“Hey Barry,” I wonder, “the show, is it sold out?”
“I don’t know.”
Okay, maybe he’s lying. You’d think a manager would have a handle on this kind of detail. Bookin, it turns out, contributed background vocals to a few Johnny Rivers songs back in the seventies. He says the highlight of his career was singing on the television show The Midnight Special. That’s sort of big-time, or was back then.
There are so many guys milling about, trying to make this gig happen. Inside the guts of a concert operation, a number of occupations and livelihoods are at stake. There are guys who work for the center. There are guys who book the tour into the center and every other venue on the route. There are guys who take care of the stage. There are guys who take care of the lighting. There are guys who take care of the sound. The parade of support for two acts to be on stage at the correct time and look and sound good seems endless. All everyone needs for success is bums in seats.
Over at stage left, it’s sound check time for Don Felder and his band. They’re doing some slow-bluesy, duh-duh, duh-duh, bass-line-driven, cock-rock thing, with this long-blond-haired wisp of a siren belting out her need to be whatever’ed. That would be Felder’s daughter Leah, a real Malibu Barbie. This schlock will work because we’re tripping back to the seventies for what Felder calls “A Night at the Hotel California.” Calgary, the place where all those Stevie Ray Vaughan and Boston and Van Halen and Supertramp albums flew off the racks, likes to time travel. Or maybe it never left.
Sound checks are both necessary and tedious to musicians—but not necessarily for the leader in this case, because this is all new to Lefebvre. Thump-a, thump-a, thump-a goes Ricky Fataar’s kick drum. “Okay! Snare!” Fataar snaps the snare skin robotically. Meanwhile, bassist James “Hutch” Hutchinson gives his best Roger Daltrey in testing the main mic, aping the scream from “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: “Y-e-e-e-a-a-a-h-h-h-h-h!!!” Yes indeed, meet the new boss, same as the old boss, the goddamn fucking Eagles.
Then guitarist Greg Leisz lets fly a Roger McGuinn–style cascade of notes. The guy is nothing but pure pleasure to listen to and makes me forget how bloodless this procedure is.
Since it’s the first show, the band wants to rehearse as many full tunes as possible before hitting feeding hour, so they give four from the set list a go. Everyone is fighting for a limited frequency band in the middle, the soundman says, shrugging. Think positive—could be everyone’s hammering away just to grab some levels now, and subtlety and restraint might rule tonight.
Back in the dressing room, Lefebvre’s publicist, Sharon Szmolyan, brags about the number of hits in L.A. Mike Bell’s Calgary Herald Lefebvre profile is getting. I guess she’s on the gravy train, too, collecting simoleons.
“When are we going to see you in L.A., John?” Szmolyan’s job is to get Lefebvre ink in Canada. For the U.S., he enlisted Shore Fire, an expensive, big-time publicity machine. It represents Bruce Springsteen, to name one superstar. The Canadian and American entities may or may not talk to one another.
Around 7:15 p.m. I sit down in one of the movable chairs that have been placed beside the soundboard at the back of the auditorium. People file in. There are an awful lot of people here for the opening act. Lefebvre has invited friends and family, sure. “I can’t believe it,” someone says, “he actually filled the place up.” It’s true. Not every one of the 1,800 seats, but Lefebvre has a good crowd on hand for his first show. The band walks on. Applause. Lefebvre walks on. More applause.
“Hi, Mom … you here? I’ve got a song for you later.”
Silence.
“Any of you ever done this before?”
Silence.
No, and neither has Lefebvre. He flubs the first line of “Painted Pony.” There is no instrumental introduction to the song, so his vocal is supposed to come in at once. He misses the post and catches the second line. It’s embarrassing, but no big deal. It won’t be perfect.
Lefebvre introduces each song, which starts to disrupt the rhythm of the show. For instance, he introduces the song he calls “Theme” as, “My friend Danny told me this joke. There’s a typo in that title. It’s actually ‘The Me.’” It might have been funnier when Danny said it.
Lefebvre’s band is lively and tight—not tight to its standards, but not bad for a first night. The leader has chosen mostly rock-oriented material—country rock, country swing, fifties jive-rock—to showcase his songwriting. When you have only forty minutes, hit them between the eyes seems to be the rationale. Just two ballads in his twelve-tune set—nothing like the ratio on his albums.
