But what could constitute a pleasurable stimulus for a critter too primitive to even crave nourishment?
Music.
Think about that. Here’s an organism potentially human—but so underdeveloped that right now it isn’t really even a functional animal. Yet it enjoys music. Enough to work to get it. We are hardwired to love a tune even more than the teat. Music is more basic to us than food.
(Naturally, musicians are among of the poorest and most ruthlessly exploited members of our society. Even the 1 percent who are superstars don’t live nearly as well as you think they do. The list of rich retired musicians pretty much begins and ends with George Harrison.)
Now I begin to understand why Georgie Fame’s Walking Wounded albums have such a powerful emotional impact on me…
Georgie Fame is an English singer/keyboardist, born in Lancashire in 1943. He’s most often pigeonholed as a rock or pop guy, but he has worked in just about every genre except punk and rap, and I’ve always thought of him as a jazz musician who isn’t pretentious about it. He has a voice reminiscent of an alto sax, warm and smoky, and sings like Dexter Gordon plays.
His first international hit, “Yeh Yeh,” was written by Jon Hendricks of the legendary jazz “vocalese” ensemble Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. That single made number one in December 1964, dislodging the Beatles for the first time ever. They sent Georgie a telegram of raucous congratulation. To this day Lord McCartney says Georgie is his favorite nightclub act…and not just because Georgie was onstage at the Bag O’ Nails, playing “Yeh Yeh,” at the moment when Sir Paul met his late wife Linda…
Georgie appears regularly at a London club called Ronnie Scott’s. In December 1995 his band Walking Wounded included trumpeter Guy Barker and alto sax man Peter King (who can both be seen in the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley), vibraphonist Anthony Kerr, tenorman Alan Skidmore, bassist Geoff Gascoyne and the Powell Brothers, Tristan and James, on guitar and drums. Led by Georgie’s nimble Hammond organ they spent 133 minutes casually performing musical miracles, which were captured on the CDs Name Droppin’ and Walking Wounded. If you’re a musician, this, right here, is where you go to surrender.
If not…Look, every time you ever put your glad rags on and went out to a club, this is the show you were hoping to catch. The magic perfect night. That time you and someone you love transcended time together in some smoky dive…got so high you forgot to drink…had so much fun holding hands you forgot to go home…rode the music straight off a cliff together, and for a few shining hours just finally dug it, grokked the universe in fullness and forgave the well-intentioned clown who thought it all up.
It’s not simply the material—it’s the provenance, too. Georgie’s the Real Deal. All the blessed golden sainted names he drops—Mose Allison, King Pleasure, Nemoi “Speedy” Acquaye, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Stan Getz, Lionel Hampton, Chet Baker, Phil Woods, John Coltrane, Fats Domino, Betty Carter, Chris McGregor, Clark Terry, Hoagy Carmichael—these are all cats and kitties Georgie has known and blown with over the years, and every one of them alive or dead must regret having missed this session.
Together the two CDs constitute a millennial summation of the very hippest music made on planet Earth in the past century. More than that: it was a summing up of the sensibility, the vibe, the spirit, the chronically laconic but rarely sardonic, spastically iconoclastic but seldom drastic, cool but never cruel approach to the universe and the Human Dilemma which produced that music, and thereby justified that millennium’s existence. When history judges the twentieth century, these two albums will be major exhibits for the defense.
The band absolutely cooks—if this is truly Walking Wounded, they’d kill you running flat out. Saint Bernards should carry CD players with these two albums strapped under their necks: even the most frostbitten toes would involuntarily tap themselves back to life. You’ve probably heard a lot of people take a hack at “Moondance”—but Georgie Fame was Van Morrison’s musical director for years…and has a better voice.
And I hope I haven’t given the impression I’m talking about preserved fossil music, a picking of the bones of a century of dead hipsters by some aging dilettante Brit. Better than half the tunes on these albums are Georgie Fame originals. It’s just that he’s a contemporary and peer of all those gone great ones, producing music that fits seamlessly into an evening of classics. He’s entitled to drop names.
