Cigar Box Banjo (12 page)

8
Which is to say, Bob Dylan was, for all intents and purposes, joined onstage by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band! Bloomfield and the rhythm section had been wrangled by organist Al Kooper the day before, and three songs were rehearsed during the night. It was, apparently, not the most comfortable mix of musicians. “It was a tough night,” Al Kooper has said. “Complicated and ugly.”

9
Yarrow ostensibly supported Dylan’s decision to “go electric,” though he later said, “It was as if all of a sudden you saw Martin Luther King, Jr., doing a cigarette ad.”

10
Folk festivals have the same heart beating deep within. They are egalitarian, rarely making special accommodation for the moneyed or privileged. Or the performers, for that matter. At Blue Skies, held near the town of Clarendon, Ontario, everybody camps out, which surprised some members of Porkbelly Futures. The organizers had erected our tents on the periphery of a little enclave called “The Swamp,” and that night, sweating in a sleeping bag designed for penguin observation in Antarctica, I zipped the vent open for a feeble blast of air. In the morning—many of you are ahead of me here—the tent was filled with mosquitoes. Breakfast was very tasty, as were lunch and dinner, but Marty, Chas, and I felt ourselves growing weaker. It dawned on us with a sick-making thud that they were not feeding us meat. We were eating
meat substitutes.
The next day, the three of us snuck out and drove the hundred kilometres down to Kingston, where we located a Keg and devoured a cow. We tried to find a hotel, but none were available in the city, it being the August long weekend. Then a motel—but none were available, it being, you know. With great resignation, we returned to the campground and climbed into our downy sacks.

11
Which began in 1936, to quote from their website, “when five London Labour Choirs met to perform together at a time when the world was hurtling towards a struggle to contain the menace of fascism; embodied in the conflict of the Spanish Civil War; the development of the holocaust; wholesale genocide, and the suppression of human spirit.”

12
MacColl wrote the song in 1957—this is the kind of story we songwriters love—but it remained unknown for twelve years, at which point first-time film director Clint Eastwood used the song to underpin a love scene in his movie
Play Misty for Me
. Three years later, as recorded by Roberta Flack, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was awarded the Grammy for Song of the Year.

13
MacColl wrote in the September 1965 issue of
Sing Out!
magazine, “our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside traditions formulated over time . . . But what of Bobby Dylan? . . . A youth of mediocre talent. Only a completely noncritical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel.”

14
One of the things I thrilled to, I should mention, was the organ, a musical squalling as insistent as eaglets wanting to be fed. It was played by Al Kooper, although he had originally gone to that session to play guitar. There was this other guy there, Mike Bloomfield. Kooper listened to him warm up, then rather sheepishly re-cased his own instrument and turned his attention to the keyboards.

CHAPTER
5

H
ERE IS how I would spend some Saturday nights when I was a teenager.

The first thing you need to understand is that there were many, many Saturday nights when I had nothing to do. I am not trying to claim any special sense of isolation or loneliness. That’s the state of existence for all teenagers: nothing to do. Teenagers today, despite the mind-boggling advances made by science and technology, still have nothing to do. They have more ways to occupy themselves whilst they do nothing, that’s all. All I had was television and, well, a little dink-twiddling from time to time.

But I hated having nothing to do on Saturday nights, and I still do. Any other night of the week, and I’m perfectly content with my own company. Even Friday, when the workaday lads are pounding the city’s fun button, I have no problem staying at home and keeping my own counsel. But Saturdays, I am compelled to shore up my small puddles of energy against the ever-constant lassitude and hit the streets.

In my youth, these Saturday evenings would begin with, of all things, a consideration of wardrobe. Now, it’s true, one of the benefits of being a bluesman from Don Mills, Ontario, is that you don’t have to think much about the clothes you wear. Indeed, if you do, you aren’t really a bluesman. I usually wore jeans and t-shirts, some kind of boot to account for my splayfooted waddle. But these Saturday nights, I would try to dress myself with style, which usually involved a madras shirt with a “matching” dickie. I’m not sure if you remember dickies, which were turtlenecks. Not turtleneck
sweaters,
understand, just the actual turtleneck, with enough material down the front and back so that someone might believe that, beneath your shirt, you wore the full garment—or they might believe it if they had spectacularly bad eyesight and a double-digit IQ. “Matching” is in quotes because my colour sense was a little suspect. I might also wear Beatle boots, which forced my fat toes into arrowheads with all the merciless bone-breaking of Chinese foot-binding. As for pants, I will spare you. Suffice it to say that the salient factor was tightness. Yeah.

