Part 1 - Excerpt from the end of book, 'Can't
Win, Can't Lose, Can't Quit', by C. Livingstone.
MTYD -- Part 1
My other reason for stepping
out of Fluorspar minerals was the fact that my hair was starting to grow
longer and longer. A sign of the times in the wake of the Beatles. In
the latter mid-fifties Elvis Presley flipped out everyone’s parents with
side burns. In the early mid sixties the Beatles flipped out everyone’s
parents with moppish long hair. By the late mid-sixties if your hair
wasn’t well below your ears you flipped out all your buddies.
My
enthusiastic growing of my hair actually had its start a half year
earlier at a big rock and roll concert in Vancouver. The concert
featured six totally unheard of rock bands from San Francisco.
As a
teenager I used to go to most of the local ‘rock and roll’ and ‘rhythm
and blues’ concerts like Jerry Lee Lewis and Bill Haley and the Comets.
But by the late fifties, because Greydie had become an aspiring jazz
drummer and was jamming every weekend at a local jazz club, some friends
and myself would spend our whole weekend holed up in the club ‘til the
crack of dawn every evening catching the action. Then it was the Black
Spot. I therefore lost all contact with rock and roll for a while. From
about 1958 on I don’t think I went to even one concert.
When the
folk singing craze hit in the early sixties, I started hitting the folk
clubs. I was in the cycle but still never went to the concerts. To give
you an idea of how far out of the loop I was, Beatle mania had hit North
America with a wallop. Since I never listened to rock stations I assumed
they were just another frapsey folk group.
I played
rugby at UBC and we played a game at Berkeley California in the winter
of sixty-four. After the game, the Berkeley team invited us all to a big
Beatle party at one of the fraternity houses. So I found out the party
way that the Beatles weren’t just another barbershop quartet with a
banjo.
To give you
an even better idea of how far out of the loop my years of snotty jazz
conditioning had left me, I clearly remember a young lady friend
inviting me over to her place one day to listen to some Bob Dylan
records. I’d been hearing a lot about this guy. But frankly, after years
of an exclusive diet of musically perfected jazz, his earlier stuff
sounded just a little bit like cats being strangled.
Worse.
After a while, because so much of your attention in jazz is always
concentrated on the instruments, you tend to mask out even the presence
of a vocalist let alone tune in to the words. When I had last bothered
to listen to the words of music of the late fifties, the words were,
well, what can I say? I mean just go back and listen to some of those
oldie goldie doo wop doo ditties from the late fifties. Not your average
intellectual cup of gold.
After my
friend had played a couple of her Dylan’s songs, she looked at me
expecting some kind of favourable reaction. I started to complain about
how raw in the rough the music was. She looked at me like I was somewhat
Neanderthal and said, “But listen to what he’s saying”.
It was like
a blind man suddenly seeing the light, and I vowed then and there never
to work on Maggie’s farm no more. I have to tell you, it wasn’t anything
to do with his strumming that made the man so famous, and his fame was
every bit well deserved.
At any rate
I was now starting to move in new directions until hitherto uncharted.
So in the summer of 1965, when a widely promoted rock show billed as
‘Captain Consciousness Presents’ hit town, I decided to go. Captain
Consciousness turned out to be a euphemism for a whole pile of matters
which were all quite a bit lighter than air. It was for a new type of
substance and style imported directly from San Francisco.
Foremost in
the substance were big buckets of a cool aid type drink, euphemistically
called ‘Electric Cool Aid’. I guess electric. The stuff was at least
twenty miles due north of any standard normal pH factor for acid. In
fact, that’s where Tom Wolf’s famous novel, ‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test’, got the kool-aid part.
The concert
itself featured six totally unknown bands from San Francisco. Bands
like’ The Grateful Dead’, ‘Big Brother and the Holding Company’, and
‘The Jefferson Airplane’ all thumped around in a trance on stage while
the audience all thumped around on the dance floor in an even greater
trance of their own. This was about a year before the San Francisco
bands broke into the main stream of popular rock music and the bands
suddenly became less well unknown all of a sudden.
Talk about
the march of progress. In the old days, hucksters sold snake oil from
covered wagons and provided a medicine show to enthuse the crowd into
buying the product. Now it was a non-oxide elixir, and half the rock
bands in the genre brought along enough of the stuff to guarantee a
maximum turn out at the rocket launch.
Actually I
didn’t know at the time that the concert was in fact a bonafide rocket
launch. In fact I didn’t know anything about such things even existing.
Some of us were a little slow in arriving. All I know is that I was
staring out of my eyes and seeing no problem, and everyone else was
staring out of their eyes and who knows what the heck they were seeing.
For those
of you who are still arriving, ‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ meant that
the drinks were about fifty fifty or so LSD. Even though I didn’t have a
clue to what was going on, luck or intuition had prevailed and I didn’t
buy a kool-aid.
I was
therefore probably the only one or two out of the four or five thousand
people in attendance, including the musicians and road managers, who
wasn’t flying high in the sky with diamonds up there with somebody named
Lucy.
Some of the
conglomerate EMF must have rubbed off though. Because not too many weeks
after the concert I suddenly started twigging onto what had been going
on around me unbeknownst in the Vancouver scene for some considerable
time already.
For
example, pot had been going on in the jazz and folk clubs for a couple
of years. I had just been so far out of the loop that I didn’t even know
what the stuff was, let alone that everybody but me was floating around
the ceiling most of the time.
In looking
back, the reason I’m sure the good ole smoking stuff had hit town long
before I woke up to it, was that whispery little conversations would go
on with whispery little groups all over the place at house parties and
congregational places. Then the groups would go outside and come back a
few minutes later with big giggly grins on their faces and knowing
little nods to everyone around the place except me.
In my first
year of university, 1960 to ‘61, one of my classmates was the son of a
rich Vancouver family who had sent him to Berkeley. He had started to
experiment with pills which I learned from him was the big rage among
the campus cognascenti in the early sixties. He had a car accident while
bombed so his parents had brought him back up to Vancouver and its
supposedly not so cognascenti climate.
Graham told
me about Perludins and other mood altering drugs which were the pop of
the charts down there. Also I was the first person in the world Graham
told about his engagement to his girlfriend. Actually I was the second.
Greydie
reported to me one evening that a guy had come screaming up to him
across a parking lot on campus shouting, “She said yes. She said yes”.
Greydie had never seen the guy before in his life and had no idea who
the, ‘she’ was. Nor of course what she might have said yes about.
Greydie told Graham I was probably in the student cafe where he had just
left me about ten minutes earlier. So I was the second to know shortly
after.
Graham was
a very pleasant rather dashing chap, as I mentioned from a very wealthy
Vancouver family. So she did all right. She was a very pleasant, very
attractive girl from the interior of BC, studying music to become an
opera singer. So he did all right. Last I heard anything about them was
in the papers in the mid-nineties. They were still going strong
together, she still singing up a storm and he still managing her career
as ‘Dame Judith Forrest’ the internationally renowned Canadian opera
star.
By the fall
of 1964, the mind altering stuff had made its way up to Vancouver. A
house party of Vancouver’s supposedly non-existent cognascentis were
waxing wild one night where I had been invited. Someone was passing
around Perludins and a couple of other poppers I can’t even remember the
name of.
It was kind
of like an apothecary shop. If you took one of these with one of those,
you would get this kind of buzz. If you took that pill with these, you
would get another. One pill makes you larger and the other one makes you
small. I declined all recipes, thanks but no thanks. I was always a
little paranoid that I would alter my brain and then it wouldn’t unalter.
The reason
for the party though was that a local avante garde filmmaker was filming
part of Vancouver’s first ever bonafide feature length movie, part of
the reason why the party had been so loaded with Vancouver’s ‘real
people’ in the first place.
The movie
turned out to be a pot boiler of the first order called ‘Bitter Ash’.
The only action in the whole film part was when a scene changed. The
silver lining of course, is that Vancouver is now one of the world’s top
centers for churning them out.
I got into
a five minute yak with the lead actor about something. The camera
whirled constantly. When the movie rushes came out, about a half a
minute of our conversation was in the movie. Only the conversation. The
camera had focused on the head of the lead for the whole bloody shot.
