Cigar Box Banjo (19 page)

“Yeah,” the band members say in unison. Of course, that’s exactly what we’ve just done. We’ve driven four days in a motorized sauna.

Okay, so we drive into Saskatoon and we locate the club— this was before the days of GPS, of which Porkbelly Futures avails itself, not that it does any good. We enter to find the same dismal scene we find everywhere. It is 3:30 in the afternoon, and the bar is empty except for the Day Man, a couple, and a singleton. The couple are arguing over some aspect of their relationship, which they discuss with equal parts tenderness and vitriol.

“We met on July first. Canada Day.”

“We did not. You fucking fuck. There were no fucking fireworks.”

“There weren’t? I remember fireworks!”

“You couldn’t even get a fucking boner. Fuck, I love you so fucking much.”

The loner has drinks in front of him, but he hasn’t touched them in a while. He has developed an easygoing alcoholism, so that he doesn’t need to drink the drinks right away, he just needs to know they’re there. He is a lean man. His hair has not thinned appreciably, and he dresses with a certain amount of style. All of which is to say, he is likely a musician; his last gig may well have been at this very club.

We approach the bar. The Day Man is short and pudgy. He wears a white shirt and black trousers. The clothes are ill-fitting and frayed, because he acquired them from the last Day Man, Mel, who had to go to prison following a misunderstanding with his ex-wife. This one’s name is Mel also; at least, the name “Mel” is stitched over the breast pocket. Mel is surly, because his career plans have gone south. He would prefer to be the Night Guy, the fellow who gets to serve the fun-lovers and thrill-seekers, the (reasonably) healthy drinkers who come to imbibe after nightfall. Mel longs for their bonhomie and benevolence. He wants to facilitate hook-ups and, every so often, have one of his own, some slightly over-ripened beauty queen inviting him to accompany her to her apartment. But no, he’s got the day crowd and, once a week, a troupe of goofs who have to set up their fucking equipment.

Mel explains that he doesn’t know where the sound equipment is. (It’s in the room marked “Private” beside the stage. Mel knows that.) He says the sound guy will be in at five for the sound check. It has to be completed by then, as that is when the dinner crowd is expected. And Mel cautions us not to make noise as we set up. “I don’t want you to disturb my customers,” he says, suddenly protective and solicitous toward them. “Now,” Mel says, rolling up his sleeves, “did you guys want to start a tab?”

Of course we did! That is what we do, beyond playing music; we start tabs across the nation! We establish loci of trade and commerce, where liquor is exchanged for musical performance. So we start a tab, and a beer is consumed by way of tremor diminishment.

Then we gotta go pump Naugahyde. That is the term we have given to the transportation of our amplifiers and keyboards and drums, etcetera. (“Etcetera” is housed in a series of boxes George has rendered, cleverly engineered so that each box can hold the maximum amount of etcetera and thus weigh in excess of seven hundred pounds.) That we were in reasonably good shape back then is testament to the beneficial effects of Naugahyde pumping, because we got precious little exercise. Much of what we got up to could actually be labelled “anti-exercise.”

So: we take our equipment out of the motorized orange metal box and set it up on the stage. The stage is, of course, too small, but this particular one is also higher than most, maybe three feet off the ground, and the risers are off to the side. This adds a power-lifting element to the Naugahyde pumping, and the stale air is redolent with our huffs and puffs, grunts and farts, the screeching sound of muscle fibre ripping apart. Then I attend to my bass amplifier, Joe and Tony to their guitars. George constructs his wall of keyboard, and Martin sets up the drums.

We search for power. We are like the first generation of robots in this. The first generation of robots was designed to scoot down university hallways, metal arms extended like babies searching for breasts to suckle. When their optical equipment landed on electrical outlets, they would plug in, charging up with enough juice to power their next foray.

Then we wait for the sound guy. He has to run cables and set up microphones before the sound check, which has to be completed, as I’ve said, preferably in silence, before five o’clock. No one is really surprised—we’ve met our fair share of sound guys—when he shows up a little after six. He apologizes and launches into an explanation that seems overly complicated. The sound guy throws around first names like we should know who the players in the story are. He says never mind about Mel, Mel’s full of shit—

“Hey, Mel! You’re full of shit!”

