Driving Minnie's Piano

by Lesley Choyce

  I read every line, every word, with great care and caution now. Michael had done most of the work. I just had to agree that more wimpy lines, purple prose, whining and pontification, all had to go. And then I took a red pen and inked out some more.

  My biggest fear was that after everything had been cut I might just end up with a longish short story. That's the way it felt. But with each stroke of the pen, I hoped, Cold Clear Morning was improving.

  Reading my own novel for the twenty-third time was not much fun. This final rewrite was more painful than all the others and I wondered if other writers feel this way at this point. Was I learning to suffer like the best of them or was I just a bad writer trying to cobble together something printable?

  There would be one final read of the page proofs and then, after another hiatus, the Purolator man would drive up, my dog would howl and a book would be delivered into my hands. If the entire book industry did not shut down, the novel would actually appear on the bookshelves of stores. It would be loved, hated, or ignored.

  It's true that I would have to help “promote” the book and I would pretend that it all came together without any grief whatsoever. I wanted to hang onto that myth and fool the public because I didn't want them to feel sorry for me. I might even have to read from the book in public. I would pick short passages that were not about potatoes and I would tell long rambling stories like other writers do, rather than actually have to read directly from the text.

  But for the most part, I would not read my book again. My work was over and I prayed that it all turned out well in the end. I was finished after all with the final draft.

  I would hang onto the belief that somewhere in Canada, someone would be enticed by the cover of the book, by the blurb on the back cover - the one that should read, “Choyce is not really a bad writer, once you lop his first thirty pages, axe dozens of stupid sentences and a lot of unnecessary language.” I visualized some stranger actually buying the book, bending the spine and reading the first line: “I saw the boat before I even saw the house.” The reader would be transported thereafter to Nickerson Harbour and ultimately to that cold clear morning where the journey began. And a story would unfold.

  Origins of the SurfPoets

  A great array of irrational factors led me back to performing music after a lapse of nearly thirty years. Music has always brought out the best and the worst in me. I'm a mediocre singer, I admit, but have always assured myself that I have character in my voice if I use it properly. The world can thank Bob Dylan for this. People like me who can't hit the right notes figure out clever, insidious ways to do something with the words until it sounds, well, at least interesting.

  Nonetheless, music was in me and it wanted some form of expression. Minnie was the one who had taught me my first few notes on the piano. “Chop Sticks” was the only tune in my repertoire for nearly eight weeks. And then, one day, not long after my sixth birthday, she sat me down at her baby grand piano. “Just hit the black notes,” she said, “in any order you like.” I did and the results were magnificent. That's when I realized music was not just memorization and structure but it had limitless random possibilities. The six-year-old me would not have expressed it this way but I felt it in my bones.

  There was no particular logical path to my musical career and still there is none. It was a costly enterprise financially and even emotionally. It involved a lot of complicated equipment that could and would screw up. All of the cohorts involved in my brand of music seemed to be as complex, moody and unstable as I am. Sometimes it all turned to mush. Other times to shit. And then, every once in a while, the band slipped into some other universe entirely where the words and the music created their own rules, and their own beautiful codified enthusiasm for a celebration of life. And then we soared above our individual frail human limitations.

  At the heart of the SurfPoets was a creative cocktail of three great elemental forces of the universe: music, poetry and surfing. While we did not emulate old surf music from the Sixties, we did have an underpinning of surf language, surf stories and surfer philosophy that carries the intellectual weight of the band's “message.” And I decided early on that our songs should mostly have just two or three chords repeated over and over. I get easily confused by too many chord changes.

  Like all bands, ours evolved. We began in the basement of a recording studio on Gottingen Street in Halifax, six blocks up from Halifax Harbour. Halifax is the biggest surf town on the east coast of Canada, even though many people in Nova Scotia will still state with inaccurate bravado that “Nobody surfs in Nova Scotia.” Some ideas die hard and I think it's a generational thing. What they really mean is, “Nobody surfed in Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century.” Which was probably mostly true - the exception being the odd Mi'kmaq canoeist who put to sea and then caught a wave back to the beach on a warm summer day.

  But people do surf in Nova Scotia and they also create surf poetry and record it on CDs for public consumption. This occurs even though there is a minuscule audience for surf poetry in Canada. In truth, most Canadians would tell you that there is no surfing in all of Canada. The problem there is that most Canadians live hundreds of miles from the three oceans.

  Of course, the SurfPoets ignored all of these realities and went ahead and coalesced there in the basement on Gottingen Street in late February of 1993. Actually, there were only two surf poets coalescing: myself and Doug Barron, aka Hal Harbour. Doug had a keyboard that sampled beats and sounds. I had an electric guitar with a fuzz box and the masterful skill of strumming an A minor chord over and over again. Years later I would tell the press, “Life is like an A minor chord.” If you know what an A minor chord sounds like on an electric guitar, you'll know what I mean.

  I also had sheaves of unpublished poetry, some of it even about surfing. Our first ever tune was called “Traction.” It was about cars, not surfing. Now the Beach Boys did surfing and then cars. We did cars first and then surfing. Brian Wilson, after coming out of a couple of decades of seclusion and mental illness, would explain to the media that the Beach Boys actually sat around trying to determine the next popular obsession to sing about after they milked surfing to death. Brian would say something like, “So we had done surfing and it worked, even though most of the country didn't have an ocean nearby. But then we realized that everybody had a car.”

  And so the SurfPoets would begin with cars - a long surreal, hyperventilated spoken word poem about a nightmarish landscape that was automotive. It was all just one chord with a synthesized driving beat and an amazing embroidery of sampled sounds and voices that ranged from William Burroughs to a chanting Gregorian choir. I played some really frenetic high squeally notes that hurt the SurfPoets' ears if played too loudly in the basement.

  Part of the lyric went like this:

  Hands on the rim of all possibility, I'm haunted home

  barricaded on four sides by darkness

  while up above the universe, unhinged,

  dazzles me like a rowdy all-night service station

  with check-the-oil slingshot eyes

  and how's-the-air-in-the-tire politeness.

  I know this feeling, this comfortable bucket seat of longing

  'cause I've been harnessed here before, heading home,

  pistons lighting up underneath the hood like nova stars

  burning tips off spark plugs down

  inside the throat of my ambition.

  So we had one song in our canon and no where to go but up. But we were not out of the basement yet. In my own head, I was formulating a “SurfPoet philosophy” in hopes that we might eventually become bigger than the Beach Boys or their arch-rival the Beatles and I'd actually have some profound ideas to share with the world. I was formulating surfing, poetry, music ideology and had configured love into it as well. Unlike the Beatles who proffered, “All you need is love,” I was offering a more complex recipe, something like, “All you need is love, poetry, music, and surfing.”

  It was around
that time that local radio was getting rid of DJs who were not at all cost effective and replacing them with walls of CD machines programmed to play music punctuated at plentiful intervals with commercials. DJs were being fired left, right and centre and that included a friend of Doug's named Stan Carew, a.k.a. A.J. Stanley. Stan became a local legend on his last shift of live radio at rock station Q104. Just as he was about to be replaced by twenty-five CD players, Stan gave a distinguished sermon on air about how pissed-off he was that automation was taking over and then he left the building, leaving the radio audience to sample ten minutes of dead air.

  With loads of free time on his hands, Stan was lured into the SurfPoet conspiracy still hatching in the recording studio basement of the same building where a young alternative group called Sloan had cut their first recordings. Sloan was already huge in a Canadian alternative sort of way and we knew that soon we'd go upstairs and cut similar hits.

  Now, Doug surfed a longboard he had brought down from Toronto, which is only a semi-surfing town, if you count surfing on Lake Ontario. Surfer kids who come to Nova Scotia from Ontario say they like to surf near the nuclear power plant back home “because it's warmer there.” Nova Scotia surfing, as you know, is very cold. And it's the cold surfing experience that is primal to SurfPoet music. Stan Carew, however, has never surfed. But he was a lead singer in a country band. He also played acoustic guitar and ushered in two new innovative concepts to the SurfPoets. The first was the idea of adding a second chord to our songs.

  I was opposed to using a second chord at first. I thought A minor was fine. But not Stan. I wanted to kick him out of the band but Doug, usually a sombre, quiet keyboardist, was militant that Stan was “in.” I was afraid that shifting chords on my guitar while trying to recite my poetry would throw me and the audience off. The compromise was that one of the chords be A minor and the second one also a minor chord - an easy one: E minor.

  I had decided that it would be a cliché if all the SurfPoet songs were about surfing - not that we'd done any songs yet about surfing, just the one about cars - so I decided to use a poem I had written called “Beautiful Sadness.” It was a bittersweet, melancholy love poem about the concept of beauty and sadness. Sad things can be beautiful, it seemed to say. It was, I argued, a very Celtic idea inspired by sad Cape Breton fiddle airs. So Doug found a sampled slow hip-hop loop, I found my two chords, Stan would strum acoustic and sing backup. Doug also had sampled recordings of women in a church singing the Lord's Prayer, which Doug added - only those recorded elements were played backwards, just like on the old Black Sabbath records.

  And so emerged a kind of spoken word hip-hop love song that made you feel really sad - but good. During coffee break, Stan introduced one more concept that would revolutionize the SurfPoets forever. He took me aside and told me a song should have a chorus - if it was going to be a hit. It really should.

  I told him in no uncertain terms that we were not in it for the money and if all he wanted was commercial success, he should get the hell out of the basement and out of the band. I actually camouflaged my anger and said this politely. But it was still a SurfPoet chastisement of monumental proportions. I saw the look on Stan's face and then I remembered that Stan had recently been fired after his public on-air stand against automated radio and, suddenly realizing I had hurt his feelings, I relented. Okay, we could try a chorus. “You mean like 'Help me Rhonda, Help, Help me Rhonda?'” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Stan said. “Or 'Round, round get around, I get around.'”

  We were talking sacred texts here.

  I mulled and mired over it. I did not want us to be “like every other band” using a flashy elaborate number of chords, harmonies, and choruses up the ying yang. But I had a fairly small pool of talent and realized I needed my band members more than they needed me. Okay, I said again.

  I went out onto the street then to breathe in the diesel fumes from a couple of buses going by and watch kids spray-painting their names on empty store fronts. In my poem, I had already configured beauty as a character: the abstract represented by an ideal. She was a shadowy, beautiful woman who herself was the embodiment of beauty and sadness at once. She was a kind of fatal attraction as well. The narrator in the poem was me-but-not-really-me: also a sad, but not beautiful, character. Deep down I envisioned myself as a very sad, lonely person even though I really wasn't. It was a pose like that of the public persona of so many other poets before me. Poets must really like to feel sorry for themselves even though they have nothing to feel sorry about.

  The streets were slushy that day. Slush was good for musical melancholia. I would later enshrine that slush as well as my old car, an insanely unreliable Skoda, in the poem/song:

  I was always afraid of Beautiful Sadness

  Because I believed she was friends with despair and misery

  But now, driving on the slushy Halifax street

  I realize I want to know Beautiful Sadness.

  I'm only driving a small Czechoslovakian car

  But I want to stop and open all the doors to the beautifully lost

  I want to drive them anywhere they want to go because someday

  I know I'll be one of them and I want to know what it's like.

  And so it was time to introduce a chorus. Something basic, Stan had said, something regular people could relate to. (I didn't know what he meant by regular - people who were not SurfPoets, I figured.) I'm in love with Beautiful Sadness? I'm a fool for Beautiful Sadness?

