by Arden, Jann
After just a few months we had quite the eclectic crowd following us around the Calgary nightclubs. Most of the clubs were holes in the wall but we’d always manage to pack the people in. David had us earning about $1,200 a week, which I thought was fantastic. I was used to making maybe a hundred bucks a week, if that. Playing the nightclubs was like winning the lottery. I was happy to not be working full-time at the video store. I think my folks missed the manpower, but they were happy for me to be doing what I loved just the same. (Keep in mind, I was a terrible employee.)
I don’t think David and I had more than two up-tempo songs in our entire set list. All our songs were dirges, including the ones I’d written. That’s what I liked to sing and that’s what David liked to play. We were a perfect team. People would sit around their little candlelit tables, drinking wine and puffing away on cigarettes with their eyes closed, and be lulled to near death by our sombre, depressing tunes. In between songs, I’d tell funny stories and jokes just to let everybody off the hook. Nobody can stay in the dirge zone for four straight hours, not even me. We’d start around 9 p.m. and finish at one in the morning. Most people stayed the entire night.
After that first year, David realized that we didn’t really have a band name. We were David and Jann. Not all that original. One night when he was introducing us, he said, “Hello, guys and dolls, we are Hart and Soul … I’m Mr. D. Hart, and this (he pointed at me) is Ms. R. Soul …” Everybody laughed hysterically. They got the joke, I guess. The name stuck.
Hart and Soul had eight or nine lounges that we played on a regular basis. We would rotate from one room to the next, playing a week at a time. Our calendar was booked for months ahead. It felt good to know what I was going to be doing. I wasn’t used to that.
One of our regular gigs was at Marty’s Diner. A five-hundred-pound guy named Marty (surprise, surprise) owned it. He and his eighty-pound wife, who looked like Olive Oyl, ran the joint. I know it’s horrible, but I always wondered how in heaven’s name they had sex. I tried hard not to think about it but once in awhile a disturbing vision crept into my head and I’d have to shake it out onto the floor as quickly as I could or go straight to hell for conjuring up such a dirty scenario.
Marty’s was a quaint place, warm and woody. They had a rustic menu of sandwiches and soups and a few deep-fried delights. For the most part they served specialty coffees and an assortment of wine and beer. It seated thirty-five or forty people comfortably. On a good night Marty might be able to squeeze in another ten but it would be cramped. David and I played there every few months to a sold-out house. I loved being able to sing in front of people, but even more than that, I loved making them laugh.
I had no grandiose ideas about taking what we were doing to a professional level. David used to go on about how old he was and that no one in their right mind would ever want to work with an “old ugly fart” like him. I knew he was right but I never said so. I simply stayed the course and felt glad to be working, period.
Since I’d moved home from Vancouver I hadn’t seen my brother Duray all that much. It was the norm for him to be in jail for some sort of minor offence. He’d serve a few months here and get out and do something all over again and serve a few months there. It was hard on our entire family. He was drinking all the time, smoking a lot of pot and hash. He would take any kind of pill he could get his hands on too, and not worry about the consequences to his body and soul.
My parents dreaded the phone calls that would inevitably come in the middle of the night from the police asking if they knew a Duray Richards. They’d hear that he’d been pulled over for drunk driving or that he’d threatened somebody or that he had assaulted some poor prostitute.
One night Duray found himself in a horrible fight at a house party. The house apparently belonged to a friend of a friend of a friend. Duray was always looking for a party to go to. It didn’t matter where it was, or even if he knew anybody there. He’d simply show up. Duray told us later he’d been having an okay time. He was having a beer and a cigarette and talking shit to the drunk people around him. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Around midnight, he noticed that the guy who lived in the house was making a huge commotion in the kitchen. He was wrenching the arm of his little boy, shaking him and yelling at him to get to bed. Duray said it went on for a long time. Everybody at the party was noticeably uncomfortable but didn’t make any attempt to do anything about it. The little boy was crying his eyes out and was obviously very upset. Finally Duray couldn’t take it. He told the guy calmly to back off and take it easy. He told him he shouldn’t be doing that to a kid, that it wasn’t right. That didn’t go over very well at all, and the guy got very aggressive very quickly, telling Duray, “Get the fuck out of my face and get the fuck outta my house!”