Great.
Everybody else gets fifteen minutes in the limelight. All I get is a
half a minute as a disembodied voice. Actually it was even more short
lived than that. When the final cut came out for distribution, even the
disembodied voice was gone. Sob, my whole movie carreer, started and
stopped in the same twenty five seconds.
Greydie’s
short lived acting career was a lot more illustrious. He was co-lead
with academy award nominee Chief Dan George in a mid-sixties CBC hour
long drama called ‘How to Break a Quarter Horse’. Likewise he was on
center stage in the auction scene of Rita Tushingham and Oliver Reid’s
movie, ‘The Trap’, which had been filmed in Vancouver.
Greydie was
also the publicity director of the Vancouver Playhouse Theater for
nearly a year and a half during the time. Ray Orbach of the popular TV
series ‘Law and Order’ fame was a six-foot three, hundred and sixty
pound string bean from New York who was starring in one of his first
major roles in one of the Playhouse’s productions.
The
Playhouse Theater borrowed Greydie’s tiny little 80cc Suzuki motorcycle
for some publicity photos of bean pole Ray riding around. Picture Icabod
Crane on a tiny motorcycle waving high fives to the crowd as he tooled
slowly around. Ok, you had to be there to see it. At any rate, talk
about the difference between form and function.
In late
1964, one of Vancouver’s supposedly non-existent cognascentis started
putting on light shows in a small converted warehouse. Everybody sat
transfixed, ooing and awing. I just sat there bored. I know now it was
because I was probably the only one coming to the shows who wasn’t
already transfixed into ooing and awing well before they got there. It’s
a bloody good thing PC computer screen savers weren’t existent back
then. Nobody would ever have gotten any work done.
I remember
going over to a friend’s house one day in 1965 and asking him what the
funny smell was. His jaw dropped, then he giggled. But he never told me
what was going on. Like I said, I was way out of the loop.
I got my
first pot to hiss in so to speak in the summer of 1965. Athletes who
don’t think smoking a little pot now and then will affect their
performance are kidding themselves. Don’t forget now, in 1964 I was a
rugby hooker playing top at the first division level in Vancouver.
One of my
competitors wasn’t bad. But frankly, compared to myself, he was well, er,
ahem, coff coff, pat pat, you know. Similarly, a new fellow showed up
the winter of 1965 from Toronto, who, while likewise not too bad a
player, wasn’t up to my well, er, coff coff, pat pat, you know what I
mean.
By the
summer of 1965, I had finally started taking to floating around the
ceiling on occasion with some of my new found acquaintances. When I
turned out for rugby that fall, to my dismayed amazement my two
competitors had improved so enormously over the summer that it was
almost all I could do just to keep up. Whereas before, well you know,
coff coff, pat pat.
Shortly
into the season, I separated my shoulder. Another telling sign. In fact,
that officially ended my athletic era. By the time I healed, I had lost
all interest in the whole sport environment world completely. Another
telling sign.
It wasn’t
until years later, long after I had gone through four full years of more
than just token smoking and toking and had cut it off cold turkey for at
least five more years, that the light bulb finally dawned. Those two
guys hadn’t improved over the summer one jot. I had simply lost my
razor’s edge because of the pot.
If you
think about it, that’s exactly what the stuff does, it lays you back.
Small loss for some people. But for athletes who train hours a day, week
after week, month after month, they’re taking away from themselves in
the blink of an eye the very thing for which they’ve worked so hard in
the first to put in. Kind of like cutting off your toes to spite your
pace.
A
snowboarding champion from Whistler Mountain BC, in the late nineties,
who won a gold medal and then was disqualified for having pot in his
system, should have been given two gold medals for what it implied about
his actual ability.
Smoking
today and playing tomorrow doesn’t help either. That’s just another part
of the illusion. It takes at least six months for the deeper seated
toxins to even begin starting to wearing off.
If you
think about it, the same situation applies for anyone whose success
depends on a razor’s edge. Kids and students all take note. Remnant
hippies also take note, the houses and clubs which you think feel so
warm and groovy when stoned, feel cold and clammy once you are always
straight again. It’s not because your vibration level is so low as the
pot heads would have you believe. It’s because the vibration level of
the pot envorment is so low, which none of them will ever believe.
It’s also
not because straight people aren’t with it and it’s not because the
vibrational energy of the stuff is bad in its own right. Under the
proper circumstances of medicinal aid or spiritual advancement it is
very good.
It’s
because when pot is corrupted by use as recreation, and or for profit,
the vibrational energy levels associated with it fall well below the mid
line, not above as has always been believed. This resulting drop in
frequency is the hidden sucker punch behind the promised lotus land of
pot and most psychedelics.
If you find
this hard cheese, tough luck and all the more of it because you know in
your heart of hearts that it’s true. Like the man says, lies revealed
are self destroyed.
The long
and the short of it is, that by the time I had walked into the Fluorspar
Minerals board meeting to walk out in early 1966, I was already sitting
well along the sidelines of the whole new Vancouver hippie scene coming
along, and already had a whole new circle of friends who were way more
often than not a whole lot airier then air and higher than a kite could
fly.
When I
walked out the door of Fluorspar Minerals, I also in effect walked out
into a world with no future and no money in my pocket. You could do it a
lot easier in those days than today. Besides I did have some assets,
like an impressive hi fi set, which I downsized in increments and lived
off the difference.
Also the
hippie community to which I was becoming more and more attuned had an
impressive unwritten rule of looking after their own. If you were a
hippie and on the outs, you were never really alone and desperate. In
fact the hippie community might well have become a good model for all in
many respects if it hadn’t been for the hair.
Like Animal
Farm, where all the real animals were equal, hippies tended to live
communally and quite equitably. They would live a number to a house
where a few would be the core occupants and the rest changed from day to
day on the move. If you hit town a total stranger, you could quickly
find a place to stay and didn’t need American Express to make it happen.
It didn’t
matter who you were, you always had somewhere to stay and something to
eat. Total strangers, not a stranger, didn’t matter. No questions asked.
If they knew your first name, they knew all they ever wanted to know.
As good as
it got there was always a bad seed or two around. Hippies had a kindly,
true justice way of dealing with problem members within the household. I
knew a house with a girl that loved to bake chocolate cakes. She would
bake a cake and simply leave it out on the table for everyone else to
help themselves.
One of the
guys evidently thought he was a little more equal than others because if
he got there first he would polish off the whole bloody thing. The
others griped but who would stop him?
So she did
what any self respecting baker would do in a situation like that and
baked in a whole package of Ex-Lax on the sly. Everybody else was queued
up to stay away from the cake that particular day just to make sure he
got there first. Worked perfectly. After the air was cleared he never
took more than his fair share.
There was
another aspect of the hippie world which the straight world never caught
onto. It was a two-way street. A simple example says it all.
Haight
Ashbury in San Francisco was the undisputed core central of the hippie
world. Fourth avenue in Vancouver was the suburb. Yorkville in Toronto,
and Greenwich Village in New York were also well touted suburbs but not
the same. Both of these were more from commercial motivation. The
difference was between wearing love beads because ‘that’s what you were’
on Fourth Avenue and in the Haight, and wearing love beads because
‘that’s where the money was’ in Toronto and New York.
Right in
the middle of Fourth avenue was a nice grassy slope about two houses
wide sitting right in the middle of the block. About seven every night
the hill would quickly fill up with hippies sitting watching the traffic
go by. Which comprised a non-stop line of straights in cars, bumper to
bumper, cruising by at about five miles an hour from all over the lower
mainland for the specific and singular purpose of gawking at the hippies
sitting on the hill.
The reality
was that word had gotten out. So at the appointed time around seven
every night, the hippies would gather for the specific purpose of
watching the straights driving by gawking at the hippies sitting on the
hill watching the straights drive by.
The
intensity of a given car load of gawks of course, produced the intensity
of the collective yaks amongst the hippies. And the straights never
caught on. The Beatles had it right all along. The fool on the hill was
no fool.
