Cigar Box Banjo Page 17

  So this was the equipment that Porkbelly Futures used, and it affected our sound. Why would it not? Here’s my analogy. Take an angler, a civilized sort who is accustomed to using a three-weight split-cane on sedate rivulets, gently dropping a dry fly on the water in hopes of luring a twelve-inch rainbow trout. Okay, now give him a stout baitcaster with forty-pound test and place him in a boat with one of those outboard engines that is, in the words of my great friend Jake MacDonald, as big as a pagan war god. It’s going to change his style. So it was with Porkbelly Futures: using that equipment changed our style.

  When we played at the Black Swan on New Year’s Eve, 1999, Stuart’s brother Robbie joined us onstage. He’s a very talented musician (the Laughtons are a family of talented musicians) who plays guitar in the style of Stevie Ray Vaughan. (See, another three-part blues name!) Porkbelly Futures was loud and raunchy that night. People crowded the tiny dance floor. There was much flailing of limbs. The Laughton brothers played simultaneous solos and rubbed their guitar necks in a manner that can only be described as unseemly. There was high-octane desperation that evening in a general sense, because no one knew what was going to happen at midnight. There was a chance that every computer in the world would vanish or something, that electricity would get sucked back up to Heaven, that we would all somehow be transported back to the year 10,000 BCE, banging rocks together in a pitiful attempt to placate the Creator. When that didn’t happen—when nothing happened—everybody felt as if they had a new lease on life.

  Porkbelly Futures went forward with optimism.

  IN THE early days of the year 2000, Stuart Laughton arrived at our rehearsal space with a lick. He had been listening to one of his favourite players, Amos Garrett, and he was taken with a short passage Garrett played, a parallel melody executed on the lower strings.2 Garrett played this quickly, probably without taking much note of it, but Stuart slowed the lick down and struck it with moody deliberation. This was a blues song, he said, and when he went to the four-chord, Stuart struck a major ninth. Ooh, we were horripilated! Inserting a major ninth into the blues is a bit like setting a ballet dancer down in the middle of a football field where the Argos and the Ti-Cats are having at it. We immediately started playing along. I should point out, too, that there was a rhythmic trick in Stuart’s idea. We assume—usually correctly—that the first sound we hear is coincident with the downbeat, the one of “and-a-one, and-a-two.” This lick actually started on the “and-a,” the last bit of the preceding bar. That’s not important, really, except it necessitated that we practise it over and over again—attempt it over and over again—and during this process I began to speculate about what kind of lyric would suit this music. Well, it was a sweltering hot day, if memory serves, and the slack-boned jauntiness of the music, easygoing as maple syrup, made me think of my favourite pastime, fishing. Actually, my second favourite pastime. Which made me think of my first favourite pastime, which caused me to wonder if I could create a lyric that, while it might seem to be discussing the Art of the Angle, would actually be discussing something other. This is what occurred:

  I got my line in the water,

  I got nothing else to do.

  I got my bait down at the bottom,

  It’s down in the deep, deep blue.

  When I’m fishing, I never think about you.

  I got my worm out there working.

  It’s wriggling on my hook.

  All the little fishies come around,

  They come around to take a look.

  When I’m fishing, don’t need no little black book.

  Aside from the “worm” reference, nothing in the lyric is really salacious and/or pointed. Neither is there anything particularly innovative here. In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare defines a cuckold as someone who has had “his pond fish’d by his next neighbour.” And as we know, the double entendre in the blues goes away back to that wonderful tradition called hokum.

  It came as a shock—sometime later, over beers and chicken wings, of which Porkbelly Futures are perhaps inordinately fond—that Stuart and I had actually written a song. Yes, you’re right, there wasn’t much of a song there, two short verses, but “Deep, Deep Blue” proceeded at such a non-clip that these two verses, and a reprisal of the first, were all that were required. So we’d written a song, and that opened the sluices.