“
You
guys are full of shit!”

Oh well, now we’ve inadvertently thrown in our lot with the sound guy, but we don’t care. You know why?
We’ve been working on our tab.

Indeed, by this time our collective bar tab has achieved the heft of any old indenture. Soon we will be owing
them
money, soon we will be paying out of our pockets in order to take the stage. But we are all muzzy, and afternoon beer drinking often makes the outside world seem sunnier. We don’t care if Mel hates us, and we don’t care if we’re late with sound check and must perforce alarm the diners. There’s precious little food to be seen, anyway; a few more people have come to drink. Men wrap big hammy fingers around beer glasses. Women poke at their mixed drinks with plastic straws.

The sound guy is slender to the point of emaciation. He evidently needs a cigarette in his mouth in order to breathe. If unadulterated oxygen were to enter his lungs, it might overload his system, flood him out, something like that. He works with great care and attention. If he were to wire the sound imperfectly—plug the lead vocal mic into channel 2 as opposed to 1—life as we know it would presumably come to an end. So it is approximately eight o’clock when we begin sound check.
³

Here’s how sound checks go. The sound guy takes his position behind the board, which is usually some distance from the stage, typically at the back of the room, so that the sound guy can gauge how the music is inhabiting the space. He starts playing with the knobs on the board. A roaring squall of feedback announces that he is ready to proceed. The band senselessly takes to the stage. “Senselessly” on two counts: that roaring squall of feedback was very intense, and we know full well that the majority of us will not be needed for a long while, because the first thing that happens is the sound guy says, “Okay, the kick.” There is sometimes a talk-back system, so that the sound man’s voice issues forth from the monitors, but in the kind of clubs we play, that is rare. Mostly the sound guy just says, “Okay, the kick,” and we don’t hear him (because he’s in the back of the room), and then he gets mad and shouts, “Kick!”

Kick=bass drum. The big drum that used to be strapped on and belly-borne. Remember good old Haywire Mac back there on the street corner in Spokane? I hope you pictured him smacking at that drum with a mallet. In a modern drum kit, the mallet is worked by the drummer’s foot. He flattens a pedal, and a system of levers and springs drives the mallet against the drum skin. That’s why it’s called “the kick.”

“Okay, the kick.”

Thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock.

I was, in my little transcription there, tempted to fool around with type and font size to indicate that the sound guy transforms the sound of the bass drum by adjusting his knobs. But in all my years as a musician, I have never really heard the difference between the first bass thwock and the last, which happens, on average, about ten minutes later.

“Okay, floor tom.”

. . .

“Floor tom!”

Thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock.

The rest of us stand around while this is going on, smoking cigarettes, working on our tab. Occasionally, boredom drives us to sneak up the volume on our amps, softly stroke out a riff.

“Just the floor tom, please!”

Eventually it registers on the bar’s patrons that, for the past while, a loud thwock has been sounding in their brains. Perhaps at first they dismissed it as symptomatic of a hangover. Then they realized they were still drunk, so what the fawk is with this thwock? They start to get nasty, which is why Mel wanted to accomplish all this early and quietly. “What the fawk?” they holler.

“Rack toms.”

. . .

“Rack toms!”

“What the fawk?”

Thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock.

Eventually—really, eventually—the drum kit has been sound-checked. Then it’s time for the bass. I turn up my amp, fiddle with the knobs on the amp and the instrument itself, place my fingers on the strings and produce a low E, the great fundament of rock’n’roll.

“Okay, good. Keyboards.”

Perhaps I exaggerate, but sound guys do really spend most of their time with the drums, which pisses me off as both a former bass player and a fellow whose brain has been thwocked repeatedly. Indeed, I’d often catch a glimpse of myself in the future, sitting at a small round table in the shadows of some licensed establishment, nursing a beer and a shot of whisky, minding my own business, when . . .

Thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock.

“What the fawk?!” I would roar.