By about
three quarters of a year after I had left the mining business, most of
my sellable material effects were gone and I was living on the loose. I
had started to gain interest in the new hippie styled Rock and Roll
coming out of the West Coast, including Vancouver. I had started going
to the local concerts plus a local hippie club which featured local
hippie bands and a local hippy-styled light show for strictly local
hippy-type audiences.
I stayed
strictly away from the fruit drinks though. Actually I have to admit
that I never did drink one of the electric kool-aids which were so
popular at the time. Had I missed out on an important piece of history?
I think not.
Greydie had
a folk singing friend who was planning to start up a rock band. So I
said I would manage. We played a couple of gigs using the remnants of my
once landmark hi fi speaker system as the PA. Then he decided to go back
to folk and I decided to go back into hanging loose.
Then in
August 1966 came another one of those memorable turns in life we spend
the rest of our lives reflecting. I had become friends with the operator
of the local hippie club called ‘The Afterthought’. He had decided to go
to university for Business Administration and wanted to know if I wanted
to take over the club. “Well sure”, I said, “Why not”.
The
Afterthought was no mean potatoes. Jefferson Airplane hung around
Vancouver for four months in the early days before their big singles
started. Playing at least every couple of weeks at the Afterthought.
The Steve
Miller blues band likewise hung around Vancouver for a while and played
the Afterthought on the optimum rotation. He went back to San Francisco,
slickered out his moustache, called himself Morrice, said “Abracadabra”,
and launched a couple of sleazy big hits.
After I
took over, the Afterthought became a mysterious affair. Every weekend
the place was way fuller than the number of people buying tickets at the
door. I even hired two guys to watch the back door and fire exit. It
made no difference. I never made more than enough to pay for club rent,
the bands, the staff, and sometimes a few groceries. I even got to
suspecting that maybe the two door guards were in on it.
I never did
figure out how all those extra patrons were slipping in past the door.
Not being hard-nosed whenever hard action was needed was never one of my
strong suites.
The only
money I ever made, chicken feed at best, was on Saturday afternoons when
I would rent a whole pile of roadrunner cartoons and run a Roadrunner
festival for the day. Believe it or not, after a couple of weeks, we all
started cheering for Wiley Coyote.
It seems as
though I was never destined to make money from rock and roll promotions.
I made nothing from the club, and put on three concerts with the
Yardbirds that never earned me a penny. The first was in Seattle in the
summer of 1966. The second, a day later in Vancouver.
The third
was in early November on their swing back through the West Coast.
Another little piece of history, the last swing though was also their
farewell tour, last concert.
I did the
Seattle concert in cahoots with a local Seattle promoter. Someone had
introduced me to him for the purpose of the concert. I think he did the
whole thing on speed which was a subject about which I didn’t know much
about at the time.
Later, I
came to recognize the ersatzing behaviour of someone revving along at
twice the speed of sound. So in hindsight, I definitely recognized that
the fellow had definitely been buzzing along at five times the metabolic
rate of a normal human being during the whole ill-fated episode.
Seems he
had blown the money I had given him to get started with on amphetamines.
Then he didn’t start promotion until about three days before the gig.
Consequently, even though it was the Yardbirds, the show barely drew an
audience.
After the
show the band got their money. Then the City of Seattle took the partner
and I into an office in the concert hall to get theirs. Seattle had an
automatic tax on such soirées.
A lot of
these affairs were put on by tour promoters from some other city. So the
city had long since gotten tired of getting stiffed for their show tax
and had developed the habit of sending a knee capping taxman to collect
their tithe at the moment of truth the second after the concert had
ended. The rules were simple, pay the levy or go to jail.
I had been
standing by a desk with the taxman. The taxman was spreading his forms
out on the desk getting ready for business. The partner was standing
behind me holding what was left of the gate receipts in a large paper
bag. Wrong guy to have been left holding the bag.
The taxman
and I felt a sudden blast of cold air. We turned, the door was wide
open. Our bird had flown the coop with the dough. I never saw or heard
of him again. I only hope the tax guy didn’t get fired. I mean try and
imagine a likely story to tell your superiors. I went back to Vancouver
cold sober broke for all my effort.
My silent
partner back in Vancouver wasn’t all that happy either. In yet another
minor brush with history he was the owner of the very first ever Midas
Muffler franchise in Canada. He had been making a piss pot full of money
and a friend had suggested he front me enough to do the concert in
Seattle.
The first
Yardbird concert in Vancouver was an all day rock affair featuring six
additional local backup bands. The place was packed. My Mom was the
cashier. As her cash tray filled up she would simply stuff it in big
wads into a shopping bag and set it on the floor beside her.
I pulled
the first bag which counted out around just enough to pay the Yardbirds
and the bands. When the second bag was nearly full she turned around to
put in another wad and it was gone. What came in after that was just
enough to cover off the remaining assorted nicky nork expenses.
The funny
part about all this was that nobody actually ended up getting burned.
The only bad thing was that I ended up not making a penny again but I
was getting used to that.
I had
borrowed enough for the promotion down payments and arena rent from a
local electronics parts dealer. He had been saving the money to bid on a
sixty-foot coastal utility boat. The BC Government was retiring the boat
after many years of service and it was going up for auction a few weeks
after the concert.
After the
concert the money was gone. What else could he do but bid what little he
had left? He got the boat anyway. Life is good.
I shouldn’t
grouse too much about missing the third pitch every time at bat though.
A Vancouver acquaintance had put on a fairly successful concert with a
then completely unknown British Rock band called the Rolling Stones on
their first time through.
A number of
British rock bands were been offered up on a platter in the wake of the
initial success of ‘Eric Burton and the Animals’ and ‘The Dave Clark
Five’.
He had also
been offered, for two thousand bucks, the chance at yet another
completely unknown British band called the Beatles. He turned it down
flat. Between the time he said no and the day they would have gone
onstage in Vancouver, the Beatles had done their first Ed Sullivan show.
As they say, timing is everything. He muttered about that one for years.
For the
third Yardbirds concert I partnered with a local building contractor.
The contractor had agreed to back the concert because he wanted to
showcase his son’s band who were up and coming at the time. A lot more
up than coming actually. They were, um, somewhat unpracticed. So his
son’s band on the bill was strictly as a condition for the money.
Everyone has their price.
I was also
permanently managing my own band by then which I had put in as the other
back up. So it was a mutually beneficial concert anyway. Nepotism runs
rampant. The guy’s wife ran the till. The place was packed. When the
show was over, the bands and everyone else got paid off.
When my
turn came, the story was, “gee son, sorry son, no money left for you or
me son”. Whenever it’s my turn at the trough there’s nothing left but
turnips. I’m sure he and his wife had a fine time in Hawaii or wherever
it was they spent that winter. However, my real objective had been
achieved. Our band received a super reception and we were on our way.
In some
people’s eyes I did miss another golden opportunity though during this
whole concert cycle, new band aside. The concert cycle itself could have
been a very lucrative career.
The
original Yardbirds concert in Seattle had come to me courtesy of a
successful local Seattle promoter. Floyd, Lloyd, or Boyd Grafmeyer, I
can never remember which, was already tied up doing another show at the
time of the Yardbirds concert which is why he had passed it on to me.
He asked me
to become his permanent Vancouver liaison. He was one of the West
Coast’s most successful promoters and Vancouver was one of his bedrock
locations. Maybe he’s still in business today. Since I haven’t been back
to Vancouver since 1974 I have no way of knowing.
At any
rate, he did real well for quite a while there while I was still there.
And so did the other guy who eventually took over the Vancouver slot
which I had turned down. And thus I wound up as the manager of a local
rock and roll band. We called the band ‘Mother Tucker’s Yellow Duck’ for
short, MTYD if you didn’t mind spelling it all out.
The band
wasn’t planned. Like a lot of the things that happened in my life, it
just sort of happened. During the time I had been running the hippie
club every Friday and Saturday night, I would assemble a group of local
musicians as backup band to whatever main name local band I was
featuring.
One of the
more popular local rock bands I booked a fair amount was called ‘The
United Empire Loyalists’. Then eventually ‘The Seeds of Time’. The group
comprised five kids barely out of high school. In another really
miniscule touché with history, the core members eventually became the
highly successful International rock band Prism of the seventies.
