We all turned around at the squeal of tires to watch the motorcycle with the miniskirted girl noisily take off.
“Because when I heard you and your guitar doing ‘1913 Massacre’ the other night at the Riverboat, Miss Christine, I was moved like everybody else who was there that night was moved. And I knew right then and there that I wanted Mr. Woody Guthrie to be part of my musical family. I knew it.”
Pulling me closer, “What’s in the other bag?” Christine asked.
“This,” he said, holding up the other package, “I have because I was hoping that maybe later tonight I could convince Buckskin here to let me come by his place and sample this record album of fine music. And if he lets me—and maybe if he could convince you to come by and help me get to know your Woody boy a little bit better—maybe we could all three of us share a little ...”
Out of the paper bag a bottle of 100-proof mescal, a little white worm floating all by its lonely self on the clear-glass bottom.
Christine took the bottle from him and inspected the green chicken carrying a red spear on the label, the unfamiliar Spanish. She handed it back. “Jesus, where did you ...”
“Well, Buckskin mentioned the other night that he’d never had a chance to sample mescal’s not-insignificant charm. So I got a hold of a friend of mine who talked to a buddy of his and ...” Thomas smiled, shrugged.
“Thomas,” I said, “how is it that you’ve managed to live in Toronto for two months but have already made more friends than I have in twenty years?”
He handed Christine the Guthrie album and me the bottle of mescal. Draping an arm around each of us, “Not real friends,” he said.
Pick a city, any town or city, pick any place there while you’re at it, too (a tarpaper shrimper’s shack in Biloxi, Mississippi; a polished dormitory room in Harvard Square; a poorly heated small room at the top of the stairs of a subdivided Victorian house on a tree-lined Toronto side street); pick the people gathered there, pick the time of night, pick the circumstances that brought everyone together.
Regardless: Thomas Graham, rolling, pouring, playing.
The consummate madman host leans into one of his guests—even if always on the road, always the master of ceremonies wherever he goes—and politely inquires, “Another hit? Top off your drink? Care to hear that song again?” And whatever the answer given, invariably, Yes, Yes, Yes.
There are no spectators when Thomas runs the room. No way to know, for instance, when his slightly perspiring face will without warning loom large right there in front of yours imploring stillness and concentration because, just between you and him, this is something you really don’t want to miss.
“The tune’s called ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ Hank Williams is the artist, the year is 1951, but let’s forget about all of that for a minute and just go nice and slow and try to hear what’s there, all right? Because we’ve got all the time in the world, don’t we? And even if we didn’t, this is where we’re supposed to be anyway because this is where we are right now. Okay, let’s give it a shot, here we go, cheers. Now, what you’ve got to do first is dig the steel guitar that starts things off. It’s right out of the chute, just a little acoustic strumming and then BOOM! there it is, so get ready for it. You all set? You ready? Okay. All right.”
Needle penetrates record and, as promised, three or four seconds of muted minor chording before a screeching steel-guitar run that sounds like the brake-slamming final tragic seconds before a train wreck set to music.
And because there is no chorus or even an instrumental break to the song, only one long chugging uninterrupted confession of how, happy or sad, heaven or hell bound, when the Good Lord made Hank, He made a ramblin’ man, Thomas comes close to whisper in one ear while Hank continues to sing in the other. Moves right in so tight and has his mouth so close to your ear that his breath on your earlobe sends goose bumps up and down both arms. He speaks slowly. He speaks clearly.
“‘Luke the Drifter’ is what it said on the single when this song was first released. The name was a pseudonym Hank used for some of his so-called ‘devotional’ songs. But every song Hank Williams ever recorded was a devotional song. He was twenty-nine years old going on a hundred but he never made it to thirty. But Hank Williams did not die in vain, friend. He died for me. He died for you. He died for all of us. This much we know. This much is not in doubt.”
His mouth so close now, the whisky on his breath dampens your ear, tingles your nose.
“The only question is,” he says, “is anybody listening?”
With another screeching steel-guitar line “Ramblin’ Man” crashes to an end the same savage way it began. You wonder where this universe of quiet came from. You wonder where it’s been hiding all this time.
