On Monday night I went to the Tranzac open stage for the first time since the beginning of September. There was a new bartender with dreamy dark eyes and much prettier and friendlier than the guy that was working there on Monday nights for the last couple of years. There were already five or six people on the list when I signed in. At about twenty minutes before the official start time, Chris Banks arrived to start setting up.
I overheard a conversation
between two guys, one of which asked how a mutual acquaintance was doing. The
response was that Mark had gotten himself into some hot water. He’d married an
Italian woman who stopped taking birth control and “dropped a kid on him”. Then
she made him stop smoking marijuana, even though it will be legal soon.
I noticed No MSG
sitting at the table next to mine. I greeted him and we chatted for a while. I
went to the washroom and he followed me, although all he did was wash his
hands. He’d been coming every Monday night the whole eight months that I’d been
in school. He told me that the open stage was getting so popular that one has
to come earlier to get a spot. Judging from the length of the list when I
arrived at my usual time, it didn’t seem any different from before to me. I
expressed the wish that they’d start earlier though. He suggested that maybe
they could have an open stage for seniors that begins at 20:00. I said that I’d
be okay with that start time and added that it would be nice to get to bed at a
decent hour.
The toilet stall of
the men’s washroom at the Tranzac is enormous. It has one of the barroom tables
in it and I wonder if that’s where they hold their board meetings.
After I returned to the Southern Cross
room, No MSG didn’t come back in.
The room was very cold. I could tell at
first if it was because the air conditioning was on or if a window was open, so
I got up, walked over and asked Chris. He looked up from the floor where he was
connecting some cords and with the smile and the forced patience of someone
that didn’t want to be asked, he answered, “I don’t know.” A few minutes later,
perhaps to make up for his terseness, he came over and told me in a friendlier
way that he really didn’t know what the problem was, but he’d heard about the
air conditioning at the Tranzac being very finicky.
At 22:08, Chris started things rolling by
inviting Robert Labelle to the stage. Robert was filming himself with a camera
mounted the table in front of him with a little extra height provided by what
looked like the box the camera came in.
Robert began with what he said was a
tribute to the Reverend Gary Davis. He called his piece the “Keep Your Lamps
Trimmed and Burning, Running Into Hesitation Blues”. When he got to the part
that was a cover of the traditional Blues song, “Hesitation Blues” he sang – “
… The eagle on the dollar says, 'In God we trust', you say you want a man but
you wanna see that dollar first, oh how long do I have to wait? Can I get you
now, how long must I hesitate? Well, if the river was whiskey and I was a duck,
I'd swim to the bottom, and never come up … Well, the hesitation stockings got
the hesitation shoes, you know I got them hesitation blues …”
Robert
said that his guitar goes out of tune after playing Ragtime because he has to
bend the strings a lot to make the tunes come to life.
His
second piece was an instrumental called “Mona Ray”, composed by Leo Kottke. The
piece had some pretty fancy fingering.
While he was
playing, I counted heads. Besides the bartender and Chris, there were twelve of
us in the room, and almost all of them were signed up for the open mic. When
the audience listening to musicians is made up of only musicians it seems kind
of cannibalistic to me.
The next performer
was Steven, though I don’t know how he spells his name. His first song was
entitled Bluebird, and in the lyrics he’s asking the bird to fly to his lover
and tell her he loves her – “ … Bluebird sail over my teardrops …”
It seemed to me
that there was something wrong with the electronics that were amplifying
Steven’s acoustic guitar. It sounded kind of fuzzy to me. I mentioned it when
he was finished and suggested that he just unplug and play to the room, but
nobody else noticed a problem, so he continued with his pick-up as it was.
For his second
offering, Steven had Robert Labelle accompany him, and he explained that the
song was inspired by a relationship in which Robert used to be – “She never
learned my name … called me by the months of the year … I forgot about Sadie
when a long-legged lady said that I would …”
Then came
Christopher, who told us that he plays with a band called Treeport and that
this would be the first time he’d ever played quietly while sitting down. He
said that the name of his first song was “Anti Blues”, but even though he was
singing into the microphone he wasn’t putting enough volume into his voice and
so I couldn’t make out most of his lyrics. On top of that, about halfway
through song, for some reason he thought he didn’t need the microphone at all and
so he pushed it away. It was kind of a Punk Blues song but the only thing I
could discern of his lyrics was the repeated phrase, “the things she makes me
do “.
