Cigar Box Banjo (13 page)

Just so we’re clear on this point: George was white. All of the singers and all of the musicians were white. True, they were following the lead of the Mandala, playing R&B: “Knock On Wood,” “Hold On, I’m Coming,” “Soul Man,” etcetera. But in Toronto, back in the late sixties, black musicians were a rarity, treated with the same kind of wonder and curiosity that Londoners a century previous evinced toward Jemmy Button, who had been transported there from his native Tierra del Fuego aboard the
Beagle
(with Charles Darwin riding shotgun).

England had a much more inviting immigration policy in the fifties and sixties than did Canada, trying to recover after World War II. Then, when England decided that things had recovered as best they could, it played kitty-bar-the-door. The governments of many Caribbean countries began to pressure Canada to rescind the “climate unsuitability” clause in our immigration policy. When they were successful, thousands of new people arrived in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto.

But before this happened, Toronto, as I’ve said, lacked a sizable black community. Not that the city was all that homogenous. For example, the members of the Mandala, in addition to George, were Don Elliot (bass); Pentti (Whitey) Glan (drums); Josef Chirowski (big hulking B-3); and Domenic Troiano (guitar). Their names indicated a typically Torontonian admixture of heritage: Anglo, Finnish, German, and Italian. When I wasn’t watching George—and it was a little hard to take one’s eyes off him—I was concentrating on Dom Troiano.

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but by this time I had gained a reputation as a hotshot young guitarist. I owned an Epi-phone Broadway guitar—a thick, black, jazz-styled electric— and I had an old tube amplifier. The combination produced a satisfyingly thick wail, feedback lashing out like a lion’s paw through the cage’s bars. I was fast, too, and there were some little tricks I could do,
memes,
triplet figures that could be easily moved up and down the fretboard. So some people thought I was a hotshot. True, all of these people were young men who smoked way too much dope. (It pains me to point out that there were no girls who thought I was a hotshot.) But I knew I wasn’t really all that good. I knew that my brain lagged far behind my fat little fingers, that I didn’t really understand music and its complexities. I knew, for example, that I would never be able to play like Dom Troiano. If the two of us stood on a stage together and played, I realized, the difference would be obvious. I would be grappling with my big Epiphone, wringing its neck and plucking notes out of its belly. Troiano would be coaxing the music out of his guitar— significantly, a Fender Stratocaster
⁸
—caressing the thing gently and producing high wails, the kind of sounds I imagined a beautiful woman would make on the brink of orgasm.

When Dom Troiano soloed on the song “Opportunity,” he opened with a squalling insistence, a repeated, bluesy, and very elastic interval. From there he would venture higher and higher on the fretboard, until it seemed that there were no longer any actual notes, just emotion and wild-eyed freedom.

ALLOW ME to flash ahead in time for a moment here. Don Elliot was involved in a serious car accident in 1968, forcing him to leave the group. Josef Chirowski established himself with the group Crowbar, where he replaced keyboardist Richard Bell, later of Porkbelly Futures. Whitey Glan had a very successful career and managed to make his way south of the border; he played with people like Alice Cooper and Lou Reed. Glan and Dom Troiano also had success with the group Bush, their best-known song being the energetic and emphatic “I Can Hear You Calling.” Troiano was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the 1990s and struggled with it for ten years before passing away. “Struggled with it,” “lived with it,” I’m not sure what the most appropriate phrase is. And I certainly don’t know why the gods act with such offhandedness, flicking their fingers with irritation as they allow some to ascend, others to plummet to their doom.

But back at the Broom & Stone, these beautiful young men were in their prime, with only promise ahead. Dom Troiano was finishing his solo in “Opportunity,” his final notes suspended somewhere in the Kuiper belt. George continued dancing, pulling angrily at his collar and shirt buttons.

George Olliver was the Blue-Eyed Prince of Soul, praying at the altar of James Brown. Like Brown, Olliver was in part a hopped-up preacher man, his invocations just this side of speaking in tongues—or complete gibberish, depending on where you locate the Holy Ghost in all this. George led the audience through the Five Steps to Soul, which eschewed doctrine and coherency and promised that salvation was to be had in music.