In the midst of an instrumental solo, he’ll suddenly call out “Thank you for Sam Cooke!” or “Thank you for Sweets Edison!” I don’t know who he’s thanking, but I thank him for doing it. In addition to being 133 minutes of relentlessly cool music, this set is a detailed Treasure Map, pointing the astute student to some of the very finest forgotten geniuses of the twentieth century, some of the greatest musicians who ever inexplicably failed to become household words—people who deserve to be as famous as Pops or Bird, Ella or Lady Day, but aren’t—giants whose trail-breaking footsteps have sadly begun to erode. If you don’t already know the work of, say, Jimmy Smith, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Percy Mayfield, Clifford Brown, Eddie Jefferson, Richard Tee, Gene Ammons, Joe Zawinul, Benny Golson, Kenny Gordon, Bobby Timmons, Zoot Money, Kenny Drew, Ezra Ngcukana, Chris McGregor or Karl Denver…well, listen to these two CDs, and you’ll see.
Now, I’ve been a serious Georgie Fame fan since 1964. These two albums were recorded in December ’95, then released in ’97. Until a few months ago, I didn’t know they existed. If any attempt to market or publicize them in North America was made, I managed to miss it…
…until it finally dawned on me, about a year ago, that I could use my computer to hunt down music.
Especially the weird stuff I like. I’ve spent thousands of hours of my life combing through remainder bins and cut-out stacks, hoping to find a rare Charles Brown side or Betty Carter reissue. I was slow to realize that an online source like Chapters, Indigo or Amazon can stock everything in its virtual catalog. I made a list, went a-mousing…and Georgie’s Walking Wounded CDs are only one of the happy discoveries I’ve made as a result.
For those of us who’d like to keep the footprints of the great ones from eroding, who hope to preserve the memory of the pioneers on whose shoulders all contemporary musicians stand—not merely the handful who’d make it onto a Time Magazine Ten Best list, but all of them—the Internet is one of the best tools we ever had. It’s actually easier to find a copy of Ray Charles’ classic 1964 album Sweet and Sour Tears today than it was in 1968.
Cyberspace as cultural cryogenics. That’s the kind of technology use I like.
Farewell to Nova Scotia
FIRST PRINTED JUNE 2003
We wanted spirituality
on other days than Sunday
so we made our homes in shacks and domes
on the shore of the Bay of Fundy
on a mountainside that the Fundy tide
has been poundin’ on for ages
and we lived for years on homebrew beers
and the wisdom of the sages
We lived in ruins in huge communes
where no one did the dishes
We lived in huts and froze our butts
and fed ourselves on wishes
We lived in shacks and broke our backs
to keep ourselves from freezin’
We lived on hope and grains and dope
and vegetables in season.
—“NORTH MOUNTAIN CRAZIES”
MY FIRST FIFTEEN YEARS in Canada, I lived in Nova Scotia. Now I’ve been here in BC for sixteen. But you don’t get over Nova Scotia, not really. It’s where I met and fell in love with Canada and then my wife and then our daughter, where I wrote my first dozen books, where I started to believe in magic because there it was under my nose. I’ll go back there any time I can find someone to pay the airfare. I’ve just returned from my first visit in well over a decade, thanks to “Open Book with Mary Walsh,” a CBC-TV show on which—I’m not making this up—people discuss a book which they’ve read. It was a week
that stirred up old memories, then revised them.
I expected change, but paradoxically there was both more and less than I’d anticipated. Crow’s Hollow, the parcel on which I courted my Jeanne, lies below what used to be a dirt road. It’s paved, now, and in paving it, they raised the roadbed some eight meters just where it passes the Hollow. They swore they’d restore our access and provide parking. Turns out they lied. It took three passes to even locate the Hollow, then a desperate scramble down a scree slope to reach what used to be the head of the trail.
