place” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

And this brings us back to Dan Hill, because Dan-Dan’s collaborator (the first was Paul-Paul Quarrington) was Barry Mann. Dan went to meet Mann at the Motown Building in Hollywoodland, California. (The building housed the L.A. offices of AT V music, which had signed both men.) They exchanged ideas. Or rather, Barry Mann fired off a number of musical ideas, inveighing young Dan to provide lyrics, something Danny found himself curiously unable to do. As Dan-Dan reports, “I still clung to the clichéd notion that songwriting could only come from a pure, inspired place.” With a degree of desperation, Danny removed a sheet of lyrics from the bottom of his guitar case, instructed Mann to do something with them if he wanted, and elevated down to the reception area to call for a cab.

Before the cab arrived, Barry Mann came exploding through the elevator doors. “I got the chorus!” he yelled as he ran, singing the melody that would propel the song “Sometimes When We Touch” to number three on the
Billboard
Hot 100.

We will return to Dan Hill later in the story. Before we leave him here, however, I’m going to recount a little anecdote that is non-musical in nature, and out of order in the narrative sense. After my musical career (which you will read about in the upcoming chapters) didn’t amount to much, I decided that I’d concentrate on my novel writing. I supported myself with a series of bad jobs. I believe I’ve already mentioned “tractor-tire stacker.” I was also a dishwasher, a paralegal attaché (that’s a messenger who delivers legal materials), and a security guard for the aptly named Cavalier Security company. My uniform consisted of grey slacks and a bright red jacket adorned with a crest surmounted by the word “Cavalier.” I also had a hat, which was too big. (If you knew how big my head is, you’d wonder who the prototypical Cavalier man was.) The reason my hat didn’t settle over my eyes and blind me was that I wore, after the fashion of the day, spectacles with lenses as large as side plates. None of my careers—in security, law, sanitation, or machinery—earned me much money. It was barely enough to cover my basic expenses, beer and smokes. So I had to cut back on a few things, namely food and rent. The food problem I solved by subsisting on a diet of Kraft Dinner. As for accommodation, I moved into the basement of my richest friend, who was, by a long shot, Dan-Dan Hill.

With the money from his hits, and barely out of his teens, Dan had bought a house in the Beaches, an old and fashionable neighbourhood in East Toronto that abuts Lake Ontario. Notice I didn’t say, “Dan put a down payment on a house.” No, he bought the damn thing. So for a while I lived in his basement.

The house was the location of some fairly wild parties, though not so much during the time I lived there. Dan had married a beautiful lawyer, Beverly Chapin, and the place was reasonably quiet, except for me stumbling down the stairs at three o’clock in the morning, pissed as a newt.

Late one afternoon, I returned home from work resplendent in my Cavalier Security uniform. I entered the house through the back door, picked up a glass of water in the kitchen, and, drawn by some voices, went into the living room. Bev was sitting there with a friend. Quite an attractive friend, so, without being invited, I sat down on a small chair, folded my arms, and waited to be introduced.

Bev didn’t pause in her story to introduce me. Indeed, she kind of ignored me, but that was all right, I had time. Bev’s friend threw me a quizzical glance, and then another. As the quizzical glances came faster and faster, Bev continued speaking in a measured manner. Finally, she left off her story long enough to announce, “Oh, that’s the security guard Dan hires when he’s out of town to make sure I don’t fool around on him.”

AFTER HIGH school, I began attending the University of Toronto, studying English Literature. I was interested in becoming a writer by then, but it quickly dawned upon me that this wasn’t the way to do it. Back then there was not the proliferation of writing programs we have today (I myself have long been associated with the fine Humber School for Writers), and although I might have considered attending the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, that would have required my first hearing of it. What I did do was ignore my studies to a certain degree, and at night I would bang away on an old typewriter and try to work though certain technical problems.

My childhood friend Stephen Tulk, who was in a pre-med program, took an English Literature class with me. The concentration was on the American novel, and that course was the only one that ever did anything toward equipping me to become a novelist. Specifically, Professor Asals spent two whole hours discussing the beginning of Melville’s
Moby Dick,
with its famous three words, “Call me Ishmael.” His lecture gave me an inkling of the depths that were possible, the vast spaces beneath words, and if that didn’t teach me about writing per se, it taught me a little bit about reading. Tulk annoyed me, because when called upon by the prof he would stand and put forth an eloquent argument in defence of or opposition to a statement, despite having
never read the novel in question.
I myself was forever mired in bullshit. I remember suggesting that Captain Ahab, fearing that he would die by rope, preferred to stay at sea because it eliminated the possibility of hanging. “But one can be hanged at sea,” replied the professor. “And if you’d read
Billy Budd
as you were supposed to, you would know that.”

Tulk was and remains the most talented man I know. He is a fine artist and a skilled musician, as well as being a doctor. As much younger men we goofed around on musical instruments together, and Tulkie claims still to have a reel-to-reel tape recording of yours truly singing “Long Tall Texan” before my voice changed. At any rate, Tulk was a member of a musical group called the System, and one day he reported (after a class on
Pierre: or, The Ambiguities
) that his friend Martin Worthy had returned to Toronto. I remembered Martin, he of Marty’s Martians and the scoliosis. “Where’s he been?” I wondered.