Cigar Box Banjo Page 11

  Danny (he achieved fame as Dan, of course, and what I call him is Dan-Dan) and I wrote a few songs together, and we both penned a couple of originals. (Again, gone from the memory banks.) Quarrington Hill also did a couple of covers, one of which I can remember, “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens. This song is a dialogue, with Stevens singing the older man’s part in a lower register and going up an octave to portray the rebellious offspring. I would sing the father’s role, and then Dan-Dan would come in and carve my ass in a beautiful silver voice tarnished by painful emotion. In terms of making me look good, this song was a misguided venture, but it always went over very well. Not that Quarrington Hill played that many places. We did manage to convince a bar on Jarvis Street (never the most wholesome avenue in Toronto the Good) to let us play nightly, and after dinner I would borrow my father’s car, drive over to pick up Dan-Dan, and drive downtown. This arrangement lasted a week or so before the owner asked Dan-Dan how old we were. “Seventeen and sixteen,” he replied blithely.

  “Butbutbut,” the owner stammered, “this is a bar. ”

  “Oh.”

  Danny was much more ambitious than I, and a much more talented performer, and after a few months Quarrington Hill ceased to be. Quarrington went back to the basement, and Hill became a very famous Canadian songwriter. He achieved international fame as the singer and co-writer of “Sometimes When We Touch,” a song that, while some may find it overly earnest, packs an enormous emotional wallop. Dan had first written the words to “Sometimes” at age nineteen, along with a chord structure and a melody that are lost to oblivion. This is perhaps the neatest and clearest form of collaboration, one party handling the music, the other the lyrics.

  LIKE GEORGE Gershwin and his brother Ira.

  The Gershvins, having emigrated to New York from Russia, decided that their bookish and bespectacled older boy, Izzy,3 should have music lessons, so they bought a piano and had it installed in their second-floor walk-up. Before Izzy could lay a finger on the instrument, his little brother Jacob came running into the room and, kind of miraculously, pounded out a passable version of a current popular song. (He had learned to play, it is said, by staring for hours at a friend’s player piano.) Ira went back to his books, and Jacob—who called himself George—went on to demonstrate a fierce brand of musical genius. He was interested in all sorts of music, from popular song to classical European stuff to the avant-garde.4 At the age of fifteen, George got a job as a song plug-ger down on Tin Pan Alley. This was an area of Manhattan, mostly on West 28th Street between 5th and 6th avenues, where there was a concentration of sheet music publishers. Tin Pan Alley blossomed in the last half of the nineteenth century, before the coming of the radio and the phonograph, when musical entertainment at home meant sitting down at the piano and doing it yourself. The odd name of the place supposedly stems from the fact that there were hundreds of tinkling pianos sounding in dissonance. George’s first hit— “When You Want ’Em, You Can’t Get ’Em, When You’ve Got ’Em, You Don’t Want ’Em”—violated a basic Tin Pan Alley dictate, which was to keep the title short.

  Ira worked in his father’s Turkish baths and continued to read his books. But George Gershwin—once he changed from “Gershvin” to “Gershwin,” the entire family followed suit—called upon his brother for help when he began writing for the musical theatre. The boys took their show to Broadway.

  George usually came up with the music first, at least, the initial musical seed. Ira laboured long and hard over the text. He would sometimes stay awake all night, struggling to find just the perfect word. The music to what would become “Embraceable You” so daunted him that he had to check into a hotel for three days to work out the lyrics.

  Another famous site of collaboration was the Brill Building, located at 1619 Broadway Avenue, with its offices leased to music publishers, composers, arrangers, and recording engineers. Musicians loitered around the lobby, hoping to be hired to play for a demo. That was the actual Brill Building, but when people use the term they are mostly referring to a neighbouring building at 1650. This is where Aldon Music kept its offices, and it was Aldon Music (run by Don Kirshner and Al Nevins) that had the most successful stable of songwriting teams, none of its creators older than twenty-six years of age: Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield; Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman; Gerry Goffin and Carole King; Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart; Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

  Arguably the most influential was the team of Leiber &Stoller (Jerry and Mike, respectively), who pioneered a lot of revolutionary ideas we now perceive as commonplace. They incorporated teenage slang into popular music (“Yakety Yak”), championed “girl groups” like the Shangri-Las, and, as producers, used orchestration, strings, and such to enhance rhythm and blues. In doing so, they influenced a weird kid who liked to hang around the place, Phil Spector.5

  Great songwriting teams are book-worthy subject matter all on their own, so I’m going to limit myself here to things you might find interesting. (Which is to say, I suspect you might not know these things, so you have to suffer through this pon-cey delivery of the fruits of my research.) For instance: Gerry Goffin and Carole King were a married couple, responsible for many songs identified strongly with a female mindset: “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” for one, and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” But King supplied the music to these co-compositions, and it was Goffin who supplied the lyrics. Carole King, as you know, went on to find great success as a solo performer. Her album Tapestry was one of the best-selling LPs of all time. You remember Tapestry, don’t you? It was the album that everyone’s girlfriend liked.

