by Arden, Jann
chapter fourteen
THE SOUND OF SURRENDER
Back on dry land in Vancouver, it took me three days to stop feeling like I was walking on water. (No Jesus reference here at all.) I felt like I was drunk and, believe it or not, for a change I wasn’t! Even when I slept I felt like I was rocking on the ever-swaying waves. I slept for almost twenty hours when I got back to my crappy little apartment. Then I sat in front of my ironing board/table and contemplated what I was going to do next. I remember counting cracks in the ceiling of my bedroom. I got up to 371 and had to quit counting. I had salt in my blood and hope in my heart, and I had already made up my mind. I didn’t belong here. This wasn’t me. I was bigger than all of this. It felt so good to have a giant ball of faith in my body for a change.
I thought about my grandma Richards and her telling me that God could see me no matter what I did. Well, for the first time that didn’t bother me. I was starting to see what God himself saw every day, all day long.
My face had completely healed up from having been slugged in Gastown. My skin was windburned and full of freckles but I looked pretty healthy and young and, if I dare say so, relaxed. I recognized somebody I actually liked when I looked in the mirror. And I wanted to take the face that was staring back at me … home! I missed being around my old friends and my family. I packed up all my meagre possessions and called my mom to tell her I was headed back to Alberta.
I can’t even remember how I got home. I don’t know if it was by bus or if I flew or if somebody drove me. I don’t remember—I just got home. I didn’t even stop long enough to say goodbye to my lovely friend Jean. I moved back into my mom and dad’s basement and vowed to find my own place over the next few months. I just wanted to get back on my feet and gather myself up after my two-year voyage to nowhere. I was so relieved to be back home. I felt like I could breathe.
It took me longer than a few months to move out, but my parents didn’t seem to mind me being there; in fact, they were very grateful that I had finally had the good sense to return from the west coast. I knew I was going to keep writing songs and at some point try to figure out what to do with them. In the meantime I needed to find a job again.
I am not sure what possessed my parents, but they decided they were going to buy some sort of small business so that I could work there. They told me they wanted to invest in something but, more than that, I think they just wanted to help me get back on track. I don’t think I truly understood and appreciated that at the time. I certainly do now. They bought a small video store, of all things. I was glad it wasn’t a bottle depot or a vacuum-repair shop. One thing I did like doing was watching movies. The store was aptly named Fairview Video because it was on Fairview Road. That made sense to my mother: she said it would help customers find us.
The store was in a strip mall across the street from a 7-Eleven so I knew where I was going to be eating every day. There was nothing else around but a bakery and a bowling alley. Our video store was open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and I worked every one of those days. Well, maybe not every one, but quite a few. I was late for work a lot, but I always did eventually show up. My mother tells me I was the worst employee they ever hired. I probably was. It was just us: mom and dad and Patrick and me. We ran the entire operation. Maybe mom hired one teenage girl to work a few hours a week but most of the time we were it.
I took my guitar with me every day and wrote songs like a madwoman. Most of them were terrible, but I was figuring out a truly original style. I was starting to sound more like myself than the singers I had admired so much. You start out emulating the artists you love and eventually, by process of elimination, you wind up sounding like your own self. That, at least, is the hope and the goal. I wrote hundreds of songs while I worked behind the desk at our video store. Our customers were very used to seeing me there, propped up on my stool, strumming away on my guitar.
I watched eighteen hundred movies the first year I worked there. I was like Roger Ebert on crack. Whenever I didn’t know what to watch, I’d put on The Goonies: best movie of all time as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t my dream job, but I didn’t feel as hopeless as I had. For some reason I saw a very dim light at the end of my tunnel and I was determined to keep marching towards it.
One day my mom handed me a tiny little scrap of paper, maybe an inch long and the ends on it hardly legible. She told me she’d cut it out of the newspaper that morning. It was about a country show band looking for a backup singer.
“I think it would be good for you to get out and sing a little bit,” she said. “You could make some pocket money.” I thought I was already making some pocket money working at the video store. I had never once told her I wanted a singing job—I was through with all of that nonsense. But secretly I was kind of interested.
I didn’t know if I wanted to sing in a country show band. I had never been a backup singer and I wasn’t sure what backup singers did. My mom told me it that it wouldn’t hurt to try out. She told me the experience would be a good thing to have. “Those things always look good on a resumé,” she said. A resumé for what? What the hell, I would go and try out for a country show band. It wouldn’t kill me.
The following weekend I drove to the other side of town, I mean the very edge of the other side of town, and, finally, after many wrong turns and missed signs, I managed to find the building where they were holding the auditions. I got lost twice and kept having to stop at a pay phone to call some guy and ask directions. He was getting tired of me bugging him, I could tell. Every time I called him he talked louder and faster.
When I finally arrived, there were about twenty girls lined up against the wall, all waiting for their turn. I brought my guitar and thought I would just sing something by the Carpenters. They were about as country as I got. Of course, I had been the last person to show up so I was going to be the last to audition. I didn’t think I had any hope of making the cut, but I was there so I didn’t see what harm it would do. When my name was finally called out, I grabbed my guitar and walked into a room that looked like the gymnasium of a Mormon church. (You’d have to have seen one to know what I mean.) It was very well lit; in fact, it was more or less blindingly lit. Maybe it was all part of a psychological game they were playing, but perhaps not … It took me a few seconds to see just what I had wandered into.