Thus attired, I would leave the house. I was not married back then, of course; there was no one to look at me with disdain tinged with disbelief and demand, “You’re not going outside like that, are you?” So I would leave, unchallenged, and I would walk out to Lawrence Avenue and wait for the eastbound bus.

A
west
bound bus would have taken me downtown. I bet you assumed that’s where I was going, didn’t you, to the big city. Even though Toronto was still called “Toronto the Good” by many people (chiefly Montrealers), there were some lively places. There was Yonge Street, for example, which back then had developed a truly awesome seediness. It’s hard to believe that any major city, let alone Toronto, would have allowed its main commercial thoroughfare to become such a crippled stroll, the boulevard lined with strip clubs and massage parlours. And, of course, there was Yorkville, which was our version of Greenwich Village or Haight-Ashbury. I would go there, on occasion, because there were girls in Yorkville, young women with long hair and see-through blouses. The famous club the Riverboat was not licensed, which meant I could enter and see such notables as Phil Ochs,
¹
Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee.
²
Kotzma and I spent one notable week attending the nightly performances of the Siegel-Schwall Band, an outfit from Chicago that was, in some senses, But-terfield Lite.
³
Corky Siegel and Jim Schwall met while studying at Roosevelt University. Schwall, a guitar player, came from a country music background, while Siegel (who studied saxophone, but focussed on the harmonica) favoured the blues. Their sound resulted from an attempt to combine these two genres, which I suppose explains why I liked them so much. In many ways this is what we tried to do, years later, with Porkbelly Futures. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s not the point of this aside, anyway; I was concerned rather with delivering a memory. There’s Kotzma and me attending every night of a week-long stint, sitting as close as we could to the Siegel-Schwall Band, who knew us as the kids who came to see every show. As they played the blues, Corky Siegel would wail on his harp (remember your terminology, now), drawing in and flattening his thirds and sevenths with very deep-throated howls. Every so often (actually, quite often, compared to other harpists) a reed would snap inside the harmonica. Corky Siegel would reach for a fresh instrument with one hand, and with the other pass the busted harp to Kotzma.

But I rarely ventured down to Yorkville on my own. As mentioned above, there were young women with long hair and see-through blouses there, but don’t forget I was wearing a dickie and a madras shirt. So I would board the eastbound bus, which took me into the wilds of Scarborough.

I’ve mentioned Scarborough before. Patrick Murphy, the Manure bassist, came from there, and, as noted, it was a slightly better place for a bluesman to be from than Don Mills. My high school actually serviced both Don Mills and Scarborough, abutting as it did the divisional road, Victoria Park Avenue. It was a cruel and damnable stereotype (but like all such cruel and damnable stereotypes, not without foundation) that a lad from Don Mills would be enrolled in a five-year academic program while a Scarborough boy would register in four-year tech. There were even
two
-year tech guys, gormless fellows with tattoos and decks of smokes folded into the sleeves of their t-shirts. They took apart cars and put them back together again, biding time until their sixteenth birthdays. And while I could not in fairness claim that all of these guys came from Scarborough, I would bet a lot of money that none of them were from Don Mills.