7.
THAT I DIDN’T KNOW how to play the drums apparently wasn’t going to be a problem.
“I’ve seen you keep time to a jukebox with your butt planted on a barstool all night about a million times,” Thomas said. “We’ll just sit you down behind a drum kit and you’ll barely even know the difference.”
The main thing was that I was the only person he’d met since moving to Toronto who really understood “where my head is at, vision-wise, what I’m shooting for on the white soul concept level.” Canada, Thomas explained, was the absolutely perfect non-prejudicial place for the launch of his sensibility-shaking movement of musical pioneering because of its basically blank cultural slate. Being a good Canadian, I chose to take this as the compliment it was intended as. Also, he said, he knew he could trust me.
“When the bullets start flying I know you’ll cover my back, Buckskin.” We were at our usual sobering-up back-corner table downstairs at the Riverboat. “When things begin to get heavy I don’t want to have to worry about the guy standing next to me in the trenches.”
And now that he’d deemed it time to put together a band and start spreading the gospel of the rich musical medley that was Interstellar North American Music, Thomas had decided that not only would I make a fine drummer but that Christine, with her beautiful singing voice, would fit in very nicely on high-harmony vocals. She’d have to play bass, though, he insisted. Besides the pedal steel, Thomas had always heard only one guitar in his head when he envisioned the kind of sound he wanted, and that guitar was his.
“Christine doesn’t play bass,” I said.
“I only hear one guitar, Bill,” he said firmly, holding up a single finger. I tried to explain to him how he’d sort of missed my point.
Since the night at my place spent listening to Thomas’s Woody Guthrie album over the shared bottle of mescal, Christine, it was true, was well on her way to gaining a deeper appreciation of all things twangy. And even if more inclined toward, say, the guitar, mandolin, and high-harmony approach of the Louvin Brothers rather than the straight-ahead fiddle and Telecaster assault of Buck Owens, it wasn’t too long before Charlie and Ira’s “Cash on the Barrelhead” began popping up in her shows right there between Woody’s familiar “Union Made” and “This Land Is Your Land.” But, I tried to point out to Thomas, Christine’s coming around to the idea that folk music and hillbilly duets were actually country cousins didn’t mean she was about to lay down her acoustic Martin and her own solo career just so she could pick up an electric bass and join his band.
“Our band, Buckskin,” he said.
“Yeah, okay, our band,” I said, putting on the patient smile one saves up for young children, the mentally ill, and the very religious. “But you don’t get it. Christine’s not going to—”
“Christine sure cares one heck of a lot for you, doesn’t she, Buckskin?”
I paused. “What do you mean?” I said.
“C’mon, now,” he said. “That woman of yours, she loves her Buckskin Bill.”
I was a little confused, and it wasn’t just the ten or twenty glasses of beer. “Yeah, okay. So?”
“Nothing, that’s all. She sure loves him, though. Do anything for him, I expect.”
I set down my c
offee. “I’m not going to ask Christine to do something she doesn’t want to do, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Buckskin. All a man can do is lead a horse to water.”
Before I could object that my girlfriend wasn’t a horse to be led anywhere by anyone, a waitress flipped on every light in the room. Thomas already had his sunglasses on. I clenched my eyes tight against the light and frisked my shirt and coat pockets. Since I’d started hanging out with Thomas, a good pair of dark shades had become an indispensable accessory. I finally found mine and jammed them over my ears.
The waitress stopped several feet short before getting to our table, probably something to do with wanting to have as little as possible to do with two clearly intoxicated men in matching red silk cowboy shirts wearing sunglasses inside in the middle of November.
“Five minutes,” she said.
I nodded politely and thought about how although it had only been a few months since Thomas had shown up in town, it seemed like a whole other lifetime ago that I was just an inconspicuous hippie boyfriend of a local folk singer who could usually get a coffee after closing time and nurse it in peace until the floors got swept and the tables wiped down. But maybe, I told myself, it wasn’t just Thomas Graham guilt by association.
