Cigar Box Banjo Read online

  I will say this on behalf of those Britishers, they did acknowledge their debt to those old fellows. They made sure that royalties were directed toward their influences. But well they might. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is based on Muddy Waters’s “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” Allan Moore, in his book The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music, says the following: “[The Stones] substituted the banalities of American advertising for the blues male macho of the original. This loss of meaning in the British re-workings of American blues was a necessary part of the reason for its success with white audiences in the U.S.”

  BACK IN Canada, I was able to find myself some like-minded blues-obsessed friends.

  In my first year of high school I met Patrick Murphy, who was (you’d never have guessed) of Irish heritage and bore the nickname “Murph.” He was red-haired and bespectacled, and his nose bled all the time. Murph owned (and could play) an old Fender Precision Bass that had a bullet hole in it. There was a scrawny little kid named Gordie Paton who was apprenticing to become two things, an electrician and a chain-smoker. Gordie played the drums, adopting an odd and individual regimen that saw him practise at incredible velocity and volume. His attitude was, he could always slow and quiet down if he needed to.

  And squalling away on the harp6 was Kim Kotzma.

  I was twelve and Kim was thirteen when we met. A group of young fellows had assembled to do something stupid—I believe the idea was to bust street lights with thrown rocks— and I backed away from the horde, tsking at the inanity of it all while inwardly bemoaning the fact that I had a weak arm. At the same time, a much larger fellow, wearing skin-tight, bright red pants, pulled away as well. “What a bunch of tweezoks,” he said. I wasn’t certain that this guy was talking to me. For one thing, he was very, um, mature. Which is to say, he’d already been through puberty.7 To me, puberty was still as distant as China. This guy, who was obviously allowed to dress himself however he wanted, seemed way too cool to be addressing me, but as he commenced walking I got caught up in his wake, and he didn’t seem to mind. “Are they ever numb-nuts,” he went on. “Don’t they have anything better to do?”

  The tweezoks and numbnuts really didn’t have anything better to do. Then again, neither did we. We began to wander around the neighbourhood, and for the next few years we often did that in the middle of the night. Kim and I and Joel liked to “sneak out,” which meant waiting until the household was fast asleep and then climbing out through the basement window. We could have gone out the back door, but that would have been no fun. And if there was nothing to do during the day, sample our suburban world at three o’clock in the morning.

  It was my brother Tony who stuck an album in Kim’s hand and said, “Listen to this guy named Paul Butterfield play the harmonica. You could do that.” So Kim listened to the record, bought a Marine Band in the key of C, and discovered that he could, indeed, do that.

  The group we eventually formed had a great name: Manure. I seem to remember we were originally called Mister Manure and the Flounder Box Four, but that makes for a grand total of five, and whoever that mystery guy was, he either left the group or never existed. Manure did pretty well for a high school band. We played the blues—“I was born in Chicago, nineteen forty-one . . .”—and we were not without musical talent. Also, fuelled by precocious amounts of alcohol and drugs, we could behave rather outrageously, especially Kotzma, who, shirtless and bathed in sweat, was often inspired to leap from the little stages and either grab the rafters or belly-flop into the crowd. (And in those days, crowds tended not to catch stage-leapers.)

  It was with Manure that I wrote my first song. It is possible that I invented a ditty prior to this, a little tune that I would whistle/hum, plunking out the accompaniment on a stringed instrument or the old, groaning piano in the basement. But it was with Manure that I first set out to write a song, or more specifically to co-write one. Murphy and I sat in his basement and collaborated. We also drank Old Man Murph’s beer with insouciance. Murph claimed that he was allowed to do so, since his father’s attitude was that allowing open alcohol consumption lessened the likelihood of more extreme clandestine imbibing. If so, Old Man Murph (that’s what Patrick called him) was woefully mistaken.

  I was fifteen or sixteen years old. I know that because the year was 1969, and I know it because the inspiration for our collaboration was the Who’s Tommy, released that year. Tommy, of course, is a deaf, dumb, and blind boy. Our thought was to write a song about a boy hobbled by a condition that put him at odds with society, made of him an outcast and a pariah. Don’t forget, Murph and I were boys born in the fifties, a time when medical authorities urged circumcision for reasons of cleanliness. To not be circumcised was therefore something of a rarity. Well, enough of trying to whitewash our manifest insensitivity. The song Murphy and I wrote had the title “Johnny No-Knob.”