A few hundred meters downhill it got worse: both of the hobbit houses we left behind—the TA (for Total Anarchy) and the Five-Sided House down past the waterfall—are now wrecks, way beyond salvage. We, and our marriage, are holding up a lot better than the dwellings in which it was born. We wandered back uphill in a thoughtful mood until we suddenly noticed that, since our day, ticks have come to the North Mountain. In great numbers. See the funny old hippies parked on the road, dancing vigorously around their car, singing loudly if incoherently, and tearing off their clothes. Just like old times.
Still slightly ticked, we drove half a klick east, and found that our magnificent old neighbors Myrna and Johnson Sabean have not aged a day since 1987. Myrna has finally retired from taking in the foster kids nobody else wants—but there were so many, just keeping track of them all is a fulltime job now. Johnson, in his eighties, still goes up into the woods with a chainsaw and comes down with finished boards. No change at all there.
That helped us come to terms with the decay at the Hollow—only wood was rotted, the important stuff was unchanged. And surely we’d have better luck at the next landmark down the road, Moonrise Hill. It was the main headquarters of our spiritual commune, our most together building, not a funky hippie hovel but a real fifty-year-old farmhouse. It sat right beside the road, so it had electricity (which we used to run the stereo) and two cleared acres of good garden soil. Someone would surely have moved in and squatted after we left, and that was fine with us.
We couldn’t find a trace of the place. There’s not the slightest sign Moonrise ever existed. Not a scrap of lathe, not a shard of broken window glass. The sills left no detectible impression on the earth. The root cellar has healed over and left no scab. We couldn’t agree on where the outhouse used to be, or even pin down the former location of the front door with any certainty. Nothing anywhere but knee-high grass and snarls of alder. And 2 million more ticks.
We asked around. None of the hippies we knew still lives on the North Mountain. That brutal winter defeated all of us in the end, it seems.
But as Jeanne and I drove around the mountain last week with our grown daughter (who flew up from New York to revisit the places of her childhood with us), on at least four separate occasions we spotted new hippies, putting their garden in. Young kids in their twenties, like we were, sprouting curly hair in all directions, homesteading in the middle of nowhere with bright eyes and mysterious smiles, looking to get straight. That cheered us. When the next generation of kids suddenly realizes that the city sucks, and goes looking for someplace that isn’t totally insulated from reality, there’ll be a few country-competent folks waiting there to welcome them, teach them important things like how to build a fire and where to put the privy and why you should never sneeze in the goatshed.
I reckon that’ll do.
And there may not be a hippie left
on the goddamn Fundy shore
Or it may be true that there’s one or two
but there can’t be many more
And we don’t write much but we keep in touch
in a casual kind of way
We pass the word, and last I heard
we was all gettin’ by okay
We’ve mostly found our way around
the things we were afraid of
The Mountain taught us what we sought:
we know what we are made of
We share one quirk: we’ve all found work
that doesn’t hurt the planet
And it sounds like myth, but we’re mostly with
who we were when we began it
Our kids are growin’, our ages showin’
our memories gettin’ faint
But I’m mighty glad for the times we had
and I won’t pretend I ain’t
The memories will bring me ease
when it’s time to push up daisies:
I’ve had my fun—I once was one
of the great North Mountain Crazies
Why Pamela Wallin Is Dangerous
FIRST PRINTED NOVEMBER 1998
IN 1998 I WENT ON A two-week triple-crown marathon of literary festivals: Calgary, Banff and Harbourfront in Toronto. Amid the endless readings, signings and interviews, there were many high spots—among them, meeting in person at last my esteemed editor at the Globe and Mail, Warren Clements; singing onstage with my wife Jeanne, accompanied by Amos Garrett and Ron Casat; and being interviewed by Pamela Wallin.
Ms. Wallin is unique in at least two respects. First, she appears not to have an adrenal gland: she is the only on-camera TV personality I’ve ever met who displays not even the faintest trace of stage-fright, who does not change in any detectible way when the red light goes on. Second, she actually listens to what you say—and is perfectly capable of dumping her next scripted question—or all of them—if something you say suggests a more interesting question. This makes her roughly as rare as a compassionate Republican, and even more precious.
