Jig Doll at Dusk: a review of Fat Albert's Open Stage for Wednesday April 27th

           

            On the evening of April 27th as I was getting ready to leave for Fat Albert’s open stage, I realized that I’d once again forgotten to reattach my white and red flashers to the front and back of my bike. I only had time to get the white one roadworthy because the little ring that I’d run the wire through before had broken off. I couldn’t thread another wire through the inside, so I had to take the light apart. Even then it didn’t work and so I had to take an exact knife and try to break a larger hole. Finally the plastic hole broke open all together, so I had to hook the wire over the little screw and then just snap the other half of the flasher over it to hold it in. I wired it into place at the centre of my handlebars and then secured the wire with black tape. I put the red flasher in my pocket to see if I could figure out a quick solution later on for my return trip.

            When I arrived at the Steel Workers Hall, the sombre security guard directed me into the little room near the entrance that the Fat Albert’s group is sometimes moved to when crowded out by a bigger function. In the smaller space, Tony Hanik was already setting up and Charles Winder was practicing on his Spanish guitar. There were already ten names on the list, though not half that many in the room, but the number two slot was open and I put my name in.

            I don’t know much about Tony Hanik, other than the fact that he’s originally from the States, but I overheard him chatting with Charles Winder, who knew that Tony had studied with Marshall Mcluhan at U of T back in 1970. Based on what he learned from McLuhan, Tony said, “Communicating information in a different way structures the mind in a different way … Cars make the suburbs possible and then they make them necessary.”

            I temporarily tied my red bike flasher to the leather lace that’s threaded on the lower left side of my motorcycle jacket.

            The host, Mary Milne arrived. She and Tony were discussing the fact that they couldn’t get any room for the open stage until after 21:00 on the following Wednesday of May 4^th. The security guard, they said, has been unaccommodating. Sometimes they are given a small office space upstairs when there is no room for them downstairs, but the guard told them that the people upstairs don’t want them using their office anymore.

            I asked Tony if the honeymoon between fat Albert’s and the Steelworkers Hall was over. He explained that only the following week would it be a choice between starting late or cancelling all together. He said that he’s only there once a month, so it would be up to Glen Garry what they would do.

            Mary declared to someone else that she was looking forward to June, when Fat Albert’s ends for the summer, because after twenty years of hosting, she would be retiring from the gig.

            The open stage began, as usual with Charles Winder. He said that he would be playing two farruca flamenco pieces. I think that he called the first one “Farruca Buleria 13”. That kind of picking and strumming really takes a lot of discipline and unlike a lot of different genres of guitar music that may sound different but use the same kind of playing, flamenco is almost an entirely different approach to the instrument. It seems to me that it would be hard enough just to learn all the fingering, let alone how to recognize from musical notation exactly where one’s fingers are supposed to go. When Charles finished his first piece, I looked at my watch. It had been ten minutes long. His second offering involved the same type of picking, fingering and strumming, but with the added element of tapping out percussion on the wood of the guitar at various points.

            I was next, and began by asking if there were any “bad girls” there tonight. Ruth Jenkins was sitting on the steps that lead down from the entrance and she responded, “Are there any what?” in a tone that was really asking, “What the fuck are you saying about women now?” I repeated my question and Glen Garry raised his hand. Then I asked if there were any “naughty boys” there, and I seem to recall that it was also Glen that put up his hand. I then performed “Bad Girls and Naughty Boys”, which is my English adaptation of  Serge Gainbourg’s “Villaines Filles, Mauvais Garcons” – “… Tearing through the valley are the wild rapids that mirror in their dancing all our young passions, and it’s because of that flow we create and destroy like bad girls and naughty boys …” I noticed that the woman sitting beside Ruth was bopping to the beat of the song though. In retrospect, I guess I could have set up the song with less confusion by asking if anyone there had ever been referred to as a bad girl or a naughty boy, since that’s what the song is about.

            I had been nervous about doing my second song, because it seemed to offend a few people last year when I did it there. I decided to ease the blow this time by giving a bit of the song’s history. I segued from “Bad Girls and Naughty Boys” by saying, “Speaking of bad boys, the title of this next song was inspired by a line from a poem that an old friend of mine wrote about twenty years ago and the rest was inspired by what I know about his life. Some of you know him. His name is Cad Gold Junior.” I then sang “One Hundred Hookers”. Some of the people in the audience looked so old, so middle class and so stone faced that it was bizarre to see their faces while I sang, “I’ve got a hundred hookers in love with me, I take my pick, they suck my dick, they do it all for free …” I played it better than I did there last year and I did get a couple of enthusiastic responses when I was finished, especially from Glen.