  It was, believe it or not, quite a good song. It was not, as I remember it, formally a blues song, but it was certainly bluesy, and the inspiration we drew from the Who included a refrain complete with chiming power chords. When Manure played the song, the crowd would react with giddy, pumping enthusiasm. Gordie Paton would pound the drums with unbridled energy, a cigarette clamped between pale lips. Murphy would grin and scan the crowd carefully, separating drug-addled cretins from mere morons. Kotzma would hurl himself into the crowd. And I would concentrate on my hands, because I have ever been withdrawn and inward-looking. Perhaps if I’d hurled myself with my buddy Kotzma, my life would have been completely different.

  I saw the Butterfield Band—which was an amorphous creature, the personnel changing constantly to feature increasingly virtuosic guitarists—many times as a teenager, whenever they played Toronto. At least, whenever they played a concert or a festival. If they played a venue that was licensed to sell liquor, I was unable to attend, not yet having attained the age of majority. I consciously avoid the phrase “too young to drink,” because I was, naturally, drinking all the time. Murph and I were devoted neobibes. We would hang around the parking lot at the local LCBO store, and when we spied a likely candidate—a fellow of say, twenty-two years of age, recently paroled from a penal institution—we would approach with the following proposition: We’ll give you some money, you buy us some booze, and in return . . . Oh, wait a sec, it wasn’t really a proposition at all. The guy never got anything out of the deal, except for, perhaps, a faint nostalgia for his own ill-spent youth. He would exit the store and give us the provender which, if Murph and I had money, might be a case of beer, but was more often than not a bottle of Four Aces.

  I suspect that the truth-in-advertising board would insist, nowadays, that Four Aces label itself as a “wine-like beverage.” Maybe even a “beverage-like substance.” All we knew about it was, it contained alcohol and it was cheap, namely, a bottle cost one dollar and five cents. “Come alive for a dollar five” was the refrain chanted by the fifteen-year-old bluesmen from Don Mills, Ontario, although I will tell you that Murph actually lived in Scarborough, which is a slightly better place for a bluesman to be from.

  Despite my behaviour—the imbibing of Four Aces, the smoking of Players dead-ends—I had failed to become a hardened and seedy-looking bluesman. I looked years younger than my age and possessed such chubbiness of cheek that my nickname was, throughout my adolescence, Cherub.

  At any rate, I went to see the Butterfield Band at a place we used to have here in Toronto, the Rock Pile, and unbeknownst to me, there were three other boys there who will play important roles in this story. One was a guy called Marty Worthy, whom I sort of knew. He was a year ahead of me in school, but he was friends with my next-door neighbour, Isobel, so I saw him every now and again. I had even visited Marty once when he was in hospital. Marty was there for several months when he was fifteen, having steel rods implanted in his back to deal with his scoliosis. Marty could play drums and sing; I knew that because I’d seen two of his groups perform at local sock-hops. The first group was called Marty’s Martians, an
d they were a lightweight, poppy ensemble. After that, Marty played in an R&B group called the System. So Marty was there at that Butterfield concert, but I guess I just didn’t see him, because I would have said hello. Also at the concert was a fellow named Chas Elliott. Although I didn’t know him yet, I’m willing to bet I saw him, because Chas was (and is) a tall man, and would have loomed above the crowd. Chas played the bass, the big bull fiddle, and was studying at the conservatory. And also at the Butterfield gig, a fellow named Stuart Laughton, whom I learned in later years was pressed up against the apron of the stage snapping photographs. Stuart came from a family of musicians, and he was applying himself to the trumpet. As we shall see, his skills and interests in fact covered vast tracts of instrumental and stylistic ground.

