Cigar Box Banjo (7 page)
That’s my understanding of things, anyway. I have learned that doctors like to speak by analogy, and they especially like visual aids. For example, we had asked Dr. Simone why he couldn’t simply remove the tumour. He was sitting behind the desk in his office as he answered this, and he immediately scanned his desk top, seeking the means of illustration. He picked up the mouse for his computer. “Paul’s tumour isn’t like this, you know, where it can just be removed.” He then picked up the blotter pad. “It’s like this, you see. It’s thin, but spread out.” (I believe the technical term, which I first heard from Dr. Frazier, but didn’t inquire about, having had my concentration scuppered sometime around, “It’s cancer, lung cancer . . . ,” is “sessile.” Mosslike.) When explaining the pleurodesis, Dr. Frazier found nothing suitable on his desk top, so instead he rubbed the palms of his hands together. “Imagine that you have two plates of glass, and you put sand in between them. At a certain point, friction would cause them to”—Dr. Simone stopped his rubbing abruptly.—“stick together.”
This is what was done to me. The procedure was successful. I knew, we all knew, that it would not hold indefinitely. But it did give me a little time to consider how best to proceed. Margit Asselstine, a woman I’ve known for a very long time, did some work on me. I’m not sure exactly what sort of work; she used her hands a great deal but tended not to touch me. Anyway, I felt much better after seeing her. And one thing she told me was, “Paul, you have a lot of health still in your body. And there’s a lot of health in the world that you can draw on.”
Yeah, I thought. I
am
healthy. As funny as it might sound, it occurred to me the one thing I had going for me was that I was healthy. Big and burly. I began to wonder why, exactly, I was so eager to make myself sick. Especially since the chemo was palliative. Especially if it might only buy me a couple of months. Suppose those months were February and March. Here in Ontario, that might not seem such a great gift.
Okay, thought I, let’s have a re-think. I assembled the health team. We conferred. The decision was to forgo chemotherapy, at least until I found myself in trouble. In the meantime, there were shows to play, songs to write, people to see, and places to visit. I may only have a year, I thought, but it’s going to be one hell of a year.
And it revolved around music.
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Part of the problem is that designation rock’n’roll, which I feel stupid even typing, seeing as I had to use two apostrophes. I suppose if we accept the term as referring to a very restricted sub-segment of popular music, the three-chord assertion makes sense. Actually, three chords might represent the upper limit. “Bo Diddley,” for example, is a one-chord song, or one and a partial, although I myself play two full chords. But when we were thirteen years old and figuring out chords, it wasn’t to play “pop” music—we applied the term “rock’n’roll” to everything. I guess we would have averred, without blinking, that Mrs. Miller singing “A Lover’s Concerto” was rock’n’roll.
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Some people don’t bother to stop that low string with their thumb, either, the idea being that they will thence avoid smacking the open, dissonant low E string. They rarely do.
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There are some songs that abound in “guitar logic.” The introduction to “Knock on Wood,” for example, is a power-chord ascension up the guitar fretboard. It was written by Steve Cropper, who then reversed things and came back down for the introduction to “Midnight Hour.”
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Guitar chords in their most simplistic fingerings are often given the appellation “cowboy.” A Cowboy G, for example, created with three fingers (there’s also a better sounding formation that requires four), allows the B string to sound boldly. Because it’s impossible to tune a B string precisely—and I don’t mean difficult, I mean impossible— the chord sounds in a rowdy manner, the fanfare for a plaintive yodel.
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B–B–B–C#–D, when playing in the key of E. And there’s no other key you can play it in. I mean, of course there are other keys, eleven if my sketchy music theory suffices. But this is another instance of guitar logic, something that makes illuminating sense given the mechanics of the instrument. The last note is usually played upon an open string, allowing even a struggling twelve-year-old guitarist the opportunity to finger the accompanying chord—which is impossible to do without executing the swaggering pelvic twitch that possesses Keith Richards when he plays this little riff, his most famous composition.
I
’M GOING to continue detailing my musical education. Condensing it to a few pages, however, whilst useful in terms of pacing, fails to adequately convey the time given over to the process. I spent months, maybe even years, sitting in the basement. It might take, say, a week to learn a song, which involved much lifting and replacing of the phonograph needle on the platter. Even though I tried to do this gingerly, I purchased a new needle practically every other day. After the week spent learning a song, another week would be devoted to playing that song, executing it with pride and exultation.
