Cigar Box Banjo Read online

  7 Indeed, he had the beginnings of a moustache, twenty-odd whiskers acting in valiant concord. As Kim matured further, his moustache essentially became a homunculus, a creature that had grown happy and plump in the warm air wafting down from Kotzma’s nostrils.

  8 Oh, I forgot to mention something during the nutrition section earlier: Christina outlawed beer. Good luck.

  9 In fact, this is the first plank in the platform of my somewhat idiosyncratic musical-healing therapy.

  10 It would be unfair of me not to mention that Marty, Jill, and Dorothy made a great many, maybe even most, of these phone calls.

  CHAPTER 4

  WOODY GUTHRIE died of Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder. The disease is progressive and fatal, and Guthrie was hospitalized for the last decade of his life. One of his regular visitors at the Brooklyn State Hospital was a young musician from Hibbing, Minnesota, who idolized Guthrie and the things he represented. As Time magazine reported in November 1963, “The tradition of Broonzy1 and Guthrie is being carried on by a large number of disciples, most notably a promising young hobo named Bob Dylan . . . He dresses in sheepskin and a black corduroy Huck Finn cap, which covers only a small part of his long, tumbling hair . . . He delivers his songs in a studied nasal that has just the right clothespin-on-the-nose honesty to appeal to those who most deeply care.” Bob Dylan is going to turn up at key points in this narrative, as you will see, and this is an appropriate moment in my own musical history to bring him in.2

  My friend Bobby G. and I entered into a brief business partnership when we were approximately twelve years old. I was twelve years old, anyway. Throughout my life, it’s usually been the case that my friends are a little older than I, and I suspect this was the case with Bob. He was much taller, for one thing. He was much taller than most people, and there seemed to be no end in sight. Bobby’s body quivered and sprouted upwards, as in those time-lapse photography segments depicting a tendril struggling toward the sun. He was curly haired and perpetually wore a loopy grin, as if he knew where something kind of disgusting was buried. But he was a nice guy, one of the nicest guys I’ve known in this lifetime, and the business partnership we formed was never fraught with any kind of suspicion or tension. Mind you, it was short-lived, and there was very little money involved. Sixty-nine cents, if I remember correctly, which is what a forty-five cost in those days.

  Some of you may recall forty-fives, which were delightful in every way—discs of music seven inches in diameter, slipped into a plain paper envelope, with a circle cut out of the envelope so that the pertinent information on the label could be read. Except for that damn centre. Remember? The little records had a hole in the middle an inch across. That had something to do with some fucking competition between Columbia and RCA. I don’t even pretend to understand it. All I know is that it meant you had to go out and buy a piece of plastic, a “centre,” as we Canadians would have it, in order to make the thing fit onto the turntable’s spindle. (You could try to place the single on the turntable freehand, with geometric exactitude—but that method ensured, almost without fail, that the chart-toppers you were listening to wowed and drawled most unmusically.) Come to think of it, this may have been the origin of the partnership I established with Bob G.: he owned one of those yellow plastic centres.

  Assuming that to be the case, on the day in question, Bob ponied up thirty-four cents and I made up the difference, giving us the requisite sixty-nine cents. My other contribution was my enthusiasm, because the whole thing was my idea. We took our sixty-nine cents and purchased “Like a Rolling Stone.”

  Dylan had been a constant in our household for two or three years. Tony brought home his albums—I recollect The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in particular, with its iconic cover, Dylan walking the streets of New York with a girl clinging to his arm—and my father judged them not to be too bad— at least, he allowed them to be spun often and loudly. Dylan played folk music, simple and unadorned. He spat out the lyrics with smirking insolence, but this never seemed to deprive the words of their importance. It was the sixties, and the times were a-changing; people believed that the course of events could be redirected by the common will, and that this will could be affected profoundly by the song. By the protest song, to give it a label that today possesses a heartbreaking quaintness. Protest songs were so prevalent back then that they blasted through the air during the barbeques hosted by my parents and their friends, adults and teenagers alike singing along with zeal and piety.