George Olliver still performs, and he still performs Sweet Soul Music, although he now has a split focus. As a born-again Christian, George sings gospel whenever and wherever he can, serving the ministry of Jesus Christ. I may not be a born-again Christian, but I can certainly see the appeal in singing gospel.

The connection between blues and gospel music has been proclaimed by more eloquent and authentic voices than mine. “The blues is a lot like Church,” said Lightnin’ Hopkins. “When a preacher’s up there preaching the Bible, he’s honest to God tryin’ to get you to understand these things. Well, singing the blues is the same thing.” Blues and gospel share the same unbridling of the spirit, in which the singer shakes off the constraints of propriety, just as James Brown would shake off the cape his handlers wrapped around his shoulders in an attempt to get him quieted down, sedated, moved off the stage.

Blues and gospel are flip sides of the same musical coin— songs of complaint, songs of belief—with that coin most definitely tossed by an African-American hand. Oh, there is gospel that white people create, but to me it doesn’t sound remotely similar. Songs such as “Shall We Gather at the River?” and “The Church in the Wildwood” are dreary and dirge-like. Their melodies—typically sung in unison rather than in harmony—have creepy rises and falls that remind me of Druids gathered in the palest of moonlight. But I will say this: “Church in the Wildwood” comes with a pretty good story attached to it. Dr. William Pitts, in the year of Our Lord 1857, was travelling by stagecoach out of his native Wisconsin to meet his fiancée. The stagecoach stopped for a bit in Bradford, Iowa, and Pitts took a little walk. He came upon a glade, a “setting of rare beauty,” as he put it, and he imagined he saw a church, a humble brown church, sitting there. It was an image he could not shake, and when he returned home, he wrote a song about it. Happenstance had it that William Pitts moved to Bradford seven years later, to teach music at the local academy. He was stunned to find the townspeople in the act of erecting a church on the very spot of his intense imaginings. He had his students sing the song at the opening, and he subsequently sold the rights to a music publisher for twenty-five dollars, money he needed to attend medical school. The song is still sung, and the little brown church still stands today.

Let us compare this quaint little tale to the story of the man often cited as the Father of Black Gospel,
⁹
Thomas A. Dorsey.

Under another name, “Georgia Tom,” Dorsey and the similarly monikered Tampa Red (Hudson Whittaker) constituted a duet called the Hokum Boys. Georgia Tom played the piano, Tampa Red a big-bodied steel guitar in the bottleneck style. “Hokum” is characterized by sexual content and a heavy reliance on the double entendre. It was in that tradition that Thomas A. Dorsey made his debut in taverns and tiny theatres across the USA. Their hit record of 1928, “It’s Tight Like That,” is a hokum exemplar if ever there was one:

Two old ladies waiting in the sand,
Each one wishing that the other was a man,
It’s tight like that . . .

But Tragedy entered the scene—the gods waggled their fingers—when Georgia Tom’s wife died in childbirth. Heartbroken, he turned to the Lord, and in his grief came to him his most famous song, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Dorsey’s influence on gospel music goes beyond imbuing it with the rhythms and airs of the blues and hokum. He also wrote highly subjective lyrics—“I’m tired, I’m weak, I’m lone”—a subtle shift from the congregation to the individual. “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” was sung at a rally the evening before Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination and was sadly reprised, by Mahalia Jackson, at his funeral. Lyndon B. Johnson left instructions that “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” be sung at his own funeral. The song has been recorded by many of gospel’s stars and, interestingly enough, by many stars of country and western music, including Roy Rogers and Tennessee Ernie Ford. Why is that interesting? Well, consider this: Thomas A. Dorsey was the first African-American to be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Given that that institution was probably the last bastion of white musical exclusivity, I think it’s interesting that integration came in the form of gospel music.

This line of investigation will take us to some interesting places, including Nashville itself. But please bear with me—it is much too early in the story to go there yet.

1
The most overtly political and active of the “protest singers,” Ochs was a good friend of Bob Dylan’s until a famous incident in which Phil’s criticism of one of Bob’s songs prompted the latter to throw the former out of his limousine, proclaiming, “You’re not a folk singer, you’re a journalist!” Mentally unstable and increasingly alcoholic, Ochs wandered the world, at one point meeting and singing with Victor Jara. Ochs was so upset by Jara’s death during the 1973
coup d’etat
in Chile that he organized a huge benefit at Madison Square Garden. Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie were scheduled to play. When it looked as if sluggish ticket sales would force them to cancel the event, Dylan agreed to perform, and the evening was sold out.

2
Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee were a duo (Terry played harmonica and McGhee guitar) who were among Alan Lomax’s discoveries. What I think is most interesting about them is, by the time they were playing the Riverboat in Toronto the two men could no longer stand each other. But they were bound together by symbiosis: McGhee, who had suffered from polio as a child, needed to be pushed around in a wheelchair. Terry, the wheeler, was blind and needed to be told where to go.

3
Indeed, the Siegel-Schwall Band took over the house-band gig at Big John’s when Butterfield and the boys began touring.

4
In a previous chapter I mentioned Charley Patton’s famous Grafton, Wisconsin, sessions of 1930. What isn’t always mentioned about Patton is that you can barely understand anything the man is saying. This is not simply a function of archaic recording techniques. He was a mumbler, more concentrated on whacking his guitar in an admittedly very funky manner. (Not all the time, only when the spirit overtook him.) What I’m getting at is, it was not the most satisfying listening experience.

5
Traynor amplifers were, of all things, manufactured by a wholly Canadian company, a rare example of frostbacks actually thinking they could do something as well as, maybe even better than, the Americans.

6
If I give the cabinet its full name—and you really think about it—you might understand what it is I’m talking about: the Leslie Rotating Tremolo Speaker System. It’s a sound modification device (as opposed to a mere amplifier) that takes the organ sound and spins it around in the air like
boleadoras.

7
I want to point out that I use the phrase “step forward” only figuratively. The guitarist would actually remain in the shadows, studying his hands with the intensity of a Talmudic scholar.

8
Why, you might ask, did I attach the word “significantly” to the Fender Stratocaster? (You might also ask why I used such a heavy-handed and sophomoric analogy, but let’s gloss over that for now and talk about guitars.) The significance has to do with the musicological thesis that I’m about to promote. Ahem. The Fender guitar was significant to the development of the Toronto Sound. There is indeed a Toronto Sound, and as far as I’m concerned, it is as distinct as anything coming out of Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, or New Orleans. David Clayton Thomas, frontman for the band Blood, Sweat and Tears, was one of its early proponents. Listen to him singing “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” if you care to; that’s the Toronto Sound. I characterize it as Sweet Soul Music, with the sweetness purely musical in nature. The sweetness has to do with a major tonality, unflattened thirds and L.A. fifths abounding. Also featured prominently in the Toronto Sound is a Hammond B-3. With Leslies. Toronto has produced a statistically unlikely number of wonderful organists: Joey Chirowski, Mike Fonfara, Doug Riley, Richard Bell.

9
I’ve been confused for years about the difference between a gospel song and a “spiritual.” I’m not absolutely convinced there is one, but I did read, in a book by Studs Terkel, that a spiritual is a song that arose from the slave days, in the folk tradition, and is not attributed to any composer. A gospel song is authored, and Thomas Dorsey was one of the first to write one.

CHAPTER
6

R
EMEMBER DR. Hill’s son, Danny? (He had come to audition for PQ’s People and sampled some strange Sinatra stuff; he ddcap2idn’t get the job.) Well, the year I was sixteen, one of my high school music teachers came up to me and said that the organizers would like an original song for the upcoming Christmas assembly. “Hmm,” I said, “I guess I could do that.”
¹

“Great,” she said. (My memory being what it is, I can’t be 100 per cent sure, but I’m thinking this was Miss Sage, who taught strings and had long blonde hair and broke my heart by marrying one of the other music teachers before I had a chance to fully mature.) “I’ve asked Danny Hill, too. You guys can write it together.”

“Oh.” During the first few seconds of our conversation, I had already vaulted ahead in my imagination. I was projecting mere months into the future, by which time this triumph— the first public performance of a new Christmas classic—had led to my performance at the Mariposa Folk Festival, where the entire audience was composed of women who had removed their blouses in deference to the sun and its heat. Now this Danny guy had come along to scupper the deal. But I went over to his house anyway, toting my Goya, the fairly cheap acoustic guitar that I’d managed to acquire.
²