From This Moment On (15 page)

That was great, but I increasingly felt the pressure to fulfill the dreams that she was living vicariously through me—regardless of what real talent or potential I did or did not possess. Imagine what a burden that is for a young girl. I just wanted music, not necessarily a music
career.
But because I felt obligated by her dedication to me, her singer, I never had the heart to consider exploring anything else in life, even though I’d dreamed of maybe becoming a veterinarian. I also developed a passion for design and architecture that continues to this day. In fact, that’s probably what I would have pursued had my mother not been so forceful about music. She dismissed those and any other ideas that were outside of music as if
they
were silly things to consider as a career. Her perspective was the polar opposite of most parents’ point of view. What parent wouldn’t be thrilled for her child to show interest in a commitment that would require a university education? My mother was convinced that music was my destiny, and I was too young to argue.

I felt pushed into my music career as a child, but I don’t say all this feeling sorry for myself. I am happy that I was able to make my mother happy, and smile at the conviction she had that I would make it. She was right: I
would
make it. The road was not easy, but I have no regrets and am very grateful for her persistence and belief.

My mother had contacted Ian Garrett, a voice coach who’d been referred through Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, which I attended a few years earlier in Sudbury for guitar lessons. A fantastic classical singer and a kind, enthusiastic voice teacher, Ian would prove to be helpful more than once in my youth. My mom had dreamed of sending me for voice training at the conservatory, but we simply couldn’t afford it. How could we? But Ian generously offered
to give me vocal lessons for free, so long as she could get me there. We’re talking a
ten-hour
drive, one way.

Yet my parents gladly took me out of school for several days and drove me to Toronto for vocal lessons with Ian. He had a large, elegantly appointed house and a new car, and was well dressed. Wow. I figured that even if my mother was wrong about me making it as a singer, maybe I could at least teach music for a living someday.

Ian had a beautiful black grand piano in the room where he gave lessons. There was always another student waiting in the hallway for the next lesson, and knowing that that person could hear me singing through the door made me a little self-conscious at first. Ian taught using all kinds of interesting and perplexing techniques, many of which required you to do these ridiculous-sounding, freaky voicings that reminded me of Jerry Lewis imitating a person in painful agony. Not Jerry
Lee
Lewis the rocker, Jerry Lewis the actor and comic. I was shy, so some of the exercises felt awkward to me, to say the least. One of the most embarrassing was a technique that teaches you how to control your exhalation of air by putting pressure on your diaphragm. That’s the dome-shaped muscle that acts as a bellows on the lungs.

Ian instructed me to stick out my stomach, then inhale as much air as I could without raising my shoulders, so the air went down and out. From behind, he would slip his arms under mine and wrap them around my abdomen—his ample belly pressing against my back—then lock his wrists and proceed to squeeze with an even, steady pressure against my rib cage.

All the while, I was instructed to purse my lips chicken-butt style, as I released as little air as possible,
slooooowly
but steadily. Ian would tell me to make a slight sound while doing this, so he could be sure that I wasn’t faking it. The idea was to continuously exhale while conserving and extending the breath for as long as possible until you eventually ran out of air, completely emptying the last bit with one last flex of the diaphragm muscle. Then you’d be ready to take in the next deep breath. At least if I felt faint, which I often did, he was
ready to break my fall should I collapse from lack of oxygen. These exercises were a strenuous workout, but they helped train me to sustain and carry long notes with a solid, even flow of volume and projection. It was the resistance against the abdomen that built strength and control in the muscles—sort of like vocal Pilates. Strange position, but it worked.

This type of vocal training left little room for creative expression and had me bored within the first fifteen minutes of the lesson. I preferred to improvise. One exercise after the other, drill after drill of scales, breathing combinations, interval gymnastics, pronunciation repetition, and contorted mouth formations, and I was physically exhausted after every lesson. I wasn’t having fun with this, as I didn’t want to be a classical singer and therefore didn’t understand how it would help me. But my parents had sacrificed a lot for me to be there, and Ian was being generous to teach me, this self-taught child singer that the cat dragged in, which was how I saw myself. The other students were always well dressed, nicely groomed, and obviously not poor like me. They could surely afford to pay for their lessons, unlike me. I felt out of my league in regard to class. That was obvious.