For his second
song, he gave us a choice of two titles: “Marilyn Monroe” and “Mark Twain”. One
of the women called out “Marilyn” and a couple of people said “Twain”, so he
decided he’d do “Mark Twain”. Then a few ore people said “Marilyn” but
Christopher told them it was too late. It had some good strumming, with lots of
rock chords, but for the most part the lyrics were faint, until he started
screaming, “Somebody kill me please! I can’t look at no one in the way I look
at you!”
After Christopher was Nick, playing
Classical guitar music. The first song sounded familiar but I could quite place
it. When he was finished he told us that it was “Romance Anónimo” by Anonymous.
Man, that guy’s prolific! For the second one, Nick dug the sheet music out of
his case and told us that it was “Hungarian Dance #5”, but he didn’t tell us
that it was by Johannes Brahms.
The following performer was Anthony, who
I hadn’t seen at the Tranzac for a long time, though he’s a regular at the
Yellow Door open stage once a month at 6 St Joseph. For years he’s done the
same two or three songs that he’s written, though he does them very well,
playing hard on the strings and hitting the wood too every time he strums. I
know that Anthony has spent a lot of time homeless and may still be in that
situation. He tunes by ear, plays and sings non-verbally and then talks for a
while to set up a song before actually getting into it. He told us, “I knew a
little one, she said, Anthony, what’s about to happen was always meant for me”.
Then he began to sing, “So sad and lonely … I just think that you’re pretty …
and you just think that you’re pretty … and I just know that you’re pretty …
You were always meant for me.”
He told us that his second song was
pulled “from my freak bag full of hope and humour”. He sang – “ …I see you and
I see you and I see you” and he usually points at people in the audience when
he sings that part, but he didn’t this time – “ … I had to walk away and I had
to walk away, I don’t hate when you get that way, I’m not somebody’s fool, I
just walk away …”
I was number six. I set up my first song
by asking if anyone there had ever been referred to as a bad or naughty girl or
boy. Steven said, “It depends on whether or not I’m about to get spanked.”
Dennis said “No” and wanted to know why I asked. I answered that it was because
the song is about being notorious and a young age and I added that I think
everyone spends at least a small part of their early life being notorious for a
while. The I sang, “Bad Girls and Naughty Boys”, which is my English adaptation
of Serge Gainbourg’s “Villaines Filles, Mauvais Garcons” – “ … There is no one
else alive but you who can make me glow, if your parents found a way to wipe
your mind, I would teach you all the things that you already know …”
I hadn’t planned on saying anything to
set up my second song, but since my guitar was out of tune, I don’t want to
lose the audience’s attention while bringing the strings back into harmony with
one another, so I told the story of how I used to work as a furniture mover for
the Ontario government. One day I was removing the furniture from an office in
the old Lakeshore Mental Hospital, and in the drawer of the desk I found a
manual entitled, “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy”, which is what
eventually became the song I sang – “Plug the female end of the cord into the
place where it’s meant to go, plug the male end into any, any, any old electric
hole, now flick the switch, the light is green, we need to wait now to warm up
the machine, we’re wearing white and we’re feeling clean for shock therapy …”
It’s a long song, but a couple of people gave some indication that they liked
what I did.
Next was Dennis,
who told us he was going to cover a song by one of his favourite songwriters,
Jason Molina. He said the day Molina died was a very emotional day for him,
because it was also his nineteenth birthday.
I looked it up to find that it was March 16, 2013. The song he covered
was called “Farewell Transmission” – “ … Now
we'll all be brothers of the fossil fire of the sun, now we will all be sisters
of the fossil blood of the moon … all the great set up hearts all at
once start to beat … I'll streak his blood
across my beak and dust my feathers with his ashes, I can feel his ghost
breathing down my back, I will try and know whatever I try … The real truth
about it is no one gets it right, the real truth about it is we're all supposed
to try … Mama here comes midnight
with the dead moon in its jaws …”
with the dead moon in its jaws …”
Dennis
told us that he needed help with the next song, Phil Elverum’s “Human (Twenty
Bees)”. He wanted people to sing “human human” at certain points, but it was
not easy to tell exactly where they were expected to come in. If anyone did, it
was so faint that it might have been my imagination – “Human, human, where does your life go? How do you live? How do you forget that you must die … You will not and I will
never be free from the weight of our living. The load that our lungs must lift,
the armour we wear…”
Then
we heard from Isaac, who, though his dark hair was fairly short it rose high on
his head in a similar way to Lyle Lovett’s. Isaac assured us that he’d gotten
permission to read a poem in addition to his two songs. The poem was entitled
“Time for Coffee” – “ … The wind’s skeleton howl … tomorrow will be Hitler …
lowly hyperbole has no reason to exist … time for coffee.”