            After me was Andrea Hatala, who played two of her songs on the piano, starting with “The Bridge” – “Out on the sea … calling to you … safe inside your house …. trying to find the key … take a look inside …” I’d thought that a line in the refrain was “castrate your fears” and I thought to myself, “What a great line!” but then I realized that Andrea was probably saying, “Cast away your fears” and I was disappointed.

            Before starting a second song, the title of which I don’t think she gave, Andrea commented, “It must be spring or something!”  From the song – “I was tough as leather … Nobody could change me, nobody could win, then you slipped under my skin … I won’t enjoy my solitude anymore …”

            The fourth performer was Martin Owen, who brought a colourful painting with him and set it up on a chair to the left of centre stage, as if it were there to accompany him visually while he played guitar. He sang and played the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller song, “Hound Dog” very slowly with excruciatingly extended syllables and a vibrating voice perhaps in a kind of bizarre imitation of Elvis Presley’s own melodic stutter. When he was done he took a red harmonica out of his pocket and was about to play, but I asked him first if he was going to tell us about his painting. He said that it was of his childhood friend sitting on the couch. He said, “I grew up loving not my neighbour … Having breakfast while watching Francis Bacon eat your bacon …” Then he played for a while on the harmonica, though I didn’t recognize any tune. After he’d finished I asked him what the melody was and he answered, “How Much Is That Doggy In the Window?”

            Next was Dawn, who did her own song on guitar, entitled, “In Love Again” – “This man with the sad eyes makes me tremble, don't ask me why I'm in love … Never can get enough … How can it be so easy … No I didn't look for love. It found me. My heart takes a detour when love is here … Goodbye to old friends I see no one but him … Can't walk him off my mind. I don't even try …”

            Dawn’s second piece was called “If I Were …” – “If I were a man I would be a captain on a boat … we'd make love on the beach savouring every second and after our bodies gorged in flames we'd fall asleep in each other's arms but a woman doesn't say things like this … I'd offer you pretty jewels … enough pearls to drive you crazy and near Milan in a village called Bergam I'd build you a villa, but a woman doesn’t buy things like this … nowadays it's everyone for himself, these old fashioned love stories only happen in the movies … If only men weren't in such a hurry … If I were a man I'd phone you up all day long … but a woman doesn't make these things happen, oh if I were a man I would be romantic.” One good thing about being in this other room, at least from my position in the front row, was that the silhouette of the still bare tree against the deepening blue sky made a nice backdrop as Dawn played at dusk.

            Following dawn was Kirk Felix, with some guitar help from Jeff Currie. Kirk began with a cover of Tom Paxton’s “The Last Thing On My Mind”, and urged people to sing along on the chorus. I’ve always liked that chorus, so though I tend to resist the dictatorship of singalongs, even I joined in on “Are you going away with no word of farewell, will there be not a trace on your mind. Well, I could have loved you better, didn’t mean to be unkind. You know that was the last thing on my mind.”

            Kirk told us that he met Tom Paxton at a concert not too long ago and found him to be a very nice guy.

Kirk’s second song was an original, named, “Old Folkie Song” – “I’m just an old folk singer … I’ve never been in a band … I remember haunting places … opening for Johnnie D … and meeting a guy called Gordon … Now I’m over sixty-five, and I’m still singing those songs … sharing rhyme and reason before I am long gone.”

At the end, Kirk grabbed hold of the cord that was plugged into his guitar and asked Tony, “Can I pull out now?”

It was 21:00 and time for the feature performer, who this time around and pretty much the same time as last year, was Bob Allen. He had Glen Garry back him up on the piano and Tom Daniel to fill in on the acoustic bass, though Bob didn’t introduce Tom at all.

Bob started with Gordon Lightfoot’s “Cotton Jenny”.

His next few were traditional sounding country songs of Bob’s own composition, beginning with “Truck Drivin Song #2”, in which the narrator complains about his friend the truck and thinks about hanging up his keys.