Ever since some of my more politically active long-haired brethren, Christine among them, had started slapping posters around the village and making noise in the newspapers about getting Yorkville shut down to all the exhaust-choking cars full of button-downed oglers hoping to get a good look at an honest-to-goodness hippie, the cop presence had picked up noticeably. Not quite “Move along, move along, young man,” but enough that they would’ve loved to have busted a popular hipster hangout like the Riverboat for having a single cup of coffee on a table a few minutes after hours.
I turned back to Thomas. The smile of before had been replaced by the deep pout I’d come to recognize whenever he didn’t get what he wanted.
“What?” I said.
“You never asked me the name of our band.”
I knew I’d have to give in eventually. “Okay. What’s the name of our band?”
He waited a second or two for dramatic effect. Then, taking off his glasses, leaning across the table, “The Duckhead Secret Society,” he said.
I smiled like I knew he’d want me to and clinked his raised cup with mine.
More than the goofy name, though, I wondered at the unblemished whites of his eyes, unaffected as always by whatever amount of booze or pot we took in or whatever hour it happened to be. I didn’t dare take off my glasses. Thomas could keep looking at me all night if he wanted to, but he’d still only see nothing but himself looking right back at him.
8.
FOR THE TIME BEING it was easier not to tell Thomas no. He might have wanted to argue, he probably would have sulked, and, more than likely, I thought, the idea of an absolute rookie rhythm-maker like me keeping the beat for whatever the hell the Duckhead Secret Society turned out to be probably wouldn’t last much past tomorrow morning’s hangover. And besides, we were well into phase two of my Interstellar North American Musical Apprenticeship by now and I didn’t want to run the risk of doing anything that might disturb my studies. That more than anything else kept me silent on the subject of Christine and me joining Thomas’s band. Trust me, once Little Richard is introduced directly into your bloodstream, you’d be amazed at all the things you’ll do to make sure the medicine keeps coming.
And not just the ivory-pounding Georgia Peach, either. A Chuck Berry disc, in fact, was the first classic rock and roll record Thomas stuck in my hand, the first roots music changeup he threw my way. Because once I was lost but now I am found, and so where are all the shimmering harmonies, the softly moaning pedal steel, the weeping fiddle? So much electricity and so little bittersweet subtlety surely must add up to an impure teenybopper art form that all of us musically enlightened ones should turn our properly self-righteous noses up at, right? Wrong.
“I think your colour wheel needs a little filling in, Buckskin,” Thomas said, hand-delivering to my door his own lovingly beat-up copy of 1959’s Chuck Berry Is on Top LP.
“You’re saying you think I should listen to more black music?” I said.
“Skin colour’s got nothing to do with it. The Good Lord gave you ten toes to tap and two feet to dance with and it goes against His will not to use them.”
“Isn’t this kid’s music?” I said, scanning the track listing.
Thomas raised an eyebrow; looked me over as if an offensive odour had begun to emanate from my body. He shut his eyes before he spoke.
“Because the head bone is connected to the hip bone, and the hip bone is connected to the feet bones, the high lonesome sound of a freight train blowing its sad midnight way through the middle of town on a frosty November night is, in fact, the exact same train that earlier that sunny afternoon clippety-clop chugged in perfect 4/4 rock and roll rhythm right past some dreary fool standing by himself by the side of that same set of tracks.”
“Uhm ...”
Opening his eyes, “Just listen to the record,” he said, heading down the stairs.
9.
AND WHAT DO you know. Chuck Berry could play a guitar like he was ringing a bell.
Boom pop, boom boom pop, boom pop, boom boom pop, the drumsticks Thomas had given me a few days before and two pillows on my bed coming together to keep surprisingly good time to any number of raging rock and roll tunes, wopbobpaloobopa-wopbamboom black boy Little Richard neck and neck with piano-pummelling white boy Jerry Lee Lewis for the title of my all-time drumming favourite so far.
Boom pop, boom boom pop, boom pop, boom boom pop.
10.
“YOU?” Kelorn said.
“Yeah, me,” I said. “What’s so hard to believe about that?”