I was not formally educated in music and had little theory; most of what I knew, I’d learned by ear. I was musical and could pick things up quickly but relied on feel. I had adequate sight-reading skills from the few prior guitar lessons I’d had, enough to work out melodies. With the help of Ian playing the piano, I’d follow along, straining my eyes on the sheet music while keeping my ears attuned to what he was playing. I faked it mostly, but managed. He never let on and spared me any embarrassment.

At the end of each lesson, Ian would relax the mood, I think sensing my itch to sing with less instruction and allow me a freestyle vocal exercise for which I could choose a song from a pile of his sheet music. It encompassed a variety of styles. I came across the music for Minnie Ripperton’s 1975 number one hit “Lovin’ You,” a dainty, almost childlike ballad that showcased her five-and-a-half-octave range. I liked this one and chose to sing it. I already knew the melody
from the radio, so I would just read the words and sing along, pretending to be reading the notes, too. I loved the challenge of the range—especially that really,
really
high glass-shattering part at the end of the “la-la-la-la-la” chorus—and Ian always seemed impressed afterward. Maybe he was just being kind to make me feel good. I was happy with myself in any case, but figured that I could probably hit those notes because I was still a kid with the natural high register of a child, not something I’d earned from intense, technical training.

One of the lyrics went, “Making love to you is all I want to do.” The words meant nothing to me at that age, and I don’t remember Ian reacting at all. But I laugh now, wondering if it had been uncomfortable for him to hear those words sung by an eleven-year-old. I know when my son sings songs with mature themes that are beyond his level of understanding, I chuckle, but I try not to let on in order to spare myself from having to explain the meaning to him. I just wipe my brow and say, “All righty then!” I suppose Ian must have done the same.

My parents and I were able to make the ten-hour trip only a few times over the course of a year. Still, my lessons with Ian were worthwhile, and I am forever grateful for my parents’ sacrifice in making it happen. What a stress it must have been to go so out of their way, both financially and with their time, when they had four other kids at home. I don’t remember who stayed home with my siblings when we made these trips, but it was most likely my dad’s sister Karen, who was a few years younger than him, or even Kenny, as he was six years my senior and old enough to babysit.

My mother sent me to Toronto by myself a few times after that to meet with a manager she’d found for me who she thought could take me to the next level in my career. Kelly Kramer (already a pseudonym) was his name, and according to my mom, he would be able to promote me in all the right places and work up to getting me a recording contract. Kelly was a tall, imposing guy with long, black hair and long legs that clopped with every widely spaced step he took in his hard-soled boots and ankle-length fur coat. The first time I arrived
at his house, I was so hungry from the trip that I devoured every last nut sitting in a dish on his coffee table. He asked his wife to get me something to eat, and she brought me a bowl of a very exotic, white, fleshy, oval-shaped fruit that I now know are called lychees. I didn’t want to eat them at first, but I was so hungry I bit into one. Delicious!

The next time I visited Kelly’s home, however, the wife was gone, replaced by a girlfriend. Undoubtedly, there was some cause and effect there. There were no canned lychees, either, although the girlfriend, assigned to be my guardian when Mr. Kramer was out, was the one who taught me, at age twelve, how to roll joints with a pencil. Worked pretty well, too, but I soon learned how to do it freehand. The funny thing is that I had no interest in smoking pot, not even out of curiosity. I understood that marijuana was illegal, and I worried about getting into trouble with the law. Also, I was very serious about being kind to my voice and knew that smoking of any kind can damage the vocal cords.