  I’m hard-pressed now to tell you exactly why I campaigned for Bob and me to purchase “Like a Rolling Stone.” The song was just beginning its ascent of the music charts. It would eventually reach number two in the U.S. of A., the first popular song to break the three-minute rule.3 Indeed, it smashed that rule to smithereens, being six minutes in length. I hadn’t heard “Like a Rolling Stone” on the radio. I didn’t have a radio. (There was some sort of receiver integrated into the hi-fi system in the living room, but it’s not like I could take that to bed with me and try to pull in “Abilene,” and that’s the purpose of a radio, isn’t it?) I suppose I might have gathered from overheard snippets of conversation between Tony and his friends that Bob Dylan had done something inappropriate. That he’d gone too far, in many people’s view. I’ve always been intrigued with people who go too far. At any rate, that Saturday afternoon Bob G. and I took the bus to Eglinton Station, and then a train south to the Dundas subway station, where we effected the purchase at Sam the Record Man. We got back on the subway, rattled north, and took the bus back to the suburbs.

  Bob had a kind of a den set up in his family’s two-car garage. He had a turntable on his father’s bench-saw, a speaker wire leading to a couple of cabinets suspended in the corners. Many of my friends were good at making speaker cabinets. Of all the differences between my daughters’ generation and my own, this often strikes me as the most dramatic. We wouldn’t have wanted to put anything called “buds” into our ears, no matter what kind of fidelity they promised. Rather, we enjoyed pulling paper cones and dusty magnets out of derelict consoles, slapping together a housing out of plywood, and settling the surround into the baffle as best we could. Bob G. possessed some talent in woodworking, so his cabinets didn’t rattle even when we cranked the volume really high.

  And we cranked the volume really high. We listened to that song maybe seventy-eight times in a row. We took turns picking up the needle and placing it back on the spinning disc. We didn’t say anything to each other, but occasionally we’d look into each other’s eyes, checking to see if the other guy was going through the same thing.

  To this day, I can’t hear the opening strains of “Like a Rolling Stone” without experiencing a thrill, a realization that the world is suddenly about to become far more interesting than it was just moments before.4

  I DON’T really have a clever segue into my new thematic material here, except that “Like a Rolling Stone” is, in my estimation, a great song, and it was on that day I decided one of the things I wanted to do with my life was write a great song. I can’t say that I’ve done so, but I have taken a couple of good shots.

  After the reception of the dread Dire Diagnosis, I began to think about the work I’d be leaving behind. I asked myself, “If I were to die tomorrow, would I be satisfied with my output?” Surprisingly, I thought my ten novels were fine. I felt no great urgency to start scribbling the masterwork that might ensure my immortality. None of my novels was particularly successful.5 Still, I liked them well enough. I worked hard at them, and they are, for the most part, what I intended them to be. Likewise with my five books of what I sometimes refer to as “whimsical non-fiction.” This memoir was uncompleted, and I was contractually obligated to submit a second draft, so that was on my to-do list, as I’ve said. There were also a couple of television projects I wanted to push as far as they could go, because I thought they were worthwhile and might provide some money for my family.

  But my songwriting, that was a different stor
y. I actually felt like I was maybe just getting good, that I was getting close to a place inside me where the words and the music could be easily accessed. I had become interested in combining musical forms with longer narrative, and without really being aware that I was doing so, had composed some recitatifs and singspiels. I was very proud of a couple of these, Friendly! and Hey, Hollywood. One of the things I liked best about these songs was that they were true, by which I mean factually precise and germane to my life. It comes back to what I was saying near the beginning of this little volume, that songs should be about something.

  One song running through my mind these days is “Tom Dooley.” I suppose it’s natural, under the circumstances, that I should be drawn to a refrain like “Poor boy, you’re bound to die.” I listened to that song a lot when I was a little boy, and it scared me shitless. Something truly wicked had happened up there on the mountain. “Tom Dooley” is based on the misadventures of a womanizing, banjo-picking Confederate soldier named Tom Dula, but the point here is not the song’s historical accuracy. The point is that the balladeers used dark colours on a big canvas.