The
Afterthought Club itself was an old neighbourhood motion picture theatre
which had long since been closed down after TV had come into full bloom
and had taken away the audience. The seats had long since been torn out
and the floor flattened out. It was now used mainly as the meeting hall
for the landlords, namely the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Russian
Society. I would meet the manager once a week to givew him the rent.
I’m sure that’s the second time CISIS had me down in their little black
book for talking with the Russians.
As a dance
hall at any rate, the meeting hall was pretty simple stuff. No tables,
no chairs. Just a well polished wooden floor on which everyone sat,
danced, or did whatever else their current predispositions fancied.
Hippies,
who were always way more for substance than form, loved the loose
format. My only problem as earlier mentioned, was that there were always
way more patrons in the place than had paid to get in. I never did
figure the leak through that little levy. Not that it was ever the
foremost thing on my list of things to do. I liked the energy of the big
crowds, money would have been a bonus.
I found out
one day that both of the door guards I had hired to watch the back were
musicians. I found out because they asked me over to their place one day
to listen to a new tune they had just written. Quite a nice song
actually.
So one
weekend I used Donnie and Pat in my ad hoc back up band, plus a base
player named Charlie I had been using who I figured was a franchise
player.
That Friday
night after finishing, we just knew it was a band. I came on board as
the manager and by the next week had turned the club over to someone
else. Now I was officially the manager of a hippie rock and roll band.
After a six
year hiatus of sitting in jazz clubs listening to my brother on drums, I
was back in hippie clubs listening to a band member play drums. Fate
always has a way of recapitulating itself.
Our
original drummer was from the USA and decided to go back. So the bass
player brought in Hughie, his favorite drummer, and the music improved
on the spot. Similarly the group hadn’t yet settled on a lead guitar
player. The two original guys knew of a player named Roger who they felt
was something else, a common hippie expression implying great praise in
a somewhat convoluted kind of way.
Roger had
just arrived in Vancouver from the interior of BC and was still trying
to decide what to do. After about two more weeks he officially came over
to the band. And that was that, the band was set.
When Roger
had first moved to Vancouver he came alone. He didn’t know a soul and
lived the first three days on the beach without a meal. Actually all he
had to have done was gone the few blocks over to Fourth Avenue where the
hippies hung out, and he would have been set up with both in about an
hour.
As it was,
on the third day at the beach he had met some people strolling by who
discovered he was quite the guitar player. So suddenly about five bands
were after him which is why he took so long to make up his mind.
Roger was
talented par excellent because he had been raised on a cattle ranch in
the remote Chilcotin River ranch area of West Central BC. Except for
high quality munching grass and a bit of natural gas that no one was
supposed to know about, not much else was up there. The family lived
forty miles from their nearest neighbour.
They were
in an area so remote that if you looked at a map you would wonder how on
earth they got out in the winter. The answer was simple. They didn’t.
Instead, dad would pull out the ivories, the kids would all play
something, Mom would keep the cookies coming, and it would be one happy
jam session after the next for the whole entire winter. Roger played
guitar.
During
every summer up at the ranch, Roger would sit behind the woodshed
practicing guitar while his father wondered why the chores weren’t
getting done. By the time Roger came out of the wilderness as a young
teen, he was a very accomplished country western singer and player. He
played with a rock band while living in the Okanogan Valley for two
years. So by the time Roger hit Vancouver he was a master of both
worlds.
One of the
original back door musicians, Donnie, was both a lead singer and rhythm
guitar player. This was back in the days when it was presumed a singer
could at least sing a bit in order to be the lead singer of a rock band.
Nowadays of course, it’s considered tony to sing off-key and sound like
your adenoids are being pulled out though your eyeballs.
Donnie was
from Winnipeg, still nearly a kid. He had spent most of his formative
musical years following the Guess Who around community centers in
Winnipeg in their formative years. Consequently he had developed a
decidedly Burton Cumming type singing style.
He had
followed him so consequently in fact that he was way more Burton Cumming
than Burton himself. At least twice the pipes, not that Burton is in any
way a slouch. Burton as you may well know is considered one of the five
greatest Rock and Roll singers of all time. No small praise as at least
some of the earlier ones could really sing.
In Donnie’s
case, the second one along always has the first one along to build on so
usually winds up the better. When our band had initially set out, we at
least therefore had going for us not only a first rate bass player and
lead guitarist, but an exceptionally good powerful lead singer. If
you’ve ever heard a new band up there for the first time at a sock hop,
you’ll know that says plenty.
Actually
Donnie ended up second lead singer and Roger third. The other door
guard. Patrick became the front man and main singer. Patrick had an
amazingly beautiful musical voice but didn’t always have the training
for pitch and timing to the annoyance of some. When all was said and
done though and the three sang together in harmony, it was great.
The
original two musicians were living in a hippie house in downtown
Vancouver. So we all squeezed in and became a family as a lot of bands
did at the time. We stayed together as family for three more years
before they finally booted me out the door as their manager in Toronto
in late 1969 for totally blowing their prospects for big band success
out the window.
Before I
was fired, I saw us onstage with The Birds, the Yardbirds, Jimi Hendrix
twice, James Brown, Paul Butterfield Blues Band about three times,
Fleetwood Mac, Deep Purple, The Moody Blues, and so it went. We of
course headlined numerous local all day rock shows featuring a quantity
of local bands rather than big name groups. We were the perennial
headliner at the, ‘never to be missed’, world-famous Vancouver Easter
Be-Ins every Spring.
The start
was rough. But after the first six months we at least always had a place
to stay and food to eat. In the early days however things were not
always the most favorite way in the world you would like to live.
The two
original back door guards/musicians provided most of the money for rent
and expenses by indulging in a little side enterprise. The same kind of
enterprise just about every hippie on the planet was getting by on at
the time, namely spinning grass into hay.
Business
didn’t always deal fairly though. One day they gave a buddy the week’s
take to secure the next weeks inventory. By the end of the day still no
score. That meant either the guy had been busted or had flown the coop.
Sadly, he hadn’t been busted.
We found
out afterwards that he had gone straight from the house to the airport,
straight back to Scotland where he had had the whole thing lined up for
weeks. This proves yet again that you can’t tell a crook by the cover.
He had gone
back to Scotland because some of the lads from his home town had invited
him back to join a new rock band they were forming. Before too long he
was back in North America touring around big time as the Bay city
rollers or Boomtown Rats, something like that. Nothing like getting a
well-financed start with other people’s money.
The low
point for us came near the end of October just before the concert with
the Yardbirds. Roger and I sat down for dinner one night. The only thing
in the entire house even remotely edible was a single raw onion.
We did it
up in style. We set the table with all the fittings. Cut the onion in
half. Then each ate our half with knife and fork, tastefully seasoning
it with salt and pepper, eating each bite with raised pinky and great
flourish and acted relish. If you can’t laugh at adversity, or yourself,
you don’t deserve to laugh at anything at all.
Overall,
life was pretty good for the three years I managed MYTD. We never made
big money to speak of however. My fault entirely. If anybody should have
made it big, this band should have. Same old story, while flocks of big
opportunities flew by the coop in unending number, I stood around
stupidly studying their flapping wings for aerodynamics.
Actually,
we already had it made courtesy of the Yardbirds show. Only I didn’t
recognize it.
My lawyer
friend from my mining company of a year before, and of the Vancouver
mining company which still remains unnamed, came to the concert. After
the concert he offered to co-sign a bank loan to help get us going. I
purchased new equipment for the band and made the down payment on a new
Ford Econovan. It was the year the engine had been moved in between the
seats to shorten the front end and it was a looker.
Ford was
looking for all the exposure it could get for the new line, the lawyer
was loaded, so it was a deal made in black to put it through. We were
one of the first in Canada to have one and it was good exposure for Ford
and the money was on the table.
But because
I was so snotty about our great potential, it never occurred to me to
also ask to have money to live on until we got established.
So we
continued to live poor for a while and consequently I missed a golden
opportunity for the band to get the music together in comfortable style
instead of with onion dinners in angst.
