Cigar Box Banjo

by Paul Quarrington

  Another fellow I remember well—despite the fact that I just had to phone Marty to be reminded of the guy’s name, Bruce Miller—had a song called “Anna Marie.” Miller was a romantic figure, I thought, dark and handsome and something of a loner. He always came late, sneaking in the door and then standing in the shadows. He wore a leather jacket, and his guitar case was battered and held together by “Fragile” stickers, as though it had spent most of its life in the travel compartment of an old freight train. Miller rarely had to stand around long before taking the stage. It was as though everyone was eager for him to play his song. The crowd would fall silent, the owners would set aside the money they were counting, the wait staff would stop ferrying foodstuffs and stand quiet. “Oh, Anna Marie, don’t you love me anymore . . .?”

  Marty and I didn’t really have “our” song. We’d written some pretty good ones, and our friends would advocate for one or the other. Jill liked “Winter Weather Bound,” our buddy Fedderson was fond of “Mary Cargill,” Marie-Christine liked “Welcome.” They weren’t united in their enthusiasm. We had yet to write “the song.” But that was okay; years stretched out in front of us.

  MANY TIMES since D-Day, people have asked if I believe in miracles. They are asking, really, if I believe the stories wherein tumours simply vanish, or a change in diet or tea made from tea-bark causes a total remission. I hear an awful lot of those stories, let me tell you. Everyone seems to know one, and they are eager that I hear them. I listen and nod, and when they ask, “Do you believe in miracles?” I assure them that I do. I am being disingenuous, to a degree. In my own thinking on such matters, I am more likely to choose the word “anomalous” than the word “miraculous.” Human beings have tools, medical and spiritual and even magical, to deal with illness. So anomalies certainly occur. I have every intention of being an anomaly. Indeed, I began the process as one, burly and beefy and seeming as unlike a cancer patient as one could be.

  But the miracles I truly believe in are of a different order. They are closer in spirit to what used to happen whenever Donny Sinclair sang at the Brunswick House. On the days Marty and I wrote songs together, we ended quite a few of our evenings at the Brunswick House. Okay, every evening. We were such regulars that Belle, one of several matronly waitresses, extended us credit. She didn’t let us run the tab around the block or anything, but if we were penniless, and often we were, we knew that we could still drink massive amounts of draft beer. Many of our friends drank at the Brunswick as well, so while an evening might start out with just Martin and me instructing Belle to cover our tabletop with eight-ounce draft glasses, it could easily end up with fifteen or twenty of us clustered together, university students, writers and poets, actors and clowns. We would all applaud madly for the entertainment.

  Back then, the entertainment policy at the Brunswick House was to have a standing open mic, but that was something of a technicality. There were relatively few occasions when a stranger demanded stage time and was granted it. The evenings were hosted by a woman named Irene, and she would introduce the acts, even though there was no real reason to. We all knew what was going to happen. Around about nine o’clock a very slender middle-aged man would take the stage. He wore a blazer and a tie, and he had taken care to make certain that his shoes were well polished. The person behind the organ (I’m trying to remember who it was; perhaps my memory is challenged because I couldn’t see him or her behind the great hulking instrument) would draw out some chords, and the well-dressed (but somehow sad-seeming) middle-aged man would begin shooting out his left hand, his fingers snapping to the beat. He would hold the microphone to his mouth as though it were a delicate scientific instrument measuring the lightness of his breath. “Chicago, Chicago, that’s my kind of town . . .” Next, Diamond Lil, one of the waitresses, would set down her silver tray and unclasp the moneybelt that girded her. She would plump and fluff her hair before taking to the stage. Arriving there, Lil would grab the microphone and, without introduction or fanfare, sing the oddest version of “Bill Bailey” that I have ever heard. I don’t know if I can describe it—although I can render it faithfully, as can Martin and any of the other Brunswick regulars—other than to tell you that Lil placed stress at very unexpected places. I guess what she was doing, musically speaking, was counting a couple of beats between her phrases. Try singing “Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey?” and then silently count “one, two” before repeating, “Won’t you come home?” It sounds unnatural, as you’ll see. Still, we would all sing along, and some nights there might be a couple of hundred people in the place. Everybody knew where the quirks would occur, and we knew that at the end of the chorus, we would be forced, like Lil, to eliminate the word “Bill” in order to get all the lyrics in, so that the song ended with a somewhat pugnacious, “Bailey, won’t you please come home?”