Sound check completed, we must attempt to eat dinner in the twelve minutes remaining before our scheduled start time of nine o’clock. There is some agreement with management that gives us a break on our food, but that only adds to our collective indenture.

Finally, we take to the stage—this both confuses and angers the patrons, who thought, gratefully, that we had abandoned it moments before—and begin our set. Our opening number is something lively and up-tempo—“My Imagination and Me,” sometimes, or “More Cold Drinks”—and people don’t know what to make of it. When the music ends, it’s obvious that the notion of applause has never entered their minds. They simply stare forward, too stunned to even blink. “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen,” Joe calls out. Deciding that they’ve been suitably warmed up, he launches into “Eva B,” the song with the goose-stepping Hitler impersonation.

We’ve got a four-set contract—four forty-minute sets, separated by twenty-minute breaks. The break between the third and the fourth set is always a lot longer than twenty minutes, and we take to the stage clutching beer and shot glasses to our chests. Between songs we demand, over the PA system, to know if we’ve missed last call, and when the bartender shouts it out (by now it’s the gregarious and philosophical Night Guy, Frank), Joe orders from the stage on our behalf, a massive order which, over time, has evolved into this telling and eloquent phrase: “The top shelf in a pail.”

Over the course of the evening, young people have ventured in, and by midnight the place is crawling with ’em, young people who hear in Joe’s music the plaintive love song of the circus geek, the anthem of the addled. When we play our last song—“Nos Hablos Telefonos”—they roar with approval. They respond to the final
cha-cha-cha
by lurching to their feet, clapping their hands together with rhythmic precision, or at least with concentration, because by this point in the evening no one in the joint could clap their hands properly, certainly never to the satisfaction of any law enforcement official delivering a roadside sobriety test.

Then it’s time for the after-party. This is rarely anything organized, although we can count on a bespectacled fellow sidling up to the band and asking, “Did anybody want to get stoned?”

Of course we did! That is what our group is all about: music, starting tabs, and getting stoned.

IN THOSE days, a typical club date was a week long, Monday through Saturday, leaving Sunday available for travel to the next town. The crowds would grow exponentially—through word of mouth, sometimes a mention in an entertainment column, very occasionally a review—and the weekend could be a little bit crazy. A little bit crazy, as in, you would wake up not knowing where you were, who that was, or what your foot was covered with.

This all takes its toll, spiritually. I can be more precise. After five years of this sort of thing, my spirit was about the size of a postage stamp. Just a regular little stamp for local mail. Martin and I had kept our duo going, and very often when Joe Hall and the Continental Drift had a week off, Quarrington/Worthy played a club date. Once, Joe and the boys left us in Ottawa. The band had played downstairs, in the “rock room,” and now Marty and I were playing upstairs in the same establishment, where there was a softer music policy. The music policy might have been softer, but the drugs weren’t, and of course Martin and I were always quite partial to the drink. Once a young woman asked us, “Are you guys Baha’i?”

The girl’s boyfriend rolled his eyes. “Just ’cause they sound like Seals and Crofts doesn’t means they’re Baha’i.”

But she was persistent. “Are you guys Baha’i?”

“No,” answered Martin. “We’re B’drunk.”

Neither of my musical careers was doing very well. Promise called to us from a great distance, like the sirens singing to sailors. One of the songs from our Quarrington/ Worthy album was actually a number one hit. That should have an asterisk—a number one hit*—just like Roger Maris’s tainted record. A periodical called
RPM,
the official organ of Canada’s music industry, had a number of charts rating songs that played on various formats. Our song, “Baby and the Blues,” was—for one week and one week only—at the top of the AOR chart. AOR meant “adult-oriented,” which I suspect translated as “the people listening to these radio stations, even if they absolutely
hate
a song, are too weak and infirm to get out of bed to change the station.” Still, Marty and I knocked none less than Kenny Rogers from that lofty height, along with his little song “The Gambler.” But Quarrington/ Worthy was toppled, after a mere seven days, from the top rung by “Babe,” as performed by Styx. And we didn’t merely slip to number two, there to feint and parry at Dennis De Young and his cohorts; we plummeted and were never heard of again.