Cigar Box Banjo Read online

  I must admit I don’t have much to say about individual Lennon/McCartney songs. I enjoy “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” and often introduce it into impromptu sing-alongs, but that’s largely so that I can shout “Hey!” at (or around) the appropriate time. (I think this also reflects my attraction to the point of view adopted by Lennon in the song, the stance of surly self-centredness.) “Here, There and Everywhere” is a very beautiful song, and it has what we might call “sophisticated chord changes,” which means that as teenagers we were baffled and unable to work them out. There is, if you’ll allow me to get technical, a modulation to the bridge in that song, and at those same singalongs, you might notice that with the words “I want her everywhere,” the bottom usually drops out of the accompaniment bag, leaving the singers crooning eerily on their own.

  The assertion that pop music, rock’n’roll, is informed by a mere three chords is a myth propagated largely by non-musicians. The statement correctly points to a simplicity, an eloquence, in some of the music, but there are surprisingly few songs that the young, aspiring guitarist can actually execute with just three chords.1 “Summertime Blues,” that’ll work. That’s actually a song wherein knowing more than three chords might prove a detriment. And Van Morrison’s classic “Gloria” can be played with three chords, but they aren’t the usual three chords. Rock’n’roll’s three chords are the tonic, the sub-dominant, and the dominant. The sixteen-year-old Morrison was thrashing away at the tonic, the flattened seven, and the sub-dominant. “Gloria” also contains a little guitar fill that seems to follow these changes with a logic born on the fretboard. In reality, there is a fingering change that must be made. As teenagers we usually pretended that wasn’t the case, and many of us still do, just in case you’re wondering why that instrumental part always sounds like crap when your buddy plays it. As a young lad, I spent thousands and thousands of hours trying to work out changes—to “figure out the chords”— so believe me about this three-chord business. Even a seemingly simplistic ballad from the fifties—“You Send Me,” for example—has four chords.

  Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” was a Gordian knot, an impenetrable puzzle. I sat in my bedroom for days on end trying to work it out, intuiting that the ability to play and sing “Yesterday” would increase my chances of getting laid. (Or getting kissed, or fondling a breast, or even remaining in reasonably close proximity to a female human being for more than a few seconds.) There are chords, as you may know, made by stopping some strings and leaving others free to vibrate. These have the pleasing name of “open chords.” Other chords—“bar chords,” we call them, although “closed chords” conveys the right impression—require that all the strings be dampened, usually by a flattened index finger. This is not the easiest skill to acquire, in terms of either dexterity or strength, because it’s hard to slam all six strings down with a single finger and still have them sound boldly. “A” is a great key, because most of the important chords (the fourth, the fifth, even the “Gloria” flattened seven) are open chords. It’s a great key on the guitar, that is; saxophonists don’t care for it. If the guitar player is playing in A, then a tenor saxophonist has to transpose (the instrument actually sounds a tone lower than the written note) to the key of B, which has five sharps. Five sharps represent a lot of cowflaps in the musical pasture, if you see what I mean. It is for this reason that the sax player is always the best musician in the band.

  But, getting back to “Yesterday.” The first chord on the recording is an F, a bar chord. Some people play F in a manner necessitating that the index finger be bent at the first joint, that the thumb wrap around and stop the low bass string. As complicated as that sounds, it’s often preferable to trying to pull off the infernally difficult F bar chord.2

  Despite all this whining on my part, “Yesterday” is the most recorded song ever. There are something like three thousand covers. One way of explaining this is that while the song may lack “guitar logic,” it makes a lot of musical sense.3 Indeed, it makes so much musical sense that apparently Paul McCartney was initially unsure that he had truly composed the music. He was afraid he had inadvertently pilfered some standard.

  BEFORE WE continue with our story, here’s a little aside. You’re probably wondering, if he’s stopping the proceedings to make an aside, then what are all those footnotes about? Well, you don’t have to read the footnotes if you don’t want to, but you should pay attention to these asides. I might be introducing characters, new players in the scenario, which is the case here.