  That makes a fairly important statement about the song, doesn’t it? A really great song has to possess a certain malleability. Even stretched way out of shape, it has to be recognizable. Even badly distorted, the song must deliver its rumptious joy to the people singing along.

  The Rowdyman would take to the stage next. He was by far our favourite; we had christened him the Rowdyman on account of his curly hair and the thick-knit fisherman’s sweaters he favoured. (The Rowdyman, which I often call the best Canadian film ever made, was written by Gordon Pinsent, who also starred. His character was curly-haired and favoured thick-knit sweaters.) The Rowdyman was young—at least, youngish for a Brunswick House entertainer. His evident affection for liquor and cigarettes had sped up the aging process considerably, however. He radiated shiftlessness. He clearly had no steady employment, and in conversation he was usually vague about his recent activities. Sometimes he had a fair bit of money; sometimes he picked coins out of his palm parsimoniously and ordered only a single glass of draft beer. One thing he did have, the Rowdyman, was talent. He would sing “She Taught Me To Yodel,” and she really had. When he came to the chorus, the Rowdyman would let fly a wonderfully melodic series of leaps into the falsetto, which never failed to make the patrons cheer with great enthusiasm. Well, all right, it’s truer to say that the yodelling never failed to make patrons glance up from their drinks with a dull startle in their eyes. Perhaps it was just Martin and me who cheered with great enthusiasm.

  Then Irene would announce Donny Sinclair, who would abandon his station to join her onstage. In the corridor leading to the big beverage room was a shoeshine stand, a boxlike creation with a couple of wooden chairs perched on top, foot rests mounted on small pedestals. One of Donny’s occupations was shoeshine man, and the other was bouncer. I never saw Donny actually bounce anybody—and the Brunswick House was certainly capable of turning as riotous as a prison during a heat wave—because his tactics included persuasion and an appeal to common sense. Even very drunken, boisterous people were reluctant to tangle with Donny. Not that he was large, far from it; Sinclair was a little person. As a younger man, he had been a “midget wrestler,” fighting under the moniker “Little Beaver.” (This is what we believed, at any rate, and I’m reluctant to research it. This whole section about the Brunswick House must be taken with a grain of salt, I guess. After all, inside the place, truth and lies took to the tiny dance floor wrapped up in each other’s arms.) Donny had a powerful voice, and he had a couple of crowd pleasers, “Danny Boy” and “I Believe.”

  Some songs possess the ability, almost unerringly, to make people weep. Certainly “Danny Boy” is such a song, and it has caused many, many alcoholic beverages to become diluted with salty tears. If a song’s purpose is to thrum people’s fundaments, “Danny Boy” succeeds. Some of this is Pavlovian, I suppose, in that people tend to start weeping as soon as they recognize the song, which happens with the first three words of the lyrics (or several moments afterward, in establishments like the Brunswick House). Also, there’s something exhilarating in hearing someone accomplish, or even vaguely attempt, the vocal vault (“For I’ll be THERE. . .”) that moistens the eyes.
But at the heart of that song, of course, is the unadorned voicing of emotion. “Oh, Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so.” My own opinion is that people are dying to give voice to that particular emotion, and they don’t mind addressing it to this guy “Dan,” who lives over in Scotland or something and isn’t even there in any tangible fashion. “Danny Boy” doesn’t provoke weeping so much as allow it.

