Cigar Box Banjo Read online

  This was a reaction we were to encounter again on our Dylan Thomas pilgrimage. We travelled to Laugharne (pronounced “larn”), the coastal village where Dylan and his wife Caitlin lived the last of their years together. Laugharne is the town upon which Llareggub, the fictional setting of Under Milk Wood, is based. As soon as we got there, we rushed to the nearest pub, which I seem to recall was named the Sailor’s Arms, although I may be confusing fact with fiction here, as that’s the name of the pub in Under Milk Wood. Whatever that pub was called, it was the closest one, so when Marty and I descended from the bus we rushed over with enthusiasm. We ignored various signs that differentiated the “Pub” from the “Lounge,” and when we opened the door we were assailed by the sounds of boisterous laugher. Ale dribbled audibly over stubbled chins, darts whistled on their merry trajectories. As soon as we crossed the threshold, there came an unearthly silence. And a question came, very much spoken this time: “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Turns out, the kindly publican who ushered us quickly to the “Lounge” side explained, that we had walked in on a wake, the local (and physically intimidating) Danny Williams having just delivered his uncle unto the earth. It was Williams who had shouted, “What the fuck are you doing here?” and there was no answer we could give that would satisfactorily answer that question. Danny was dressed in a nice suit—ill-fitting though it might have been—but obviously itching for a scrap to ameliorate his grief. And as we proceeded on our tour of Laugharne, which consisted of visiting its four pubs, Danny followed us, in each case throwing open the door and demanding, “Indian! Do you want a fight?” (He called me “Indian” because he’d learned I was a Canadian and, given that I tan up pretty well in the summer, figured I was aboriginal. I guess.) Word of our pilgrimage had spread, so the bartender always shouted back, “Danny Williams, go away and leave these lads to drink in peace!” In this manner, Martin and I were adopted by the town of Laugharne, everyone (except Danny Williams) committed to ensuring our survival.

  We visited Dylan Thomas’s grave, which was marked by a modest cross, and tried to visit the boathouse where he had done much of his adult writing (the poems, the famous poems, were mostly written when Dylan was a teenager), but a couple out in a rowboat shouted at us to “Fuck off! Fuck off!” so we fucked off.

  1 The lead singer sings the lyrics, but it is not necessarily the final version. It’s just something for everyone else to respond to, and then, when everything else is finalized, the singer usually goes back in for the definitive version. Leastwise, that’s the way we do it.

  2 NB: this last circumstance applies mostly to the Rolling Stones.

  CHAPTER 8

  IN TORONTO in the 1970s, Queen Street West was the place to be. There were the fabled clubs (the Horseshoe, the Cameron, the Beverley) and inside there were bands. Some of the bands went on to great fame— Blue Rodeo, Martha and the Muffins, the Parachute Club with their anthemic “Rise Up”—and others didn’t, but many of them were very, very talented. There was a thriving punk scene as well: the Viletones, the Dishes, Teenage Head. (The latter band were from Hamilton, but like any Torontonian I don’t hesitate to claim them as our own.) Some groups, like Blue Rodeo, were mixing things up, following the lead of Handsome Ned (Robin Masyk) in trying to incorporate country music.

  At a club called the Black Bull, a singer-songwriter named Joe Hall had a house gig. Martin and I took to hanging about down there, after we’d written our requisite daily song or given up on the prospect of doing so. There were two reasons for this hanging about: beer cost a quarter at the Black Bull, and my brother Tony played with Joe. They were actually a trio: Joe, Tony, and George. (One could almost have conceived of the ensemble as a quartet: Joe, Tony, George, and George’s moustache, which was one of those bristly affairs possibly ripped off the upper lip of a slumbering sea lion. There was a yellowing hole burned through it that George employed as a cigarette holder.)