It is during this early period in a musician’s life, I believe, that he or she acquires a unique cluster of predilections. Some tricky little licks, through a quirk of anatomy or some other manifestation of blind luck, come more easily to the fingers. A chord change affects some dim recess of the soul. Why? Who knows? Some combination of personal memory and cultural resonance, probably. And these become a songwriter’s personal memes, the basis upon which the compositions that lie far ahead in the future are built.
Are you familiar with memetics? I hope you are. Otherwise, what I’m about to say may confuse you. The “meme,” according to Richard Brodie, author of the book
Virus of the Mind,
is “the basic building block of culture in the same way the gene is the basic building block of life.” “Memes,” Brodie states, “are the building blocks of your mind, the programming of your mental ‘computer.’” The concept of the meme was invented by Richard Dawkins, so there is an easily discernible neo-Darwinian context. Let us say that caveman Og, beating a hollow log with a bone, hits upon a rhythm that has a curious appeal, not only to himself but to the others gathered nearby. This makes Og more sexually desirable than Nood, who insists on emphasizing the first and third beat and never approaches what we might call ur-funk. In these terms, rock stars are the epitome, using music to make themselves sexually attractive and then disseminating their genes far and wide. Indeed, this is how Charles Darwin accounted for the existence of music in the first place, likening it to the peacock’s lurid herl. I also like to imagine that musical memes contribute to the evolution of music itself, that they shape it to become increasingly beautiful and stirring. My thinking here has very little scientific credibility, so take it with a grain of salt. But, for example, I believe I have identified one such “meme,” a small musical idea: five-one-two, so-do-re (in solfège). To me, that little phrase has deep resonance; it states the interval of the fifth, the note that splits the octave in half, and then it launches into the unknown, leaving us without solid musical footing. That meme serves as the beginning of Handel’s “For Unto Us a Child Is Born.” It turns up several times in Brahms’s work; think of the lonely oboe that announces the arrival of the lovesick piano in the First Concerto. I myself use it all the time.
So, as I’ve said, every songwriter has his or her memes. A Randy Newman song has a distinctive quality. Newman is from a musical family—his uncles Lionel, Alfred, and Emil all wrote music for the motion pictures—and Newman’s memes (the intervals and inversions he chooses, his chord structure, the melodic intervals) come from a very particular place. To my way of thinking, they have the same poignancy as, say, the musical memes of Charles Ives or Aaron Copland. Newman’s success has as much to do with the genius of his lyrics as anything else, I should add, but we’re not discussing lyrics, we’re discussing memes.
Memetics were at play during my own formative years, then, but any kind of payoff was still years in the distance. PQ’s People failed in our quest for global domination. Joel became distracted by the double bass, anyway. He’d been allowed into the music program at our junior high school, shunted into the string section. When asked by the teacher which instrument he’d prefer, Joel pointed at the hulking, oversized viol standing in the corner. It is my opinion that his reasoning proceeded thus: that thing over there is big; if I were a guy who played that thing, I would therefore myself be big, despite all the physical evidence, which would indicate that I am kind of a shrimpy little fella. So he began to play the double bass right then, and indeed, he has not played anything else since.
1
As much as I came to love the Beatles—hold on, I should admit something. In 1964, at the height of Beatlemania, I was in Grade 6, and there were two distinct factions. There were those kids who felt that the Beatles were the greatest thing ever. And there were those kids, of which I was one, who felt that the Dave Clark Five were every bit as good, if not a little bit better. Yeah, I know. I have a history of such decisions. For a while, I preferred Donovan to Bob Dylan. Let me explain that I’ve always admired tuneful singing over idiosyncratic intoning or stylization. I can’t really defend this stance, as it has caused me to dismiss many artists that I should have paid attention to. I have made a handful of good choices over the years, too, however. My favourite of all the British groups were (was?) the Animals. True, Eric Burdon bombilated more than he sang, but even then I could recognize the magnificence of his pipes.