There was a big fat guy with a beard sitting in a chair whose name, I found out, was Larry. Perfect. He looked like a Larry. Larry was the band’s lead singer and namesake. I was soon to find out that I was auditioning for the Larry Michaels Country Show Band. I had never heard of them or him but I was told by one of the other girls in the waiting room that he was a big deal and this was a very important job I was trying out for. Larry, so I was told, played the A circuit, which included casinos, country fairs and large weddings. Larry also played the Calgary Stampede every year. I guess I was supposed to be in awe, but I wasn’t.
Larry’s brother was there in the very well-lit, Mormon-looking gymnasium too. He was apparently the band’s sound man and was operating the mics and getting all the girls set up. He looked like Elvis with his oily, jet-black hair, only this Elvis had eaten a Buick. I thought the whole audition thing was odd, but it had a car accident type quality to it that was really addicting to be around.
I went up to the mic and waited for instructions from fat Larry. I assumed he was the guy running the show. He didn’t instruct me to do anything, though; he just looked me over like I was a sandwich. Larry’s piano player asked me if I had any sheet music and I said that, no, I didn’t and was that going to be a problem? I told him I was planning to play a song on my guitar.
The piano player, whose name turned out to be David Hart, looked at me for a long time and then casually told me that it wasn’t going to be a problem. I felt relieved. David was the band leader and Big Elvis told me that he was the guy who was going to be doing all the hiring. Thank God, because Larry seemed to be lacking the sense Jesus gave a fish. I wanted to sin
g my song and get it over with. All this looking me over was making me anxious. I wondered if Larry could sing a note himself. I hoped in my heart that he could at least do a decent rendition of “Islands in the Stream.” I could picture it as plain as toast: if I got the job he would be Kenny and I would be Dolly and we’d be on stage at the Calgary Stampede with thousands of people cheering us on … What a scary thought. I had to snap myself back into the present moment. Part of me hoped I wouldn’t get the job. Maybe I thought that way so the rejection wouldn’t hurt quite as much when they sent me packing.
“How did you hear about us?” David inquired.
“My mom cut an ad out of the paper.”
“Oh,” David replied, “I see.” He rolled his eyes at fat Larry. Meanwhile Elvis was saying “check, check, check” into the mic.
I thought telling him about my mother cutting the ad out of the paper might have been a mistake. It probably wasn’t the coolest thing I could have come up with. I thought by this point they must have already picked one of the cute girls I had seen in the hallway for the job.
I stood there for another few minutes while the three of them whispered among themselves. I felt my face burning. Finally David said, “You don’t need to sing for us today.” I was so disappointed and hurt. I immediately thought that I must not have looked the part.
“I’m good, I’ve got what I need,” he said, very matter-of-factly. My heart sank. I swallowed hard and stood there like an idiot, looking out at everybody looking at me.
Nobody said a word. Not Larry, not his Elvis impersonator brother, not even David. They all sat there staring at me like my hair was on fire. It was really weird. Larry said something to David under his breath, and David whispered “Later” to him and sort of waved him off.
I asked them if they were sure I couldn’t at least sing a little something, and David said he didn’t think he needed to hear a single note.
“Don’t worry, I’ve heard you before,” David said, as I packed up my guitar. I didn’t really think about what that implied, I just wanted to get out of there. “Thanks for coming out today, Jann, is it?” Larry looked over the brim of his thick reading glasses as he said my name.
“Yes. Jann Richards.”
“Well, we’ll get back to you in the next few days, Jann Richards.” I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be getting a call from Larry Michaels or David Hart. I threw my guitar into the back seat of my car and headed home.
Not two hours after I got home that night, our phone rang; it was David from the Larry Michaels Country Show Band. He told me that I had unanimously been chosen for the job as backup singer. I couldn’t believe my ears. My mom asked me if everything was all right, and I told her that I had gotten the job in the band. My mom said, “See what happens when you try?” If only she’d known that I actually hadn’t tried at all.
The Larry Michaels Band was a step up from Executive Sweet. They were very talented, actually, and gave me a really fun opportunity to learn and grow as a performer. Singing harmonies wasn’t my strong suit, but I did get better at it as the weeks went by.
David spent extra time making sure my parts sounded perfect. I knew he could tell I was struggling a little bit, and he was extremely patient with me. Of all the band members, he and I especially hit it off. I probably spent three or four months doing weekend gigs with them, travelling around southern Alberta in a packed van, so we got to know each other quite well.
On one of the road trips I finally got around to asking him why they’d hired me and not one of the tall, pretty, country-looking girls who had shown up for the audition. I told David that I was quite sure I didn’t fit the ideal physical type everybody was looking for. He looked me in the eye and said, “When I saw you walk in, I didn’t even need to hear you sing. Like I told you, I had heard you sing before. I loved your voice back then and I was sure that I’d love what you were going to sing that day.”
