And then came July 26, 2009, two and a half years after the fateful MLK day visit. He flew down to L.A. and took his usual round. He’d gone fifty-eight days—nearly two months—without a toke. He figured he was in the clear. Then the guy asked him, “You been around any dope lately?”
“No, not to my knowledge,” Lefebvre said, truthfully. “Why, what are you looking at?”
“Com’ere.”
The tester showed Lefebvre a card with four columns on it labeled with four drug short forms—OPI, COC, mAMP, THC. There was one line across the top of the columns and another line across the bottom of three of them, but not the fourth. The top line said the test was functioning and the bottom line says it was positive or negative. If positive, there was no line.
“There’s no line here.”
“Honestly, I don’t know. There’s a lot of dope where I live. People put it in brownies and shit, but I don’t know. What should we do?”
“Well, I suppose we can look at it a while longer.”
“Is this wishful thinking, or are my eyes deceiving me?”
“Actually, I do see the beginnings of a line here.”
The three other lines shouted “Negative.” The THC line they were staring down, it was a pretend line.
The test man looked over his glasses.
Lefebvre was grasping at this point. “What do we have to do?”
The man turned back. He squinted a little harder.
“I promise,” Lefebvre said, “I’ll be really, really careful when I’m out at bars.”
Pause. The guy kept looking.
“This is really scary.”
In the end, the tester let Lefebvre walk out the door. Well, look, he had been a stellar bailee otherwise, right? Followed all the rules, cooperated fully. And anyway, wasn’t it California, the state of Mary Louise Parker’s Weeds, the place where you go to your GP and say, Look Doc, I got anxiety issues, can you prescribe me some marijuana? Doc asks what the anxiety attacks are about, and you say, Doc, I’m anxious I’m going to run out of marijuana.
Lefebvre looked over his shoulder on the way out the door. He felt like sprinting. The limo was waiting. He was supposed to have lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air—eighteen acres in the middle of Bel Air with swans in the pond—but who cared about that right now? Forget lunch with Hilary and her mom and dad visiting from Palm Springs. Just go!
But no, he kept a lid on it. He was supposed to see his lawyer first, before lunch. On the way over, he tortured himself: Drop everything, go see Dale at the airport and get the fuck out of this country. Right now!
Dale Kirkwood had flown Lefebvre into L.A. on the Cessna Citation II, so his pilot was waiting for him. He could have bolted, a move that would have been catastrophic, but Lefebvre quelled his anxiety attack and made it to the lawyer’s office. A little pot would be useful right about now. When he explained what just happened there was a wail: “J-O-H-H-H-N-N-N-N!”
One of the problems with the two-weeks-and-you’re-clear theory is that it doesn’t account for differing metabolisms. It also doesn’t factor in fat cells. If a guy has a lot of fat cells it might take longer to get rid of the lingering THC. Lefebvre, already a sizable man, had put on some weight since the bust. Also, by his own reckoning, he’d been really “letting her rip” before shutting it down.
• • •
Now we’re into the next summer. We’ve crossed the halfway point of 2010 and still no word from the DOJ about a sentencing date. We’re sitting on the front lawn of Lefebvre’s Sunset Drive property, looking at the boats and the seals and the mermaid sculpture in the shallow water. He chats amiably about his crazy life while taking calls from his album cover designer, his contractor, his girlfriend, his pals, his lawyer, and so on. He’s been working on his second recording, which he’s decided to call Initial Album. He wants to put a band together for a tour.
In among all of these discussions, right there, on the front lawn, is how he finds out from his lawyer that Gordon Herman, the now-former CEO of Neteller, has told the DOJ to take a hike. Herman has thought about it, and he’s talked to his lawyers about it, and he’s decided, thanks for the offer, but he’s not coming in to talk to them. If they want him, they’ll have to come up and get him. The DOJ is one powerful entity, but it isn’t generally in the business of extraditing people they haven’t charged but just want to talk to about online gambling. Herman won’t be able to set foot in the U.S. for the foreseeable future, but he probably wasn’t going to anyway.