So I would take satisfaction in rolling “a good one,” but I’d add it to the pile of joints on the coffee table. I was more interested in what record we were going to put on next, which song we were going to jam to—stuff like that. I had a one-track mind, and the only destination was music. Boys? Drugs? Not a distraction for me even as a preteen, a time when girls are usually developing their first crushes and getting all goofy in the company of boys. I was intent on developing myself as a singer-songwriter. My mother’s passion was the music career, while mine remained creating the music, but she had been grooming me to be the performer since I was three years old. Now, ten years later, as if crossing a threshold of acceptance, I resigned myself to being what she wanted me to be, the whole package. I became determined to be the best I could be at that, and actually grew impatient to join the world of music entertainment professionals, and just get on with it.

Kelly decided I needed a stage name, so he renamed me Elly—without the Twain, I believe. But before anyone ever knew me by that one name, our professional relationship was over. To this day,
I’m not sure if he lost interest or if my mother had the sense to get me out of an unsavory situation. But my description of the fur coat–clad manager and my education in joint rolling would have fit several of the adults in my world. I’m not sure whether my mother didn’t understand the music world outside our little Northern town scene to any realistic degree and was just too naïve to know what she was sending me to, or whether she figured that I could handle myself and kept her fingers crossed that it would all turn out okay. Probably a bit of both.

This being the mid-1970s, drug use was omnipresent. Mostly, I saw people smoking pot and hashish; some were taking acid. I never saw cocaine or heroin around me, and pill use probably would have been too discreet for me to really notice, I suppose. Of course, alcohol flowed freely in the places I played. But in a private area where the manager and entourage would gather, there was usually a table designated for joint production. Those who wanted to indulge would gather around to twist and roll cigarette papers with a thin layer of hash oil spread across them, then a sprinkling of weed, tobacco, or small hash chunks crumbled onto the paper as well. Twelve-year-old me would join the assembly line of joint rollers. But, again, I never smoked with these adults. In fact, I puffed a joint only once several years later, at a girlfriend’s house. After a few choking puffs, I decided it wasn’t worth all the fuss everyone made over it. I mean, it did make me dizzy and giddy, but at that age, so did having a good laugh over an unexpected, loud fart.

I was afraid of drugs more than alcohol at this age mainly because they were illegal and because I really didn’t understand the effects all the different drugs had on the mind. I wasn’t interested in experimenting to find out. Life had enough highs for me in my youth, without me relying on either drugs or alcohol. I can’t say I feel I missed out on anything by not using drugs, especially as a teen. It was entertaining enough watching everyone else getting high and just letting the music take me away. Thank goodness I felt that way, because with all the independence my parents afforded me at such a young
age, I easily could have gotten into the drug scene without them noticing until it was too late.

Now that Mr. Kramer had unceremoniously departed, my mother picked up the reins again as my manager. I felt a bit as though I’d gone one step forward and two steps back by no longer having a professional manager. Now, I’d never consciously set out to become rich and famous; my goal in music was to please myself by loving the music I sang and wrote, and if I should ever make it, I hoped to be respected as an artist and worthy of a place among the greats. I didn’t yearn to be famous just for the sake of achieving celebrity. Performing wasn’t even so much the main interest for me, as I was still painfully shy onstage. If I had to be up there, I’d have preferred to be a backup singer, not out in front. For instance, my debut on
The Tommy Hunter Show,
while a very positive experience, brought home the reality that I preferred huddling with the band and singers rather than standing in the bright, hot spotlight alone. I wanted to write songs and sing them to myself and around the campfire with my friends and family; the dream was not to be the “star.” The star would perform my songs, and I would sing background vocals. This was my genuine childhood dream: to be behind the scenes, which was clearly where I felt more comfortable, creative, and happy.

My mother, however, insisted that the only way I was going to make it was to be the singer and to get out there and sing anywhere that would have me. Talent contests, local bars, music festivals, telethons, senior citizen homes, community centers—you name it, she set up the gigs, plugging away toward the next opportunity.