  KIM KOTZMA disappeared from our lives as we neared the eighteen-year-old mark. Murph, Gord, and I soldiered on. Manure persisted as a trio, and occasionally we’d find a fourth, although never someone who was willing, let alone eager, to f ling themselves into the rafters. Kim drifted around, did some jail time on a drug-related charge, ended up in Calgary, Alberta, where he became a landscaper. It was in Calgary that I reconnected with Kim, because during the year of 1987 I spent a great deal of time there, writing a book about the Canadian Olympic hockey team. (As you might recall, the 1988 Winter Games were held in Calgary.) I stayed with Kim and his then-girlfriend and any number of animals, many of which—but certainly not all—were Kotzma’s own pets. He came to visit in Toronto when my first daughter was born, and I know that because I have photographic evidence: Kotzma holding Carson in the palms of his hands, hugging her to his face, Carson grimacing because she was thus brought into contact with the creature that was Kim’s ’stache. But between those two events—sometime between those events—Kim called with the news that he’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He spent a long time explaining what MS was, which he did with a chatty matter-of-factness.

  Whenever book tours took me to Calgary, I had visited Kim, who by then had hooked up with a woman named Deborah. We would laugh and drink and get into a little trouble here and there, and sometimes I’d notice that Kim was walking stiffly, but I didn’t think anything of it. For one thing, Kim had always been ridiculously healthy, possessed of one of those muscular bodies with a negative fat percentage. When the crowds failed to catch him after a stage-leap, he would bounce back to his feet without missing a beat. Now, he told me, he and Deborah were moving to Arizona, where the climate would be kinder to his condition.

  After that our contact was mostly telephonic. And I will admit, with a certain amount of shame, that our contact was largely one-sided, with Kim leaving messages on my machine. “Okay, brother,” he’d say. “Just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you. I love you, and we’ll go from there.”

  I did go to visit Kim in Arizona, in the fall of 2007. He and Deborah had a place high upon a mountain—or a mesa, or some massive swelling of the earth’s crust—near a place called Rio Rico. Through my guest room window I could see, first, a charming little patio area, rustic and treed and filled with birds that were, to my Ontario eyes and ears, wonderfully exotic. After the garden the land fell away, and it moved in great waves, vast and green and darkened by clouds’ shadows; High Chaparral country.

  Kim had by this time lost the ability to walk, and he rode around the property on a bright red scooter. He was reluctant to use his wheelchair, feeling that would be somehow giving up on his legs, which he was not willing to do, even though they had clearly given up on him. Still, Kim remained pretty hale. As he put it when I first laid eyes on him, “What, were you expecting a worm with a head on it?”

  On Canadian Thanksgiving, we deep-fried a turkey and watched an American football game. After that, we sat out on the patio and talked. Kim had a bottle of tequila in the basket of his ride, and every so often he would pull it out, uncap it, and take a long draw. Myself, I drank beer8 and watched the night fall. I mentioned a fellow we’d known in high school whom I’d seen recently, a fellow who was rather bitter that his musical career hadn’t panned out.

  Kim tilted his head, bewildered. “He’s bitter about that?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  “That’s weird,” Kim said, truly not able to comprehend this. “I just figure life moves along.” He pulled on his tequila. “I played in some bands, you know, in other places, and sometimes we got it going pretty good, but if it didn’t work out, that was okay by me. There was a time in my life when I was good at music. And I’ll always be thankful to your family. You guys introduced me to a world that I would never have known anything about. But then that was over. And I became a landscaper, and I was good at that.” Kim stared at the black shapes of the mountains. “Now I’m good at living in a desert.”

  I believe it was the American novelist, poet, outdoors-man, and gourmand Jim Harrison who called bitterness “the writer’s black lung disease,” but musicians are likewise susceptible. There are some ameliorating circumstances. There are more opportunities, to be blunt, for second-rateness as a musician. There are Holiday Inns across the continent, and each has a little lounge, and a rock’n’roll wannabe (even a former rock’n’roll star) can ride out years and years playing stale music and drinking cheap shots. I know that sounds like a recipe for bitterness (and I’m certain that in many cases it is) but the very act of playing music is—sometimes in defiance of all odds—uplifting.9 At three o’clock in the morning, you might play a lick with such poise and rightness that the drunk at table fourteen lifts his soggy head from the Formica and grins crookedly. But in both professions, writing and music, a practitioner stands about as much chance of real success as does a sperm cell. And there are no pre-established hallmarks of success. You don’t get a raise after two years of belonging to the Musicians’ Union. Indeed, you usually get fined by the union for taking a non-union gig. The only thing to gauge yourself by is how well other people are doing. The most visible people are doing way, way better than you, and the result is bitterness.