But though the Beatles set the tone in the sixties, I soon came to realize I had trouble harmonizing. I was pudgy, saddled with spectacles, and long hair exacerbated my acne. They didn’t seem to have any groovy clothes in the Husky section of the children’s clothing department at Eaton’s. To top it all off, when I was fifteen my mother died, which made me surly and silent.
DOROTHY MADE an appointment for me to see Xiaolan. Actually, several people had suggested that I see Xiaolan, as she has a reputation for healing that is formidable. Moreover, Xiaolan is attached to the literary world, because she has written books (one was co-authored by my friend Marni Jackson) that were published by Anne Collins at Random House (my fiction editor). The short story on Xiaolan Zhao is that, although she trained in and first practised Western medicine, she decided that it was wrong to turn her back on more ancient practices. Acupuncture, massage, herbs, and unguents: that’s the kind of medicine she advocates. So off Dorothy and I went to the clinic, a squat brownstone on Prince Arthur Avenue staffed by many women wearing starched white lab coats. On my first visit, I was examined by Xiaolan, who declared that she could help, but that my health ultimately depended on myself. Then she proceeded to work on me, a process that involved things like sticking her fingers up my nose and in my ears and placing pins in various parts of my body, including the top of my head. Xiaolan never announced her intention of doing any specific thing, so for that hour I was in a state of constant surprise, even shock. I’ve been back a number of times since, and this is a trait shared by the doctors there. They simply do things to you, things like laying a forearm to the small of your back with the sudden intensity of Sweet Daddy Siki or the Sheik. One practitioner, Mariko, did mutter something one time, apparently asking permission. I didn’t quite catch what she said, but it was something about “cups.”
“Good for drawing out toxins,” she said. “Is that all right?”
“Sure,” I shrugged. Or made a gesture as close to a shrug as I could, given that I was lying face down on a massage table, my face pushed through the hole, and had needles sticking out of my arms, my ears, and the back of my neck. Mariko busied herself. I could hear the tinkling of glass, I could hear her arranging things on a trolley, I could hear the trolley approach. There was the sound of flame, as though Mariko were lighting up a smoke (which I thought unlikely), and then suddenly a perfect circle of my back fat was sucked up by some concentration of Hell. I barely had time to scream before it happened again, and again. It happened approximately thirty times; that’s how many little glass bowls Mariko drew the air out of (that was what the flame was all about) and then adhered to my flesh.
It was one of the most intense things I’ve ever experienced. As far as my back is concerned, it’s number one on the list. The next day my back was vividly patterned with circles in a range of purples from light to royal. I felt not so well the next day, and then better, and then pretty well indeed. So perhaps the cupping did achieve the aim of drawing out toxins, and perhaps the many pills Xiaolan gives me (the dosages are along the lines of “eight pills, three times a day”) effectively battle the tumour. To be honest, I really don’t know. But I do know this: I like the attitude Chinese medicine has about cancer. They don’t treat it, as Westerners do, as though it were the boogeyman hiding under the cellar stairs. They don’t panic when the word is mentioned and start looking for the rat poison. As Xiaolan explained it, cancer represents an imbalance, and imbalances can be addressed. Except, you know, I have a bit of a hard time finding balance. Take my diet, for example.
Xiaolan wanted me to see her nutritionist, Christina Gordon, so I went along again to the clinic on Prince Arthur. This time, I brought Rebecca Campbell with me. Rebecca has gathered great critical acclaim as a solo artist and songwriter, and she also sings and plays percussion for Porkbelly Futures. It was early July by now, and the band was scheduled to begin a two-week, ten-date tour of the Maritimes in less than a week. I knew that I was going to need a great deal of help on the nutrition front. Rebecca is pretty health-conscious, and she is receptive to non-traditional ideas. Which is to say, she’s not going to turn and hightail it just because something is a little wacky. And Christina was a little wacky. She was vivacious and very pregnant, and I liked her instantly, but she was flitting around some pretty distant lightbulbs. For example, she practised “oracular” medicine (I think that’s what I heard), which involved me lying on a table and her waving some object toward my head. She placed and replaced small vials between my fingers, apparently trying to determine which particular holistic medicine my body was receptive to.
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She also told me what I should and shouldn’t be eating.