Cigar Box Banjo (21 page)

Blues musicians, by contrast, are really only required to know the blues. As a musical term, “blues” refers to a specific chord structure, the template for 99 per cent of all blues tunes. You may have heard the term “twelve-bar blues,” and here’s what we’re talking about: I (4 bars), I V (2 bars), I (2 bars), V (2 bars), I (2 bars). That’s it, with some minor variations. Sometimes a blues goes up to the IV on the second bar, and this is mostly dictated by how well the players know the song being performed. “Stormy Monday” usually doesn’t do it; Butterfield’s similar “Driftin’ and Driftin’” usually does. If you are ever listening to some blues guys jam, pay attention to the second bar of every verse. I wager you’ll notice that, for the first couple of times round the block, there is some confusion there, some dissonance. The last pair of bars can also be divided up, so that the notes go from the tonic to the dominant seventh, which supplies drama and urgency.

So: Stuart Laughton and Chas Elliott were walking along a European beach, ignoring bared breasts, discussing the blues. They had decided it would be fun to jam, and they wondered who else might care to join in. “How about,” one of them suggested, “Joel’s brother?”

In the world of symphonic music, I am Joel’s brother. I have no complaint with that. After all, in the world of Canadian letters, he is “Paul’s brother.” Actually, it is more like “Paul’s brother Joel, that amazing bassist, and by the way, remind me what Paul has written.” Anyway, I was contacted, once those fellows arrived back in Canada, and a jam was scheduled.

I went over to Chas’s house (his then-house, as he and his lovely artist wife, Alex, seem to move a lot). I pulled out a borrowed electric guitar and an amplifier of the same ilk as the one I’d used to blast out “Satisfaction” all those years ago. Stuart Laughton was toting a beautiful black Gibson guitar (the same style played by one of his great heroes, B.B. King) and a Fender amplifier,
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along with a battered suitcase full of harmonicas and peripherals. By “peripherals” I mean things like cables, tuners, picks, and capos. I assumed upon seeing the suitcase that Stuart was a well-equipped and organized man, but I was soon to learn this was not true. Despite the fact that the case was crammed full of stuff,
no particular and needed item could ever be located.
It was kind of astounding. Likewise with his harmonicas. It was almost like a magic trick: “You see here, I have twenty-nine silver harmonicas. Name a key, any key, the more common the better! Hmm? G?
There is no harmonica in the key of G!!
” Chas, for his part, produced a bass that seemed to have been sculpted by Degas, exquisitely contoured and well maintained. His amp had been attenuated, and the compression levers adjusted with microscopic precision. It’s interesting how one’s personality can be announced through one’s musical equipment. Chas showed himself to be fastidious, an appreciator of the finer things in life. Stuart gave evidence of a more than passing acquaintance with chaos.

The first song we played was Nick Gravenites’s “Born in Chicago.”

After a while, we went upstairs, where there was a vast kitchen full of top-of-the-line knives and sauté pans and so forth, and Chas prepared a simple but fabulously delicious pasta. Chas Elliott is the finest amateur chef I know.

We had opened a fine bottle of Beaujolais, and we sat there and stuffed our faces and got a little snockered.

“This,” we told ourselves, “is the blues.”

THE THREE of us did that for many months, maybe almost a year, and then I phoned Marty and asked him to join in. It’s not that I had been hesitant to approach him—quite the contrary—but the twelve-bar blues aren’t very interesting to drummers. Actually, the twelve-bar blues are interesting to only a handful of people, when you get right down to it— typically emaciated guys in their forties and fifties. They lack teeth and smoke cigarettes and wear a small denim jacket regardless of the season, the same one they’ve had for years. Most other people find the twelve-bar blues a bit boring, especially drummers, so I held off on calling Martin until Chas and Stuart and I had done enough lead-footed plunking and were, as a musical group, ready to head off down the road. Happily, he was game to give it a try.

The first incarnation of Porkbelly Futures—for that is what we decided to call ourselves—found an occasional home at the Black Swan, a venerable institution that proclaimed itself “Toronto’s Home of the Blues.” The Black Swan operated on two levels. On the ground floor was what we once referred to as a “beverage room.” (When I was embarking on my drinking career, there were two entrances to such places, one marked “Men” and the other “Ladies & Escorts.”) Above the beverage room was a long, narrow space, in places only as wide as a couple of bowling lanes. There were two old pool tables at one end, and at the other was a small stage.

