Dancing in the Dark (4 page)

     We were sitting up on the roof a few nights ago, it was about 2 o’clock in the morning, it was hot, we were eating crackers and some pale yellow Kraft cheese from the 7-11 and demolishing 2 or 3 litres of cheap white Spanish wine. I guess there were about 7 or 8 of us. It was late and it was casual. You could hear faint traffic sounds coming down from Queen Street in the dark air.

We’re all musicians except for Karen, Scott’s girlfriend, who was sitting with her legs stretched out in a long line and her back against the low brick & tar wall of the roof with her beautiful short-cropped pale brown head asleep against Scott’s shoulder. These guys are all about my age, I’m 23, and mostly from Toronto, although I’m from Manitoba, Dick is from New York, and Paul used to play with a couple of groups after school in Halifax. Halifax is in Nova Scotia.

Ned was talking about music, and how important it is, guys playing in bands, changing the world or something, and how we all want to be famous, but we’re only going to be famous for about 15 minutes.

I didn’t say anything. It was late, it had been a long day, the air was just starting to get lovely and cool. And I’m usually a fairly quiet guy. I hold myself in. I’m a hot bassist, that’s what I play, that’s what I do in life, dude, I play bass, people have been saying I’m pretty hot; but if you come from a town south of Great Slave Lake, just a bit north of the Dakota border, and you’re in a city like Toronto, with all these different groups, or New York, then I think it’s sort of dumb to come on mouthy whenever you get the chance. I’d rather be just easy-going reflexive, take my time and give myself time to think about some of the ideas that people like Ned rap down. It always comes together for me a few days or a few weeks later, and I’ll say, O yeah, I see what I think about that. Whether it’s music, or maybe art, or something to do with economics, how the Japanese are buying into the entertainment industry or something like that, or, perhaps, something to do with fame. Like, what is it, what does it mean?

I’m 23. I haven’t lived in Toronto for very long. Well, about 11 months.
Manitoba is sort of classical. Toronto is an incredible hodgepodge. I think a lot of that goes into people’s music.

Anyway I’m not a punk. Not since I was about 12. Before I began playing and took up bass in high school. None of these people sitting around eating fake Kraft yellow cheese and listening to Ned trying to act like a talk show host or a media guru or something like that are punks either. I don’t look like that or dress like that. As for the playing, well, that’s different. I like songs that seem to be about an issue of some kind. I like people like this guy Adrian who has started hanging around a lot who can write songs that are really sort of “in your face.” That’s a term, it just means, direct, challenging. But I’m more interested in the bass lines of a song, and how the bass lines can take over the song and make it into something really incredible. What went wrong with Johnny Rotten? He didn’t understand the idea that bass is more important than lead, that’s what went wrong, so all his stuff with PiL sounds incomplete and sort of tinny, like not quite whatever it’s supposed to be.

There’s a girl here with the same name I have, almost. Her name’s Samantha. She’s sitting on a little flat car cushion of some kind, in the circle, across from Karen, and she has one of those really light frilly around the shoulders pink & print summer dresses on. Sounds frilly but she seems to be a really ballsy girl, super pretty, with a ton of honey blond hair. She’s talking to Paul about some of the young kids who come into the store, a trendy brass fittings place just off Queen Street West, where she works, and she says, “They’re just a bunch of high school kids who like Duran Duran.” and Paul laughs. That’s how people communicate. We’d be lost if we didn’t have these 1000s of different groups to use as designations for what we’re talking about. A teacher I had in Tremlo, Grade 12, I think, said it was sort of like the Greeks and Greek mythology. The Greeks had a lot of Goddesses like Diana and Hecate.

I’d like to say something to her, start a little rub of some kind, but I’m too tired. Now she’s talking about buses plunging off cliffs in Peru. Lebanese rebels blowing up embassies with car bombs. Somebody says something about children being given heart transplants in Utah. This is wild, isn’t it, or maybe it’s what you talk about all the time over 6 o’clock dinner.

“Books never stay around,” Ned says to somebody who has said something about books. It’s dark and I’m lying almost flat on my back with my head resting against an old pillow with some sort of cover around it.

Samantha says, “The Great Books stay around.” She must be a reader, maybe she’s a student, and she just works part time at the little brass fittings store. That sure is an attractive pink dress, with big splashes of green print you can hardly see, even with a moon, up here on the roof, in the dark. But, I think to myself, we’re not in the dark. We’re in the light, or maybe we
are
the light. What the fuck. Who can say we’re not?

I’m going out with a girl right now, Alice, who works in the UofT library, knits macramé, that’s something she does, okay? and smokes some very good dope. She has lovely breasts. We take showers together. She seems to like Mozart a great deal, but we get along and she seems to like the guys I hang around with fairly well.

Punk is very kicksy. Very trendy. But it’s also very principled. Punk concentrates almost entirely on immediate attitudes. Punk songs are deemed successful if they do a good job of simply making a hook – take a single word, sometimes a phrase, and then play it with this catchy sound mix that sort of completes a basic take on that one attitude. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the philosophy courses at UofM when I went there, but I think what I’m describing here is a fairly complete aesthetic. It’s complete, but the bass is all-important, that’s where I come in, and I’m hot right now, 2 or 3 groups have come on to me in the last month, I’m a bit of a star. And according to Ned, or what he was talking about 5 minutes ago, of course, and this is an interesting comment on people who say, O so&so is just going to be famous for 15 minutes, that, itself, was 5 minutes ago, and his remarks have sort of passed, like cigarette smoke, gone up in air, they’re drifting off into the dark night air above Richmond south of Queen.

What makes Alice so attractive to me, I think, the librarian with the wonderful breasts, is that she’s not a punk, she’s this beautiful, easy-going, everything more or less in order … librarian. Which is comfortable. We don’t have any problems.

“Well, it’s like dope,” Ned says, “what does dope do for you? It makes you feel relaxed.” I think every social area has guys like Ned, who have to
define and over-define the different things that are going on, without necessarily really understanding them very well. But sure, that’s what dope does, generally, for most people.

But what the bass does is sort of similar and almost opposite. Bass opens up the whole body to a simple idea – an idea which the singer has to be in command of, and which he, or she, I’m crazy about this girl Mary Margaret O’Hara, for example, is responsible for getting across. But when a good bass does that – it has to be a hell of a lot more than just an extension of percussion, it has to be playing some wild and complex lead notes down at the level of percussive rhythm, and sort of flirting with the back-beat, or maybe, in some cases, doing away with it altogether, but anyway, all at the same time.

You need to know something about language, melodies, engineering terms, different kinds of sounds.

Maybe we will be famous for 15 minutes. Or maybe we’ve already changed a number of attitudes – to things like body language, or dope, or what certain attitudes mean. A lot of kids are just going to wind up on the street, you know, wearing those silly red bandannas over their heads, or funny haircuts, the whole head cropped grey & stubbly and just a patch, like a big pool of ink, like a scalp, floating on top of their dome. Sure, but that happens with every social change. I think Ned’s trying to talk about Thailand now. He probably doesn’t even know where it is. I think it’s next door to Vietnam or Cambodia. I’m just going to close my eyes and drift for half an hour, nod off, half-closed eyes, watching this beautiful girl in the pink&greensplash print dress moving her legs back and forth like a stationary dancer in the dark, car sounds, Paul talking about raspberry pie with ice cream, sounds good. I’m not going to wind up on any street corner, or hanging out at some dick bar or coffeehouse; I’m going to get behind the best singers that come along, the best singers, with the best songs, I’m going to put down bass lines that they can move around, dance, sing, for hours.