  Back inside, Stan suggested, “A date with Beautiful Sadness . . . Got a date with Beautiful Sadness.”

  I didn't know if people even still used the word “date.” I figured it came from the country music world Stan had been escaping to since he had stormed off the radio. Oh, what the hell. I gave in altogether. A chorus was born:

  Got a date with Beautiful Sadness

  Down by the corner of possible madness

  Turn right at fear

  In a desperate year.

  A minor chord after that over and over into infinity.

  We recorded those two tracks in Terry Pulliam's (upstairs) recording studio, Sound Market, and they became cornerstones for a CD called Long Lost Planet. I learned that in the recording studio you could make mistakes over and over and all you had to do was get it right once and get that one “take” on tape. And even if you couldn't get it right you could sometimes fix up your errors by a kind of cutting and pasting of sound.

  We would eventually get back to the roots of surfing with a Ventures-like backdrop for “Big Left” and a rap-like Dylanesque “Nova Scotia Surf Scene Blues.” Over the years the SurfPoets would expand and contract, add and lose saxophones, fiddles, singers, drummers, dreamers and techno-artists. In our own small universe we exploded and imploded and got older all the while. Unlike other pop bands, we refused to ride the wave of other performers' success. Ours was to make our own wave and ride it like a thirty-foot Waimea motherlode. Carving our own path, intermingling music, surfing, poetry as only we knew how. This we would do even if our audience was small or even if we had no audience at all on the beach to watch.

  (To listen to or download free SurfPoets tunes, go to www.lesleychoyce. com)

  Zen and the Art of Canadian Winter Surfing

  It's one of the final days of February. The air temperature is about minus ten degrees Celsius but it was much colder last night. The seawater temperature is, of course, below freezing but only the fresh water of the lakes, streams and potholes is frozen. All the local driveways are sheets of ice. But the sea is intent upon remaining its liquid self. It's salty and active and full of life. I'm sitting on its surface on my surfboard. The shoreline of Nova Scotia is only thirty metres in front of me. I'm staring at a ragged, snow-dusted headland.

  Like an idiot, I'm thinking about mutual funds. Alone with a playful mind that's filled like an old junkyard full of useless scrap, I have nothing better to do than begin to think about mutual funds. As nature's direct response to this insult, the sea
has ceased sending surfable waves my way and I bloody well deserve it.

  So I stop thinking about mutual funds and say the mystical eastern word “Om” very loudly. I've been rereading and teaching Herman Hesse's twister again and so the word “Om” has good reason to be up there in my brain with the other iron scraps, memory shards and jagged heaps of information about retirement investment. A single “Om” seems to be good for a spectacular small but icy parade of near-perfect waves that afford several damn fine rides.

  I talk to the waves, giggle a little. Hey, I'm alone and happy. At this very minute, it's possible I am the only person surfing in Canada. This, I realize, is another potential ego trap but I gloat on it for a minute, and then I let it go. The little ego blimp drifts off into the faultless empty blue sky and I try to keep my mind empty and pure, knowing that such a deed will conjure more exquisite winter waves.

  My drysuit keeps me warm. The sun is on my face. There is little wind. Last night it howled long and hard enough to knock down the power lines and we were without electricity for an hour or so. But none of that matters now. Now is now. The eternal surfing present. No other place to be. Everything is indeed as it should be, unfolding.

  That's when I notice the seagulls: about two hundred of them, directly in the air in front of me. They have gathered suddenly into a very precise formation. All kinds of gulls. Brownish ones, white and black ones, grey ones. Herring gulls and laughing gulls and all their cousins. They have found a thermal rising at the edge of the cliff and they are making it work for them. Thermals, of course, come from heat and the sea is somehow “warm” enough to stir the westerly breeze into a spiralling current of air that, up until this very moment, has been invisible - to me at least, but not to the gulls.