Now might be a good time to discuss the origins of the band’s name, since many people ask about it. They ask about it in this tone: “Where did you get
that
name?” Well, seeing as we were a blues band, I thought we should have a bluesy-sounding name. I have always been taken by the three-part names one encounters in the genre: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy, Sleepy John Estes. I felt Porkbelly Futures had the same rhythm, and the fact that it also referred to some financial arcanum was an ironic bonus, because our collective intelligence was very far removed from financial arcana. When I first imagined the name, it was spelled “Pork Belly Futures.” When Chas produced our first posters, working wonders with his Photoshop and such, the first two words got mashed together.

With that little piece of history out of the way, we return to the Black Swan to witness a typical Porkbelly Futures performance. Sometime near the end of our second set—when the crowd (a term I use loosely) was at its densest and liveliest, having ingested enough liquor to make them talkative and eager to dance, but not enough to make them turn the corner into snarly moroseness—I would crank a knob on the Johnson and play an E major 7. The Johnson was an amplifier with a built-in, um,
thing,
that electronically changed the guitar’s sound. It had hundreds of settings; you could select options like “Fuzz” and “Super-charged” and “Jimmy Page stoned on acid at the Isle of Wight, 1969.” Of these hundreds of settings, I used exactly two. One made my guitar wail like a thirty-four-pound cat that wanted inside—
now
—and the other combined phasing and tremolo to make my guitar ethereal. It was this latter setting I employed near the end of our second set, setting free that E major 7 chord. It flew away in the air, and then I played a D major 7, a whole tone drop. Heads would lift slightly, ears would be cocked. It was familiar, somehow, and yet still felt strange. True enough, it is a distinctive musical meme. Rock and rollers are used to the whole tone drop—Bo Diddley did it a lot, strumming out that distinctive Bo Diddley beat, E (bumpbadumdum), D (bumbum), E. Or something like that. But the major seventh chords imbued the bluesy drop with a delicate beauty.

It was an almost funereal cadence: E major 7, D major 7. The band would join me in playing that figure, Chas adding ballsy foundation, Martin splashing away on his cymbals, Stuart contributing harmonica, lorn and lonely. Then I would lean into the microphone, press my lips against the spit-mesh, and pull out a rumble from the bottom of my register. “Hovering by my suitcase / Tryin’ to find a warm place to spend the night . . .”

I’d say that moment represented a zenith as far as personal sexiness goes. I’m not being immodest to suggest that my rumble loosened a few loins, because, after all, it was not me so much as the song: “Rainy Night in Georgia,” written by Tony Joe White, also known as the Swamp Fox. The song’s lyrics are remarkable, and the story they tell has a heartbreaking eloquence. The singer wanders around a southern train yard, lonely and outcast. Every sound he hears is mournful, and the busy-ness of the nearby city only serves to remind him of his isolation. He has two sources of comfort: his guitar, which he has been lugging around with him on his sorrowful pilgrimage, and a small picture of someone he loves. He clutches this picture to his breast and claims—not that anyone is buying it by this point—that he thus feels fine.

In that version of Porkbelly Futures, we were a “cover band”—that is, we covered other people’s material, and “Rainy Night in Georgia” was one of the most popular songs we played. We did a lot of other covers—all, like that one, kind of dated, obscure to anyone under a certain age. And many people in the crowd were under a certain age, so they would frequently demand that we play other songs, songs we had rarely even heard of. We did play a lot of blues, which possesses a certain timelessness. The twelve-bar blues is a little like a canoe, in that no further tinkering is required. During the End Times, when personal space pods zip through the smog-choked troposphere, people will still be playing those tonics, sub- and dominants in the same order, flattening the sevenths every chance they get. So we were never booed off the stage or anything. Indeed, we could often win the audience over by playing something, like “Rainy Night,” that sounded vaguely familiar.