  “I Believe” was less overtly a tear-jerker, but that wasn’t Donny Sinclair’s fault. It is one of those songs that seems to have been written by committee: Ervin Drake, Irvin Graham, Jimmy Shirl, and Al Stillman. I’ve reconstructed its creation as follows. Irvin Graham was a lyricist and a television writer (he worked on Your Show of Shows), and one day his then-employer, singer Jane Froman, suggested that what the general population needed was some cheering up. (This is in the early fifties, and Ms. Froman was concerned about the U.S. involvement in Korea, so soon after World War II.) I’m supposing the others were friends of Graham’s. I don’t know anything about Jimmy Shirl, but Ervin Drake had been established since he was a kid (he wrote “Those Were the Days”), and Al Stillman was a newspaperman and a staff writer at Radio City Music Hall. Jane Froman first recorded “I Believe,” although Frankie Laine had the biggest hit with it. Other covers included renditions by the Righteous Brothers, the Young Rascals, Mahalia Jackson, and Elvis Presley.

  I think Donny Sinclair was most influenced by the King. Not that he did any pelvic thrusting, but he sang with his voice deep in his throat, with a kind of humble sincerity, which is how Elvis addressed each of the many gospel songs he recorded. Toward the end of “I Believe,” Donny would motion somewhat irritably in the direction of the organist, as if silencing a full string and woodwind section. In the resulting hush, he would press the microphone to his lips and pronounce: “You know, ladies and gentleman, every so often I make the mistake of feeling sorry for myself. I think that everyone else is out having a good time, and I’m not. But you know what? They’re not all having a good time. There’s a lot of lonely people out there! That’s why Every time I hear a newborn baby cry . . .”

  At the end of the song, I would weep and applaud very loudly.

  Over time, my applause convinced Donny Sinclair— “The Little Man with the Big Voice”—that I, and by association Martin, held profound religious beliefs. He had heard us singing harmony, sitting at our table and bellowing with inebriated dedication, and one night he invited us up onstage to sing the glorious spiritual “Amazing Grace.” There was only one microphone, which Donny wielded, so Marty and I crouched beside him as he waved the thing in the air, trying to effect a compromise among the various mouth levels.

  I don’t actually hold profound religious beliefs, as you may have deduced. I wasn’t applauding “I Believe” because of its religious overtones. After all, it’s not especially Christian to cheer oneself up, as Donny urged in his little speech, by thinking about all the unfortunates who are worse off. (It’s very human, of course; I do it all the time.) I applauded the song precisely because it was non-religious, at least non-biblical, non-churchgoing. This fact likely has its roots in the committee who wrote it. Not only were some members Jewish, but a committee will naturally have a problem giving precise voice to spiritual matters, because everyone has a slightly different idea of what might go on in what the song refers to as “the great somewhere.”

  What I liked about the song was that it makes miraculous the mundane. It may have been mathematical precision that Donny and the committee were stressing, each drop of rain accounting for a single bud. Martin and I tried out that idea in the chorus to a song we wrote called “A Mansion of the Wind”:

  God ain’t dead, he’s not to blame.

  But He has to spend all his time making snowflakes not the same.

  But really, I’ve never needed to imagine His Great Hand behind the scenes to appreciate that the growth of a flower is a remarkable thing. And if there is a God overseeing all these snowflakes and flowers, He must be way too busy to worry about us.

  1 I don’t think I would be so glib today. After all, if we disregard the huge and nebulous thing called “love”—hey, there’s a song title!—there are probably more songs written about Christmas than about anything else. An enduring Christmas song is the Holy Grail for songwriters. For example, aside from all his other talents and accomplishments, Mel Tormé’s most lucrative artistic achievement was no doubt co-writing “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire).” It is akin to winning the lottery, writing a popular Yuletide ditty, and subject to the same whimsical winds of fate. Take the music teacher, Don Gardner, who noticed that his charges, seven- and eight-year-old children, could not say certain words without issuing little whistling sounds. He went home and wrote “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.”