  Joe was a tall, slender fellow with a large hooked nose, bright blue eyes, and a mouth that could be twisted into any variety of grins. Regardless of how I describe Joe’s features, you need to imagine them in motion, in a state of flux. When he played, his face would go through an extensive repertoire; it could be scrunched up with introspection or elongated in besotted wonderment, the eyes open with an intensity normally encountered only in Warner Brothers cartoons. Joe was very physical when he played, his shoulders moving to and fro as though from perpetual embarrassment, his hands often flying from the guitar to illustrate or punctuate a point. And he made points, that’s for certain. Joe’s songs, whether beautiful or soulful or barrel-housing, were usually wrapped around an idea, a conceit, something so clever it would blow right over your head if you weren’t paying attention. Which is probably why Joe liked to punctuate these points; he was trying to be helpful. An example: he had a song called “Eva B,” an upbeat and calypsodic (I just made that word up, but I’m kind of liking it) avowal of love. “Eva B, Eva B, please come live on the island with me.” As the song proceeds, we are given more and more information about the lovesick fellow at the heart of things—“I recall the last few moments in the bunker, when I was a big man across the big water”—and it dawns that we are listening to Hitler pine for Ms. Braun. At the end, when a polka breaks out, Joe would throw one arm up in the air in stiff-armed salute and simulate a little moustache with two fingers from his other hand.

  Two of Joe’s more popular songs were “Nos Hablos Telefo-nos” and “Vampire Beavers.” The second song title is, at least by Joe Hall standards, self-explanatory. “Nos Hablos Telefonos” is a little trickier. It describes, with drug-addled glee, the action and atmosphere on the set of a spaghetti western. “Someone is approaching out of the horizon / It is the fat director, he calls everyone ‘paysan.’”

  The crowd loved these songs, and Martin and I soon loved them too. I especially appreciated the fact that, for all his humour, Joe could write a lovely ballad with the best of them. “Moment to Moment” springs to mind, although I’m not certain he’d written that in the Black Bull days. As we listened to Joe and George and Tony, it occurred to Marty and me that they needed a rhythm section. They should be a real group, with bass and drums. I can’t recall at what point we decided to offer our services. It must have been after ten dollars’ worth of beer (and remember, a glass of draft cost only a quarter), because while Marty could play drums, I couldn’t play the bass. I was a guitar player, and my brother Tony had that position wrapped up. But the bass shares many things with the guitar; it is the bottom four strings (at least, it was when I took it up1) of the guitar, E–A–D–G, dropped down an octave. Because I knew guitar chords, I knew how to root them, which is kind of Job One for the workaday bass player. So we put the proposition to the lads, and they accepted. I acquired a bass, Marty got a set of drums, and we became Joe Hall and the Continental Drift.

  As a songwriter and musician, Joe Hall shared certain characteristics with Townes Van Zandt. Tallness, for one. Leanness. Poetic sensibilities. An ability to wander through his own psychic landscapes.

  Excess.

  I’m not pointing fingers here. I am plenty excessive myself, thank you very much. Indeed, I am more excessive nowadays than Joe is, because I will vault ahead in my storytelling to inform you that it’s been a decade since he’s taken a drink. Me, I’ve taken a drink just now.

  I often think that my sojourn with the Continental Drift was like a stint in the army, which is to say that it shaped me on some profound level, that there is an aspect to me that civvies could never truly comprehend. For five years, I travelled back and forth across Canada in a motorized orange metal box with four other young men. Loved ones back home were abandoned and ignored. Our intercourse was with each other, for the most part, though sometimes with other itinerant musicians, or, all too infrequently, with women who had a short-term rental in their hearts for musicians.

  WHAT I thought I’d do next is describe a day on the road with Joe Hall and the Continental Dri
ft. I don’t propose this be an actual day that occurred in history; I propose to invent a day and its happenstances. Still, I can assure you that I will make absolutely nothing up.

