Move Montreal to Vancouver

           

            On Monday evening I had an early dinner and watched a couple of episodes of I Love Lucy. The only interesting thing about one of the shows was that as a birthday present to Lucy, Ricky wrote lyrics to the I Love Lucy theme song.

Monday August 8^th was the first time this summer that I needed to turn my bike flashers on for my trip to the Tranzac open stage, even though the sky was clear.

            In the Southern Cross room Chris Banks was playing some very slow jazz with a guitarist and a drummer. There were two middle aged couples at opposite ends of the room listening. One younger man was sitting at the bar and watching the ball game on the bartender’s laptop. I put my name down beside number 3 and went outside.

            After I’d tuned my guitar, Sarah Green came walking up with hers. She told me that she sees me a lot on Brock. It turns out that she lives in that area too. She asked if I have one of those old Parkdale apartments with the high ceilings and I confirmed that I do. When I told her how low my rent is she said, “That’s crazy!”

            Eric Sedore arrived and joined the chat. We talked about the heat ad the lack of rain this summer. I predicted that the apples would be very expensive this fall.

            Sarah asked, “Are you a lifetime Torontonian?”

I told, “No, I’m originally from New Brunswick.”

“But you’ve lived here for a long time.” She said it in the tone of an educated guess.

“I’ve been here since 1981, this time around.”

Eric added, “But you’ve lived out west too.”

“Yeah, I lived in Vancouver twice, and I was in Montreal for three years.”

Sarah, who’s also lived in Montreal, exclaimed, “Montreal is amazing!”

I nodded and told her that the ideal city would result from picking up Montreal and putting it where Vancouver is.

We went inside and Sarah began setting up the sound. Though she was scheduled to host the following week, Dave and John had asked to switch with her again because of scheduling problems that kept them both from being there.

Eric showed me a book that he had started reading by Donald Barthelme, an author I’d recommended to him. The book was called “40 Stories”. I’ve read several of his books but from that book I’d only read Barthelme’s take on the fairy tale, “Bluebeard”. Eric had only real the first story in the book and liked it, but was finding the second a little more difficult. Barthelme quite often takes his readers into the unexpected.

Eric asked if I thought he should read one of his own short stories sometime at the Tranzac open stage. My response was a definite yes. I told him that the only reason that I tend not to read my stories there was because I need the guitar practice.

Sarah started the open stage with a Johnathon Richmond song called “That Summer Feeling”. Jessie, the drummer that had been playing with Chris Banks stuck around to play drums for Sarah on that song. She told him, “I would have stolen your whole band if I’d just been more organized!” When he played along with the mellow song, he just tapped the brushes on the side of the bass drum and sometimes slapped them upward to the underside of the big cymbal. Several people in the audience knew the song and sang along with the chant of  “That summer feeling”.

First on the open stage was Isaac Bonk. He began with his song that addresses the Orlando shooting – “Way down in Orlando town there’s fifty people gone … Who did condone the sale of arms to this man … It’s the citizens who demand it as a right … Pride in religion drove this man to kill …”

He followed this with his song, “The Land Beneath Us Is Shifting” – “ … The hopeless kings will die … We see it begin as the beggar strikes a grin …”

Next was Eric Sedore, who told us that he’d recently read a book about the spread of Christianity throughout Europe. In one story within the book was a guy who could not sing, but had a vision, and so, inspired by this, Eric wrote a song entitled, “Kedman’s Hymn” – “Sing and shout, full of faith, free of doubt, I feel a little bit left out … Was I made to be ashamed of what I’ve become, so deaf, so blind and so dumb … Silent lamb follows me home. It has no voice of its own … I’d sacrifice anything to be able to sing … When I say my prayers, is anyone there? Does anyone care? When my ghost turns, the heavenly host, my voice will blend in with them, I suppose.”

Of his second choice, Eric told us, “When I was 19 and emotional, I’d play this song. He then played for us “Waste of Paint” by Conor Oberst. Eric’s delivery of this song was interesting because it was uncharacteristically angry for him – “I have a friend, he’s mostly made of pain … he cut one of my nightmares out of paper … he said … I am a waste of breath, of space, of time. I knew a woman … her love for her man was one of her many virtues, until one day she found out that he had lied and she decided the rest of her life from that point on would be a lie … She was free to waste away alone … As I hide behind these books I read, while scribbling my poetry as if art could save a wretch like me …” I heard Sarah and Jessie having a loud conversation during the song.

I needed to pee before performing but there was no time.

I performed for the second time my translation of Boris Vian’s “Le Déserteur” – “ … Dear Mr. President, I don’t want to fight in your war, I don’t think that I was born for the killing of other men. I hope you won’t be hurt, but I really really must say that my decision’s been made and I’m going to desert. Here’s the story of my line: The war is how my dad died, I missed my brother’s goodbye, but I heard his children cry. Mother suffered all her life, but now buried in her coffin, she’s cheated all the rockets and the soldier’s knife …” At the end of the song I tried to whistle the melody but wound up whisper-whistling it.

There were two new guys at the front who wanted to know about Boris Vian. I told them that he was an extremely prolific writer who died young. I said that the Robarts library at U of T has two shelves of his books. He wrote novels, plays, poetry and songs. He wrote a series of novels that were a combination of American style detective stories with a little French sado-masochism thrown in. I added that his last words were, “My ass!” I explained that one of his detective novels, which has been translated into English as “I Spit on Your Graves”, was being made into a French movie. He had disassociated himself from the film because he didn’t like the adaptation, but he went to the premiere just to heckle it. At one point when he shouted, in French of course, “You expect us to believe these guys are American? My ass!” he had a heart attack, and died on the way to the hospital.