  It did my heart good to hear my old buddy Kim talk the way he did. Multiple sclerosis is a horrible, horrible disease. But in many ways, bitterness is worse. Bitterness, say the wise men, is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die.

  ONE THING that has to be done after a diagnosis like mine is the calling of people.10 People have to be called, and one has to say, “How’s it going? Good. How’s the wife? Good. Okay, listen, I’ve got cancer . . .”

  You know what? People are great. I don’t mean they’re understanding or empathetic or anything like that. I mean they’re great, they’re fucking wonderful. Tell them you’re sick, and you will receive such a warm, heartfelt response that you will be, like me, stupefied and stymied. It seems to me now that all most human beings are doing is waiting for someone to tell them they are in need of care and kindness, because those things are certainly forthcoming.

  But there was one call I didn’t want to make, and that was to my friend Kotzma. I knew Kim was—as I suddenly was— dealing with eternity sitting on his doorstep like a rolled-up newspaper. I postponed the call for far too long, three weeks or more. But that was a mistake, and I knew it seconds after Kotzma answered the phone. He was, as always, full of good advice. “Tell the people you love that you love them,” Kim said. “Every chance you get. End every conversation with ‘I love you.’ Except, you know, when you’re talking to someone you don’t love.”

  Even so, after that I missed many of his phone calls, and I was not good at returning them. It’s a lame excuse, but my life got rather out of hand. Undaunted, Kim would leave his regular message: “I was thinking about you, hope you’re doing well. I love you, and we’ll go from there.”

  One night my phone rang at two o’clock in the morning. I was in bed, on the houseboat, and I noted the number. I thought, “Well, Kim’s had a tug or two too many on his tequila bottle. I’ll call him back in the morning.” But I didn’t. Instead, I went out to a recording studio with Porkbelly Futur
es to start work on our third album. So it was not until dinnertime that I listened to the message. It was Kim’s wife, Deborah, and she was informing me that Kim had passed away that day.

  1 My brother has never, in his life, had a job other than playing the bass as a soloist or in various orchestras and chamber groups. I myself have had several jobs. For example, for a while in my early twenties I was a tire-stacker. There were these tractor tires, and they needed to be shipped to various parts of Canada, so it was necessary that they be stacked in freight cars. My partner and I stacked ’em right to the top of the car, which I think made for a fourteen-tractor-tire-deep stack.

  2 As things turned out, it was the rather archaic-sounding “aurum metallicum.”

  3 Which, to me, meant only one thing: suicide chicken wings were back on the list!

  4 It likely wasn’t Edison, rather a representative of the Metropolitan Phonograph Company, which is why I referred to it as a “legend.” Legends are, of course, always better than the truth.

  5 Edison (if not Edison, then the well-fed white man in charge of things) didn’t sell cylinders to the general public, of course, but rather to exhibitors, who would then go across the land setting up “phonograph parlors.” People would listen through acoustical ear tubes and pay a fee for the privilege.

  6 The harmonica, I mean. Let me get a little technical. Pedantry is, after all, the function of footnotes, and it’s not like you’re reading them anyway. There are various types of harmonicas. There are the great big contraptions called “chromatic,” because a little button on the side allows you to play half-tones. The kind popularized by Paul Butterfield et al. are smaller instruments designed to play in a specific key. There is a letter imprinted on the metal, let’s say, G, which means that if you simply stick the thing in your mouth and blow, you will sound a melodious G chord. However, blues guys play “cross harp,” that is, they sound the tonic by breathing in. That way they can perform all sorts of mouth and throat manoeuvres that would be unseemly in many other situations but allow the notes to be twisted and flattened in a soulful manner. So a G harmonica is actually a D blues harp. Get it?