  In those first days of original composition, it was Stuart who wrote most. He wrote in the great bluesy tradition of combining a musical motif with, well, whatever shit came into his mind. I don’t mean to sound dismissive; that actually is a tradition, in a way, and it points to a truth I am going to have a hard time setting down properly on paper. To wit: people don’t really listen to the words of a song, for the most part. They don’t listen in the same way they listen to, say, a speech. When listening to a speech, a person’s mental bureaucracy—I like to imagine our brains as multi-storied governmental buildings, each department frantically busy and totally ignorant of what the others are up to—assigns minions to research meanings, double-check syntax, make sure that the literal “sense” of an utterance is wrestled to the ground. There are some songs that demand this same level of attention—largely they are written by Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan or the best of their acolytes—but very often the tiny bureaucrats decide, upon hearing the opening lick, that it’s time for a coffee break. A phrase will arrive, born on a riff or a chord, and the little bureaucrats will shrug, nod, maybe even mutter, “Cool.”

  Once Stuart and I wrote “Deep, Deep Blue,” songs started getting written at quite a pace. Marty went away and wrote “Simone” and “End of the World,” both songs characterized by tuneful melodies and clever lyrics. He also wrote “Fictional World,” a delightful ditty about a poor guy whose true love has been distracted by the novels and poetry of Michael Ondaatje. In those early days, that song wasn’t called “Fictional World,” it was called “Michael Ondaatje,” but we changed that title after objections from, well, Michael Ondaatje. Martin also wrote a rocking little number called “Hemingway”:

  Keep your Joyce, your Doris Lessing,

  Your Stephen King, and your Oates with my blessing.

  Don’t need no Rand, no Jacqueline Susann,

  No Günter Grass, no Thomas Mann.

  In this latter instance, Martin brought an incomplete song to rehearsal. This often happens, as verses come easily— once the template has been established, and the rhythm and rhyme schemes—but the bridge must contain a new idea. Marty had roughed out the chords to the bridge, had an idea of what the lyrics should do, and as we hammered through the structure, he wondered aloud what Hemingway’s boat was called. This I knew. I knew because I’d seen the boat a couple of months previously, sitting on the grounds of Papa’s establishment in Havana. The house is stuffed with dead animals from around the world, and in the emptied swimming pool—the pool where Ava Gardner once did hundreds of naked laps—sits the Pilar.

  Hemingway—The Old Man and the Sea.

  Hemingway—sailing on the Pilar away from me.

  And in such manner did I become a co-writer of “Hemingway.”3

  Stuart continued his lick-based endeavours, songs like “You Got Me Talkin’” and “You Learn To Love by Lovin’.” His songs were characterized by bluesy exuberance, and he usually dropped g’s. He also composed a long song called “Louisiana,” ambitious and sprawling. The persona in the piece is a wanderer, but his personal road has ended in that great southern state. He mentions his “baby” and makes a vague reference to having “really got the blues in Baton Rouge.”

  Around this time, Martin took away my guitar. I’m couching what happened in exaggerated and somewhat symbolic terms, so don’t take this as literal truth, but try to respond to the spirit. I was playing the Gibson Flying V, dwarfed by an august stack of Marshall speakers. Martin had an idea, a notion of how we might sound, and he took that guitar out of my hands. I’d been having fun, banging away with grit and enthusiasm. It might be the case that I’d been having too
much fun, banging away without much consideration of what other people—Martin and Chas, the rhythm section—were up to.

  Ever since I first encountered rhythm at close quarters— when a jazz legend set it loose on me in a suburban basement— I had been on uneasy terms with it. I tended to keep it at arm’s length, to process the stuff through my cerebrum rather than my belly or crotch. This problem extended to other areas of my life, such as a) dancing and b) love. I don’t think I’m the only fellow who has dealt with these problems. It’s a matter of surrender, abandonment, and it doesn’t come naturally to some of us. Of course, unless you can commit blindly, things aren’t going to go smoothly. You’re going to dance like a spaz, and eventually your marriage will unravel. And in the case of playing the rhythm guitar, the lads in the battery of bass and drums will grow annoyed with you. They will make oblique complaints about your strummage; they will accuse you of rushing the beat. This was happening back then, and it had a lot to do with Martin’s idea that the electric guitar should be taken away and replaced with an acoustic. My flat-pick was likewise lifted—at least, I surrendered it, as a criminal surrenders his weapon—and I attacked the acoustic guitar with nail and plectra. One talent I had acquired as a teenager, through endless hours of practise (like my grandfather on a train, riding a coin up and down his knuckles), was “Travis picking.” Briefly, the thumb keeps up a bass pattern, bouncing off two bass strings, whilst the fingers do other work. Sounds like this style of picking would get in the way more, doesn’t it, but it has the virtue of, well, it is hard to Travis pick loudly.