I hadn’t really sung anywhere but in the middle of nowhere in British Columbia, so I couldn’t imagine where he’d heard me. I was curious so I asked him exactly where he’d seen me sing. I wasn’t prepared in any way for his answer.
David told me that he’d heard me sing on a ship sailing from England to the “new world, three hundred or so years ago.” I wasn’t sure how to respond.
“I know you think I’m crazy,” he said candidly, “but I’m not kidding. It was you, as sure I’m standing here. It was you on that boat.”
I started laughing because I didn’t know what else to do. He’d heard me sing three hundred years earlier? What the hell? He explained to me that he was into something called Eckankar. Eckists, he told me, enjoyed many levels of existence and consciousness. He believed he had lived many other lives on this planet and had shared a few of those lives with me. I thought David was crazy but I humoured him anyway.
I asked him what I looked like on the boat and he told me that I looked the same—same eyes, same skin, same hair—only I was really fat! He told me that I was always singing. I apparently looked after all the men on the boat, and they all looked up to me like a mother. Good God, I thought, a mother to a bunch of toothless rum-drinkers looking for the new world. No wonder I had issues. I was smiling at this point. Part of me believed him even though it was so bizarre. I mean, who would make something like that up? A crazy person, that’s who.
David and I talked about the girl on the boat once in awhile. He was always happy to answer my questions no matter how nutty they were. He never changed his story. David told me I was the best singer he’d ever heard, then and now. It made me blush.
David and I ended up leaving the Larry Michaels Band and going off to do our own little lounge gigs. Larry was probably mad but David thought it best to move on to other things. I think when David met me, he saw his chance to get somewhere and took it. I was kind of nervous about working as a duo in lounges, but David assured me that we could make some really good money and work in some really nice places. Both of those things sounded promising to me.
The first year we worked together was one of the most educational years of my musical life. David was a lot older than me, probably twenty plus years. He had fought in Vietnam (so he told me) and had come up to Canada from California to escape the “political bullshit” that he said haunted his every move. He was such an interesting man. For one thing, he had no front teeth. I never asked him how he lost them. I always figured he’d bring it up if he wanted to. I imagined his teeth being knocked out by the end of a machine gun in Vietnam although I was quite sure that’s not at all what had happened. I think it was more a case of bad dental hygiene. I’d have to beg him to put his dentures in when we played in public because I was sure he was scaring some of our patrons away. He looked so weird without teeth. His cheeks were sunken and it made him look eighty-five years old. He hated his dentures and I couldn’t blame him. I would have hated wearing them too. David smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, if not more. The fingers on his right hand were brown and yellow. Back then everybody smoked in bars so he could have a cigarette burning the entire time we played. He had an ashtray on his piano, and he lit one cigarette after another.
We both drank too much. People were forever buying us drinks and sending them over to the piano. Who could say no? It was free, after all, and free was good. David loved it when people bought us drinks. It meant that they were drinking too and that our tips might be higher. Sometimes we could make an extra few hundred dollars a night, and that made a huge difference to each of us.
My mom and dad were a bit leery of my new singing job, but I felt like I was living the dream. I was singing full-time now and making a wage as an honest-to-God singer! If somebody wanted to send me a drink, so be it. My parents liked David, although my mom said she felt sorry for him. I didn’t feel sorry for him ever. He was so strong and so certain. He had two great kids and a really nice girlfriend, so I was very comfortable staying at his house to rehearse when we weren’t working the circuit. I guess my mom saw something
in him that I didn’t. She was intuitive that way. My mom could see right through people’s intentions. She still can. Not that David’s intentions were ever bad, she just saw how troubled he was, and how broken. He never let on to me or anybody else how hard his life had been. There were a lot of secrets kept inside his heart.
Before meeting David I hadn’t really been exposed to great music. I knew nothing of Motown, Detroit, and the brilliant black divas that carved a path so wide that every other singer in the world ran right through it after them. There was so much music he played to me, and all of it just about made my heart stop. It was all so good! I couldn’t believe the new sounds I was hearing. I couldn’t believe the soul and the depth of the singers he was introducing me to. For the first time in my life I could feel the heartache and hurt they were singing about. It was tangible.
He spun Nancy Wilson and Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone records. (Nina made me think about Leslie.) He would play DJ for hours on end. He would put on Tom Waits and Frank Sinatra, the Staple Singers, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Ray Charles and Mary Wells. It was a long list of amazing vocalists and hearing them changed the way I thought about songs and songwriting. Where had I been? Fishing, apparently.
He loved turning me on to new things: new grooves, new melodies. He told me I could sound just like them if I wanted to, or at least incorporate some of that soul into my own music. By this time, David had also talked me into putting some of my original songs into our act. I was reluctant at first but he told me that I needed to start singing my own songs and wondered why I hadn’t been singing my own songs to begin with. He made me feel like they were really good, even great. I trusted his opinion and I didn’t think he’d tell me my songs were good unless he meant it. He would quite often tell me that he didn’t like a new song when I played it to him. He’d say “You need to work on the bridge” or “The melody could use some work.” He was always honest.