If you have an interest in the biographies of musicians, this might all have a familiar ring. The young white lad, eager to immerse himself in the blues, travels out of suburbia and ventures into the black ghettoes. That’s not what’s going on here. I like to think I would have done that. I mean, I did what I could, buying recordings of performers like Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson. I didn’t like them much, but I bought them.
⁴
And when opportunity presented itself I would hurry out to hear performances given by Albert King and Buddy Guy. (The former performed at Toronto’s Massey Hall, the latter at the aforementioned Riverboat. Buddy Guy, using the advanced technology of cordless radio transmission, would leave the club and play out on the sidewalk of bustling Yorkville Avenue, shilling for his own show.) But the biggest obstacle to my adhering to the template mentioned above was that Toronto, in those days, lacked a sizable black community. No, in heading into the heart of Scarborough, I was seeking out the white working class. Scarborough was peopled with hard-drinking people—in my imagination, the men are uniformly gnome-like and wear grog-blossomed noses, the women are large and lack teeth—of various descent, although I would say the largest demographic was Scottish. I can’t cite statistics, but I can tell you that my destination (I descended the bus at Kennedy Avenue) was a curling rink, the Broom & Stone. On Saturday evenings, back in the late sixties, the curlers were forced to retire to the club room, and the sheets were given over to soul music.

THERE WERE four stages set up on the cardinal points of the ice (I guess there was some covering over the ice; at least, I don’t remember the dancers going down all the time), and the audience would move, herdlike, to assemble in front of the active one. Each stage contained more or less the same equipment. Traynor amplifiers constituted the backline.
⁵
Off to one side sat a couple of hulking wooden crates: one, a Hammond B-3 electric organ, the other, a Leslie cabinet.
⁶
Five young men would take to the stage. I suppose there might have been some quartets, or sextets, but they were uncommon. Invariably, the configuration was bass, drums, guitar, organ, and lead singer. They were dressed identically. That is, the members of each quintet were dressed identically. They took pains not to be dressed the same as, or even similarly to, any of the other quintets. That is why some of the groups were dressed even worse than myself, as though they were attending some Formal Event for the Criminally Insane. Pinstripes were common, and satiny sheens. The singer was allowed a little latitude. Sometimes he wore a different suit from the others (the same cut, mind you, with the material a complementary colour, or an attempt at such), and he was allowed to strip down a bit, to remove the jacket and loosen the tie. Often this stripping down happened as the set progressed. The singer, after all, would be engaged in some pretty strenuous activity, his fists clenched in rapture, light streaks shooting off his patent-leather shoes, his eyes focussed on some Gloryland far away. As I remember it, the singers for the first three groups would introduce songs by saying things like, “I was talking to my friend George the other day. . .” or “This is a song I learned from my friend George . . .”

It took a couple of hours to make the circuit of all four stages. By the time we arrived at the last one, the crowd was jittery with anticipation. We emitted a low rumble, like an idling ’56 Bel Air. When a voice announced the next group— the Mandala!—there was an eruption that registered on the Richter.

You know who was in that group?

George.

George Olliver would glide sideways to the centre of the stage, carried there by a vacillation of his right heel and toe that was so small as to be virtually undetectable. At any rate, a lot of George’s foot action was shrouded by the bell of his bell-bottoms. He would snatch the microphone out of its clip with an irritated, almost violent motion, as though he’d been looking for it all day long and this was the last place he expected to find it. He held the mic in an overly fussy way, his hand curled upwards, fingers often pointing outwards in a nancy manner.

“I’ve come four thousand miles,” he’d bark at the crowd. “Maybe here I can find my opportunity. . .”

And the band would kick in with the rhythm, which I am producing even as I write this, my cheeks puffed and my lips slapping together explosively.

“People have always made a fool of me . . .”

George’s voice possessed a high huskiness. His diction was clipped and his vowels tight. The lines he produced were embellished with bluesy glissandos and grace notes. And when the guitarist stepped forward to solo,
⁷
George would throw the microphone back into the clip, glide sideways and begin to dance. This he would do with a degree of muscularity, his dancing being comparable, as I recall it now, to the figure skating of Elvis Stojko. Indeed, the two men share a distinctive physiology, their limbs ever so slightly truncated. Many of their moves have a pugnacious quality, as though the two men were card-carrying members of the Lollipop Guild. And often, wee moments before the instrumental interlude ended, George would drop into the splits. He would pause there a moment, sucking in air greedily, and then squeeze his legs together, propelling himself heavenward. He’d grab at the mic again and launch into the new verse.