Cigar Box Banjo

by Paul Quarrington

  As much as I came to love the Beatles—hold on, I should admit something. In 1964, at the height of Beatlemania, I was in Grade 6, and there were two distinct factions. There were those kids who felt that the Beatles were the greatest thing ever. And there were those kids, of which I was one, who felt that the Dave Clark Five were every bit as good, if not a little bit better. Yeah, I know. I have a history of such decisions. For a while, I preferred Donovan to Bob Dylan. Let me explain that I’ve always admired tuneful singing over idiosyncratic intoning or stylization. I can’t really defend this stance, as it has caused me to dismiss many artists that I should have paid attention to. I have made a handful of good choices over the years, too, however. My favourite of all the British groups were (was?) the Animals. True, Eric Burdon bombilated more than he sang, but even then I could recognize the magnificence of his pipes.

  But though the Beatles set the tone in the sixties, I soon came to realize I had trouble harmonizing. I was pudgy, saddled with spectacles, and long hair exacerbated my acne. They didn’t seem to have any groovy clothes in the Husky section of the children’s clothing department at Eaton’s. To top it all off, when I was fifteen my mother died, which made me surly and silent.

  DOROTHY MADE an appointment for me to see Xiaolan. Actually, several people had suggested that I see Xiaolan, as she has a reputation for healing that is formidable. Moreover, Xiaolan is attached to the literary world, because she has written books (one was co-authored by my friend Marni Jackson) that were published by Anne Collins at Random House (my fiction editor). The short story on Xiaolan Zhao is that, although she trained in and first practised Western medicine, she decided that it was wrong to turn her back on more ancient practices. Acupuncture, massage, herbs, and unguents: that’s the kind of medicine she advocates. So off Dorothy and I went to the clinic, a squat brownstone on Prince Arthur Avenue staffed by many women wearing starched white lab coats. On my first visit, I was examined by Xiaolan, who declared that she could help, but that my health ultimately depended on myself. Then she proceeded to work on me, a process that involved things like sticking her fingers up my nose and in my ears and placing pins in various parts of my body, including the top of my head. Xiaolan never announced her intention of doing any specific thing, so for that hour I was in a state of constant surprise, even shock. I’ve been back a number of times since, and this is a trait shared by the doctors there. They simply do things to you, things like laying a forearm to the small of your back with the sudden intensity of Sweet Daddy Siki or the Sheik. One practitioner, Mariko, did mutter something one time, apparently asking permission. I didn’t quite catch what she said, but it was something about “cups.”

  “Good for drawing out toxins,” she said. “Is that all right?”

  “Sure,” I shrugged. Or made a gesture as close to a shrug as I could, given that I was lying face down on a massage table, my face pushed through the hole, and had needles sticking out of my arms, my ears, and the back of my neck. Mariko busied herself. I could hear the tinkling of glass, I could hear her arranging things on a trolley, I could hear the trolley approach. There was the sound of flame, as though Mariko were lighting up a smoke (which I thought unlikely), and then suddenly a perfect circle of my back fat was sucked up by some concentration of Hell. I barely had time to scream before it happened again, and again. It happened approximately thirty times; that’s how many little glass bowls Mariko drew the air out of (that was what the flame was all about) and then adhered to my flesh.

  It was one of the most intense things I’ve ever experienced. As far as my back is concerned, it’s number one on the list. The next day my back was vividly patterned with circles in a range of purples from light to royal. I felt not so well the next day, and then better, and then pretty well indeed. So perhaps the cupping did achieve the aim of drawing out toxins, and perhaps the many pills Xiaolan gives me (the dosages are along the lines of “eight pills, three times a day”) effectively battle the tumour. To be honest, I really don’t know. But I do know this: I like the attitude Chinese medicine has about cancer. They don’t treat it, as Westerners do, as though it were the boogeyman hiding under the cellar stairs. They don’t panic when the word is mentioned and start looking for the rat poison. As Xiaolan explained it, cancer represents an imbalance, and imbalances can be addressed. Except, you know, I have a bit of a hard time finding balance. Take my diet, for example.