  Here’s another way of saying that. The musician Lou Reed, as a university student in Syracuse in the early 1960s, entered the sphere of influence of Delmore Schwartz, poet, alcoholic, and habitué of the White Horse Tavern.6 Reed thereafter decided that the Song should have every bit as big a realm as the Novel, as great a scope. Lou Reed’s songs are informed by a novelist’s bravery and recklessness, and that’s the spirit I determined I would emulate in what songwriting work of mine there was to come.7

  I felt there was a song I needed to write, a song that would address, somehow, my bumping up against Death’s Door. A phrase entered my mind. That’s an accurate statement, since suddenly there were three words in my head that hadn’t been there before. They weren’t the culmination of any cud-chewing; those three simple words arrived all by themselves. We could debate whether they were shoved forward, like small children, by the bureaucrats in some buried mental department. Or maybe inspiration is divine. I’m hedging my bets at this point. But those words—“all the stars”—came to me with unexpected clarity, and I believe I actually pulled on my chin as I wondered, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I allowed my novelistic sensibility free rein. I imagined a man—a quiet man, a nice man, a man who likely enjoys crossword puzzles and never did any real harm to anyone else— and I imagined him stepping outside, looking up, and seeing all the stars.

  But I walked outside, just after midnight . . .

  And I saw all the stars.

  As I continued, it quickly became apparent that the man was missing someone, that his partner was no longer alive. In the final verse, he writes this person a letter, acknowledging the futility of the act. “Still,” he intones with a shrug, “you do what you gotta do to survive.” And then the man looks up at the sky again, seeing all those billions and billions of stars, essentially all of creation. It is a small miracle that such a tiny human act can reap such amazing benefit. It was a good song. I showed it to the rest of Porkbelly Futures. We added it to our repertoire just before we hit the road for the Maritimes.

  OKAY—BACK TO Bob Dylan. When my brother’s friends speculated about whether Dylan had “gone too far,” they were, of course, referring to his appearance, on July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival.

  It was Dylan’s third consecutive appearance at the festival, and in the years previous, he had done exactly what was expected of him. He’d stood in front of a microphone—actually, two large radio-style microphones duct-taped together— and rendered his songs of protest. He’d invited Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, and the Freedom Singers to join him onstage as he sang “Blowin’ in the Wind,” accompanying himself and the others on his guitar, stiffly strummed and rudi-mentally fingered.

  That summer, as in summers previous, Dylan spent a great deal of time in Woodstock, New York, staying at the home of his manager, Albert Grossman. I have no concrete evidence that he was indulging in pharmaceuticals—other than the fact that everyone else in the world was—but his writing was becoming increasingly, well, agitated. The husky-throated Baez, his girlfriend at the time, recalled, “Most of the month or so we were there, Bob stood at the typewriter in the corner of his room, drinking red wine and smoking and tapping away relentlessly for hours. And in the dead of night, he would wake up, grunt, grab a cigarette, and stumble over to the typewriter again.”

  One ignores at one’s peril (isn’t it hateful when one begins with “one,” and one is therefore compelled to keep using “one”?) the former Robert Zimmerman’s choice to rename himself “Dylan,” after Dylan Thomas, the great and fabulously self-destructive Welsh poet. Zimmerman was inspired by the driven manner in which Thomas spun lyrical gold out of the dross of his day-to-day life. He was likewise inspired by French poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and by the Surrealists, who allowed their thoughts to come forth freely and uncensored. I could say much about that school of thinking, but I believe the Surrealists’ position is succinctly expressed by one of their visual arts counterparts, Salvador Dali. “There is only one difference between a madman and me,” he asserted. “I am not mad.”