  2 I had a paper route for many years as a boy, which required a weekly collection of monies. One of my customers was Lloyd Percival, the great hockey genius. Great hockey genius, perhaps, but too often not at home. Even when he was home, Per-cival usually claimed to have no cash, that such matters were the purview of his wife, although there was never any evidence of such a creature. Anyway, one afternoon I found the universe in perfect harmony. Lloyd was at home, his wallet was stuffed, he agreed to pay up. Thus I believe was my guitar acquired.

  3 He was called “Izzy” from birth, and by the time he got around to wondering what his real name was, his parents had forgotten. He thenceforth assumed it was Isadore—it was, in fact, Israel—but he settled the issue by going with Ira.

  4 I will ignore—it’s outside the scope of my little book—the miracle of George’s excursions into the realm of “serious” music with his creation of such marvels as Rhapsody in Blue, still a staple in the concert hall.

  5 Here’s something not many people know: on the original recording of “On Broadway,” performed by the Drifters in 1963, the guitar that can be heard squalling away in echo-land is played by Phil Spector. I’ve another little suchlike tidbit. Leiber & Stoller were also responsible for Peggy Lee’s hit “Is That All There Is?” The tune’s orchestration was unlike anything heard on radio at the time. It is large, capricious, emotive, as though written to accompany a movie filmed in Technicolor. The parts were scored and conducted by a very young Randy Newman.

  6 Including “Who Put the Bomp.” Apparently Mann can be a little bristly, feeling that he has never gotten the credit he’s due, and from time to time bemoans the fact that he never had a big hit under his own name. Except he did: “Who Put the Bomp?”

  7 I currently live on Toronto’s island archipelago; at least, I spend much of the summer there, living on a houseboat.

  CHAPTER 7

  MARTY AND I decided we’d make a demo tape.

  That’s how things worked in the olden days. One would go into a small studio and record three or four songs as a demonstration (demo=demonstration) to the big record companies of how brilliant those songs were, how they would (with the proper production and arrangement) become big, boffo number-one hits! Nowadays, the practice is little seen, being as digital technology has driven the little recording studios out of business and is currently taking aim at the big ones. Simply put, anyone now has the capability to make a professional-sounding recording. Indeed, fairly advanced software is on many people’s computers without their even knowing it. This machine I’m currently pounding on, for example, comes out of the shop with Garage Band, a reasonably sophisticated program, already installed. But back then we were dealing with magnetic tape, and sounds had to be scratched upon that tape in some fashion only a few wizards understood. Quar-rington/ Worthy got a couple of friends to back us up (the bass was played by our old friend Stephen Tulk), and we went into a recording studio.

  Mike Burke located the studio. You recall Mickle Burkle from pages previous, I trust, the bearded, sweat-shirted computer nerd who these days owns a record company and lives in a house so large and fabulous I don’t think he’d notice if I moved in. (That, in a nutshell, us
ed to be my retirement plan. But I don’t need a retirement plan no more.) Burkie didn’t have a lot of money back then, when we were all in our twenties, but he had a real job, a good one, and accordingly had a lot more money than the rest of us. He was searching for some attachment to the arts, and seeing as Martin and I were both old friends of his (he and Marty have known each other since the age of six), he decided to become our angel. We didn’t use that terminology, of course. We may even have referred to Burkle as our “manager,” although we needed little management— it’s not hard to book free gigs, and Marty and I drank so much beer that we were eagerly welcomed by club owners at open mics—and would not brook the little management that was attempted. Mickle was our patron, really, owing to his having, as I say, more money than we had.

  Oh, he also had a car, which is significant, as the studio he located was in Ancaster, Ontario, just the other side (from Toronto) of Hamilton. It was very affordable, this studio, because it was new and small. Two brothers had built it in the basement of their mother’s home. We drove out there one day and were greeted by the elder brother, who shook our hands solemnly as he introduced himself. “Hello, I’m Bob Lanois,” he said, dipping his head in a gracious manner. “Welcome to our studio.” He turned and spread his hands expansively, indicating the grandeur of the enterprise.