Lefebvre wears some heavy, powerful emotions on his face. He looks proud of Herman for telling the DOJ to shove it. He looks peeved at him, too, and maybe jealous, because he wishes he could have somehow done the same. And he looks a bit awestruck at the news. All the what-ifs buzz, beep, and pinball through his head, not just being pursued in a criminal indictment but also losing most of his fortune. And then he says, “Gord’s a sharp guy, so you know he would surround himself with the best legal advice available. So if he says he’s not coming in, that probably means he’s on solid ground.”
XVI (2011)
Music Is the Healing Force
The guys who planned the Don Felder–John Lefebvre tour of Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver over February 6, 7, and 9, 2011, ought to buy a calendar. Lefebvre’s Calgary start time, 7:30 p.m., conflicts with the second quarter and halftime of Super Bowl Sunday. My friend Grant, for instance, can’t go to the show because he’s too busy focusing on his annual Stupor Bowl. Lefebvre invited both Grant and Kevin Brooker when he did a guest turn on their Friday afternoon CJSW radio program, The Road Pops, but they both begged off. Understandable.
Then again, I can’t imagine many of my Calgary friends sitting in the audience taking in Lefebvre’s music, even if it is performed by a great band of hired guns in a soft-seat environment with excellent acoustics. It’s in the heart of downtown, on the Eighth Avenue Mall, and is a nice place to listen to music. Philip Glass, Emmylou Harris, David Lindley, and similar acts played there in the mid-eighties, when I was living in Calgary.
They might think it’s a bit of a laugh, Lefebvre trying to be a big-time professional rock musician, renting the best studio in L.A., hiring the best musicians, pretending he’s some big shot. Putting on airs can be costly, at least a couple of hundred thou for this tour alone.
And I’m sure it’s the same feeling my friend Al expressed about Lefebvre’s first double CD, Psalngs, when he quipped, “Gilding the turd.” In other words, dressing up mediocre songs with fancy musicianship. Or the initial verdict my friend Shelley expressed about the second double CD, Initial Album: “Some of it’s awful … don’t you think?”
Well, no, I don’t think it’s awful. I don’t necessarily think it’s great, either. Too many songs, as in, the man does not have to put every song he records on the CD. Lefebvre could use an editor. Problem is, either he listens to people who provide advice that costs a lot of money, or he doesn’t listen to people because, ultimately, he never listens to any voice but his own anyway. And why would he listen to anyone else? For example, in Edmonton, in Lefebvre’s dressing room, around 5:30, tour manager Barry Bookin, Lefebvre, and I sit around chatting. Lefebvre opens a bottle of expensive wine. He decides to have a glass after sound check. I suggest, “Hey John, why don’t you hold off on the wine till after the show? Alcohol isn’t great for the voice.” The reason I say this is out of concern—last night his voice sounded weak in spots, but I was trying to be tactful.
“Bill, I hired the most expensive instructor in L.A., an opera singer who worked in Europe, to be my coach. He gave me lots of advice about singing. He said, ‘A lot of people think they know how to sing, and the one thing those people are going to do is give me advice about singing, and I want you to know that the only person you need to listen to is me.’”
What an argument. The guy might be an opera singer, but he’s not too smart. This is the sort of thing L
efebvre falls for. He pays the earth for the best recording studio, but then the results are middling. He pays a heavy price for Brian Ahern’s production experience even though Ahern wouldn’t know a rock song if it clubbed him in the head with a ’63 Fender Mustang. He pays a guy at Oceanside Studios top dollar to get his first album remixed, but then he decides he and his friend Danny Patton can do it better themselves. And they’re right. Money talks and people listen … More money than brains … People lining up for the gravy train … It’s all trial and error … Learning on the job … Growing up in public … All of these clichés apply to Lefebvre’s situation. It’s the banality of money in action.
Or, to take a different approach, as Lefebvre’s friends and supporters and fans have, you might see Al and Shelley’s criticisms as two more examples of a lingering resentment of Lefebvre, who does whatever the hell he feels like before doing something else. As if, because the guy has a lot of money, he can’t possibly be a musician we’d pay good money to see. That would be too much to bear. Skepticism can reign supreme outside the inner circle. Except in Lefebvre’s case, which is a special one, it’s more like “He’s already got more money than God, but, guess what, he can’t have my time.” And they could be right—maybe Lefebvre’s music isn’t that remarkable. They’re entitled to their opinions.