  Michael Burke was a fellow I met around this time—when I was thirteen, I believe—as he attended the same junior high school I did. He was a heavy-set boy with a big, bushy beard. Well, I suppose it’s improbable that he had the beard at fourteen, but he grew it at the first available opportunity and has owned it ever since. These days, that beard is somewhat out of hand. It ambles off his face and rests on his sweatshirt, which is an essential component of Michael’s preferred wardrobe. Burke—I usually refer to him as “Burkie” or “Mickie” or “Burkle,” as in “Mickle Burkle”—has often averred that he chose his course in life so that he could avoid jackets and neckties. His course in life revolved around computers. When we were boys, he took Computer Science very seriously. In those days, the subject involved punch cards and farm machinery. Burkie and another lad, Rob Dunn, lacking sufficient access to the actual mechanical works, would take turns writing programs (punching out chads on those damnable yellow cards) and then passing the stack of cards to the other, who would act as the computer and execute. Fairly geeky behaviour, it’s true, but both boys went on to find great fortune in the burgeoning field of personal computing. Some years ago, Burkie started a company that, as he puts it, “decided to concentrate its efforts on a little-known thing called the Internet.” Specifically, the company made and distributed firewalls. All of which is to say, Burkie soon had money, lots of it. He sold the company to become an arts entrepreneur; he started a record company. (This reminds me of the stories you hear about people who receive a huge amount of money through inheritance or some other windfall, and are then driven by guilt to throw or fritter it away.)

  Mike Burke owns the company that released our second CD, Porkbelly Futures, so he will figure in this story in various ways. But for our current purposes, his significance is this. Mickle’s fortune has allowed him to indulge his long-lived passion for the Beatles. He has, in a lovely house in Victoria, British Columbia, a room devoted to record albums, reel-to-reel tapes, all manner of recorded rarities created by the Fab Four. I happened to be visiting not so long ago when Michael played me the most interesting thing, a recording of Paul McCartney teaching the other Beatles the chords to his new song, “Yesterday.”

  “F major,” we hear Paul saying. “E minor, A seventh, D minor—” McCartney leaves off his rhythmic intoning momentarily to instruct, “Don’t watch my hand. The guitar’s tuned down, so I’m playing in G.”

  The importance of this may well be lost on you, but me, I was stunned. I had spent much of my life grumbling about the fucking F chord that begins the song, and all this time McCartney wasn’t even playing one. He’d cunningly tuned his guitar down a whole tone, so that he could strum a Cowboy G. And that little term, “Cowboy G,” deserves a footnote.4

  WELL, THEN, the Beatles arrived, and we started forming groups.

  My brother Joel and I immediately came up with plans that involved a) pop music and b) total global domination of the sort demonstrated by the Liverpudlians. (Tony was never really attacked by the British Invasion. He seemed to know the chords to all the Beatles songs, but he persisted in his folksy ways, forming a bluegrass band called the Gangrene Boys. He hung around Toronto’s Yorkville area, the Village, and was sitting around someone’s kitchen table one day, drinking wine and smoking grass, etcetera, when Neil Young rushed in and announced that he was driving to California. “Anyone want to come?” Tony had academic ambitions in those days—he was assiduously studying Ezra Pound’s Cantos at
the university—so he declined. There is a dent in his butt where he’s been kicking himself all these years since.) Anyway, Joel and I started a group. The instrumentation was somewhat fluid. We both hammered away on guitars, and sometimes I pounded on the piano. There was even a snare drum/cymbal combination that I’d received as a Christmas present, which seems to indicate that maybe my parents were hitting the liquor cabinet a little heavily that particular holiday season. But we needed more people for our group, which I had decided should be called PQ’s People.

  Now, I understand that groups had existed before the British Invasion. Indeed, because of my brother Tony and his folkie ways, I was acquainted with all sorts of groups. The New Lost City Ramblers, as I’ve mentioned. The Kingston Trio. Bluegrass music was nothing but groups; there’s really no such thing as a bluegrass solo artist, and Bill Monroe had his Blue Grass Boys. But, perhaps because there was such a massive tsunami of publicity material, the Beatles impressed upon us that a group was made of distinct and disparate components, with the whole being much greater than the sum of its parts. There was quiet, introspective George, rebellious John, romantic Paul, and, um, whatever Ringo was. The implication was that none of these guys could survive on his own, that their individualism would otherwise not allow them to function in society. That concept appealed to those of us who felt we couldn’t function in society. When I was a lad, that included everyone except Vance Milligan and a couple of girls in grade eleven. So, in assembling a group, Joel and I had extra-musical considerations. It was all right that we were brothers—the Kinks had brothers, Ray and Dave Davies— and better than all right, since Joel was red- and curly-haired, and my hair was dark and straight. But we needed to be complemented by other distinct types.