The blowout between us of a few weeks before was by now long forgotten, me admitting that my yelling at Making Waves customers was not a sound business practice, Kelorn agreeing to let me have my full rootsy turn on the store turntable. Little Richard, therefore, in all his shrieking glory, implored Lucille to please come back where she belonged while Kelorn indexed a fat stack of new Making Waves volumes and I climbed up and down the room’s rolling wooden ladder, shelving this newest arrival under POETRY and that one under POLITICAL SELF-DEFENCE.
Under the latter heading were several copies of the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, the only book you could always count on taking home with you from Making Waves, a how-to-avoid-the-U. S.-draft guide published by a small Canadian press that Kelorn always made sure to have in stock and that was always gratis to whoever was legit in their need. Every week more and more nervous-looking guys my age and even younger with a variety of American accents were dropping by the shop. The word was starting to get out that having a moral conscience wasn’t considered a crime in Canada and that the Making Waves Bookstore at 189 Harbord was a good place to find out how to keep your hands ethically clean and Vietnamese shrapnel out of your ass.
“Sometimes it seems like everybody I meet is a musician, so why not me?” I said. “Besides, it’s fun, you know? Bashing away for a couple hours is a good way to blow off steam. Almost as good as sex.”
“Now, don’t start getting weird on me, Bill,” Kelorn said.
I looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was close to six, nearly quitting time. Christine was coming by to pick me up to grab something to eat, but I was going to have to talk my way out of the movie we’d planned for after. Although I’d known for a couple of days now that tonight was going to be the night Thomas unveiled the rehearsal space he’d rented, a room on the third floor of a four-storey Victorian full of a bunch of other bands and located right smack dab between the Mynah Bird and the Penny Farthing, I’d neglected to tell Christine not only about Thomas’s bass-playing plans for her but also my own recent pillow-whacking drumming workouts. Mine was and still is, I guess, a mind not of the particularly confron
tational kind, especially if things are rolling along just fine. But I’d tell her. Sooner or later.
But sooner or later always eventually becomes right now, and right now right now meant Christine coming through the door of the shop and kissing me on the lips and Kelorn on the cheek and asking if she could put a poster up in the front window.
“Certainly, dear. Where are you playing?” Kelorn said.
“It’s not for me,” Christine said, scotch-taping the hand-drawn flyer to the inside of the window. “It’s the Diggers. They’re organizing a ‘Shut Down Yorkville’ campaign because of all the traffic and pollution and stuff. Do you know what that fascist Lamport said about Yorkville in the paper yesterday? ‘Frankly, I’d like to see it become a shopping centre.’ That’s an actual quote, I’m not kidding you. A shopping centre. Over my dead body, you fat, bourgeois pig, over my dead body.”
A quick explanation and a guilty confession.
The Yorkville Diggers were the Toronto arm of Haight-Ashbury’s Diggers, hippie do-gooders who worked hard to get free clothes, food, and medical attention to the swelling number of Yorkville’s penniless. Now the Diggers wanted city controller Allan Lamport and Mayor William Dennison to make the village clean and safe again by designating it an automobile-free zone. While they were at it, they also wanted the powers-that-were to get rid of all the cops who’d started hanging around and to basically give Yorkville back to us, the kids, the ones who’d turned the developers and the politicians in their back pockets onto the idea of it being such a swell place to begin with. Those are the facts.
The truth of the matter was that as much as the idea of a pack of drooling businessmen stumbling all over each other in the fight to see who would be the first to bulldoze down the village to make way for upscale shopping boutiques and exclusive dog-grooming salons bothered me just as much as it did Christine, the light of pure indignation that burned in her dark brown eyes whenever she raged on about some injustice or another was matched only by the hot flush of moral fervour that came to her cheeks, her accusing, clenched jaw and fight-ready fists illustrating wonderfully well that she damn well believed every word she said. So, okay: Christine thrilled me with the way she could hate. And sometimes I even wondered whether, if somehow I were given the choice, I wouldn’t retain just a few slimy businessmen on the side if eliminating all the evil in the world would mean never seeing her so angry and so beautiful ever again.
Moody Food Page 5