I run into another former Calgarian, Terry Tompkins, a musician now based in Toronto. We’re both heading to New York. I’m coming back from the Lefebvre tour on February 15. We meet at Billy Bishop Airport on Toronto Island. He asks what I’m working on. I give him a brief version of the Lefebvre story. He’s interested. When he hears the part about Lefebvre playing with expensive session guys, his first question is, “Is he a musician?”
I answer by telling Terry what our mutual friend Al said and then suggest maybe Al was being too harsh. I explain that I’ve put together my own sequenced collection of Lefebvre’s songs, which I’ve culled from the four CDs’ worth of material he’s pumped onto the market since 2008. These are twelve songs I really like, in the sense of being happy to hear them repeatedly. I’ve made a playlist in iTunes, given it its own cover, a shot I took of Lefebvre looking out over his land at Oldman Dam south of Calgary. So there are twelve out of fifty songs I like a lot.
I tell Terry I don’t much care for Lefebvre’s old-time rock ’n’ roll, the Texas swing, the fifties jive-rock—it all sounds a bit like constipated geezer rock to me. I prefer it when Lefebvre’s songs rock like Neil Young rock songs, but look, I’ve seen women dancing at Moby’s on Salt Spring to the music I call geezer rock, so they go over all right with a certain crowd. “That was a good time the other night, John,” Harold, his regular Salt Spring Air pilot, told him after the Moby’s show, adding, “A friend of mine said, ‘Wow, I didn’t know Grizzly Adams was fronting a band!’”
And Terry says, “Good for him! That’s exactly what I’d do if I had his money: rent the best studio and engineer, hire a really good producer, hire the best musicians, make the best version of my music I could possibly make.”
So did the professional musician Terry Tompkins resent the rich man John Lefebvre’s bid to become a professional musician at age fifty-nine? No. Terry echoed the thoughts of Toronto indie musician Steve Bromstein, who said exactly the same thing to me at a party. “If I had his money, that’s what I’d be doing. Good for him.”
• • •
Lefebvre has been itching for years to take some session superstars on the road to play soft-seat venues. The idea was simple. Fly into a town on the Cessna Citation II, put a trio of guys up in good hotels, don’t string too many gigs in a row, and don’t stay away too long. The logic was inescapable to the man with the money. Other working musicians might see a gap in the logic, and I found one by happenstance. After conducting a series of interviews with Lefebvre in June 2008, I headed back east on a WestJet flight. The airline seated me beside an old acquaintance, Neil Osborne, lead singer of Vancouver rock group 54-40.
Over the years I’ve interviewed Osborne quite a few times and always gotten along with him. He asked me what I was doing out West. At one point I mentioned that my subject, Lefebvre, had been looking into touring his CD. Osborne began to show skepticism. When his professional music career began, in the early eighties, Osborne’s band was grouped with the post-punk-era acts that showcased themselves at venues such as the Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret in Vancouver. Mostly, 54-40 was and is a rock band, not necessarily an indie-rock band, and in its 1986–96 heyday it was quite successful at selling CDs, touring, and getting regular airplay. One might call them one of the country’s finest singles bands: “I Go Blind,” covered by Hootie & the Blowfish in 1996, “One Day in Your Life,” and “Ocean Pearl,” among many others.
The band hasn’t had a radio hit in years, and its fortunes are on the wane, which isn’t to say Osborne and company are without popularity or get no bookings. They retain a smaller but dedicated fan base, issue new material every two or three years—the latest a catchy single called “The Waiting”—and still tour when requests come their way. They play the odd corporate show—the kids who went to college and loved their music are executives at companies and now have the pull to pay them well to perform at company functions. And they’ll hitch a ride on the summer festival and touring circuits. But they’re realistic about their middle-aged careers as Canadian rock musicians in a vast country that nonetheless is a small market. So when I tell Osborne of Lefebvre’s elaborate scheme for touring—and mention playing only soft-seaters—his healthy skepticism ramps up to disbelief. He shakes his head once, matter-of-factly, and says, “That’s not going to happen. I don’t care how much money he’s got. No one knows who he is, and no one cares about a bunch of session musicians. He’s not going to sell out soft-seaters, I can tell you that right now.”