  I pick up the story on the Canadian prairie. We have been traversing it for weeks, seems like. There are five of us in the truck, and we are irritable and hot, because the air conditioning doesn’t work. George drives, because he likes to drive and is the best driver. (Two of the men in the truck don’t drive at all: Joe and Tony.) George has a cigarette rammed through his moustache; every so often he’ll remove it from the bristly setae, hold it out the opened window, flick on the butt with his nicotine-stained thumbnail. Tony sits beside him, riding shotgun, although that was not terminology we employed. Tony reads a book, because that is what he does much of the time.

  In the back seat are the three remaining musicians. Martin is staring out the window. Joe is listening to music. He is in charge of the music in the truck for the moment, in fact. He earlier gave George a cassette to put in the deck, and it is JJ Cale. Are you familiar with JJ Cale? He is a great songwriter, and you likely know at least two of his songs, because they were made famous by Eric Clapton: “After Midnight” and “Cocaine.” Cale has a rare hypnotic power; his songs are informed by intelligence and a slow, pounding beat. What I’m getting at is, you don’t necessarily want to be listening to JJ Cale as you drive along the highway approaching Plunkett, Saskatchewan. Because he will put you to sleep. So I lay aside the book I’ve been reading . . . But wait. Let me tell you a little bit about that book. It’s about weather prediction. Driving back and forth across Canada is a dicey proposition. Out in the vastness, one can encounter a snowstorm during any month of the year. Icy tempests are rare, certainly, in July, but they are not unheard of. I am attempting to educate myself on matters meteorological so that I might predict such things, and thus avoid a crumpled death on the endless Trans-Canada. I earlier studied the sky to the west—it was stippled with light cloud—and announced that I expected there to be rain at about two in the afternoon.

  But I put the book aside, stretch and yawn, and say, “Let’s play Botticelli.”

  “What letter?” demands Martin.

  “K.”

  “John F. Kennedy,” says Joe.

  “You can’t just guess like that.”

  “Why not?” demands Joe. “It’s a guessing game.”

  “You have to earn the right to guess. You have to stump me by asking me about someone whose name begins with a ‘k.’ So, you could have said, were you the thirty-fifth president of the United States, and if I didn’t know the answer, then you could have asked me a yes/no question. You would amass information slowly, and eventually you could guess.”

  “Uh-huh. But if you knew Kennedy was the thirty-fifth president, you probably would be able to come up with his name.”

  “Are you,” asks the crafty Martin, “part of a famous alphabetic hockey line?”

  Marty knows a lot about hockey. His brother Chris played in the NHL, after playing goal for the legendary edition of the Flin Flon Bombers that included many future Philadelphia Flyers: Bobby Clarke, Reggie Leach, etcetera. Not only does Marty know a lot about hockey, he knows that I don’t know that much. I’m on to him here, though. K, alphabet, K-L-M, uh-huh, Russian guy. . . “Kharlamov.”

  “Enhhh. Wrong. Krutov.”

  Whereupon ensues a half hour of lively bickering (Marty is correct, by the way) punctuated by Joe’s guesses—“Don King?”—and my reminders that he is not allowed to merely guess names, despite Botticelli being a guessing game. (I should maybe point out, a joint had been hoovered a while back.) The game drags on, and they are unable to guess my famous person whose last name starts with a “K.” When I finally tell them the answer—Derwood Kirby2—they threaten to throw me out of the truck. I save myself by pointing out that it’s now ten past two and raining. There is a cloudburst, literally; it’s as though a tiny cloud has split open and is spilling its contents across our windshield. George turns on the wipers, which clear the windshield with a single trip back and forth. So we bicker about whether or not my prediction has come true. Tony claims that it was not actual “rain.” George points out that, seeing as it was water from the sky, it’s hard to deny that it was rain. Then we bicker about the timing, because I had said two PM, and this is a few minutes past.