  Xiaolan wanted me to see her nutritionist, Christina Gordon, so I went along again to the clinic on Prince Arthur. This time, I brought Rebecca Campbell with me. Rebecca has gathered great critical acclaim as a solo artist and songwriter, and she also sings and plays percussion for Porkbelly Futures. It was early July by now, and the band was scheduled to begin a two-week, ten-date tour of the Maritimes in less than a week. I knew that I was going to need a great deal of help on the nutrition front. Rebecca is pretty health-conscious, and she is receptive to non-traditional ideas. Which is to say, she’s not going to turn and hightail it just because something is a little wacky. And Christina was a little wacky. She was vivacious and very pregnant, and I liked her instantly, but she was flitting around some pretty distant lightbulbs. For example, she practised “oracular” medicine (I think that’s what I heard), which involved me lying on a table and her waving some object toward my head. She placed and replaced small vials between my fingers, apparently trying to determine which particular holistic medicine my body was receptive to.2 She also told me what I should and shouldn’t be eating.

  Kale came up. Kale comes up a lot in the context of what people with cancer should be eating. Just for the record, I’m not convinced kale is even edible, but it was duly listed (Rebecca was inscribing madly in her notebook) along with other leafy greens. Beef was out, but somehow lamb survived the cut. No dairy, although I could eat goat cheese. I asked about spicy food, and Christina shook her head, but I thought that was a little arbitrary, or perhaps she hadn’t really understood the question. Rebecca inquired about various concoctions that she might render with her juicer, and Christina told her what vitaminic additives would make the stuff sparkle. “I know there’s a big difference between what I want you to do and compliance,” said Christina. “Sometimes the joy factor outweighs the health factor.”3 I thought that statement evidenced much wisdom.

  “And when you’re on tour,” said Christina, “try to have some fun.”

  “Oh,” Rebecca assured her, “we have fun, all right.”

  “You’ve got to have more fun than you’ve ever had. Remember, the umour hates laughter. It hates laughter, and it loves fear.”

  That’s something I still say to myself, even as I realize that I’m out too late and have had too many drinks and really should be home in bed.

  The tumour hates laughter.

  Christina had, prior to her somewhat draconian pronouncements on diet, asked me a lot of questions about my family life. She wanted to know if my parents were alive, and I reported no. My father died suddenly, of a heart attack, at age seventy-six. My mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage when both she and I were very young. “It sucks that you don’t have parents,” Christina said. “And it especially sucks that your mother died when you were so young. You know, in Chinese medicine, the emotion associated with the lungs is sadness. I’m not saying that you have lung cancer because your mother died, but I am saying the two things may be connected.”

  Hmm. Well, it certainly was when I began smoking in earnest. I’d smoked prior to that—we all smoked—but after my mother died I declared my affection for Player’s Plain (non-filtered cigarettes—“dead-ends,” as we put it) and puffed away with vigour and enthusiasm. Or maybe anger is the right word. And maybe I was doing it because the inhalation, sharp and painful, hit the sadness bulls-eye that was my lungs.

  ONE DAY at school, soon after my mother’s funeral, I was approached in the hallway by Paul D. I knew Paul from my childhood, since he and his brother were the most notorious ne’er-do-wells in the area. His brother was worse. A
t least, his brother got into more trouble—perhaps he simply got caught more, Paul having a half-step on him in a foot race—and spent a lot of time in reform school. (They don’t seem to have reform schools anymore. What happened to them? I imagine derelict buildings perched high upon barren hills, the sounds of lashes still echoing.) Yes, Paul was a hood, although with the British Invasion he had let his hair grow long and started doing huge quantities of drugs. Paul D. had always liked me, which I reciprocated, because he had a sunny disposition and a great sense of humour, and if I were friends with Paul D. it meant I couldn’t actually be the lard-assed wimp that I appeared to be. So, as I say, this boy, unshaven and whorly-eyed, came up to me in the hallway and said, “Hi, Paul. What’s new?”

  “My mother died,” I informed him.

  “Oh.” Paul nodded, momentarily sombre. Then he asked, “What on the bright side?”