The main
missed opportunity though, came just after the Yardbirds concert. One of
the big local disk jockeys had taken a shine to us and had started
making a point of phoning us on air every afternoon to talk with the
musicians. Publicity like that you can’t buy, not even today.
Terry D,
now of MTV Much Music fame, called for about a week and a half, and
Vancouver was just starting to get the idea that something good was
going to happen in their midst. Then the phone got cut off because the
bill hadn’t been paid. I should have done everything in my power to get
it back on the air to keep the momentum going.
Instead I
said something equivalent to, “Shit!” So we didn’t have a phone for
nearly two months. By the time we got it back the momentum was gone.
Like I said, “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Stuporman”.
I missed
another unrecognized mini opportunity at this time. But this one would
have been quite a stretch even for Goodyear. After we began to get more
regular bookings, the drummer used to buy the complete new shelf of
Marvel comic books every two weeks.
I actually
had the very first issue of Silver Surfer in my hands as an example.
None of us ever dreamed of keeping them as an investment. Like most kids
of the era, the fun was in the reading not the having, and hippies were
kids with the best of them.
Actually,
my missed cue with the Marvel Comics Empire started years before when I
was still just a young kid in Winnipeg. In the late forties and early
fifties I used to load up with two Donald Duck or Marvel Comics every
week with my two bits allowance. I had a neat deal with a local pharmacy
which was so old it still had old wooden floors smelling of disinfectant
all the time.
Pop was a
nickel and comics were a dime. The comic book rack sat at the front end
of the store by the pop cooler. I would come in every Saturday
afternoon, buy a pop, and read every new comic on the shelf. Then pick
out the two best, pay for everything and head home. Every week he would
say, “Don’t do that again”. Every week I would do exactly the same thing
again. This went on for six or even years. Some institutions keep
humanity going.
The comics
I bought I only read once or twice and never paid them attention again.
Today, five people could be rich on what probably passed through my page
flipping fingers. No doubt though, most people my age could make the
same complaint.
The band in
the meantime continued to grow quickly in local popularity. What had
been driving everyone’s enthusiasm for the band, particularly in its
earlier stages, was that it played entirely from a female musical point
of view.
This didn’t
mean that they wiggled their hips in tight little slips. Rather, think
of Male/Female in the same sense as Positive/Negative,
Projective/Inductive, Ying/Yang, i.e., as contra modalities.
Nearly all
Western civilization music, from its earliest inception to current, is
based on a male modality mode. This means Western music is executed in a
metronommic reference to the beat. The structure is logical in its
expression and logically concludes. Nearly all music from the Middle
East, East, is female as a I describe the difference. All Eastern music
just goes on and on.
Think of
Western mode songs like, ‘You are my Sunshine’ then extrapolate that to
all Western civilization music no matter how sophisticated. Punk music
is just the extrapolated extension of that without the tune part. Yuck..
The main
difference with female music is that you play by how you feel at the
moment. Whereby, since you never feel exactly the same way twice in a
row you don’t play the same way twice in a row. Yet in the male music
mode, playing everything by rote memorized lines exactly the same way
every time is exactly what’s required. If you don’t your piano teacher
raps you sharply on your knuckles.
Female
music is expressed in the spaces between the metronomic beats. It’s the
exact opposite of male music. Female music has appeared in only a very
few, very brief glimpses in modern rock music.
Here’s a
simple start. Charlie Parker revolutionized the jazz world in the
forties by introducing a saxophone style whereby instead of working
within tight little phrasings within set musical formats, he realized he
could express just about any kind of phrasing he wanted so long as he
stayed true to the chord. The results were sometimes jarring but the
point was made. The rote crystallized structure had been broken.
Lead
guitarists glommed onto the style in the early sixties and it is now the
standard format of lead guitar instrumentation everywhere. A similar
effect is possible with timing and tempo, not yet formulated, where any
kind of time expression is possible as long as you stay true to the ends
of the bars and main chord change points. This means of course you have
to know what you’re doing but it’s there.
Base
players in particular could play in the female modality were they to
wake up to the fact. Even more particular with respect to the part about
timing changes by playing like a slow free floating lead guitar in an
easy going jam session, thus making the timing flow instead of thumping
hard. A very positive musical doorway awaiting opening like a stairway
going up in an optical illusion instead of down.
The best
example within current rock is the second half of Led Zeppelin’s
‘Stairway to Heaven’. The band stops, gains a tempo, then starts again
completely in a back beat mode in which the music drives along by flow
impetus instead of thumping.
The second
half of The Fifth Dimension’s, ‘Age of Aquarius’ does the exact same
thing in an even more exceptional way. It’s a forward tilting beat
instead of backward clinging. Listen to it again, then the Led Zeppelin
piece again for cross reference. Then figure out what I just said.
A Montreal
group called The Bells, stopped half way though a song which was
something about ‘rain, rain, go away’’, then went completely into
female-ish mode for the rest of the song. The song was ‘icky’ but
musically it was very definite another great example.
The Beatles
were just starting to cross the threshold for a few bits in their last
album ‘Abbey Road’. Then the negative stepped in and ruined the whole
migration towards female by cutting off the show with a Zen
intervention.
In
particular the Beatles treatment of ‘You don’t give me your money’ was
getting real close to the point. It’s in the way the musical structure
flows along between the beats rather than thumps along that I’m talking
about. If the Beatles had been able to go even one more album together,
who knows?
The long
and the short of it is, that if the bass player backs off as the main
methodic driving force of a song, and bounces off the melody line in the
same way that country pickers sometimes lay off and just bounce little
licks on and off the foreground, you can double push the band and have
it going both ways.
In
particular, hold the notes, and slow dance around the frets to set up
the chord changes in advance using passing tones and triplet phrasings
instead of simply hammering away at a bottom line.
If this is
just a little hard to digest, it isn’t an easy topic to describe for
there being so little material to go on out there. It’s the other half
of music which the western world has yet to discover.
The proper
female musical mode transcends rock, country, classical, jazz, and even
eastern. The Eastern world hasn’t fully caught onto it yet because they
play like they’re constantly falling down stairs. No kettle is black. No
black is a kettle. The female mode will work equally for all musical
formats once someone twigs onto how it works.
If you’re
curious enough to understand this better, just take the time to listen
to the references cited above and pay attention to what was said. Even
better if you play bass. Randy Bachman in the current Guess Who, can and
sometimes does play somewhat in this mode whenever the band lays off
their forebeat rigidity long enough to give him some wriggle room.
Finally, if
any of you lucky enough to catch Willie Nelson performing a rendition of
‘Georgia on my Mind’ in an episode of the TV series ‘Monk’ in the middle
of November 2002, watched a very near complete example of the mode. One
of the prettiest renditions of anything ever done... So Willie, now’s
your chance to up the ante now you know what ante to up.
Once anyone
gets jiggy with the principle, they can effortlessly transpose it to
boogie, jazz, country western, blues, and even classical. Just imagine
someone one an alien planet somewhere light years into the future and
motivated enough to redo some of the old standard classical symphonies
into female mode. They would of course need a copy of the Willie Nelson
performance as template, plus time to battle off the centuries of
inertia. But it’s doable.
What I just
took the long way around to pointing out, was that MTYD was about ninety
percent into female band mode. The band played everything in the style
of the Willie Nelson rendition of Georgia. Fast, slow, didn’t matter it
was pat and pretty. They also played all the time like the little bit
from the Beatles. Which in fact had the band comment, “Sounds a bit like
us” the day they got a copy of Abby Road in their hands.
MTYD’s
music at the time was therefore completely unique. Absolutely great to
listen to, even better to boogie. The drummer was the modulator and
everyone else just let fly cool and melodiously off his solidity,
particularly the bass who like I said was a franchise player and carried
the load.
Unfortunately, as they matured, they moved more and more back towards
the male mode in trying to become more and more impressively tight. Half
my fault actually because I kept getting them into harder and harder
equipment to hear themselves in without realizing it. So forcing them to
keep getting louder and louder and harder and harder in compensation.
By the time
they disbanded in 1970, the touch was gone. They were just a good rock
band like ten thousand others. Even more sadly, we had never been able
to get more than about ten percent of their onstage sound and feel onto
record. It is a moment lost.
Another
Vancouver band slowly developed in the background in the very late
sixties and early seventies. Amethyst was fully aware of the female male
distinction and were in fact to become the full knowing expositors of
the expression. I had a tangent to them as I had been appointed their
manager in the early seventies for part of their existence.
Unfortunately, egos prevented the band from getting it up to snuff and
the whole thing was called off. More unfortunately, punk rock and other
such simplistic male musical forms started to sidle in through the later
seventies and have kept a hard rock lock on rock ever since.
Today, the
female musical mode is an all but the forgotten memory of a few for now.
Maybe all is not lost though. Maybe a reader will to these comments by
heart and decide to give them a try, and the mode will rise again.
Wouldn’t it be nice if some music faculty somewhere adds enough andante
to their allegro to set up courses teaching the female distinction and
becomes a world leading musical institute.
My three
years with MTYD and a few years before, saw me rubbing shoulders with
the rich and soon-to-be-famous on numerous occasions. Some of the rubs
were warm and fuzzy, others were outlandishly outlandish. In our second
year, we were booked into one of Vancouver’s two still running supper
clubs as a backup act.
Izzy’s was
one of the few true supper clubs of the old style still running in North
America outside of Las Vegas. The very risqué new stand-up comedian
Richard Pryor was coming to town as the headliner for ten days.
The club
decided to try something risqué themselves and booked us as the backup
act because of our reputation even though we were a so called, ‘hiss,
spit’, hippie band. We watched our Ps and Qs like a hawk and things went
without a hitch. A couple of us even went to a local all night
restaurant with Richard and his new wife a couple of times after the
last show of the evening.
The last
night of the gig, after it was all over, we stood around shaking hands
and saying goodbye. Richard looked at me for a couple of seconds then
suddenly grabbed me up in a great big bear hug of a goodbye. Which I
always remembered, not because it was Richard Pryor but because it was
sincere.
Two years
before the band came together, the late comedian Pat Paulson had been
playing for a week at a small local folk club. His, um, headline thing
at the time had been hanging from his feet and painting a canvas with
his nose and hair.
Very
sophisticated ‘do in a zoo’ stuff, but evidently very popular because
the club was always packed. Every night the paintings would go on the
auction block to the highest bidder for charity. Not a bad scene
actually.
Just in
case you think some of these guys are all onstage, I had a house party
one night and Pat showed up. He spent the entire night sitting on the
chesterfield dry lining us out of our stomach contents with patented
dead pan “Who me?” deliveries that you never saw coming.
Every word,
every sentence. The guy had a lightning fast razor wit like nobody you
ever saw. Like five cue cards in the air all at the same time, every one
a stop-your-breathing-gagger for laughter.
It’s
probably why he got into comedy in the first place. After finding
themselves at the receiving end of his talents long enough, his friends
and family finally said, “Go into comedy or you die”.
The
University of BC was also having its annual homecoming celebration and
Pat was the featured entertainer. Pat had been going out with a girl
chum of mine at the time so I drove them to the gig. The two of us sat
up in the audience while Pat got on with his show. Or at least tried to.
The
gymnasium was packed with engineers. Talk about your tough room. If you
know campus engineers you know the problem. The only reason they go to
university in the first place is to be seen and heard, order irrelevant.
Many
engineers are from small towns where a new bridge or highway just came
through. So engineers are obviously the first impressive big timers
these guys see and become the object of their hero worship. So seeing
themselves at the same center of attention in some other small town in
their own right someday down the road, they can’t resist and decide to
go into engineering.
Being the
only one from the town up for it, they get to strut a bit, well a lot if
the town isn’t very big. By the time they get to university, they think
they own the place. Now put them all together in the same gymnasium as a
bonded mindset and you see the problem sitting in front of poor Paul.
His fate was sealed.
For about
twenty minutes he fought hopelessly trying to get the conglomerate “Me”
into his patter. Nada. All the remainder of the audience could hear, who
at least had come to see him because of his rep, were the engineers’
constant ‘Here we are and don’t forget it” pep songs. They didn’t even
seem to notice there was an act onstage trying to happen.
After about
twenty minutes of basically delivering into a huge black hole, poor Pat
put his mike down, walked quietly off stage, and came around up to where
we were sitting. He quietly sat down, quietly put his head in his hands,
and quietly started to hyperventilate. He was completely devastated. It
was the first time in his life he had ever yielded the stage.
We did
everything we could to play the whole thing down.
“Ha, ha, ha, Pat, ha, ha, ha.
Look at the bright side, ha, ha, ha, you got paid big bucks for a night
off, ha, ha, ha”. But it was lame at best and poor Pat wasn’t buying. He
was convinced his career was ruined for good. Not without good reason.
These are
very sensitive guys these comedians, and need the full support of the
audience to keep it going. Richard Prior would almost go into a trance
before going onstage in order to build up his intensity. Similarly, not
too long before the homecoming, a very popular comedian of the late
fifties and early sixties had been headlining Vancouver’s other
remaining nightclub, and lost the audience.
So Shelly
did what any self respecting comedian would do in a situation like that
and had a complete nervous breakdown. Right up there on stage. Right in
front of everybody. It was your basic career breaker. Who would ever
book him, it might happen again. He never did get back up to where he
had been in popularity. Nowadays think of Micheal Richards and his
career ending N-word freakout.
So Pat was
afraid word would get out about his being driven from stage and it would
be the career-ender he so covertly strove to avoid.
His only
forthcoming ray of hope was that in about six weeks time, his long time
chums and buddies the Smothers Brothers had a break of luck of their own
forthcoming. Who were going to begin taping the first show of their all
new, hour long, specials for CBS. Pat had a small guest spot on the
show. The rest as they say is history. Pat even eventually got to, um,
run for President of the United States.
As much as
there were many up sides to the life of a musician, there were also down
sides. A short time after the Yardbirds concert, our band was booked for
a big local high school concert just before Christmas exams.
Because
part of the population of Vancouver had become tied more than just
slightly to the cultures of San Francisco by then, the school had a
considerable teen contingent of somewhat hippie type persuasion. Of
course it also had its usual contingent of fully constituted
red-in-the-neck homeboys. In my old days of high school we called them
greasers.
Not too
long into the dance, the homeboys had already starting coming onto the
hippies and not for dancing partners. After a while of this, I went over
to the two teachers chaperoning the dance to see if they could do
something about it. They said if it got any worse they would shut the
dance down until things cooled off. ‘Fine’, I said, and started back
across the gym.
As I headed
back I was watching the floor so as not to attract too much of the
attention of the bozos on the sidelines. About half way back to the
stage, the front of my nose suddenly met the back of my nose by a fist
attached to the arm of the number one homeboy in the crowd.
He had
evidently begun his momentous high speed journey to the front of my face
from the far reaches of the auditorium. By the time we met in the middle
of the gym, his fist was running full tilt into destiny at the end of my
nose.
When he
connected, his fist carried not only the whole momentum of his record
breaking sprint, but also the full momentum of the punch which had been
thrown from way back over his shoulder. Since I never saw it coming, it
had about the same impact as as blind man running smack into a solid
brick wall at about sixty miles an hour.
I stood
there for a couple of seconds in the middle of the floor contemplating
life in general plus the birds and stars flying all over the place in
the blazing white light in front of my face. Blood started spurting
profusely from a very broken nose.
All I could
think of was how on earth could anyone hit someone wearing glasses.
After a couple more seconds, someone put their arm around me and helped
me into the washroom to try and stop the bleeding and start cleaning me
up.
After a few
minutes in the washroom I started hearing what can only be described as
an almost fantasy rushing like roar of non-stop yelling and screaming.
The sound was half in consciousness and half out, just like when half
awake just before falling asleep, only real loud.
I’m awfully
sure it would be very similar to the sound someone hears when a tornado
goes through the next door neighbor’s yard in the middle of the night. I
didn’t know for sure if it was real or just a reaction to the colossal
swot I had just taken.
Well it was
indeed real because about two minutes later our bass player came into
the washroom with a likewise big splay of blood on his face. Fortunately
though, no broken nose. Apparently, seconds after I had been led out of
the gym, the enthusiastic homeboy who had put the sock on me, plus three
of his buddies, had leapt the stage to commence the same upon the band.
A bunch of
hippie types at the front of the stage had immediately leapt up on stage
to help them not to commence the same quite so freely. Hippies were
never cowards after all is said and done. Just look how openly they
walked around with flagrant long hair in a society which was still high
up on its toes by an undisclosed underwear wedgie about long hair.
So the
homeboy buddies of the homeboy buddies on stage had also leaped onstage
to help speed things long. One thing led to another and within seconds
everybody in the place was into it in one way or another.
Even the
girls were in it. One girl from the hippie side, kept running around
beaning all the homeboys over the head with her umbrella. The staff
eventually managed to quieten things down and the cops were on the way.
When I came
back out, the band was ok. They had seen me get hit. So when the rhythm
guitar player Donnie saw the first contingent of homeboys coming his
way, he had quietly removed the microphone from the mike stand and was
standing ready. When the first homeboy hit the stage he was met square
on the noggin by the mike stand swung hard from the shoulder like a
National leaguer hitting a home run. It had decked the guy out flatter
than a pancake.
By the time
the police arrived the guy was still out cold. One of the police
officers took one look at him, then the mike stand which was still
standing on stage bent in the middle like a C clamp, put two and three
together, then wrote in his report, ‘ran into a pole’.
I was taken
to the hospital to have my nose attended. The news came that two of the
homeboys also had broken noses. The guy knocked out cold had come in by
ambulance but was ok. So that was three to one. The hippies had won.
Fortunately, except for a couple of other close calls later on in the
band’s career, that was the one and only time I ever saw the other side
of being a musician. And to think that not too many years before, that’s
what life as a musician was all about in the fifties.
In the
early days, if you played rock and roll or country western, you had to
chop as good with your mitts as with your guitar. Or be fleet of foot
because it was popular to take out the band at the end of a dance.
Especially in the rural routes.
The reason
for this is probably not too hard to figure out psychologically. To most
women in an audience, most musicians in a band are like god-like
irresistibles. So for a good part of the evening, a good part of the
women would spend a large part of their time trying to flash the godlike
irresistible of their preference with the promise to come later. This
was very much to the concern of their stallion-like dates who may have
been stupid but not dumb, and were pawing the dirt in abject
consternation.
By the end
of the evening, the musicians would therefore became very real perceived
threats to every homeboy’s particular self-esteemed man-image of
god-like themselves. Hence the rhubarbs.
In fact,
even into the late seventies, years after my rock band days were over
and I was selling flowers in bars and taverns, I talked to a country
western band one night that told me about a club in the southern US
where they had just finished a gig. The club had a thick chain mail
fence across the whole stage, wall to wall, floor to ceiling.
The purpose
of fence was to protect the band from the beer bottles, which would
suddenly start flying stage ward at the very first note of the gig and
continue unabated until the final last note of the night.
You could
tell how successful you were as a band by how big the pile of glass was
at the end of the show. It was part of the charm and muster of the
place, and one of the rules you had to agree to in order to play there.
Of course the money was great which is probably why none of the
musicians ever complained about coming off the stage at the end of the
night smelling like skid row.
My broken
nose turned out to be straight-forward and easy to set. I was out of the
hospital in a couple of hours. After a few days, a clump of dried blood
remained in each nostril. After a week, the one on the right fell out
but the one in the left stayed put, rattling and whistling around as I
breathed. The nostril, of course, was all but completely plugged.
After a
number of weeks it was still there. If I had a brain I’d be dangerous
since it never occurred to me to use tweezers to pull the stupid thing
out. So more than half a year later it was still in there, rattling and
whistling around. I kept expecting that the next day it would fall out
on its own.
Late that
Spring, I caught the flu of all flus. Or maybe it was a reaction to a
too-heavy prescription of penicillin I’d just been given. I’ll probably
never know for sure for not being reactive in the slightest to
penicillin before or since. The reason I think it may have been the
penicillin though, is because the tablets I had been given I’m sure were
for horses.
At any
rate, I lay on my back half awake and half asleep for four solid days in
the only true twilight zone of semi-consciousness I have ever been in.
My head filled with a non stop rushing sound, and my nose ran like a
non-stop water tap for the four whole days.
Suddenly on
about the third day, as I was blowing my nose for the thirty thousandth
time, out popped the clump. Hurray, about bloody time. My left nostril
was completely free at last. But now my right nostril was completely
plugged up from the flu I was suffering. Yet once again, can’t win ,
can’t lose, can’t quit.
After a few
more weeks it was still plugged by about ninety five percent. Twenty
years later it was still plugged up about ninety five percent. Talk
about the ever changing never changing.
By fall of
1995, I figured enough was enough so decided to go to a nose specialist
to see what could be done. The specialist’s name was Doctor Murphy. The
name should have put me on red alert. Dr. Murphy took one look at the
X-ray and asked me if I had ever been punched in the nose.
The X-ray
showed that the small bony tissue dividing the nostrils, called the
plenum for you non-scientists, had been perfectly accordionned. Like I
said, the guy had hit me square on the button.
The
scrunched up plenum had been floating around in free fall enough to have
shifted from the far right to the far left and back again in the first
year. Hence the polar opposite switched blockages. Then it had finally
fused into place at the far right. Hence the now perennially plugged up
right side.
No problem
at all to fix said Dr. Murphy. Completely routine. He did about a half
dozen such plenum operations a week so not to worry. I said fine and the
deal was set. I showed up the next week at the local hospital to fill
out the allergy forms and have the appropriate blood tests done.
I had no
allergies of any kind that I knew of except for Nutra Sweet which
discombobulates my bowels. The outputs come out something like a cross
between foam insulation and popcorn. Therefore I have never been able to
avail myself of the diet free universe everyone else has been able to
enjoy. Just as well if the reports that the universal blimp up of
Mankind around the world is caused by the inner workings of artificial
sweeteners are true.
At any
rate, as far as my operation was concerned, I looked like a model
patient.
I arrived
at the hospital the following Monday as a so called day patient. This
meant I would be in about ten o’clock in the morning for prepping, into
the operating room by about one thirty in the afternoon for the main
event, out of anesthesia about forty minutes later to see if I was still
alive, and back out of the hospital by about six in time for dinner. Not
like the old days where you were in for days just to have your tonsils
out.
I was
required not to eat anything for at least twelve hours before the
operation. So on the Sunday night before going in, Greydie and I decided
to load up on pizza. Which is precisely when Murphy of Murphy’s Law
first got wind of a potential good one.
Since it
was to be my last good meal for at least a day and a half, we went whole
hog and ordered two extra large, double cheese, fully loaded pizzas, one
each. When I arrived at the hospital the next morning, I was therefore
carrying a full load of extra large doubly loaded pizza already starting
nicely down on its run through the sugar refinery.
I was told
afterwards that the operation had gone off without a hitch and who was I
to disagree? After going under the anesthesia I remember dreaming that
someone was counting five, four, three, two, one, and I popped wide
awake. Very slick.
When I was
a kid, I remember going in for my tonsils out, and going under the
anesthetics smelled like a hundred million z’s worth of ether. Waking up
was like a hundred million z’s worth of ether fading away down a hall.
It was the sound of the machine you understand. But the smell and the
sound were as one in my brain. So that’s how ether smells for me ever
since. Like a hundred million z’s.
After
waking me up with the count down, the nurse talked to me for a minute or
so to check out my reflexes and make sure I was properly all back in the
house.. Then I was wheeled to recovery.
After about
three hours a nurse came by, said Greydie was waiting to pick me up, and
handed me a small plastic bottle with a couple of tablets. The tablets
were Tylenol 3 for nuking the pain in my nose in case the pain became
requite enough to require nuking.
The last
thing the nurse said as I was leaving, almost pleading it sounded like
to me, was, “and what ever you do, what ever you do, don’t, don’t, under
any circumstances exert yourself or do anything which could force blood
to come your face or you could pop the sutures”.
Sensible
enough advice I said to myself, deciding then and there to never under
any circumstances force blood to come to my face and pop the sutures as
I thanked her and quietly left the room and headed home.