  So it was in this frame of mind that Dylan had gone too far at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He was the Sunday night headliner; the act preceding him was Cousin Emmy, whose big tune was “Turkey in the Straw.” After singing two songs acoustically, Dylan was joined onstage by Al Kooper and Barry Goldberg (on organ and piano), Sam Lay (drums), Jerome Arnold (bass), and the whiz kid from the Fickle Pickle, Mike Bloomfield.8 And as he launched into “Maggie’s Farm,” there came—or so legend has it—a resounding chorus of catcalls and boos. “Sell out!” people shouted, and “Bring back Cousin Emmy!”

  Dylan was startled, even shaken, by the response. After all, his most recent album, Bringing It All Back Home, had featured an acoustic side and an electric side. Some people claimed later that at least a few boos were directed at the very poor sound quality. Others said that the most vocal of the dissenters were backstage. Pete Seeger, who didn’t like the music one little bit, reportedly announced, “If I had an axe, I’d cut the cable right now!” Festival board member Alan Lomax, likewise incensed, pleaded with the sound men to turn the volume down. Dylan and his band rushed through “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Phantom Engineer,” a song that eventually became “It Takes a Train to Cry.” Then he announced, “That’s all,” and the musicians left the stage. Further booing ensued, some of it provoked by the electric nature of the set, some by the fact that the set had been only five songs long. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary rushed onstage to assure the crowd that Dylan would be back, that he was just fetching his acoustic guitar.9 Behind the scenes, Joan Baez was urging Dylan to re-take the stage. He did so with some reluctance, bringing his acoustic with him. This quieted the crowd, as it seemed something of a capitulation. When he discovered he hadn’t brought the right harmonica (you remember, they come in different keys), he asked if anyone had one in E. There came a clattering of oblong silver projectiles. Dylan retrieved one, fitted it into the holder, and performed “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

  IT DOES seem, after all these years, to have been a lot of to-do about little. The Band’s Robbie Robertson opined, “It seemed kind of a funny statement to me at the time, that somebody’s gone electric. It was like, jeez, somebody’s just bought a television.” But I suppose the crowd could sense what was really going on: the division between the two ways in which music could be “popular” were being bound together with the violence of a welding torch. Before that, music could be “by and of the people”—socially conscious, eager to precipitate change—or it could be “enjoyed by the masses,” a little bit glib and innocuous. The Beatles were not, at least not at that moment in history, interested in social change. They were, it seems to me, lyrically interested only in cataloguing the vagaries of banal relationships. In this, they were part of a tr
adition that, although it is age-old, seems to have been exacerbated by World War II. Certain songs have always been light-hearted—inconsequential—and such songs were welcomed, I’m suggesting, by a war-weary world. In 1946, for instance, the big radio hits included Bing Crosby’s rendition of “Sioux City Sue” (in which the singer pledges to swap his horse and his dog for the red-haired, blue-eyed object of his affection) and “Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy.”

  This tendency toward frivolity was still dominating the radio waves in the early sixties. Consider “Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp).” The style of music in that song is “doo-wop,” which tells us something right there, that there exists a genre characterized by its use of nonsense syllables. “Who Put the Bomp” was written by Gerry Goffin and Barry Mann, and is, I think, agreeably self-mocking. Still, just because one mocks oneself for doing something doesn’t mean that one should have done the thing in the first place.

  Here’s my very unpopular stance. I think the Beatles, with their unprecedented popularity, did more than anyone else in their early days to deplete the music coming out of our radios of any remaining meaning or significance. And who came in their immediate wake? Freddie and the Dreamers. Herman’s Hermits, with front man Peter Noone smugly recycling old music hall songs. There were, admittedly, groups that evidenced more substance and grit. The Animals seemed to come from a genuine place, informed by council houses, disease, and flat ale. But while you might think the blues-based Rolling Stones had more, er, balls, I remind you of the earlier quote citing the loss of meaning in the British reworkings of American blues. By 1965, with so much music sounding so similar—the twang of electric guitars, the wrecking-ball bounce of the bass, snappy snares and cymbal washes—some people feared a diminishing of music’s intent and purpose.