Then came “I Saw Love In Your Eyes” – “Time went by like a breeze, the river was flowing like a song …”

“Northern Bound” is a song about a guy whose baby left him and he only knows she went north, and so the chorus has the call of “Northern bound” which Glen enthusiastically repeated in a higher voice along with several people in the audience joining in. The narrator spends three years riding trains looking for his baby (obsessive much?) until one day in the dining car he falls in love with another girl and in the last chorus they are both “southern bound”.

At this point, Bob handed his guitar to Glen Garry and then took out his ukulele to sing “Bye Bye Blues”, for which Glen played a very good instrumental break.

Bob then took something else out of his bag and had Glen play an instrumental piece. What Bob had pulled out of his sack was a little wooden puppet of a man with a stick coming out of its back, which Bob held with one hand and moved rhythmically above a wooden paddle that he held with the other. The effect was that the puppet was tap dancing to Ben Bernie and Maceo Pinkard’s “Sweet Georgia Brown”.

As Bob was putting the puppet away, I asked him if he’d made it himself. He answered that someone had given it to him and that they’ve been around for over a hundred years. I looked this up later and found that they go back at least five hundred years in Europe and that the most common name for them in English is a “jig doll”.

Next, Bob got hold of a set of musical wooden spoons, and played them while Glen did another number. Bob plays the spoons quite masterfully and made some interesting percussive sounds with them. I’ve heard it done with metal spoons as well, but I think that the wooden ones sound much better.

Bob Allen’s style of playing the bass with his thumb while picking out the rest of a melody is very compatible with a lot of the songs that he does that were made famous by Johnny Cash. For Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”, Bob took back his guitar and Glen returned to the piano.

Bob followed this with Hank Williams’s “Singing Waterfall”, which is about a waterfall where the narrator used to meet his love. Then she died and was buried there where he still meets with her and he also dreams of her being alive and still meeting with him by the waterfall.

Bob’s last song was “Rock Island Line”, which he said was written by Leadbelly, but according to Wikipedia it’s a song that was traditionally sung by prison inmates and that that’s where Leadbelly learned it.

Bob Allen is certainly a craftsman with an impressive arsenal of skills that he often draws from when he performs at Fat Albert’s. While his own songs are not creatively ground breaking and the lyrics aren’t very interesting, they are musically as good or better than most modern music of the Country and Western genre.

Continuing with the open stage, the next performer was Heinz Klein with his beat up old twelve-string guitar. He chose to sing without the microphone, but at first he wasn’t loud enough to compensate. For some reason Heinz was looking at me while he sang – “When you’re clueless, paralysed and helpless … there may be a guitarist that helps to connect … Stories about journeys, fear and loneliness … songs of dreams … songs of countries … where we always want to be … Future glimpses of something we might see …”

Heinz told us that these were new songs, and I don’t think he gave a title for his second offering, but his voice achieved more volume when he sang – “ … Don’t you doubt yourself … Even if you’re feeling down it’s not as if the world will break apart … You have to step outside … Everything is half as bad even if you’re feeling down …”

Then came Jeff Currie, who began with a note of thanks for all the collective get well wishes that were sent to him in a card from the fat Albert’s family during his recent illness. Mary affirmed from the back that he means a lot to them and he responded by returning the sentiment before beginning his set.

Jeff started with “Always On My Mind”, which he told us that he’d always thought to be a song written by Willie Nelson, but he’d found out that that was not the case. I’d also been under the impression that Nelson had composed the piece, but Jeff didn’t give us the actual author’s name, so I had to look it up later. It was penned by Johnny Christopher, Mark James and Wayne Carson.

Jeff’s second song was a cover of the John and Michelle Philips song, “California Dreaming”.

After Jeff was Paul Nash, who told us that he would be continuing with the arboreal theme begun in the previous song with, “all the leaves are brown”. He sang “Autumn Leaves”, the popular but lyrically mediocre English version by Johnny Mercer of Jacques Prevert and Joseph Kosma’s beautiful “Les Feuilles Mortes”.

He followed this with “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame” by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. There’s a coincidental French connection here too, since Mort Shuman was later to write English versions of several Jacques Brel songs.

Next was Tony Hanik, with backup from Jeff Currie and Tom Daniel. He began with a relaxed but moving cover of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me”.

His second offering was Dwight Yoakam’s “The Heart That You Own” – “I pay rent on a run-down place, there ain't no view but there's lots of space, in my heart, the heart that you own, I pay the rent, pay it right on time, baby I pay you ever single dime, for my heart, the heart that you own, used to be I could love here for free, way back before you bought the property, now I pay daily on what once was mine, lord I probably owe you for these tears that I cry …”

            Moving on we had Carole Parkash with guitar and vocal assistance from Paul Nash.