We were no longer rehearsing at Chas’s house by this time. We were no longer rehearsing at anyone’s house. It was hard to find a wife who would abide it, in those early days. So we rented some facilities on bustling Broadview Avenue. A musician named John operated the enterprise, sound-proofing the rooms that surrounded the small inner chamber he lived in. (At least, there was a mattress there.) John had shoulder-length hair and drove a Hummer, and his taste in music was evident from the way he equipped the rehearsal space, with huge Marshall amplifiers, Gibson SGs, and Flying V’s.

Let’s discuss instrumental taxonomy for a bit, even though it is not my specialty. The Gibson SG was, originally, a redesign of the popular Les Paul model. Mr. Paul didn’t much care for it and asked that his name be removed, so they dubbed it SG, the initials standing merely for “solid guitar.” The Flying V was originally manufactured in 1957. It was meant to represent the guitar of the “future,” at least, the rather wrong-headed future we were all imagining in the fifties. My, were we wide of the mark. (We don’t, these days, dress in white jumpsuits and suck dinner from a tube labelled “turkey, mashed potatoes, and peas.”) But I guess Ted McCarty, Gibson’s president at the time, was more prescient than most, because you still see people playing the Flying V guitar from time to time. What kind of people? Metalheads. The Flying V of the body—the point of the V attaches to the guitar neck, with two huge divergent points exploding after the picking hand—allows the player to reach notes at the very upper limits of the fretboard. When you run those bent high notes through a Marshall amplifier—or the famous Marshall “stack,” a single head surmounting at least two speaker cabinets—you get a sound that rips your eyebrows off your face.

So this was the equipment that Porkbelly Futures used, and it affected our sound. Why would it not? Here’s my analogy. Take an angler, a civilized sort who is accustomed to using a three-weight split-cane on sedate rivulets, gently dropping a dry fly on the water in hopes of luring a twelve-inch rainbow trout. Okay, now give him a stout baitcaster with forty-pound test and place him in a boat with one of those outboard engines that is, in the words of my great friend Jake MacDonald, as big as a pagan war god. It’s going to change his style. So it was with Porkbelly Futures: using that equipment changed our style.

When we played at the Black Swan on New Year’s Eve, 1999, Stuart’s brother Robbie joined us onstage. He’s a very talented musician (the Laughtons are a family of talented musicians) who plays guitar in the style of Stevie Ray Vaughan. (See, another three-part blues name!) Porkbelly Futures was loud and raunchy that night. People crowded the tiny dance floor. There was much flailing of limbs. The Laughton brothers played simultaneous solos and rubbed their guitar necks in a manner that can only be described as unseemly. There was high-octane desperation that evening in a general sense, because no one knew what was going to happen at midnight. There was a chance that every computer in the world would vanish or something, that electricity would get sucked back up to Heaven, that we would all somehow be transported back to the year 10,000 BCE, banging rocks together in a pitiful attempt to placate the Creator. When that didn’t happen—when
nothing
happened—everybody felt as if they had a new lease on life.

Porkbelly Futures went forward with optimism.

IN THE early days of the year 2000, Stuart Laughton arrived at our rehearsal space with a lick. He had been listening to one of his favourite players, Amos Garrett, and he was taken with a short passage Garrett played, a parallel melody executed on the lower strings.
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Garrett played this quickly, probably without taking much note of it, but Stuart slowed the lick down and struck it with moody deliberation. This was a blues song, he said, and when he went to the four-chord, Stuart struck a major ninth. Ooh, we were horripilated! Inserting a major ninth into the blues is a bit like setting a ballet dancer down in the middle of a football field where the Argos and the Ti-Cats are having at it. We immediately started playing along. I should point out, too, that there was a rhythmic trick in Stuart’s idea. We assume—usually correctly—that the first sound we hear is coincident with the downbeat, the one of “and-a-
one,
and-a-two.” This lick actually started on the “and-a,” the last bit of the preceding bar. That’s not important, really, except it necessitated that we practise it over and over again—
attempt
it over and over again—and during this process I began to speculate about what kind of lyric would suit this music. Well, it was a sweltering hot day, if memory serves, and the slack-boned jauntiness of the music, easygoing as maple syrup, made me think of my favourite pastime, fishing. Actually, my
second
favourite pastime. Which made me think of my first favourite pastime, which caused me to wonder if I could create a lyric that, while it might seem to be discussing the Art of the Angle, would actually be discussing something other. This is what occurred: