Cigar Box Banjo (15 page)

“He’s been in Europe, playing guitar and singing. You guys should get together.”

I should make it plain here that I was no longer a blues guy. At the age of seventeen, I had been drawn to the Mariposa Folk Festival, held then on Toronto’s Centre Island
⁷
because of the participation of Taj Mahal, one of my blues heroes. His band included Jesse Edwin Davis, who played the Fender Telecaster unlike anyone before or since, his work at once delicate and as forceful as a church organ. I still remember attending the workshops that featured Taj Mahal, watching the evening concert as his band took a huge crowd through the gloaming into night. But something else had happened to me there. There were these “singer-songwriters” hanging around. I remember two in particular: a scrawny and bespectacled kid named Bruce Cockburn, and James Taylor. I had never heard of James Taylor—neither, certainly, had any of my friends—but for some reason I elected to attend his first performance at the festival, which was part of an afternoon event.

It is quite something to watch five hundred women fall in love with a guy all at the same time. And, times being what they were, many of these women had shed clothing beneath the summer sun. (This accounts for the fantasy cited at the beginning of this chapter, in reference to the Christmas song.) A few were topless, which was dizzying. I returned from the Island with a new respect for folk music and promptly became a singer-songwriter.

So, after classes one day, I took my guitar, the Goya, over to a rooming house in the Annex. Marty and his girlfriend, Jill, had a room on the second floor. That was pretty cool, to have a girlfriend, not to mention one who resided in the same tiny little bedsit. And not only that (I met her a few hours later), but also one who was vivacious and beautiful and British. Martin had met Jill in Brussels, where she had been working as an
au pair
. He himself had been working with his friend Dave Chalmers as a musical duet. They had a job in a restaurant there—that is, they were permitted to play in the restaurant and then pass around a breadbasket into which the patrons could place alms. Now Marty had returned to Toronto—I realize I don’t actually know why; I’ll have to ask him sometime—and was looking about for something to do. So I went over there, and Marty and I exchanged songs, and we decided that we complemented each other in many ways. One very basic way was that our voices blended nicely, my baritone and his tenor. But there were other things, too, that were less evident. Martin’s lyrics were more complex, clever, poetically crafted than mine. His tonality was different—that is, his collection of musical memes. He liked, for example, to play a chord and then, retaining the rooting bass note, slide the triad up a whole tone. On this occasion (or possibly a slightly later one) we wrote a song together, then went out and drank far too much beer, a pattern we would repeat with minor variations for a long time.

Marty and I conducted our partnership in a very businesslike manner. There weren’t too many corporate types who would have recognized our manner as businesslike, perhaps, but I believe it set a benchmark for sober industry. I would arrive at Marty’s flat—he and Jill lived in a succession of flats in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, which services the university’s student and faculty population—late in the morning. We would share a coffee, discuss the travails of the Maple Leafs (though back then the Leafs didn’t have nearly as many travails as they do now), and then uncase our guitars. We would spend quite a few minutes tuning, since Martin had a twelve-string, which doubles each note and requires great persnicketiness. Following that, one or the other of us would proffer an idea: a chord progression, a lyric, a melody. Any one of these things could trigger the composition of a song.

AFTER A few months of this, we ventured out onto the streets, Marty and I.

Specifically, we ventured out onto Jarvis Street. There was quite a lot of musical activity on Jarvis back then. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that Jarvis Street was our version of Bourbon Street or anything. Or maybe it was. What I’m getting at is that Jarvis was the stroll, the sidewalks studded (hmmm, could be the wrong word) with working women. But there were little clubs up and down the street, and one, the Iron Grate, featured a hoot night, an open mic, on Mondays.

The concept of the open mic (and by the way, I’m going to persist in that spelling despite the red squiggly protests from my computer, since it’s short for “microphone,” after all) is a pretty egregious thing. Club owners are capitalizing on the desperate and competitive nature of the struggling artist. They announce an open mic, and performers line up around the block. They are allotted their ten-minute spot, and an evening’s worth of entertainment is assured, even though the audience is composed almost entirely of musicians awaiting their at-bat. And not only do those musicians not get paid, they are often charged a small fee for the opportunity. However, Martin and I went down there, week after week, and in doing so made some new friends.

When casting in the murky pond that is my memory, I am as likely to remember a fellow’s song as the fellow himself. Everyone had a repertoire, some originals and a few covers to get the people going. (Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” was often trotted out, a surefire sing-along crowd-pleaser.) But at the same time, everyone had one special song that accompanied them like a familiar. The Iron Grate was much like the cigar box banjo competition, with each individual plucking out the tune he or she had composed on the road to the fairground. Each singer-songwriter seemed to have one song that “worked.” It is relatively easy, I think, to write a good lyric, to craft a nice melody. But songs only approach goodness when the melody manages to pull a syllable out of line and make it howl and keen. Songs work when the lyrical content informs the music and gives it a precise and nuanced emotional shade.

There was a fellow named Bryan Way, whose song was entitled “One John Ferguson.” We met Bryan our first night at the Iron Grate. As he took to the stage, gap-toothed and large-beaked, he found it hard to contain his nervous energy. “You want something to laugh and heckle at,” he informed the audience in a thick Newfoundland accent, “I’ll give you something to laugh and heckle at.” He banged away on his guitar and ululated, and the audience, um, laughed and heckled. But then Bryan managed to calm down, and he started playing his song, a muted evocation of a common man’s life and death, the lyrics framed as a police report:
“One John Ferguson, age fifty-four / death due to heart attack / found on the bedroom floor.”
Bryan also managed to employ the word “barque.” I can’t remember how, but I was very impressed with that. Quarrington/Worthy later incorporated that song into our repertoire, and Bryan went on to meet with some success. One of his songs was recorded by Roger Whittaker, which is a mixed blessing, I suppose. I actually like Roger Whittaker quite a bit, but back then announcing that Whittaker had covered one of your tunes was a little like announcing that you’d gotten a hummer from a school teacher, and I’m talking your own Grade 2 teacher, that sweet Miss Paisley.

Another fellow I remember well—despite the fact that I just had to phone Marty to be reminded of the guy’s name, Bruce Miller—had a song called “Anna Marie.” Miller was a romantic figure, I thought, dark and handsome and something of a loner. He always came late, sneaking in the door and then standing in the shadows. He wore a leather jacket, and his guitar case was battered and held together by “Fragile” stickers, as though it had spent most of its life in the travel compartment of an old freight train. Miller rarely had to stand around long before taking the stage. It was as though everyone was eager for him to play his song. The crowd would fall silent, the owners would set aside the money they were counting, the wait staff would stop ferrying foodstuffs and stand quiet.
“Oh, Anna Marie, don’t you love me anymore . . .?”

Marty and I didn’t really have “our” song. We’d written some pretty good ones, and our friends would advocate for one or the other. Jill liked “Winter Weather Bound,” our buddy Fedderson was fond of “Mary Cargill,” Marie-Christine liked “Welcome.” They weren’t united in their enthusiasm. We had yet to write “the song.” But that was okay; years stretched out in front of us.

MANY TIMES since D-Day, people have asked if I believe in miracles. They are asking, really, if I believe the stories wherein tumours simply vanish, or a change in diet or tea made from tea-bark causes a total remission. I hear an awful lot of those stories, let me tell you. Everyone seems to know one, and they are eager that I hear them. I listen and nod, and when they ask, “Do you believe in miracles?” I assure them that I do. I am being disingenuous, to a degree. In my own thinking on such matters, I am more likely to choose the word “anomalous” than the word “miraculous.” Human beings have tools, medical and spiritual and even magical, to deal with illness. So anomalies certainly occur. I have every intention of being an anomaly. Indeed, I began the process as one, burly and beefy and seeming as unlike a cancer patient as one could be.

But the miracles I truly believe in are of a different order. They are closer in spirit to what used to happen whenever Donny Sinclair sang at the Brunswick House. On the days Marty and I wrote songs together, we ended quite a few of our evenings at the Brunswick House. Okay,
every
evening. We were such regulars that Belle, one of several matronly waitresses, extended us credit. She didn’t let us run the tab around the block or anything, but if we were penniless, and often we were, we knew that we could still drink massive amounts of draft beer. Many of our friends drank at the Brunswick as well, so while an evening might start out with just Martin and me instructing Belle to cover our tabletop with eight-ounce draft glasses, it could easily end up with fifteen or twenty of us clustered together, university students, writers and poets, actors and clowns. We would all applaud madly for the entertainment.

Back then, the entertainment policy at the Brunswick House was to have a standing open mic, but that was something of a technicality. There were relatively few occasions when a stranger demanded stage time and was granted it. The evenings were hosted by a woman named Irene, and she would introduce the acts, even though there was no real reason to. We all knew what was going to happen. Around about nine o’clock a very slender middle-aged man would take the stage. He wore a blazer and a tie, and he had taken care to make certain that his shoes were well polished. The person behind the organ (I’m trying to remember who it was; perhaps my memory is challenged because I couldn’t see him or her behind the great hulking instrument) would draw out some chords, and the well-dressed (but somehow sad-seeming) middle-aged man would begin shooting out his left hand, his fingers snapping to the beat. He would hold the microphone to his mouth as though it were a delicate scientific instrument measuring the lightness of his breath. “Chicago, Chicago, that’s my kind of town . . .” Next, Diamond Lil, one of the waitresses, would set down her silver tray and unclasp the moneybelt that girded her. She would plump and fluff her hair before taking to the stage. Arriving there, Lil would grab the microphone and, without introduction or fanfare, sing the oddest version of “Bill Bailey” that I have ever heard. I don’t know if I can describe it—although I can render it faithfully, as can Martin and any of the other Brunswick regulars—other than to tell you that Lil placed stress at very unexpected places. I guess what she was doing, musically speaking, was counting a couple of beats between her phrases. Try singing “Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey?” and then silently count “one, two” before repeating, “Won’t you come home?” It sounds unnatural, as you’ll see. Still, we would all sing along, and some nights there might be a couple of hundred people in the place. Everybody knew where the quirks would occur, and we knew that at the end of the chorus, we would be forced, like Lil, to eliminate the word “Bill” in order to get all the lyrics in, so that the song ended with a somewhat pugnacious, “
Bailey,
won’t you please come home?”

That makes a fairly important statement about the song, doesn’t it? A really great song has to possess a certain malleability. Even stretched way out of shape, it has to be recognizable. Even badly distorted, the song must deliver its rumptious joy to the people singing along.

The Rowdyman would take to the stage next. He was by far our favourite; we had christened him the Rowdyman on account of his curly hair and the thick-knit fisherman’s sweaters he favoured. (
The Rowdyman
, which I often call the best Canadian film ever made, was written by Gordon Pinsent, who also starred. His character was curly-haired and favoured thick-knit sweaters.) The Rowdyman was young—at least, youngish for a Brunswick House entertainer. His evident affection for liquor and cigarettes had sped up the aging process considerably, however. He radiated shiftlessness. He clearly had no steady employment, and in conversation he was usually vague about his recent activities. Sometimes he had a fair bit of money; sometimes he picked coins out of his palm parsimoniously and ordered only a single glass of draft beer. One thing he did have, the Rowdyman, was talent. He would sing “She Taught Me To Yodel,” and she really had. When he came to the chorus, the Rowdyman would let fly a wonderfully melodic series of leaps into the falsetto, which never failed to make the patrons cheer with great enthusiasm. Well, all right, it’s truer to say that the yodelling never failed to make patrons glance up from their drinks with a dull startle in their eyes. Perhaps it was just Martin and me who cheered with great enthusiasm.

Then Irene would announce Donny Sinclair, who would abandon his station to join her onstage. In the corridor leading to the big beverage room was a shoeshine stand, a boxlike creation with a couple of wooden chairs perched on top, foot rests mounted on small pedestals. One of Donny’s occupations was shoeshine man, and the other was bouncer. I never saw Donny actually bounce anybody—and the Brunswick House was certainly capable of turning as riotous as a prison during a heat wave—because his tactics included persuasion and an appeal to common sense. Even very drunken, boisterous people were reluctant to tangle with Donny. Not that he was large, far from it; Sinclair was a little person. As a younger man, he had been a “midget wrestler,” fighting under the moniker “Little Beaver.” (This is what we believed, at any rate, and I’m reluctant to research it. This whole section about the Brunswick House must be taken with a grain of salt, I guess. After all, inside the place, truth and lies took to the tiny dance floor wrapped up in each other’s arms.) Donny had a powerful voice, and he had a couple of crowd pleasers, “Danny Boy” and “I Believe.”