  Paul invited me over to his place. For reasons that I can’t explain—I mean, I don’t know the explanation myself—he and his brother, John, had their own apartment. I don’t know where the parents were. It’s possible that Paul and John were remittance men, the black sheep of some blue-blooded family, sent to live in the wilds of Scarborough and provided with a stipend every month. All I know is, the brothers shared an apartment in a high-rise at the corner of Victoria Park and Lawrence. It is there we repaired to after school, or, actually, a couple of hours before “after school” officially began.

  I remember that the place wasn’t a pigsty, which was impressive. Mind you, there wasn’t a lot there, a dining room table and some chairs. I sat down while Paul fetched refreshment.

  “Where’s John?”

  “Oh, well, you know,” answered Paul from the small kitchen area. I heard a small “pop.” “He’s gone away for a little while.”

  Paul D. returned with a bottle of wine, two greasy articles of stemware threaded through his fingers. “A fine Beaujolais,” he announced, pouring me a glass. “Cheers. Sorry about your mom.”

  They say an experience shared by alcoholics is that with the first taste of hooch, a tremendous sense of wellbeing descends. I did not have that experience, not at all. The first two sips were bitter, and I barely managed to swallow them back. With that third sip, though, I was enveloped by a cloud of fluffy, muzzy contentment.

  I’d found a new hobby.

  The other thing that happened around that time was that my brother Tony fetched home a record album, a sampler from a company called Elektra. The label was largely dedicated to folk artists, and very good ones, too, people like Tom Rush and Tim Buckley. The record company was also making a stab at the new young audience of hippies with the Doors and the Lovin’ Spoonful (a group I thought the world of), but what really intrigued me on that Elektra sampler was the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. They played music unlike much else I’d heard. For one thing, that bullying rhythm was back, the same beast I’d encountered in Conrad’s basement. It grabbed me by the collar and shook me back and forth. And overtop of that rhythm there was this electrified keening, young Mike Bloomfield pulling teeth out of a beat-up old Telecaster. The harmonica, as played by Butterfield, didn’t sound like a human voice; it sounded way more human than that, the howl of a beggar outside the Pearly Gates. Not only that, but photographs of the band showed them to be pot-bellied louts, with greasy hair and nicotine-stained fingers. Some still retained their Brylcreem-sculpted greaser ’dos. A couple were even black. Musically, fashion-wise, even as a lifestyle, this seemed a reasonable alternative to a pudgy young anti-social fellow like me. I became a fifteen-year-old hard-drinking, hard-smoking bluesman from Don Mills, Ontario.

  There is a great deal of musicological research focussed on the origins of the blues, how it all has to do with field hands exchanging calls and responses as they went about their backbreaking labour.

  “It fucking hurts—”

  “Really, really fucking hurts—”

  “When we bend down!”

  “It fucking hurts when we bend down.”

  I suppose that’s glib, and I don’t mean to be, but I think I’m pointing, if vaguely, at something of a truth, that the blues tend to be songs of complaint. (The other side of that, the hope for a better life, is reflected by the blues’ slightly more elegant and refined sister, gospel. The two were reunited in the fifties by people like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, who sang gospel music with lyrics that reflected more secular concerns.) Musicologists assert that the call-and-response tradition was prevalent in many areas of Africa, where the slaves brought to the U.S. originated. They likewise point out that an essential influence on the blues was the European music of the slave owners. James Campbell notes in The Picador Book of Blues and Jazz that the aab rhyming scheme found in most blues, Nick Gravenites’s “Born in Chicago,” for instance,

  I was born in Chicago, nineteen-forty-one.

  Born in Chicago, nineteen-forty-one.

  My father told me, “Son, get yourself a gun.”

  is also present in many old ballads that predate the arrival of the first slave in the New World:

  Polly, pretty Polly, won’t you come along with me?

  Polly, pretty Polly, won’t you come along with me?

  Before we get married, some new love to see.

  There’s also a commonality between the two kinds of music in their physical urgency. The ancient balladeer seemed every bit as anxious to get his rocks off as the most hormone-addled bluesman.