  My father had a colleague, Dr. Hill, and occasionally these two men would encounter one another, at the grocery or liquor store, or simply strolling along the sidewalk. Dr. Hill was a large man, tall and burly, as was my father. Sometimes both men had offspring with them. Joel and I would hide behind our dad and take suspicious peeks at the two kids who were hiding behind their dad. The older one was named Danny, the younger, Larry. When Joel and I formed PQ’s People, we remembered that Danny had some musical ability, that he was taking guitar lessons and had been heard to sing songs. So we auditioned him. We held the audition down in our basement one day when our fathers were upstairs drinking beer and being colleagues. We were all pretty short back then, and Danny climbed up on a table, employing it as a makeshift stage. He used a drumstick as a microphone—no, it didn’t work—and such was his eagerness to perform that he didn’t wait for Joel and me to pick up our instruments. Not that we knew the tune he sang, anyway, which was, I seem to recall, Sinatra’s “Summer Wind.” Danny crooned in a very Las Vegas fashion. He even had a repertoire of cheesy moves, which he threw at us without self-consciousness or irony. My brother and I didn’t know what to make of it. Danny would have been a good addition to PQ’s People; he was a good-looking kid and exotic to us, being as his mother was white and Dr. Hill black. But his style didn’t seem right, so we thanked him for his time and told him we’d be in touch.

  WE CONTINUED searching for candidates, minuscule musicians willing to join PQ’s People. (By the way, Joel went on record early on, declaring the band name to be stupid. But I was his older, bigger brother, and while I certainly didn’t win every fight, I was willing to go to the mat on this one. So PQ’s People we remained.) We encountered a young lad named Conrad, and he had the most wondrous of all things, a set of drums. At least, he had access to a set of drums, as his stepfather was a drummer.

  Conrad lived in the maisonettes a few blocks away. (Where I come from, the nascent suburbs of Toronto, Ontario, we didn’t really measure distances in “blocks.” We tended to mark destinations by what lay in the way: a street, a school, the ominous ravine.) Down in the basement of his townhouse was a music room. Can you believe that, a music room? It contained not just a set of drums, which sat in the centre of the room with proprietorial majesty, but the makings of several more sets. Tom-toms, snares, and kick drums were strewn about everywhere. Gleaming golden cymbals leaned against the wall. There were strange percussion instruments as well, African gourds, djembes, and congas. Joel and I would haul our equipment over there, and Conrad would climb aboard the stool behind the kit, and we would play “Satisfaction.” I will try to help you imagine the sound, because the Rolling Stones version is no doubt playing in your mind, and that is not the same as the rendition performed by PQ’s People. The cheapness of our amps and guitars is germane. Joel and I had both blown the paper cones of our speakers, so along with the music came much chittering distortion. My guitar was a Zenon, a solid body with very hard action. I don’t mean to keep getting technical on you, but “action” refers to the ease with which strings can be clamped down onto the fretboard. It required much concentration to wrestle with the Zenon’s strings, so the famous “Satisfaction” riff stumbled out as though it were wearing clumpy leg braces.5

  Now, what I’ve been withholding from you is that Conrad’s stepfather wasn’t simply a drummer. He was Ed Thigpen, whose musical career included stints with people like Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and, most famously, Canada’s own Oscar Peterson. Ed Thigpen was a bona fide jazz legend. Mind you, the term “jazz legend” didn’t signify much to me back then, and it’s only now, in adulthood, that I realize what an honour it was to make his acquaintance.

  Which I did in the following manner. Imagine the lads down in the music room, gritting their way through “Satisfaction.” We performed it with grim sobriety, our entire beings occupied with technical matters: the riff, the structure of the song (recall that at one point, everything falls away except the drums; leastwise, that’s the plan), the lyrics. Ed Thigpen entered, listened as we arrived clumsily at the musical finish line, and then waved Conrad off the stool. “Let me play with these boys,” he said.

