Featherless Bipeds (12 page)

“Sure, I see it,” I say, stepping back to avoid having a blue paint impression of this crazy man pressed onto me.

“Follow me, my comrade!” he cheers, and I follow him back into the store. “I can sense your higher creativity! I channel the grand passions of the universe, you see. Whalepassion! Birthglory! Bioangst! Stellarpride! I channel it all.”

“Right,” I say, “of course you do.”

“As a channeler of such things,” my paint-covered companion continues, wriggling his fingers in the air, “I can tell that you are full of creee-aaay-ti-vi-teeeeeee. Am I right? You are destined for stellar-scale bigness in the creative realm.”

“Hey, if you say so.”

He slips out of his crazy channeler-artist persona for a moment. “It's already inside you, man,” he says clearly, without affectation. “It's already inside us all. The hard part is letting it out.”

Now safely separated from him by the cash register desk, I ask him if he will please sell me some art supplies.

He leans across the desk and whispers, “Do you mean art supplies, or do you mean
art supplies
?”

“What?”

“Are you looking to more fully access the left side of your brain, my man?”

“Well . . . ”

He rolls his eyes emphatically, looking much more businesslike than before.

“Look kid, do you wanna buy some hash or pot? Or are you after something a little wilder?”

“Some oil paints, actually. A couple of canvases? Some brushes?”

“Oh, right,” he says. “I was only kidding about that other stuff.”

He gathers up an assortment of art supplies, and I pay him. He bundles everything into a large straw bag.

“The bag is reusable, and it's free of charge,” he says. “It's made from hemp.”

He extends a paint-splattered hand. “The name's Sebastian. No last name, just Sebastian. Come back when you're famous and you want to buy some art.”

“Okay, Sebastian,” I say, and I shake his hand. What the hell, the paint will wash off.

Two days have passed, and now I'm standing with my parents on the platform of the Faireville train station. I'm going back to the city, but not to university this time. I am going to be playing the drums in a rock band.

Mom hugs me, and whispers, “Thanks for the paints and canvases and everything, sweetie.” She has already started working on a painting, an impressionist-style picture of the view through the kitchen window. It's as good a place to start as any.

Dad shrugs and says, “Well, Dak, I think you're making a big mistake, but I hope it works out for you.” That's about the best I'm going to get from him under the circumstances.

I climb onto the train with my backpack, and I watch them walking back to their car together as the station shrinks into the distance.

When Mom gets home, I hope she paints some more. When Dad sits down at his desk, he will find that somebody has pulled his yellowing novel manuscript from its hiding place and placed it there in front of his creaky old office chair. And hopefully, while Mom is dabbing paint on a canvas, and I'm hours away banging out a rhythm on my drums, Dad will start writing again.

It's already inside us. The hard part is letting it out.

Smog and Wire

Lyrics — D. Sifter, Music — A. Ganges, T. Low, D. Sifter
From the album
Socrates Kicks Ass!
recorded by The Featherless Bipeds

I'm half future, I'm half past

I'm as flexible as fibreglass

That's me

My Dad was Thought and Mom was Love

So how did I get to be so messed up

Tell me

You're never too up, never too down

You're halfway between a smile and a frown

That's you

You rise up like evaporation

But you come down again like precipitation

That's you

We walk along staring at the hydro wires

With the smog in the sky choking out our desires

That's you and me

I'm a little bit soft, a little bit tough,

But I never seem to be either one enough

That's me

I'm on the outside looking in

It's me who loses when the other guy wins

That's me

You're numb to the truth, heard too many lies

Can you feel me, are you desensitized?

That's you

Every moment of the day I think about you

But I can never find a way to get through

What do I do?

But above that smog is a blue blue sky

d there's energy inside those wires

That's you and me

A
NYONE
C
AN
W
RITE A
R
OCK
S
ONG

I
t's already two months into my year-long commitment to the Featherless Bipeds, and overall it's been going fairly well. My father has left a couple of messages on my answering machine to ask if I've been killed by a drunk in a bar yet. Thankfully, the answer is no.

I've only had one scrape with violence so far, when an intoxicated middle-aged woman offered to “show me a good time” at her place after our final set was finished. When I declined, she attempted to throw what was left of her drink in my face, but slammed me in the forehead with her glass instead, nearly knocking me out.

Since this gig was on one of the nights when Lola had other commitments, Tristan, Akim and I all suspect that Jimmy T may have accepted the offer that I declined. None of us has mentioned this episode to Lola. We figure she'll catch Jimmy T in the act eventually, and then she'll have to decide whether she prefers honesty and fidelity in a man, or money, a Mercedes and a James Bond apartment downtown.

Jimmy T, for his part, continues to be nearly useless as a guitar player, but as a booking agent he's been doing well. He land us regular gigs, and we get paid enough to survive, so Tristan, Akim and I have been able to spend the daylight hours writing a lot of new songs, rather than working day jobs at the local McDonald's like some other bar musicians we've run across. A few of the bars where we've played have even booked us to come back in a couple of months. Usually these have been the gigs where Lola has been on stage as the lead vocalist. The rebooking rate for the shows where Jimmy T, Tristan and I share the spotlight has been significantly lower.

Once again, Lola isn't able to make it to tonight's gig because of a Women's Issues Commission event, but that's okay, because Tristan, Akim and I have written a bunch of new songs over the past month or so, and we're using this show as a chance to test them out live before we get Lola to learn the vocal parts. After the gig, we'll watch Tristan's videotape of the show, and we'll adjust the songs if they don't play back well.