• • •
I fly out of Newark International early Sunday morning to find out if it’s going to happen—with a little help from a former Eagle. I’m to meet Lefebvre at International Hotel & Suites in downtown Calgary around noon. My only preparation for this tour has been to send ahead a small package to him.
I spotted a white T-shirt in a narrow, crammed Soho shop called the Little Lebowski that I thought Lefebvre would appreciate. The store was preposterously dedicated to all things relating to The Big Lebowski, and there were Dude robes and Dude mugs with Dude lines like, “The Dude abides.” On the T-shirt there was an oversized reproduction of Jeff Bridges’s head. He was wearing old-school Ray-Bans, and the image was paired with one of the Dude’s famous lines: I HATE THE FUCKING EAGLES, MAN!
I send Lefebvre an email: “John, I am your sartorial spaceman—wait till you see this essential stage gear.” Lefebvre acknowledges receipt of the package, but he never responds to my request for him to wear it on stage. He won’t take up the dare even though the truth is Don Felder kind of hates the fucking Eagles, too—or at least the remaining two original members of the Eagles, Glenn Frey and Don Henley—for screwing him out of money and influence and the legacy. Yeah, Donny Felder would have found it pretty funny.
Lefebvre looks the same as the previous August, although his hair looks blond. He swears he hasn’t done a damn thing to it. He’s a lot heavier than when we met for the first time in twenty-five years, in June 2007. Eat, drink, and be merry is something a guy might fall back on when he’s uncertain about his future. He’s wearing old blue jeans, an orange T-shirt, and auburn slip-ons. Tonight he’ll wear exactly what he’s wearing right now, except with a formal jacket. No Lebowski T-shirt.
We congregate in the lobby at around two in the afternoon and file into a van, which gives us a lift about four blocks, which is nuts in an environmental sense, but then again Calgary is eye-stingingly cold. We arrive at the EPCOR Centre for the Performing Arts to meet various stagehands. They’re all pleasant guys. One of them, once he finds out I’m the writer in the gang, says, “You know that comedy book you always wanted to write?” He might
have a point, depending on how Lefebvre fares tonight.
Lefebvre’s old buddy Danny Patton is with us—he’s Lefebvre’s confidant and employer’s ears in dealing with the soundmen. I groan to Patton about my recent sciatic nerve woes, only to find out he’s been afflicted with diverticulitis. While I blather on, Patton quietly pops fish oil pills and aloe vera pills. He does not complain about what ails him. His meter is set on positive. He always has a wisecrack and rarely lets things get him down. In the late seventies, he was a punk rocker in a Calgary band called the Unusuals. Unlike many, he could actually play his instrument before he and the two other guys formed the band. Patton has no illusions about making music. Music is music. Sometimes people like it, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes people go crazy for it, as with the Eagles and the Sex Pistols, and sometimes they don’t (as with millions of acts). Who is he, who are you, who am I to judge? My post-career music critic mien likes this attitude … now.
“Hi, I’m John.” Lefebvre extends a hand to soundman Brad. “My whole future depends on you—but hey, no pressure.”
The soundman looks up at Lefebvre then looks back to the board. Truth is, he’s not quite sure what he’s doing—not because he’s incompetent but because this new “Xbox” setup, as he calls it, the one he’s been asked to use at EPCOR, is foreign to him. Lefebvre has hired a filmmaker to shoot the Calgary set. This seems like a narcissistic move, but maybe it’s to learn from mistakes in stage presentation. There are going to be mistakes. The band knows it. Everybody knows it. Lefebvre has never presented his music in such a plush, formal environment. Casual bars, sure, where sloppy is best, but here goofing off between songs won’t cut it.
Barry Bookin, Lefebvre’s tour manager, is looking at the camera guy’s setup. He worries about the tripod getting in the way of paying fans. He checks to see whether or not those two particular seats have been sold.
Life Real Loud Page 31
