Cigar Box Banjo

by Paul Quarrington

  This is what they feared, I think, when Dylan went electric.

  It’s also important to note that this event took place at a folk festival.10

  Silly songs weren’t the only musical response to World War II. Over in Scotland, the first Edinburgh International Festival was held in 1947 in an effort to raise post-war spirits. Finding the festival’s offerings too establishment for their taste, eight little theatrical companies more or less gate-crashed the event, putting on their own shows near the officially sanctioned ones. The movement eventually became the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In the same spirit, the Edinburgh Labour Festival Committee was created, with representation from various trade unions, significantly the Musicians Union and the Workers’ Music Association.11

  The committee organized a People’s Festival, and a man named Hamish Henderson was asked to arrange a ceilidh, a musical panoply of indigenous music. The first took place on August 31, 1951. You can listen to this ceilidh if you’re so inclined, because Alan Lomax was on hand to record it. There were fiddlers and Gaelic singers, balladeers and mucklers. I am hypothesizing it was from that first People’s Ceilidh that folk festivals have multiplied, steadfastly retaining their egalitarian nature. They are extensions of men like Hamish Henderson, who was a folksinger, a poet, an orator, a philosopher, a humanist, a soldier, a spy, and—I think this is extremely cool—the man to whom the Italians formally surrendered, at the end of World War II.

  Folk festivals are extensions of another man who was present at that first People’s Ceilidh, too. He had been present at the Edinburgh Festival as a playwright and a man of the theatre. His name at the time was James Miller. At one point, according to George Bernard Shaw, Miller was the best living playwright in Britain (other than Shaw himself). Miller was a dangerous kind of playwright; he and his first wife, Joan Littlewood, had founded the Theatre Workshop, an agitprop outfit that was once “bound over” by the police and forbidden to mount production for two years. But Jimmie Miller was increasingly attracted by folk song, the voice of the people. Like his friend and colleague Alan Lomax, he became a great collector of balladry, and—changing his name to Ewan Mac-Coll, to reflect his Scottish birthright—the composer himself of many a well-known song.

  His most famous was the Grammy-winning “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” It was written for MacColl’s third wife, Peggy Seeger, half-sister of Pete, the man who ranted and raved at Newport in 1965 and wished he had an axe with which to banish electricity. (And yes, I realize I’ve left out a wife. That would be dancer Jean Newlove, mother of two of MacColl’s children, one of which was Kristy MacColl, the singer joining the Pogues for the rousing “Fairytale of New York.”) While I’ve no doubt that the romantic underpinning of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was deep and heartfelt, the song was in fact written at Peggy’s request. She was in the United States at the time, acting in a play, and felt the production lacked something. MacColl wrote the song very quickly and taught it to Peggy over the phone, as his Communist background prevented him from entering the USA.12

  So it was, let me suggest, with the spirit of such men, Ewan MacColl and Hamish Henderson, looking over his shoulder that Robert Zimmerman elected to “go electric,” to take folk music away from the big-P People and give it to the small-p people.13 Or what was left of folk music, that is, because on that day in 1965, Dylan effectively made the term meaningless. Indeed, “folk music” these days is usually synonymous with “acoustic music,” as though people were still trying to reject Dylan’s unholy endorsement of electricity.

  People continued to boo at Newport after Dylan left the stage, prompting his famously acerbic comment that “they must be pretty rich to go someplace to boo.” But—even though I thrilled as a boy to “Like a Rolling Stone,”14 and have since then played music so loud my hearing is irreparably damaged—I’m not sure they were entirely wrong in doing so.

  And now you know why some of my acquaintances refer to me as “Paul Quarrelsome.”

  1 The reference is to Big Bill Broonzy, a bluesman from Bolivar County, Mississippi, who was popular with white audiences and helped spearhead the folk revival.

  2 I was surprised at how often I ended up writing about Dylan, in fact. As big a fan as I am, I hadn’t realized quite how profound his influence was on the popular song in the last half of the last century. I mentioned this in an e-mail to my friend Roddy Doyle, who responded, “Thanks for the heads up about Dylan. I’ll Google him.”

  3 In 1930, in what many people consider one of the most important country blues sessions ever, Charley Patton, Son House, Willie Brown, and singer and pianist Louise Johnson recorded together at the Paramount studios in Grafton, Wisconsin. A significant aspect to that session has to do with the technical limitations of the era. As each number was played and sung, the music was etched—right then and there—onto a wax disc called the “matrix”—what we might now call a master, as it was thence used to create the stamper and the commercial copies. The matrix spun at a speed of seventy-eight rpm, and a ten-inch disc (the most dependable size, less breakable than bigger versions, which did exist) could hold a little over three minutes of music. So the musicians were required to limit their performances to three minutes. That edict—this is my non-scholarly conjecture—affected the recording process long after the seventy-eight had gone the way of the dodo.

  4 Bruce Springsteen reported something similar. When he first heard the song, he recalled at Dylan’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind.”

  5 I’m speaking of commercial and critical success. On all other levels, they turned out okay.

  6 Delmore Schwartz is also the model for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Saul Bellow’s wonderful novel Humboldt’s Gift.

  7 One of the first manifestations of this was my inclusion of the phrase “twiddle with my dinky” in the song Friendly! Hardly a bold statement; still, many people are oddly irked and rankled by it.

  8 Which is to say, Bob Dylan was, for all intents and purposes, joined onstage by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band! Bloomfield and the rhythm section had been wrangled by organist Al Kooper the day before, and three songs were rehearsed during the night. It was, apparently, not the most comfortable mix of musicians. “It was a tough night,” Al Kooper has said. “Complicated and ugly.”

  9 Yarrow ostensibly supported Dylan’s decision to “go electric,” though he later said, “It was as if all of a sudden you saw Martin Luther King, Jr., doing a cigarette ad.”

  10 Folk festivals have the same heart beating deep within. They are egalitarian, rarely making special accommodation for the moneyed or privileged. Or the performers, for that matter. At Blue Skies, held near the town of Clarendon, Ontario, everybody camps out, which surprised some members of Porkbelly Futures. The organizers had erected our tents on the periphery of a little enclave called “The Swamp,” and that night, sweating in a sleeping bag designed for penguin observation in Antarctica, I zipped the vent open for a feeble blast of air. In the morning—many of you are ahead of me here—the tent was filled with mosquitoes. Breakfast was very tasty, as were lunch and dinner, but Marty, Chas, and I felt ourselves growing weaker. It dawned on us with a sick-making thud that they were not feeding us meat. We were eating meat substitutes. The next day, the three of us snuck out and drove the hundred kilometres down to Kingston, where we located a Keg and devoured a cow. We tried to find a hotel, but none were available in the city, it being the August long weekend. Then a motel—but none were available, it being, you know. With great resignation, we returned to the campground and climbed into our downy sacks.

  11 Which began in 1936, to quote from their website, “when five London Labour Choirs met to perform together at a time when the world was hurtling towards a struggle to contain the menace of fascism; embodied in the conflict of the Spanish Civil War; the development of the holocaust; wholesale
genocide, and the suppression of human spirit.”

  12 MacColl wrote the song in 1957—this is the kind of story we songwriters love—but it remained unknown for twelve years, at which point first-time film director Clint Eastwood used the song to underpin a love scene in his movie Play Misty for Me. Three years later, as recorded by Roberta Flack, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was awarded the Grammy for Song of the Year.

  13 MacColl wrote in the September 1965 issue of Sing Out! magazine, “our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside traditions formulated over time . . . But what of Bobby Dylan? . . . A youth of mediocre talent. Only a completely noncritical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel.”

  14 One of the things I thrilled to, I should mention, was the organ, a musical squalling as insistent as eaglets wanting to be fed. It was played by Al Kooper, although he had originally gone to that session to play guitar. There was this other guy there, Mike Bloomfield. Kooper listened to him warm up, then rather sheepishly re-cased his own instrument and turned his attention to the keyboards.

  CHAPTER 5

  HERE IS how I would spend some Saturday nights when I was a teenager.

  The first thing you need to understand is that there were many, many Saturday nights when I had nothing to do. I am not trying to claim any special sense of isolation or loneliness. That’s the state of existence for all teenagers: nothing to do. Teenagers today, despite the mind-boggling advances made by science and technology, still have nothing to do. They have more ways to occupy themselves whilst they do nothing, that’s all. All I had was television and, well, a little dink-twiddling from time to time.

  But I hated having nothing to do on Saturday nights, and I still do. Any other night of the week, and I’m perfectly content with my own company. Even Friday, when the workaday lads are pounding the city’s fun button, I have no problem staying at home and keeping my own counsel. But Saturdays, I am compelled to shore up my small puddles of energy against the ever-constant lassitude and hit the streets.

  In my youth, these Saturday evenings would begin with, of all things, a consideration of wardrobe. Now, it’s true, one of the benefits of being a bluesman from Don Mills, Ontario, is that you don’t have to think much about the clothes you wear. Indeed, if you do, you aren’t really a bluesman. I usually wore jeans and t-shirts, some kind of boot to account for my splayfooted waddle. But these Saturday nights, I would try to dress myself with style, which usually involved a madras shirt with a “matching” dickie. I’m not sure if you remember dickies, which were turtlenecks. Not turtleneck sweaters, understand, just the actual turtleneck, with enough material down the front and back so that someone might believe that, beneath your shirt, you wore the full garment—or they might believe it if they had spectacularly bad eyesight and a double-digit IQ. “Matching” is in quotes because my colour sense was a little suspect. I might also wear Beatle boots, which forced my fat toes into arrowheads with all the merciless bone-breaking of Chinese foot-binding. As for pants, I will spare you. Suffice it to say that the salient factor was tightness. Yeah.

  Thus attired, I would leave the house. I was not married back then, of course; there was no one to look at me with disdain tinged with disbelief and demand, “You’re not going outside like that, are you?” So I would leave, unchallenged, and I would walk out to Lawrence Avenue and wait for the eastbound bus.

  A westbound bus would have taken me downtown. I bet you assumed that’s where I was going, didn’t you, to the big city. Even though Toronto was still called “Toronto the Good” by many people (chiefly Montrealers), there were some lively places. There was Yonge Street, for example, which back then had developed a truly awesome seediness. It’s hard to believe that any major city, let alone Toronto, would have allowed its main commercial thoroughfare to become such a crippled stroll, the boulevard lined with strip clubs and massage parlours. And, of course, there was Yorkville, which was our version of Greenwich Village or Haight-Ashbury. I would go there, on occasion, because there were girls in Yorkville, young women with long hair and see-through blouses. The famous club the Riverboat was not licensed, which meant I could enter and see such notables as Phil Ochs,1 Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee.2 Kotzma and I spent one notable week attending the nightly performances of the Siegel-Schwall Band, an outfit from Chicago that was, in some senses, But-terfield Lite.3 Corky Siegel and Jim Schwall met while studying at Roosevelt University. Schwall, a guitar player, came from a country music background, while Siegel (who studied saxophone, but focussed on the harmonica) favoured the blues. Their sound resulted from an attempt to combine these two genres, which I suppose explains why I liked them so much. In many ways this is what we tried to do, years later, with Porkbelly Futures. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s not the point of this aside, anyway; I was concerned rather with delivering a memory. There’s Kotzma and me attending every night of a week-long stint, sitting as close as we could to the Siegel-Schwall Band, who knew us as the kids who came to see every show. As they played the blues, Corky Siegel would wail on his harp (remember your terminology, now), drawing in and flattening his thirds and sevenths with very deep-throated howls. Every so often (actually, quite often, compared to other harpists) a reed would snap inside the harmonica. Corky Siegel would reach for a fresh instrument with one hand, and with the other pass the busted harp to Kotzma.

  But I rarely ventured down to Yorkville on my own. As mentioned above, there were young women with long hair and see-through blouses there, but don’t forget I was wearing a dickie and a madras shirt. So I would board the eastbound bus, which took me into the wilds of Scarborough.

  I’ve mentioned Scarborough before. Patrick Murphy, the Manure bassist, came from there, and, as noted, it was a slightly better place for a bluesman to be from than Don Mills. My high school actually serviced both Don Mills and Scarborough, abutting as it did the divisional road, Victoria Park Avenue. It was a cruel and damnable stereotype (but like all such cruel and damnable stereotypes, not without foundation) that a lad from Don Mills would be enrolled in a five-year academic program while a Scarborough boy would register in four-year tech. There were even two-year tech guys, gormless fellows with tattoos and decks of smokes folded into the sleeves of their t-shirts. They took apart cars and put them back together again, biding time until their sixteenth birthdays. And while I could not in fairness claim that all of these guys came from Scarborough, I would bet a lot of money that none of them were from Don Mills.

  If you have an interest in the biographies of musicians, this might all have a familiar ring. The young white lad, eager to immerse himself in the blues, travels out of suburbia and ventures into the black ghettoes. That’s not what’s going on here. I like to think I would have done that. I mean, I did what I could, buying recordings of performers like Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson. I didn’t like them much, but I bought them.4 And when opportunity presented itself I would hurry out to hear performances given by Albert King and Buddy Guy. (The former performed at Toronto’s Massey Hall, the latter at the aforementioned Riverboat. Buddy Guy, using the advanced technology of cordless radio transmission, would leave the club and play out on the sidewalk of bustling Yorkville Avenue, shilling for his own show.) But the biggest obstacle to my adhering to the template mentioned above was that Toronto, in those days, lacked a sizable black community. No, in heading into the heart of Scarborough, I was seeking out the white working class. Scarborough was peopled with hard-drinking people—in my imagination, the men are uniformly gnome-like and wear grog-blossomed noses, the women are large and lack teeth—of various descent, although I would say the largest demographic was Scottish. I can’t cite statistics, but I can tell you that my destination (I descended the bus at Kennedy Avenue) was a curling rink, the Broom & Stone. On Saturday evenings, back in the late sixties, the curlers were forced to retire to the club room, and the sh
eets were given over to soul music.

  THERE WERE four stages set up on the cardinal points of the ice (I guess there was some covering over the ice; at least, I don’t remember the dancers going down all the time), and the audience would move, herdlike, to assemble in front of the active one. Each stage contained more or less the same equipment. Traynor amplifiers constituted the backline.5 Off to one side sat a couple of hulking wooden crates: one, a Hammond B-3 electric organ, the other, a Leslie cabinet.6 Five young men would take to the stage. I suppose there might have been some quartets, or sextets, but they were uncommon. Invariably, the configuration was bass, drums, guitar, organ, and lead singer. They were dressed identically. That is, the members of each quintet were dressed identically. They took pains not to be dressed the same as, or even similarly to, any of the other quintets. That is why some of the groups were dressed even worse than myself, as though they were attending some Formal Event for the Criminally Insane. Pinstripes were common, and satiny sheens. The singer was allowed a little latitude. Sometimes he wore a different suit from the others (the same cut, mind you, with the material a complementary colour, or an attempt at such), and he was allowed to strip down a bit, to remove the jacket and loosen the tie. Often this stripping down happened as the set progressed. The singer, after all, would be engaged in some pretty strenuous activity, his fists clenched in rapture, light streaks shooting off his patent-leather shoes, his eyes focussed on some Gloryland far away. As I remember it, the singers for the first three groups would introduce songs by saying things like, “I was talking to my friend George the other day. . .” or “This is a song I learned from my friend George . . .”