            Carole began with “All I Can Give You” by David Campbell – “A song is all I can give you, as you move near to me when the night is done.

            Then Carole picked up her little tambourine and played along with Paul’s guitar as they sang together “All I Have To Do Is Dream” by Boudleaux Bryant.

            From this point on, because of time constraints, performers were cut to one song apiece.

            Marianne Peck, with help from Glen Garry and Tom Daniel, sang “Could I Have This Dance?” by Wayland Holyfield and Bob House.

            After Marianne, Glen and Tom remained on stage to accompany Ruth Jenkins, as she sang her own song, “In My Solitude” – “ … you hold me with reveries of days gone by …”

            Brian Rosen did “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service. Whether consciously or unconsciously, people seem to pick the longest song when they are only allowed one song. I’d heard “The Cremation of Sam McGee” recited before but I’d never heard it sung – “There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold. The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold … If our eyes we'd close then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see …” When Brian was leaving the stage I asked him who’d written the music. He answered quickly without stopping, but I’m pretty sure I heard him say that he did. I found a version on YouTube later though that sounded very similar.

            Next was Peter James, who sat down at the piano and played a very short improvisation when he sheepishly said was entitled, “Travelling Cellophane”.

            Following Peter was Wendy Chairnstrom, singing a cover of Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s “Talk to Me of Mendocino” – “ … the trees grow high in New York State
and they shine like gold in the autumn. Never had the blues from whence I came, but in New York State, I got 'em …”

            Then came Lillian Kim, backed up by Glen Garry on guitar, Tom Daniel on bass and Paul James on piano. Lillian told us that Peter James had referred to this ensemble as her “human shield”. She said that she usually strums, but for this new song, entitled “Bird With A Broken Wing” she would try picking – “ … Saw your name on a bus, so it made me think of us …”

            It was Glen Garry’s turn and once again, the very busy Tom was brought to the stage. Up to that point he had only been referred to as “Tom”, with no last name. Finally, I asked and he said Daniel, “like the whiskey”, but he didn’t say “Daniels”, which is more like the whiskey.  Glen sang and played “Five Guys Named Moe” by Louis Jordon – “I gotta tell you a story from way back, truck on down and dig me Jack. There's Big Moe, Little Moe, Four-Eyed Moe, No Moe, look at brother, look at brother, look at brother Eat Moe … Who's the greatest band around, makes the cats jump up and down, who's the talk of Rhythm Town? Five guys named Moe…”

            Half of the duet that followed Glen was the youngest performer I’d ever seen on the Fat Albert’s stage. They were Charlene Small and Brianna MacBeth, and except for the difference in their surnames I would have guessed that they were mother and daughter. We weren’t told which lady had which name, but the girl looked no more than fifteen. They sang the Irish folk song “Molly Malone” acapella – “In Dublin's fair city,

where the girls are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone, as she wheeled her wheel-barrow, through streets broad and narrow, crying …” The last part of each verse was sung by the higher voice of the younger member of the duo – “ … cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!”

            The penultimate performer of the night was Zoe Henderson, with help from Glen and Tom, as she sang her song “Wallaceberg” – “ … When it came to who would leave first, you said you’d be the one … Forgive me if I don’t pick up that phone, cause I’m not here in Wallaceberg alone.”

            The final open stager, Bonnie, was new to Fat Albert’s. She told us that she doesn’t sing or play an instrument, but that she can rhyme, and she calls what she does “gripe rhyme”. She recited a poem she’d written as a protest against the way the elderly are treated in North York General Hospital. The poem recounts incidents of seniors going in with one ailment, being diagnosed with another and spending years in bed.

            Glen said that they would be starting at 21:00 next Wednesday. I asked about the sign up for the open stage and he said that 21:00 is when we would be allowed in, so we’d start as soon as we were set up and so sign up would happen right away. The feature usually starts at 21:00, so I asked if that would still be the case. He told me it was a good question. He said that in any case, it would probably be just one song each for everyone but the feature.

            As I was unlocking my bike, Tom Daniel left the building, walked toward me and commented, “So you’re the other crazy guy with the bike!” I asked who the first was and he answered, “Me!” I said goodnight and headed home, getting to bed about half an hour after midnight.