From
Isaac’s first song – “The sun it shines on through the moon … pelted by the
stones of man … Mona Lisa’s eyes … behind her eyes is just a wall … She saw the
signs of Lucifer …”
Isaac
has a real presence, he looks cool, he picks well and his lyrics are sometimes
quite poetic. I think he could go places and take modern folk music out of its
hipster slump.
He
told us that his second song was about a man, a woman and a child, and he sang
it in kind of a deep Elvisesque voice – “I loved that woman … she threw my
heart way down by the river bed … she turned my heart from black to red … I
watched her walk on out that door, she left our baby boy crying in the middle
of the floor … I gave my son that gun when he turned twenty-one, I said do as
you please … poor boy found his mama … the prettiest woman I done ever seen lay
down in the street … for the rats to feed …”
When
musicians are playing for other musicians, the people who haven’t played yet
are listening, but they are also thinking about their own set and how it’s
going to compare to whom they are listening to. The people who have already
played are listening, but they are thinking about leaving. When they listen
they listen to what relates to what they do or want to do with their music.
Musicians don’t make a very good audience because in general they are too self
absorbed. If non-performers are in the audience, it changes the whole dynamic,
unless of course the non-performers are there specifically to see and hear a
friend or lover perform, in which case there could be even more tunnel
listening.
After
Isaac came Joy Thompson, who I’ve heard perform a handful of times, always at
the Tranzac and always borrowing the house guitar, which needed some major
tuning this time around. She brought a guy named Rich to accompany her on the
piano. She tends to strum the guitar with only downstrokes, but she has a
strong, soulful voice and she writes her own songs– “ … I danced with the devil
to be on your level … all these directions have my attention … displacement in
this basement …”
Rich’s
piano accompaniment was quite good. He stayed for Joy’s second song as well.
Whatever else she does on the open stage, “Cheap Bottle of Wine” is the one
song with which she always finishes. She told us that she would be singing it
because she likes wine, because she doesn’t care if it’s cheap and because it’s
her birthday. She said that she had written part of the song for a class that
she’d been taking at the time, though she didn’t say what kind of a class it
was – “ … I like a cheap bottle of wine … just sit on the floor, just us girls
talking bout life …” Rich was did very well, backing Joy up, considering that
he’d never before heard the song.
The
second to last performer of the night was Sonja Seiler, who announced that the
songs she would be doing were brand new. I recall her having brought newborn
songs to the Tranzac before. One time she sang a very good song that she’d just
written a few hours earlier.
Her first song was
called “Your Magic Woman” – “ … I’ve known from the start I’ve got a place in your
heart, but I’m not here to make any repairs … Don’t wanna be the answer to your
question, your rock or your light in the dark … Don’t wanna be the thing that
makes you happy … Don’t wanna be the lifeboat that keeps you afloat when your
demons move in for the kill … I wanna know your secrets, I wanna be let in …
but I don’t wanna be your magic woman …”
Sonja told us that
her second song was inspired by a book entitled “Songwriters On Songwriting” in
which she’d found a quote from Willie Dixon that went, “If it’s not the truth,
it’s not the blues.” She thought that would make a great line in a song – “I
drew a hard line when we met that day, I swore we would be just friends … I
don’t mean to contradict this, I don’t mean to confuse, but I’ve got to tell the
truth, or this wouldn’t be the blues …”
The final
performer was Sonja’s friend Addie. As she went to the stage, Joy called out,
“I guess we had to wait till the end of the night for the girl power!”
Addie did two covers. The first was Paul
Simon’s “The Boxer” – “ … Asking only workmen’s wages I went looking for a job,
but I got no offers, just a come-on from the whores on Seventh Avenue, I do
declare there were times when I was so lonesome, I took some comfort there …”
At
the end of that song, Joy told Addie, “You look how you sing! You have the
whole vibe!” maybe it was the wide brimmed hat she was wearing.
Addie’s
second choice was the Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz song, “When You Say
Nothing At All”, about a lover communicating without words.
The
open station ended at twenty minutes after midnight.
On
my way to my bike I passed a gauntlet people who were standing outside of bars,
chatting and breathing each other’s second hand smoke.
As
I rode west past Long and McQuade there was a sign in the window that read
“Drum Month May 15”. That’s a short month!
When
I got home I noticed that my red flasher had fallen off the back of my bike.
Fortunately I have a few of them.
I
got to bed at about 1:30.
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