It also makes her dangerous. If she doesn’t recite canned questions, you won’t get away with canned answers. And she doesn’t let up: her last question will generally be as provocative as her first—which almost guarantees that you’ll leave the studio with a bad case of esprit d’escalier. (“The wit of the staircase,” meaning the brilliant conversational bon mots you think of too late, halfway down the stairwell on your way home.)
Toward the end of our session, she hit me with just such a question. Noting that the column I was writing at the time for the Globe and Mail forced me to focus rather obsessively on human insanity, she asked: what keeps you sane in the Crazy Years?
Nobody ever asked me that before. The first thing that came into my head was writer Donald E. Westlake; I began babbling about why he is superior to Prozac in reconciling God’s ways to Man, why I always finish one of his books a little gladder to be a human being. That reminded of Laurence Shames, who like Mr. Westlake is capable of making you delete Dr. Kevorkian from your Rolodex, using only ink stains on paper. From Shames I began to segue to Lawrence Block, Carl Hiaasen, W.P. Kinsella, Don Winslow—and would doubtless have gone on from writers to cite musicians (Amos Garrett), dancers (Jose Navas) and other artists who have helped me stay sane.
But then Ms. Wallin did something I can’t explain. Without, I swear, so much as twitching a single muscle in her face or body, she somehow conveyed the clear message that I had less than thirty seconds left. In desperation, I groped for a unifying theme, asked myself what all those writers I’ve named have in common…and came up with humor: the precious gift of laughter. I said as much, and quoted Aubrey Menen’s The Ramayana, then the red light went out and they took away my microphone. And on the staircase, I realized I could have used another hour to answer her final question…or even to begin.
One thing I wish I’d had time to mention, for instance, is the first day I ever spent in Toronto, some twenty years ago.
I was visiting Steve Thomas, a friend who then lived in a walkup on Bathurst Street. We were out on his balcony at the shank of the afternoon, preparing to hibachi a steak, when suddenly Steve screamed, dropped the meat and pointed at the sky. I assumed he had gone insane, decided to humor him by looking where he was pointing…and dropped the hickory chips and screamed myself. There, filling the whole sky, more vivid and vibrant than DVD, was the first (and so far only) complete and perfect end-to-end rainbow I’ve ever seen. Above it, like a Technicolor shadow, was a second, ghost rainbow, about half as bright
as the first. Twice as far above that a third echo half as bright as the second shimmered in and out of existence, leaking tears of color into the dome of the sky.
Steve and I gaped…turned to one another (Do you see it too?)…then together we leaned over the balcony and began hollering. “Hey—dig the rainbow!!”
At first only a few people looked up at us. Tough street, Bathurst, in a tough town, with the dinner hour at hand. Then those few looked where we were pointing, became thunderstruck…and at once took up the cry, tugging at their neighbors, gesturing. Within thirty seconds I probably heard the word “rainbow” shouted in two dozen languages. Pedestrian traffic ceased. People ran indoors, dragged out protesting friends and relatives, who soon fell silent with awe. People appeared on neighboring balconies on all sides of us, many of them frantically telephoning friends, the rest exchanging grins with Steve and me. A Sikh mad with joy ran right out into rush hour traffic and forced it to stop in both directions. People rolled down their windows to curse at him, heard what he was bellowing, followed his pointing arm…then smiled, shut off their engines and got out for a better look. The ambient background noise of the city diminished perceptibly. Strangers smiled at one another; lovers held each other close; children were silent; bent seniors giggled uncontrollably. The city ground to a halt, and focused its attention: for perhaps five eternal minutes junkies stopped needing, fanatics stopped fearing, cops stopped suspecting, brokers stopped coveting, students stopped worrying, pickpockets stopped working. For a timeless time, we all did the same thing, as one: we wondered. We shared our wonder, and took nourishment from it and from the sharing of it. And then finally the last lambent trace of rainbow faded and was gone, and a minute or so after that, we all turned back into ourselves and Oz turned back into Toronto again and reality rebooted.
Lagniappe
The Crazy Years Page 30