  There was another very successful married-couple/writing team; indeed, they met at 1650 Broadway Avenue. Barry Mann had already written or co-written some hit songs6 by the time he met Cynthia Weil, an aspiring actress. Together they wrote such classics as “We Gotta Get out of This Place” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

  And this brings us back to Dan Hill, because Dan-Dan’s collaborator (the first was Paul-Paul Quarrington) was Barry Mann. Dan went to meet Mann at the Motown Building in Hollywoodland, California. (The building housed the L.A. offices of AT V music, which had signed both men.) They exchanged ideas. Or rather, Barry Mann fired off a number of musical ideas, inveighing young Dan to provide lyrics, something Danny found himself curiously unable to do. As Dan-Dan reports, “I still clung to the clichéd notion that songwriting could only come from a pure, inspired place.” With a degree of desperation, Danny removed a sheet of lyrics from the bottom of his guitar case, instructed Mann to do something with them if he wanted, and elevated down to the reception area to call for a cab.

  Before the cab arrived, Barry Mann came exploding through the elevator doors. “I got the chorus!” he yelled as he ran, singing the melody that would propel the song “Sometimes When We Touch” to number three on the Billboard Hot 100.

  We will return to Dan Hill later in the story. Before we leave him here, however, I’m going to recount a little anecdote that is non-musical in nature, and out of order in the narrative sense. After my musical career (which you will read about in the upcoming chapters) didn’t amount to much, I decided that I’d concentrate on my novel writing. I supported myself with a series of bad jobs. I believe I’ve already mentioned “tractor-tire stacker.” I was also a dishwasher, a paralegal attaché (that’s a messenger who delivers legal materials), and a security guard for the aptly named Cavalier Security company. My uniform consisted of grey slacks and a bright red jacket adorned with a crest surmounted by the word “Cavalier.” I also had a hat, which was too big. (If you knew how big my head is, you’d wonder who the prototypical Cavalier man was.) The reason my hat didn’t settle over my eyes and blind me was that I wore, after the fashion of the day, spectacles with lenses as large as side plates. None of my careers—in security, law, sanitation, or machinery—earned me much money. It was barely enough to cover my basic expenses, beer and smokes. So I had to cut back on a few things, namely food and rent. The food p
roblem I solved by subsisting on a diet of Kraft Dinner. As for accommodation, I moved into the basement of my richest friend, who was, by a long shot, Dan-Dan Hill.

  With the money from his hits, and barely out of his teens, Dan had bought a house in the Beaches, an old and fashionable neighbourhood in East Toronto that abuts Lake Ontario. Notice I didn’t say, “Dan put a down payment on a house.” No, he bought the damn thing. So for a while I lived in his basement.

  The house was the location of some fairly wild parties, though not so much during the time I lived there. Dan had married a beautiful lawyer, Beverly Chapin, and the place was reasonably quiet, except for me stumbling down the stairs at three o’clock in the morning, pissed as a newt.

  Late one afternoon, I returned home from work resplendent in my Cavalier Security uniform. I entered the house through the back door, picked up a glass of water in the kitchen, and, drawn by some voices, went into the living room. Bev was sitting there with a friend. Quite an attractive friend, so, without being invited, I sat down on a small chair, folded my arms, and waited to be introduced.

  Bev didn’t pause in her story to introduce me. Indeed, she kind of ignored me, but that was all right, I had time. Bev’s friend threw me a quizzical glance, and then another. As the quizzical glances came faster and faster, Bev continued speaking in a measured manner. Finally, she left off her story long enough to announce, “Oh, that’s the security guard Dan hires when he’s out of town to make sure I don’t fool around on him.”

  AFTER HIGH school, I began attending the University of Toronto, studying English Literature. I was interested in becoming a writer by then, but it quickly dawned upon me that this wasn’t the way to do it. Back then there was not the proliferation of writing programs we have today (I myself have long been associated with the fine Humber School for Writers), and although I might have considered attending the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, that would have required my first hearing of it. What I did do was ignore my studies to a certain degree, and at night I would bang away on an old typewriter and try to work though certain technical problems.

  My childhood friend Stephen Tulk, who was in a pre-med program, took an English Literature class with me. The concentration was on the American novel, and that course was the only one that ever did anything toward equipping me to become a novelist. Specifically, Professor Asals spent two whole hours discussing the beginning of Melville’s Moby Dick, with its famous three words, “Call me Ishmael.” His lecture gave me an inkling of the depths that were possible, the vast spaces beneath words, and if that didn’t teach me about writing per se, it taught me a little bit about reading. Tulk annoyed me, because when called upon by the prof he would stand and put forth an eloquent argument in defence of or opposition to a statement, despite having never read the novel in question. I myself was forever mired in bullshit. I remember suggesting that Captain Ahab, fearing that he would die by rope, preferred to stay at sea because it eliminated the possibility of hanging. “But one can be hanged at sea,” replied the professor. “And if you’d read Billy Budd as you were supposed to, you would know that.”

  Tulk was and remains the most talented man I know. He is a fine artist and a skilled musician, as well as being a doctor. As much younger men we goofed around on musical instruments together, and Tulkie claims still to have a reel-to-reel tape recording of yours truly singing “Long Tall Texan” before my voice changed. At any rate, Tulk was a member of a musical group called the System, and one day he reported (after a class on Pierre: or, The Ambiguities) that his friend Martin Worthy had returned to Toronto. I remembered Martin, he of Marty’s Martians and the scoliosis. “Where’s he been?” I wondered.

  “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 Island7 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 a
ll) 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.