For my second song I chose my own, “God Goes To My Head”, which I explained that I wrote when I used to believe in god – “The amphetamine rush of the sunset wind, helps me to remember that I’m covered with skin. It fills me and it shapes me so I’m stretched down the road, to a long thin forever where I might crack the code, of the enemy’s secret but the spies in my brain, plant mines in the answers just to driver me insane. But right under their noses an invisible thread, spirals endlessly inward from god, to my head …”

No MSG was set to go on after me, but he had to use the washroom. While he was gone, Jessie sat at the piano and noodled a bit. When No MSG came back, he was puzzled at first to see someone else at the piano. He went to double check the list to make sure it was his turn. Once he’d confirmed that he went to the piano and Jessie got up and tried to help No MSG with his set up, not knowing how obsessively particular he is. He was trying to help him with the piano seat but No MSG eschews the piano seat for an ordinary straight-backed chair. On top of that, Jessie was getting a little drunk by this time and so he was standing there and still trying to help but still not cluing in. No MSG finally told him that he likes him, but he’s got it under control.

No MSG then took inventory, “I got my chair, I got my cap, the lights are off, Sarah’s here, Tom’s at the bar, Jessie’s here, Christian’s kickin lyrical butt tonight! That’s worth money, man!”

Cad arrived around this time.

No MSG started with cascading piano, then something that was almost boogie-woogie. He sang, “Babapapababananananalalalalana” He was really getting into the vocal and then jumped his voice up to falsetto. After about three minutes, he finished the first piece and said, “I still got a little gas in the tank!”

He was getting into it again for a while but then called out, “Oh! I’m runnin out of steam!” and he began to slow down. Someone yelled, “Keep going!” No MSG changed direction a bit, explored for a while. Said, “Just a minute! Just a minute!” He slowed down. “Heyyah!” He began to scat in a similar way to the first piece, but more slowly and with more extended notes. Finally he declared, “There’s no more room left in the cassette! That’s it!”

Brad was the first of the two new guys to play. He had a white electric guitar and he was written down on the open stage list as “Brad and his pet, Fluffy”, though I think it was his friend Adam who had put his name down and just decided to have some fun while doing so.

For some reason, it took Brad at least three minutes to set up, so I took the opportunity to go to the washroom, but stopped on the way to talk with No MSG. He told me again that my song, “God Goes to My Head” is awesome and that I needed to register it with SOCAN because people are going to want to cover it. He added that he’d like to cover it.

Perhaps inspired by No MSG’s playing in the dark, Brad decided to play while sitting in a chair, with his back to the audience. He took a long time to tune and then just improvised for a while. It wasn’t very organized guitar playing, but it might have sounded good as accompaniment to someone playing something more organized.

Adam was written on the list as “Adam the One-Man Trio”. He had some interesting songs and lyrics. His first was called “Nervous Breakdown” – “There’s so much green it’s hard to see … Sharon’s on the shitter with a suicide death threat … Ranch dressing sitting in the kitchen sink … There’s a clown up on aisle seven … Silicon Jesus sipping lemonade, grandma in the courtyard trying to get saved …”

I think Adam gave the title of his second piece as “California Till Eleven” – “Can’t find my way home … California skies seem grayer today … A young heart can tear a hole through the skies of blue, when sifting for gold in a sewage pipe, all I found was you … A needle tears a hole into the heart of you …” Then he whistled for a while, much better than me, and then continued singing – “Another empty handed mother dripping down the drain from thoughts they can’t contain … In the end, they crucified me … I fell into a hole that broke because I had no soul.

Sarah finished with another Jonathan Richmond song called, “You’re Crazy For Taking The Bus”. Jessie seemed pretty drunk by this time. He asked if he could play the piano on Sarah’s song, but he didn’t – “Welfare gal and a drunk galoot and nobody wearing a three-piece suit. You meet folk this way that you just don’t see wile flying … Pepsi cans rolling round the bus … They don’t want my name and I don’t want their baggage claim, my guitar us seated right where I am …”

Sarah told us that Jonathan Richmond did a whole Country album. I called out, “Which country?” She said, “That’s actually very funny!”

Cad and I chatted with Adam and Brad. The two went to high school together in Thornhill, and now they are 22. Adam lived in California until he was ten. He’s also lived all over Israel. Since Cad is from Forest Hill, they consider him to be a tough, downtown Jew. I said that Cad is hard on the outside, but soft and chewy on the inside. Adam declared that Thornhill Jews are soft and chewy all over.

I was surprised that even though it was midnight, they would still be subwaying and bussing it back to Thornhill. Later though I overheard Brad say that they had to hurry because his mother was going to pick them up at Finch station.

No MSG was going to walk them to Bathurst station. Cad was going in that direction too and he wanted us all to walk together, but got the impression that No MSG wanted the boys to himself, se we walked ahead.

            I walked my bike with Cad to Ossington station, and on the way he told me about his recent trip to Peterborough to see the Spoons with his girlfriend and or roommate, Goldie; with his landlord and his landlord’s girlfriend and his landlord’s girlfriend’s friend. His landlord, his landlord’s girlfriend and the other guy have a very strange relationship, as her friend verbally abuses her to an extreme degree in front of him and he doesn’t seem to care. It’s bizarre to think of it this way, because I don’t consider myself normal, but compared with most of the people he knows, I’m one of a handful of normal friends that Cad has.