  The first acoustic guitar I played with Porkbelly Futures was a resonator. I realize you’re getting more of an education in guitars than you might have cared for, but guitar innovation and technology go hand in hand with North American popular music, at least a marked and thick vein thereof. Back around when the nineteenth century became the twentieth, some collective thought was given to the notion that guitars weren’t loud enough. In certain quarters, bands were forming, small dance orchestras, and the guitar player, flail as he might, would often be drowned out. So experiments were done, placing a metal cone in the belly of the beast for amplification, sometimes more than one, sometimes rendering the entire instrument out of gleaming silver steel. (All of this predates, you understand, Mr. Les Paul’s experiments with pick-ups, transducers rendered out of magnets and copper wire, which transmute the vibrations of the guitar strings into electrical signals so that they might be sent through an amplifier.) A resonator guitar, because of its the high metal content, has a distinctive sound, kind of like an old tom caterwauling in a Quonset hut.

  It sounds bluesy.

  Our little group was beginning to acquire a sound. With our new songs, we soon had a repertoire. We got a producer, David Gray, and soon thereafter, work on our first CD was underway.

  1 Both these items have more official designations. The guitar might be an, um, ES-135, and the amplifier a (I’m guessing) Twin Reverb. One of the things that undermines my stature as a fisherman is my inability to distinguish one species from another, and this taxonomic shortcoming extends into all areas of my life. When it comes to musical equipment, I’ve just never been that interested. As kids, whenever Murph, Kim, and I went to a concert, those guys always wanted to go an hour early so they could press up against the stage and drool over the gear. I would, more often that not, take a book.

  2 A reference to the “lower strings” can be confusing to non-musicians and musicians alike. Or maybe it’s just me who’s confused. When I say “lower strings,” I refer to those strings that sound in the lower register, the bassier strings. They are actually the “higher” strings if you’re looking at someone with a guitar strapped to his or her chest, since they are closer to the chin. Unless the player is left-handed and has rotated the guitar one hundred and eighty degrees, following the example of the great Jimi Hendrix. There. I trust I’ve cleared that up.

  3 That’s what has to happen, both ethically and legally. I contributed to the lyrical content of the song, so my name sits beside Martin’s on the credits. But, lest this inequity seems unconscionable, let me explain that there is more to a single credit than what you may read in the liner notes. When one registers the work with the royalty agency, one can make quite clear that someone else’s contribution was negligible. Basically, Marty supplied percentages, and while I’m not certain what they were, they were along the lines that Martin had written 95 per cent of the song and I’d made up the difference. Now, being an official co-writer and member of SOCA N (the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada), I could actually go and tinker with those percentages, but then they would contact Martin and tell him I’d done it, and he’d come over and give me a stern talking to. Or sue my ass off, if that were his wont.

  CHAPTER 10

  DAVID GRAY’S first move as our producer was to call for rehearsals. In many ways, D.G. adopted a theatrical model; first the album would be rehearsed, the songs pounded out over and over and over again, so that everything was second nature by the time we hit the recording studio. He booked a place called the Rat Space—I think the name, at some point, had had something to do with “art,” but the letters had been rearranged on the sign outside—and we went there on a daily basis. David would stand in our midst, listening, and then he would make his suggestions. He might suggest that a chord choice be rethought, a bass line re-voiced. In a couple of instances, he wanted structural changes made, putting two verses together before going to the chorus, that sort of thing. None of these ideas were capricious. David spent a long time ruminating, often falling silent, his brain patently firing on all cylinders.

  The Rat Space was run by a fellow named Robin, a very nice fellow who was familiar with all manner and ilk of musical machinery. Off to one side was a little kitchen area, and one day at rehearsal, a woman was sitting in there. She was an attractive woman, with curly blonde hair, but she was single-mindedly drinking a huge mug of something brewed, so we left her alone and went about our business. We were rehearsing a song entitled “Healing Rain,” which we’d written during the Great Burlington Blackout of nineteen-ninety . . . well, I forget the year—we were blacked out. (A feeble joke I use onstage.) We had been rehearsing at Stuart’s when the lights went out. Unable to practise, I climbed aboard the “napping couch”—an old chesterfield that had cushions pregnant with the dust of Morpheus—whilst Martin grabbed an acoustic guitar and started working on a song. I became co-writer when I offered up some lyrics, but I have to admit that my big creative impulse was to get the song finished so that I could go back to sleep.

  David listened as we played “Healing Rain,” then started thinking. Sometimes he actually crosses his arms and rubs his chin when he thinks. After a bit, he went into the little kitchen area and returned with the woman, introducing her as Rebecca. We went through “Healing Rain” again, and this time Rebecca harmonized, her voice not only beautiful in itself, but finding the most beautiful places to curl up in.

  This woman, as you may have guessed already, was Rebecca Campbell. Rebecca is an Ottawa native, Ottawa having a very lively music scene. She had been part of Fat Man Waving, a group that achieved some success, as well as an a cappella trio, Three Sheets to the Wind. As I mentioned, Rebecca is a much-admired solo artist and songwriter,1 and she is well known as one of the two Rebeccas—the other is Rebecca Jenkins—who sang back-up with famous Canadian art songstress Jane Siberry.

  So Rebecca sang on “Healing Rain,” and we said, “Gee, that was swell,” or words to that effect, and Rebecca ended up singing on, I believe, all but two of the songs on our first CD, Way Past Midnight. She began playing live with us, and we came to rely heavily not only on her voice but on her industry experience and savvy.

  After we’d rehearsed enough to suit David, the actual recording process began. The rhythm section—Martin and Chas—went in to the studio first and recorded bed tracks, then I went in and recorded guitar and ghost vocals (I trust my earlier ex
planation of that term springs to mind), then Stuart went in and recorded various instruments, then Rebecca and Marty went in and did vocals with mine, and then I went back in and fixed up the vocals. We dutifully brought little zip drives with us to the studio on every visit, so that David could dump the current work onto them. All of us listened to each song countless times as it was being processed, and we all had ideas about what might be changed or added. I’d be dissatisfied, for example, with the pitch of a note I’d sung, and I’d clamour to get back into the studio to redo it. These days, of course, there are machines that can fix that, pitch correction being an extremely common practice.2 Indeed, it’s refreshing to hear someone who eschews this process—Morrissey, for example—because things are a little more human when they’re slightly out of tune.

  David Gray has always been very precise about tempo. He often refers to an electronic metronome by announcing something like, “I hear this at about 84.” Meaning that, in his inner ear, he hears a cadence of 84 beats per minute. (That’s pretty slow, by the way, in case you wonder about such things.) D.G. weighs in on structural matters, in some cases altering a song greatly from its live version. When I’m recording my vocals, David will laud, soothe, provoke, challenge, infuriate, whatever he needs to do. He is also constantly asking about my “stance,” the subtext underlying the lyrics I am singing. I once complained to Marty that D.G. required me to provide a concise accounting of my emotional position before every take. “D.G. does that with me, too,” commiserated Martin, “and I’m the drummer. ”

  As the tunes for Way Past Midnight coalesced and neared done-ness, David began to think about what they lacked, how to fill the particular emptinesses. He heard some howling slide guitar, for example, on some of the songs, and conscripted his friend Colin Linden to play. Colin Linden is, among other things, part of the trio who started Blackie and the Rodeo Kings in tribute to Willie P. Bennett. (I first met Colin when he was a kid, too young to play the bars but already something of a sensation and a mainstay at Toronto’s non-alcoholic coffee houses.) So Colin added slide guitar, but he did not go to David’s studio in order to do so. Colin lives in Nashville these days, so what happened was, David sent down the audio files via the electronic airwaves (I have an imperfect understanding of such things, as you may have gathered), and Colin went into his home studio and laid down some tracks. He recorded each song three or four times. I happened to be present at David’s studio upon the music’s return from its southern sojourn. D.G. very excitedly set his machines to playback, and we listened to “Gladstone Hotel.” Colin’s mandate was to supply a solo for that one, but he’d given us a choice of four, and on that first listening, all the solos burst forth from the speakers with bitch-slapping exuberance. I’m still a little shaken from the experience.