He introduces “Juice,” one of his booze songs: “You guys heard of Hank Snow? ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’? This is my tribute: ‘I Quit Everywhere.’ It’s a sixty-year-old’s rebel yell.” Lefebvre confesses he can’t stop drinking expensive wine. He’ll give up every other kind of booze, gladly, but don’t even try to stop him from ordering a several-hundred-dollar bottle of wine or two in a restaurant.
“Wakes and Dreams,” Lefebvre’s Procol Harum–influenced tune, sounds forced. No one in the band can get a purchase on the herks and jerks. It’s too fast to be an effective evocation of Procol, but the audience stays with Lefebvre. He’s getting through the set and the band is right there for him. And then there’s the strangest interlude. About two-thirds of the way through, Lefebvre leaves the stage. The band wonders what’s up. Is he coming back? Hey, we’re hanging out to dry here, Johnny. Don’t do this to us! After a lull, which is probably only a minute but seems interminable in concert time, Lefebvre bursts back on stage wearing a new jacket. Maybe it’s his James Brown moment, leaving the stage only to claw his way back. Can’t keep a greedy man down and all that. But Brown and Bobby Byrd had that routine worked out down to the last detail. Here we have either a wardrobe malfunction or a pee break.
After the show, in the band’s dressing room, down the hall from Lefebvre’s, there’s a meeting. They unanimously decide to recommend to their boss that he ditch “Wakes and Dreams” to streamline the set. Lefebvre pushes back: “In my mind, it’s the biggest rocker I have.” There is only one problem with this declaration: it doesn’t really rock, because the quick two-step chord change keeps the listener off balance. If we’re talking rock, Lefebvre’s most rocking song is the blaring “Wounded Knee.”
After the meeting, everyone hangs out. We listen to Eagles song after Eagles song being piped into the basement hallway via tiny speakers built into the ceiling. The lousy sound makes it somewhat easier to ignore them. The band tells bad jokes. On the radio one of them heard the temperature in Regina was minus two. He thought he heard “vagina” was minus two. “That’s one cold girl,” he says. “The cold clam on the Prairies.” Band humor.
Keyboardist Billy Payne talks about the gig. It wasn’t a disaster, he says, but the set needs fine-tuning. Other keyboardist Patrick Warren wants to slow down. In his opinion, Lefebvre has several excellent slow tunes. Payne confirms that the worst part was when Lefebvre wandered offstage—Payne was mortified.
Billy Payne was, and is, Little Feat’s keyboard player. Lowell George, who has been dead thirty-one years, is still the guy most closely associated with the name Little Feat. It may gnaw at Payne that he doesn’t get the recognition he deserves for creating and perpetuating the Little Feat sound. Lefebvre confirms this later, saying, “Yeah, it does bother him.”
Payne lives in Montana now. He bought a property for a good price and now it’s worth about double what he paid for it. He says he probably couldn’t afford to buy it now. Payne and bandmates reformed Little Feat in 1987 and the band started to tour again. They still do. A year ago, drummer Richie Hayward died, and Payne lost his best mate in the group. Payne wants to write a memoir about working with Hayward, who led such a colorful life. He wants it to be “honest and truthful, but respectful.” Meaning, if there was a Keith Richards, desperado kind of rock star in Little Feat, it was
Richie, and some things might be left out. Hayward liked girls and motorcycles and did everything to extremes.
In the dressing room, Payne continues his quiet tirade about tonight’s performance. He’s exorcising demons, blowing off steam, letting it go. They start laughing and shaking their heads about that eternity when Lefebvre left the stage. No, it was not rehearsed. No, they did not know WTF was going on. Yeah, they wondered if he was coming back—fuck you think they were wondering about? Payne has a certain authority when he wants to assert it—call it paternalism with an edge. “Look,” he says to no one in particular but staring at me, “I’m not one to tell somebody what’s what, but …” Everyone understands Lefebvre is going to get told by employee Payne just exactly what’s what. “He’s the leader of the band. He can’t leave the stage like that.”
After Felder’s band finishes its encore, Lefebvre heads upstairs to the main-floor foyer for the meet and greet. Felder will be signing his memoir about being an Eagle. I’m sure it’s a great read. I meet Lefebvre’s sister, Anne. She is pleasant and happy and frenetic. She talks fast. I meet Anne’s long-lost daughter, the one she gave up for adoption around the time Lefebvre got busted for selling acid way back in his teens, and her children.
Anne’s guilt over abandoning her child lasted well over thirty years before suddenly, quickly, disappearing. In a happy, surprising turn, about ten years ago Anne discovered that her daughter might still be living in Alberta. After some hesitation, she initiated the delicate process of making contact. Her brother puts it this way:
Anne held her name out there. She’d heard from this adoption person that the girl she’d named Cassandra was now Suzanne, married, and living in southern Alberta somewhere. They wouldn’t say where, but we started to think it was Calgary. Turned out Suzanne was happily married and had two adolescent children and wanted to meet her birth mom. It was heavy. Anne spent her life concerned that if she ever met this young person there would be suffering—you know, “I’m an addict and it’s all your fault—you gave me up!” But it turned out her daughter was perfectly happy and wanted to meet her. In just one letter, a life’s anxiety obliterated.
The mother-and-child reunion looks well reconciled, and everything seems okay. It’s a beautiful story. I meet Lefebvre’s mom, Louise. She looks terrific in a formal black cocktail-style dress. Clutching a glass of red wine, she apologizes for her shaky hands. I meet some of the Cullen clan, from Lefebvre’s mother’s side of the family. The Cullens are a savvy, well-spoken bunch.
A female friend, who according to Lefebvre used to fly the Playboy jet, comes up to him and says, “Is this the ‘reinvented’ John? Because I want to speak to the old one.” She’s alluding to one of the local newspaper article headlines, “The reinvention of John Lefebvre.” Stepping closer, she leans in and French kisses him. Lefebvre’s eyes dart back and forth: Hoo boy, where’s Hilary? He has his one in two billion now, and he’d like to keep it that way.
• • •
We pile into the van on Monday, a short bus with the usual side-door entrance up front, at about nine in the morning. In the van is the driver along with John Lefebvre, the singer-guitarist; Barry Bookin, the manager; James “Hutch” Hutchinson, the bassist; Billy Payne, the keys guy; Patrick Warren, the other keys guy; Ricky Fataar, the drummer; Greg Leisz, the guitarist; Simon Sidi, the lights guy; and me, the writer guy. Tight fit.
It’s frigid. Ice crystals hang in the air. The sky is gray and so is everything else, as if all color had been sucked out of the city. The buildings are gray, the river is gray, even headlights, taillights, and traffic lights look gray. Desolation Calgary. The van is an icebox because its heater block can’t compete with the outside cold. The windows ice up. The American guys needn’t worry—there is nothing to see between Calgary and Edmonton on either side of the highway.
Regardless, everyone is in a good mood—everyone except Hutch, who will throw a hissy fit later about his cold feet. We just get rolling north on Highway 2, and Lefebvre decides he needs some fuel. I guess he didn’t grab a morning snack or tea at the hotel. Bookin asks the driver to find a Starbucks. The driver says he knows a place in Airdrie, not far off the highway.
Airdrie! We’ve been on the road for what, half an hour? And now we have to find a Starbucks and load up on coffee? The mega coffee and snack order consumes a lot of time. The Airdrie pit stop becomes a half hour. Bookin was smart enough to realize we were going to use up every minute of his slack timetable. He’s allotted five hours of travel time even though the trip takes three.
Back on the road, I’m sitting beside Lefebvre. We joke about the Calgary Herald story. “Bill, you always go on about fact-checking in journalism. Well, Mike got most of it right. He did make a couple of small mistakes, though.”
“John, it’s hard to get every fact 100 percent correct,” I suggest, after Lefebvre points out the minor errors. I add, “There was another statement I thought might require a little check, y’know. You see, right here,” I circle with my index finger, “this part, where Mike writes that the biggest inconvenience you’ve encountered in the four years you’ve been on bail is that it has, quote, put an end to his indulging in the herb, unquote.”
“Hey, guess what,” says Lefebvre, turning to the other musicians, “Bill thinks Mike Bell got another fact wrong—the part about me smoking pot.”
Near Red Deer, the halfway mark to Edmonton, Lefebvre gets vocal about food, about stopping, about stopping sooner rather than later, about hey driver, how about we stop somewhere in “Gasoline Alley” up ahead? The driver gets the hint about who’s paying the freight and recommends a place that’s a right then a right then a left off Red Deer’s Gasoline Alley.
Glenn’s Family Restaurant is a throwback to a more wholesome era. Its exterior is decorated in faux adobe, with a giant teapot painted on one wall. It has two laminated menus, one of which is about eight pages in length and dedicated exclusively to teas. Everybody enjoys the decor, granny-like but cute (or revolting, take your pick)—a macramé-and-doily sort of joint. We blow at least an hour eating breakfast (or brunch), goofing off, taking pictures using Fataar’s Flip video camera, shooting photos with the Hipstamatic app made for iPhone, turning band member shots into thirties sepia-toned vérité portraiture. They look like album cover shots for a Daniel Lanois– or T Bone Burnett–produced roots album. Lefebvre drops a tip that leaves the waitress speechless and befuddled—probably a hundred percent of the bill—and then blames the tour manager: “Barry, you’re the guy holding the ball.”
Around Leduc, Hutch starts in again about the draft inside the van. Now it’s a full-bore whine. The van’s windows are fully iced. You could take a new credit card to the windows and have trouble scraping off the layers. “I’ve got frostbite!”
Bookin says, “Hey, Hutch, it’s okay, I’m not cold.” He talks Hutch down and switches places with him. Problem solved. In any traveling entourage, Hutch is the Official Squeaky Wheel, the one who speaks for all. Hutch lives in Hawaii when he and Fataar aren’t on the road with Bonnie Raitt playing casinos and other lucrative venues. Nice life.
Hutch raises his voice when making a point to neutralize other voices and shout down opposition. Lefebvre can play that game too, especially when espousing his political views. He says Hutch takes up a lot of the air in a room and doesn’t leave much for anyone else; it takes one to know one. I wonder what a raised-voice contest between Hutch and Lefebvre might sound like. Could be high entertainment, but ultimately Hutch defers to the boss. The group is remarkably sanguine and good-natured about Hutch’s yapping. They’re both in awe of and alarmed that Hutch can recite every last gig he has ever played, and what he ate before and after the show.
Bookin mentions to Lefebvre that he might have to have a conversation with Don Felder about the length of the opening act’s set last night. The twelve tunes took almost an hour to execute, not forty minutes. Most headliners would spit blood at th
is intrusion into their sacred space. Not that Lefebvre cares, it would seem. It looks like he’s going to do what he’s going to do. As for good old Donny Felder, who from all reports seems to be a well-adjusted and likeable man, well, we’ll see.
Backstage in the John Lefebvre Band HQ at Enmax Hall, keyboardist Patrick Warren gives me a synopsis of his successful career as a musician for hire. He used to run his own business as a medical tech, driving around L.A. recording people’s brain waves. Then he decided to try for his first love, making a living as a musician, so he relegated his business to his fallback position.
Warren found himself playing on Michael Penn’s first CD, March, released in 1989. The album was a bit of a sleeper hit. Producers took notice and looked to emulate the sound of that first Penn album because it was hot. Warren soon became a studio commodity and worked on hit records by Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, and Macy Gray in the nineties. He made his name with Penn, and that was it, he’s been working ever since. No more brain waves.
After dinner it’s time for me to head up to Enmax Hall at 7:20 and sit beside the soundboard again. The main floor is packed by curtain time, much fuller than in Cowtown the night before (even with the opening act papering the place with friends and relatives). It appears Lefebvre will have a full audience’s rapt attention tonight. The band had a meeting beforehand, and they seem positive and ready to kick it up a notch. Now that they’ve been through the set once live, they know what to look out for. Warren, for instance, rolls his eyes about some of his presets. He says he hasn’t figured out why, but sometimes they trigger themselves in the wrong spots.
Lefebvre looks more confident tonight. Maybe not fully relaxed—to maintain a certain level of stress can be energizing—but obviously more in command the second time around. He doesn’t feel the need to stop and introduce every single song. They decided to keep “Wakes and Dreams” but to flip a song or two around in the order. Introducing “Juice” tonight, Lefebvre has a better anecdote: “The doc checked me out and said I ought to cut down. One glass of red a day might be all right, he said. So my assistant Marian buys me a glass for the occasion. Turns out three bottles of wine fit into the glass.”
Life Real Loud Page 32