  Okay. Conrad hopped down, Mr. Thigpen took his position, and Joel and I began the riff. Ed—I guess I can call him Ed; after all, we were jamming, weren’t we?—allowed us to execute the lick once as establishment, and then he began to play along.

  Well, I never. My initial thought, I’ll confess, was that Conrad’s stepdad was lying about being a professional drummer, because he appeared to be, well, spazzing out, waving his arms in broad circular motions, the sticks just happening to deflect off cowhide and metal. Drummers were supposed to move with robotic precision, and if they wanted to hit a cymbal, it seemed to me, they should turn and look at the thing for a full two seconds, addressing it, making sure it hadn’t moved away somehow, before whacking it. Ed’s eyes were elsewhere, and while I don’t suppose they actually rolled up into the inside of his skull, that is certainly the impression I received. But soon I became aware that there was a presence in the room, a force with the power of a tidal wave. At least, it was far, far stronger than my twiddling little Keith Richards lick.

  This was rhythm.

  I had never encountered rhythm at close quarters before, certainly had never been trapped with it in a basement, where it bullied me up against the wall and slapped me around. “This Land Is Your Land” does not prepare a fellow for rhythm. Oh, certainly, that song has rhythm, but it has rhythm like an old woman might have a poodle, a dog with clipped fur and papers that give its legal name as “Lancelot of Les Halles.” This rhythm was like an atavistic mastiff, only a mutated gene away from ferity.

  It was scary.

  Joel seemed to be battling rhythm more valiantly than I. He was playing with exhilaration, and a broad grin had blossomed across his freckled face. Indeed, if rhythm were a bucking bronco, he did his eight seconds. But you’re right, I should dispense with metaphors, not only because I keep mixing ’em up, but because they are weak and unnecessary. Rhythm is elemental, something we have inside us like bile and marrow. The access can be a little problematic, since it is protected by self-consciousness and notions of seemliness. Let me put it this way. The fear I felt as Ed
Thigpen played the drums was not like the fear I felt when I considered asking Mathilda to dance—it was exactly the same fear.

  I’M TALKING about the fear of giving oneself over, I guess, of abandonment to the unknown, surrender to the moment. I suppose that’s the connection back to my new thematic material. I’m not referring simply to the fear of death—we will talk about that in the pages to come, I’ll warrant—but the fear of losing control. Especially since everyone wants to wrest control away from you. The people who love you want to take care of you, which makes sense. In their eyes, you may be demonstrating an inability to take care of yourself. People also have much advice: how to spend the few months left to you, how to best deal with this thing they call “cancer.” People come to visit, which is great, except that sometimes you need to be doing other things. I wanted to write; I had this second draft to complete and a television show to develop. I had songs to write and record. I probably wouldn’t have time to write another novel, but I thought a novella might be a possibility, perhaps just a long short story. But people had all sorts of notions of things I could and should be doing. Visiting Ireland, for example. My friend Jake communicated an offer from my fishing buddies, those lads with whom I make an annual journey to the bonefishing grounds that surround Cuba. “Anywhere in the world you want to go,” said Jake, “we’ll take you there.”

  “The truth of the matter is, Mako,” I told him, “if I were to die tomorrow, it wouldn’t be one of my big regrets, that I didn’t fish enough.” That fact is entirely due to Jake, who dreams big and then connives ways to make things happen. We have gone many places in the world, on assignment, our adventures paid for by the editors of various magazines, often the generous (and fishing-obsessed) Pat Walsh, editor of Outdoor Canada. Jake and I call each other “Mako” and “Thresher,” both appellations being species of shark. If that seems hopelessly ten years old to you, well, it kind of is. When I’m with the boys, I’m ten years old. When I’m with a woman, I mature slightly, and I mean ever so slightly, to fourteen or fifteen, giddy and hormone-addled, unable to believe that I am actually with a woman. Anyway, I said to Jake, “If I were to die tomorrow, it wouldn’t be one of my big regrets, that I didn’t fish enough. So I’m thinking maybe . . . Paris?”