The guy started dragging his son towards the hallway. The little boy was hysterical. Duray told the man again to leave the kid alone. They exchanged a few more heated words in the crowded kitchen and then all hell broke loose. The guy grabbed a seven-inch kitchen knife and thrust it at Duray. Duray can’t remember exactly what happened next, but he said that he managed to grab a big plant and get it between the knife and himself. There was dirt and leaves flying everywhere. Duray threw the plant at the guy and then started throwing punches. People were yelling and screaming and freaking out. By the time things calmed down, Duray realized he’d been stabbed in the stomach and was bleeding profusely. He said he didn’t feel a thing, he just noticed the blood.
Someone at the party had the sense to get him to the emergency room. My brother had to undergo surgery that removed several feet of his small intestine and part of his colon and they took out a chunk of his stomach as well. He was in the hospital for several weeks. The doctor told Duray that the blade came within a quarter of an inch of severing a major artery and if it had done that he’d have bled to death in minutes.
Not even a near-death experience slowed Duray. We thought it might change him and get him back on track, but it didn’t. He got worse.
David and I kept gigging around town. Once in awhile we’d play in Banff, which was lovely, more like a holiday than a job. We had the days to ourselves to walk around town and take in the sights. I was still going nowhere, but I didn’t dare think about that for long.
I am not sure at what point this man started showing up at our gigs, but one night I took notice of a very tall, bearded fellow at the back of the room. He had thick, round glasses, and I thought he looked familiar. I remember David saying, “That dude’s been following us around.”
Night after night, for weeks, if not months, he’d come to see us play. No matter where we went, there he was. He sat with his back against a wall, drinking coffee and listening to every note I sang. I thought he was a weirdo, but he seemed harmless and it wasn’t like he came up and harassed me. I had never spoken so much as a word to him. Just as the night was ending he always seemed to disappear. I’d look for him and he’d be gone. David was cautious about him. Although he had never even met him, he didn’t like him. It was like he was jealous.
One night on a break the man—Neil, it turned out, was his name—came up to me and said hello. David looked on from the bar. Neil asked me if some of the songs I performed that night were original, and I told him that they all were. Then he said, “If you’re serious about music, call me,” and handed me his card. It wasn’t a long conversation. Neil wasn’t the first person who had talked to me about the music business, so I didn’t understand why it bothered David so much. He was furious about the whole thing. “That guy is trying to fucking steal you from me. I know it.” I thought David was being dramatic.
“Steal me from what?” I said to him.
“From this! Us! The act!” I tried to put his mind at ease. I told him that I doubted that very much. Neil seemed interested in my songwriting, I said. I didn’t know that for sure, but I wanted to make David feel confident about our present situation. In my heart, I was intrigued by Neil’s interest in me. What if he could do some
thing for me? I felt like Neil was very sincere and legitimate. I went home that night and put Neil’s business card on my nightstand. I kept picking it up and looking at it.
“If you’re serious about music,” he had said to me. I fell asleep thinking about the possibilities.
I was serious about music but I didn’t know what to do about it. David and I were now fighting about this guy we didn’t know from Adam, and it was wearing me down. He kept going on about how Neil was trying to split us up, and I thought that was ridiculous. But David started wearing his teeth every night without my having to remind him. Then I knew for sure that he was worried about losing me.
After about a week or so of staring at Neil’s business card, I called up a friend of mine who was a lawyer and asked her if she’d come with me to meet this “music guy.” I told my lawyer friend, Karen, that I didn’t know what he wanted. I was stupid to think I needed a lawyer with me, but I really didn’t know any better. She told me that she’d be happy to go, and so I made the phone call and set up my first meeting with Neil MacGonigill. I didn’t tell David. I felt bad about that but obviously not bad enough to not go.
Neil turned out to be anything but a weirdo. I knew in my heart I had found a true champion. He had such a kind face and gentle spirit. Neil could have passed for a clean-looking lumberjack; he was a big man with a big presence but soft-spoken and peaceful. He had had a lot of experience in the music business and had worked with the likes of Ian Tyson and k.d. lang. He was a music junkie of sorts; he knew a heck of a lot of useless facts about obscure recordings from the fifties, sixties and seventies. I’d never met anybody who could drop so many names in a single sentence—and I would seldom, if ever, recognize any of them. He knew a nerdy amount about songwriters and publishing and marketing and everything else that had to do with the recording industry.
We met several times over the next few weeks. Each time I got to know him a little better. He told me all about himself, where he’d worked and who he’d worked with. He was honest and straightforward. He didn’t sit in front of me and make me a million promises. He knew how tough it was to get anywhere in the music business. He said he’d been watching me over the months and that he was completely impressed and amazed by my music and my voice. He also told me he had been very disappointed from time to time when he had come to see me sing and I had drunk too much. He told me I had sounded terrible on those occasions. I knew he was right.
“I think you could be so much better than you are,” he said to me very firmly. “You’re not anywhere near reaching your potential. You don’t do any more than you have to. You’re lazy.”
It made me feel ashamed because he was right. I never worked harder than I had to, and that was a problem. He wanted me to think about the magnitude of the commitment I was going to have to make if I really wanted to pursue music as a career. He was serious about working with me and teaching me the ropes, but I was going to have to show up for my own party.
Neil wasn’t talking about working with Hart and Soul; he was talking about working with me. I knew I was going to have to make a decision, and I knew that that would mean having to break things off with David. He would have to cancel jobs and lose money, and that made me feel sick. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. He had a family to feed and bills to pay. I was torn. I didn’t know how to go about telling him that I had to leave.
I kept hearing David’s voice in my head saying, “I’m too old and too ugly, Neil’s gonna split us apart. He doesn’t want an old fart like me, I’ll drag you down and you know it as well as I do.” It was like he had predicted exactly what was about to happen. Maybe it was his Eckankar background kicking in. Neil told me that he would talk to David if I wanted, but I thought that I should be the one to explain what was going on.
Neil felt that my time would best be spent writing as much and as often as I could, and that meant removing myself from the lounge scene for the time being. He told me that I needed to think beyond the Calgary city limits. He said that if I was willing to trust him and commit myself to my music, he’d be able to get me a record deal within five years. I was twenty-five years old at the time, and I thought five years seemed like forever, but I was willing to give Neil the benefit of all my doubts.
When I finally did tell David that Neil had offered to work with me and that I had accepted, David was very good about it all. He sat at his kitchen table and listened to me go on about all the things that Neil wanted to do with my songs and what the possibilities could be. I could tell that David was trying his best to be supportive and had the generosity to tell me he knew our parting was inevitable.
“You deserve better than me,” he said. “You have a chance to do something in this world, Jann. I don’t.” I felt like bawling. He said that he couldn’t wait to see what I was going to do in this life and he felt lucky to have worked with me as long as he had. I asked him what he was going to do about the gigs and he said that he would try and find somebody to take my place. “They won’t be anything like you, though. I’ll never find a you again.”
And then he laughed that crazy, cigarette-coughing, wet laugh that almost made me think he was choking.
“You want a beer before you go?” he said. I said sure. We sat there and had a beer and a cigarette and didn’t talk much. We’d already said everything. I got up from the table and went outside to my car. David walked me out past the door and gave me a hug.
“It’s been good, kid,” he said quietly. He hung onto me a few extra seconds and then said, “Go on and get outta here. Say hi to your mom and dad for me.” I started backing out of his driveway, holding in the urge to cry. I rolled down the window and told him that I would, and then waved goodbye. I never saw him again.