We're playing at a place called V.O.S., a trendy, converted back-road barn filled with a typical crowd of loud underaged drinkers, and a bunch of middle-aged guys with leather jackets, thinning hair and jeans pulled up to their navels, who are trying to pick up girls who are probably the same age as their estranged daughters. Playing unfamiliar songs is not as risky here at
V.O.S.
as it can be at other places, since the drunken teenaged crowd would probably dance along to somebody slapping the side of a plastic trash can with a two-by-four. Nobody knows what V.O.S. is supposed to stand for, but they're sure it must be something deep.

It's half-past midnight, time for our third and final set of the evening. Akim and Tristan are already onstage, tuning their guitars and tweaking the controls on their amps. As I climb behind my drums, my stomach gurgles painfully from the ultra-spicy “meat ‘n' bean” burritos I ordered from the bar during our first intermission. Jimmy T waves to a couple of girls seated at the edge of the dance floor nearest to the band. The high school girls smile, giggle, and wave back to him.

“When are you going to play one of your songs for us, Jimmy T?” the girls coo from the sidelines, their cartoon-like voices barely audible over the rumble of slurred barroom conversations and pool-table fist-fight preludes.

“Right away, babes,” says Jimmy T.

I hope, for Jimmy's sake, that when those girls said “
your
songs”, they meant the
band's
songs, and not Jimmy's
own
material. Jimmy has taken to describing himself as the band's “agent, front man, and leader,” so it will
really
bug me if he is passing my lyrics off as his own.

From his position front and centre on the stage, Jimmy T nods to the guy behind the soundboard, and the stage lights go up. In his rush to impress the babes in front of him, he has forgotten to tune his guitar — not that it makes much difference to the sound of his feeble rhythm playing. Jimmy's upgraded his gear to include a six thousand dollar Signature custom and a Marshall stack for amplification, which just means that we all have to play
extra
loud to drown him out.

For our last set of the night, we follow our standard routine of playing a half-dozen cover tunes before sneaking in one of our originals. I am about to introduce the song, but Jimmy cuts in with, “Thank you! Now here's a Featherless Bipeds original, that we call ‘I Want Your Embrace', and it's about men and women
gettin'
together!
”

The young girls at the front table cheer. Obviously, Jimmy wants to
get together
with them if he can get away with it. And the song is actually just called “Your Embrace.” Whatever. I just shrug and count us in. I am about to start singing when, half a beat early, Jimmy T starts crooning instead. The girls scream. Naturally, I like to sing the lyrics I write, but the bad burrito pains in my stomach are making it difficult to care much. Maybe Jimmy is doing me a favour. At least he's getting the lyrics right:

If I said to you I'm running low on crazy dreams

Would you kindly turn away

And return with your arms full

Of something that inspires

I sing the harmony line that Jimmy T is normally supposed to:

This is your embrace

This time, this place

Your Embrace

Your smile, your face

Your embrace

As he sings the next line, Jimmy T's face contorts like he's having an abdominal cramp. He's really pouring on the cheese for his teenaged fan club:

And if I begged for one last breath

Would you part with one of yours

Would you put your lips to mine

And bring me back again

As I join in on the next chorus, my own face contorts because I actually
am
having an abdominal cramp, thanks to those burritos.

This is your embrace

This time, this place

Your Embrace

Your smile, your face

Your embrace

If some tragic current

Pulled me deep beneath the surface

Would you pull me up

Would you give me something I could cling to

Up to this point, it's an easygoing, mid-tempo song, but then, right here, right now, we double the tempo, and Akim wails out on guitar, and Tristan produces some astonishing bass runs, and I polish the whole thing off with some thundering drumming. It's the optimistic ending that musically drives home the point that the lyrics make — this part was Tristan's idea.

And if a frantic wind

Pulled me up into it's fury

Would you bring me down to earth

Would you give me life again

This is your embrace

This time, this place

Your Embrace

Your smile, your face

Your embrace

Tristan and I join in on the vocal harmonies, repeating the words “Your Embrace” over and over and over again to the song's Beatlesque conclusion. Akim, without his usual sarcasm, has dubbed
Your Embrace
“our first top ten radio hit”.

The young girls scream so hard I'm afraid they might wet themselves, but their cheering has the effect of getting some of the other patrons going as well. The applause builds to an almost flattering level.

“Glad you liked that!” Jimmy T shouts, “Here's another one of our original tunes, called . . . ”

“
Great Unanswered Questions of History,
” I interrupt, just to annoy him. And, sure enough, the moment I kick into the propulsive beat of the song, which is one of our
funkiest
, the two young girls are flailing away in front of Jimmy. By the time I'm into the first verse, nearly all the other girls in the joint have joined them.

I wonder if Shakespeare was ever eighteen

Did he work at a gas bar, tell stories for free?

Did he hike to the East side to the beatnik cafe?

To hide in the shadows and drink underage?

The girls scream like sirens when Tristan and Jimmy join in on the three-part harmony on the chorus.

These are the great unanswered questions of history

The great unanswered questions of history

I wonder when Plato got his first kiss

When she offered her lips, did he pucker and miss?

Did he make up tall tales to tell loafers at school?

Did he put on black leather, pretend to be cool?

Then something amazing happens. Akim, who never sings a note, steps up to his usually redundant mike, and, adds a deep, resonant fourth harmony line on the chorus. Cool! I am playing in a band that can sing
four
-part harmonies! When the girls scream this time around, I feel like joining them! I dig into my drums, and really give it on the vocals this time.