  A songster was, originally, a little book that contained songs—ballads, “coon” songs (sorry, but that’s what the musicians themselves called them), ditties popular with the hoi polloi. The booklets had titles like The Forget Me Not Songster and The Arkansas Traveller Songster. Sometime during the nineteenth century, the term “songster” was gradually applied to the itinerant black musician (actually, the parlance of the time was “musicianer”) who went from place to place clutching a songster in his hand. A songster would have in his repertoire a few blues songs—the twelve-bar variety, with the inviolate aab rhyming scheme—but he was by no means limited to the blues, nor would he typically care to be. The esteemed critic Robert Palmer noted in his book Deep Blues that Charley Patton, later known as the father of Delta blues, was a songster of catholic propensities, singing “blues, white hillbilly songs, nineteenth century ballads, and other varieties of black and white country dance music with equal facility.” The focus on twelve-bar blues, and its association with black artists in the first half of the twentieth century, is in many ways the result of rampant commercialism. To be blunt, the owners of the “race record” companies, who were white, believed that the blues would sell better than that other stuff.

  To be fair, the “race record” concept is not quite as reprehensible as it might seem. Race records did allow for the preservation and dissemination of a vital part of African-American culture. Black artists were among the first people to be recorded on the newfangled talking machines. Sometime in the late 1880s, George Washington Johnson recorded his trademark tunes, “The Whistling Coon” and “The Laughing Song.” The reason I’m a little vague on the dates is that in those early days, each performance was captured on its own cylinder. So Johnson recorded those songs as many as fifty times a day. He was sufficiently big-lunged that he could whistle and laugh into five recording horns at once. The legend of how his recording career began is telling. Johnson was on the Staten Island Ferry, whistling, and Thomas Edison happened to hear him.4 Edison invited Johnson to come to his laboratory to make some recordings, and he offered to pay him twenty cents per two-minute song. Over time, those fees constituted a healthy income for Johnson, a man born into slavery. For Edison, and men like him, it was chump change. There was much more money to be made by selling the cylinders.5

  Nick “the Greek” Gravenites was not born in 1941, despite the assertion in the song lyrics quoted above, although he was born in Chicago. Gravenites was born three years before that, in the Brighton Park section of the city. His father died when he was eleven, an
d his mother mourned for the next ten years, black-clad and intoning her sorrow in the traditional, melismatic manner (changing the pitch of a single syllable; an example would be the bellowing we do at Christmas when we sing the “Gloria” of “Angels We Have Heard On High”). Mrs. Gravenites was not able to manage her boy as Nick entered his teens, and he spent the next few years scuffling with the law. He was sent to a military academy—which seems to be the American equivalent of reform school, as far as I can tell— and finally, through the good graces of an English teacher, entered the University of Chicago. There he soon was involved with the U of C Folklore Society, and he became acquainted with some other misfit white kids eager to play music. There was one lad named Mike Bloomfield who was a whiz on the guitar, seemingly at home with every style, but obsessed with the blues. At the age of nineteen, Bloomfield became the manager of a club called the Fickle Pickle, and he would book all these old blues guys that no one except him had ever heard of. He would spend all night sitting right in front of them, listening and watching intently. And there was this other kid, nicknamed Bunky, who was not actually attending the university, because he was too young to do so. Bunky Butterfield was raised in an interracial section of Chicago. He was very popular with both his white and his black neighbours, because he was a likeable kid and he could play the hell out of a harmonica. It was these kids, along with a couple of other friends, Elvin Bishop and Charlie Musselwhite, who spearheaded the blues movement of the early sixties.

  Oh, I know, I know, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, and Brian Jones were similarly blues-obsessed, but they only had access to the records. The Chicago contingent had access to the old blues guys. They could see and sit in with musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Wells, and Otis Rush. I think I could argue convincingly that this made them more authentic. At any rate, the Chicago guys, unlike their British counterparts, didn’t achieve insane wealth or fame, both of which are challenges to a religious dedication to the blues. From 1963 to 1965, while the British Invasion was in full swing, the Butterfield band was labouring away at Big John’s, a club on Chicago’s North Side.