  We need gas, so we pull into a gas station that exists for no other reason than to service trucks driven by fellows who must traverse the prairie, and this is where they are likely to be nearing empty. There is no community close by, just the service centre and a couple of lawn chairs occupied by old bogues, geezers wearing baseball caps and checked shirts. Their jeans are hoisted to just beneath their nipples. As we pull up to the service isle, they wait a minute before rising, just to make the point that they can if they wanna. Then they help each other out of the lawn chairs and hobble over to the truck. They notice that our windows are open and that we are bathed in sweat. The older of the two—they are both about a hundred and four—asks, “Having trouble with your air conditioning?”

  The younger of the two—a guy who has just acquired a new liver spot and wattle—puts his finger under the hood with the gingerliness of an ob-gyn and pops it open. Then the older of the two—they are going neck and neck down the stretch— reaches out and pulls on a piece of metal that allows the cab to be vented. All of a sudden, cool air is lavishing upon us.

  “Oh!” say I. “That seems to work.”

  “Why, sure,” says the older of the two.

  “Sure,” says the younger of the two. “Lucky thing you didn’t drive all the way from Toronto like that.”

  “Yeah,” the band members say in unison. Of course, that’s exactly what we’ve just done. We’ve driven four days in a motorized sauna.

  Okay, so we drive into Saskatoon and we locate the club— this was before the days of GPS, of which Porkbelly Futures avails itself, not that it does any good. We enter to find the same dismal scene we find everywhere. It is 3:30 in the afternoon, and the bar is empty except for the Day Man, a couple, and a singleton. The couple are arguing over some aspect of their relationship, which they discuss with equal parts tenderness and vitriol.

  “We met on July first. Canada Day.”

  “We did not. You fucking fuck. There were no fucking fireworks.”

  “There weren’t? I remember fireworks!”

  “You couldn’t even get a fucking boner. Fuck, I love you so fucking much.”

  The loner has drinks in front of him, but he hasn’t touched them in a while. He has developed an easygoing alcoholism, so that he doesn’t need to drink the drinks right away, he just needs to know they’re there. He is a lean man. His hair has not thinned appreciably, and he dresses with a certain amount of style. All of which is to say, he is likely a musician; his last gig may well have been at this very club.

  We approach the bar. The Day Man is short and pudgy. He wears a white shirt and black trousers. The clothes are ill-fitting and frayed, because he acquired them from the last Day Man, Mel, who had to go to prison following a misunderstanding with his ex-wife. This one’s name is Mel also; at least, the name “Mel” is stitched over the breast pocket. Mel is surly, because his career plans have gone south. He would prefer to be the Night Guy, the fellow who gets to serve the fun-lovers and thrill-seekers, the (reasonably) healthy drinkers who come to imbibe after nightfall. Mel longs for their bonhomie and benevolence. He wants to facilitate hook-ups and, every so often, have one of his own, some slightly over-ripened beauty queen inviting him to accompany her to her apartment. But no, he’s got the day crowd and, once a week, a troupe of goofs who have to set up their fucking equipment.

  Mel explains that he doesn’t know where the sound equipment is. (It’s in the room marked “Private” beside the stage. Mel knows that.) He says the sound guy will be in at five for the sound check. It has to be completed by then, as that is when the dinner crowd is expected. And Mel cautions us not to make noise as we set up. �
�I don’t want you to disturb my customers,” he says, suddenly protective and solicitous toward them. “Now,” Mel says, rolling up his sleeves, “did you guys want to start a tab?”

  Of course we did! That is what we do, beyond playing music; we start tabs across the nation! We establish loci of trade and commerce, where liquor is exchanged for musical performance. So we start a tab, and a beer is consumed by way of tremor diminishment.

  Then we gotta go pump Naugahyde. That is the term we have given to the transportation of our amplifiers and keyboards and drums, etcetera. (“Etcetera” is housed in a series of boxes George has rendered, cleverly engineered so that each box can hold the maximum amount of etcetera and thus weigh in excess of seven hundred pounds.) That we were in reasonably good shape back then is testament to the beneficial effects of Naugahyde pumping, because we got precious little exercise. Much of what we got up to could actually be labelled “anti-exercise.”