I was fine
the first night. By the next morning the nose had become, well, a tad
tender. So I took one of the tablets. No problem, the discomfort went
away and my nose stayed reasonably comfortable for the rest of the day.
The next morning, my nose was fine. That was the good news.
The bad
news was that I had suddenly received, as usually happens in the passage
of time, a rather not-so-subtle call from nature about the pizza. The
big clump of double cheese fully loaded which had been heading into the
refinery on the day of the operation, had now reached the slag heap part
of the process and was tapping on the trap door signalling gently that
it was time to be let out.
Not a
problem I thought, dropping everything, then parting hastily to the
appropriate facility and dropping everything again. I’d been dealing
with this kind of responsibility ever since I had been potty trained so
knew exactly what to do.
As I had
done successfully nearly twenty thousand times before, I hustled to the
room of appropriate accouterments, made all the necessary preparations,
and sat down on the appropriate apparatus in the correct
semi-embarrassing manner in preparation for the anticipated urging
purging to occur.
It must be
a universal fact of life. Despite the fact that the responsibility has
been upon every living organism the same since the beginning of time,
you don’t want to be caught in the can with your pants down. Take a look
at the face of any pooch anywhere taking a poop. They know.
As I was by
myself, no problem except no boom boom, otherwise called constipation,
specifically known as the inability to unload one.
Worse. It
wasn’t because there wasn’t any boom boom around, it was because the
trap door had absolutely and resolutely refused to open. It was like the
phone line from my brain to the mechanism had been disconnected.
My behinder
parts were as dead as a doornail. The hard drive had crashed. The boat
had hit a reef. The motor had blown a gasket. The system was kaput.
Having usually experienced relatively good success in the boom boom
department for most of my worldly life, I was duly taken aback.
After a
while, the boom boom in my lower groinal area again signaled its
presence, this time with a much more earnest desire to exit the
premises. Again I went through all the necessary preparations, expecting
all the due befallings. But again, nothing. No befallments of any kind,
not even the lighter than air ones.
After a
short while things quieted down again, and again after about an hour the
call from nature came back. Only this time with a vengeance, like I had
for once and forever finally found my calling and it was to go to the
John and never leave.
I ended up
sitting helplessly in somewhat hopeless despair. In particular, I sat
doubly helpless for remembering the dire warning the nurse had made
about not forcing even the slightest amount of blood to my face under
any circumstances whatsoever for risk of popping the sutures.
If you’ve
ever been there yourself, then you know that I was very suddenly and
very decidedly between a very big rock and a very hard place. And don’t
forget, this was not a problem about getting it out as I’m sure
everybody has experienced once or twice in their life in the hours
before the Exlax hit the pipes. This was a problem of nothing happening
at all. Like the telephone exchange had never made the connection.
So there I
sat, not wanting to contribute anything to the process more than
nature’s own gentle way of handling such things for fear of popping the
sutures. But needing to pop the sutures more than anything in the world
you could possibly imagine. I waited and waited and waited and waited,
my compelling friend in there becoming more and more sorely ticked by
the minute. But again, absolutely nothing. The trap door had evidently
gone to Tahiti on vacation and wasn’t coming back until after labour
day’s annual corn fest.
Things
quieted down again for about an hour. Then my friend inside suddenly
signalled itself that it was a five alarm fire. The irresistible force
(clump), and immovable object (trap door), had fallen into a cosmic do
or die battle going on and it was going on in my lower quarters. The
Battle of Armageddon had finally arrived.
It was
starting to feel like a ten pound ham in there clamouring to get out.
Don’t forget, this was a full-sized, fully-loaded, double cheese pizza
we’re talking about down there. Now all scrunched up into one big wad
ready to fire.
Women say
that what I was experiencing was simply a day at the office compared to
what they go through sometimes in bringing forth you and me kicking
happily into the world. If so, a big tip of the hat from at least one
Male on the Planet who has at least some idea of what it must be like.
In my case
though, tipping the hat would’ve been wasted encouragement. It was still
no go. The trap door was out of commission and apparently thought it
should stay that way for the rest of my miserable life.
So after
about, oh maybe three more seconds of this, I decided that the prospects
of popping my sutures would be trivial compared to the prospect of
splitting my seams which was beginning to seem an all too real
possibility. Don’t forget, you get gas down there too and gas explodes.
So I, um,
decided to force the issue a bit, causing a little blood to come to my
face. To my instant alarm and dismay it helped me not in the slightest.
It wasn’t that nothing was forth coming, it was that the trap door still
didn’t seem to be in the slightest bit aware of the program, or that
there was an all out championship football game going on between my
goalposts in there.
In these
kinds of circumstances you’re in for a penny or in for a pound. So I
threw all caution to the wind and put everything I had into one big
colossal blood-to-the-facer. My face turned the purple of midnight. No
avail. Nothing happened. My sutures didn’t pop to smithereens only by
the apparent grace of God.
I was now
beginning to question the whole philosophic topic of ‘nothing’ very
seriously. During my philosophy days at university I’d read a paper,
which in one of the longest stretches of the English language ever
attempted, was titled, ‘The Nothing Nots’.
I can’t
even begin to tell you what the attitude around the Philosophy
Department was about the ‘Nothing Nots’ at the time, but I was beginning
to think maybe the guy was actually onto something here.
In my case,
the nothing was notting pretty evidently down in my lower quarters and I
was finally getting a colossal understanding of what it may all have
meant.
I was
beginning to have real rapport with the idea of the nothing. You know
something like, ‘The Nothing nots, not because it wants to but because
that’s what nothing does’. If you substitute ‘no thing’ for ‘nothing’
throughout these last two sentences, it actually kinda, sorta makes
sense. At any rate, for the time being at least, my trap door sure
seemed to have gotten with the program.
At any rate
again, by this time I also divined that I was probably in a bit of a
bind. So I hoped in my car and high tailed it to my family doctor. I
blew right past the receptionist like the winds of November and straight
into his office babbling helplessly about my modest little problem.
He straight
off asked me if the hospital had given me any Tylenol 3 tablets for pain
killers. I said “yes”. He asked if I had taken any. “One”, I said. Then
he asked if I had ever taken Tylenol 3 before. “No”’ I said. “Ah”, he
responded like the knowledge of the ages, “That’s why you’re
constipated”. “Say what”, I replied.
Tylenol it
turns out has codeine as its main pain killing ingredient. In
particular, Tylenol 3 is the extra strength version of Tylenol, meaning
therefore it has an extra strong dosage of codeine. The problem with
codeine is that if you have never taken it before, it can completely
paralyze the rectum muscles. And now you tell me.
I asked the
doctor what’s next. ”Nothing”, he said, not the favorite explanation I’d
been hoping for and sounding like maybe he’d been in cahoots with the
author of that philosophy paper. “The paralysis should come out by
itself by tomorrow and you’ll be fine”.
Concluding
by now that he had probably never ‘bin there done that’ in quite the
same desperate circumstance that was now befalling me, I said that
tomorrow was never going to come and wasn’t there something else could
be done. So he gave me a couple of Cuban missiles and said if the
discomfort became too severe, just insert one.
Well sure
enough, about seven o’clock that night, my whole world came to an end.
My hard clumpy friend was now so absolutely furious in the winter of its
discontent that my ears were starting to ring. So I threw abandon to the
wind and launched one of the Cuban missiles.
Exactly one
hour later, the atomic bomb went off. The trap door blew wide open and
the desperate payload inside sailed smoothly out into the cool awaiting
receptacle as free as a bird.
Never,
trust me never, was I so glad to see a grouchy guest leave quite as much
as this one. I gained even more relief from the now certain knowledge
that I now had a proven technique for dealing with any more such
apocalyptic visits if ever occurring, god forbid.
None ever
did, not that was disappointed or anything. The only stuff to follow the
feisty clump was the rendered muffin the hospital had given me after the
operation in the recovery room as my meal for the day. The Cuban Missile
crisis was officially over.
The good news through all this though, was that the sutures had somehow
managed to stay intact even through all those strains of Samson. I have
no idea why. They must be making thread a lot better these days. And of
course, the operation itself was a complete success.
Continue to Part 2