Neil started working on a plan for me almost immediately. He told me that, first off, we would need to get me out of my parents’ basement and into a proper apartment. He had seen a “For rent” sign about a block away from where he lived and thought that it would be a perfect spot for me to settle so I could start “power-writing.” He could keep an eye on me there, being so close and all, is what I was thinking to myself.
It was a basement apartment, so I wasn’t technically moving up in the world. I was still a subterranean being. My parents helped me move all my stuff into the tiny 500-square-foot space. I was more or less living in the furnace room of a giant house. It was so bloody hot down there. (Too bad the world didn’t know about hot yoga yet because I could have sublet my little place out to somebody named Bikram for some extra cash.)
Thankfully I was short, so the six-and-a-half-foot ceilings weren’t a huge problem. The rent was $325 a month, and I was almost always late paying it. Thank God my parents still had the video store so I was able to work there and spend the rest of my time writing songs for Neil. He told me that I would have to hone my craft in order to get the attention of a label. “You can’t just be a good songwriter, Jann, you have to be a great songwriter,” he said. All he wanted me to do was write, write, write. So that’s essentially what I did in that little apartment for the next few years.
I’d sit at my desk with a pile of blank paper in front of me and a box of black pens and wait for the words to fall into my head. And they did fall, fast and furious. I opened myself up to the ever-expanding universe and let it do its thing. I wrote for nine or ten hours at a time. It was probably the most creative time in my life. I was piling up songs as the days passed. Some were good and there were even a few that were great. As soon as Neil felt we had enough great songs, we’d go into the studio and do some demos.
chapter fifteen
WRITING FOR MY LIFE
The old three-storey brick house I had moved into was owned by a woman named June. She was in her sixties and as cranky as you could possibly imagine. To say she was stern would be a grave understatement. June lived in the lovely, spacious suite on the main floor, right above my head, so I knew her comings and goings very well. It always sounded like she was having six pirates over
for dinner and as if each of them had a wooden leg and a talking parrot. I slept many a night with earplugs stuffed into my head. They didn’t help much.
June, for whatever reason, had no time for me whatsoever. I tried so hard to get her to like me but nothing worked. I said a big happy “hello” whenever I saw her. I felt like I was a Walmart greeter, but she barely managed to grunt a “hi” back. Maybe she was tired, or lonely. I knew she was a divorcee and maybe that was a good part of her problem.
The way June acted towards me, you’d have thought I was the worst tenant in the world. I had a five-inch television in my tiny kitchen that I’d watch from time to time, and she’d always come pound on my door and tell me to turn it down. A five-inch television set with a half-inch speaker—how could it possibly be too loud? It was a good thing I still had my lip-reading skills from my parents’ illegal satellite signal days because most of the time I watched TV with the sound off. When I sang I did it very quietly—June made a point of telling me that the floors were thin and she could hear everything I did down there. (How comforting.) She also told me I did too much laundry and used too much water. She didn’t like that I came home late and that I had people over on occasion. She didn’t want me burning candles or cooking things that might possibly stink up the rest of the house. She basically hated me. That’s how I felt, anyway. She threatened to kick me out every month. But every month I managed to get her the $325 to keep the locks from being changed. If I didn’t have the money, my parents or Neil would lend it to me, thank God. I was very lucky.
One night as I sat at my wooden desk eating curried goat and burning a dozen candles with the TV on really loud, lo and behold I came up with a song about what it was like living under June. It was a big hit with Neil. (I’m kidding about the curried goat, it was actually llama.)
I loved having my own place; even though it was crummy, it was mine. I had a poster tacked up in my tiny bathroom that said, “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds”—an Albert Einstein quote that became my mantra. I worked at the video store and played my guitar. That’s what I did day in and day out. I felt like a mushroom down there in the dark most days (minus the shit). There wasn’t much light that came in through the tiny windows. Some days I’d write three songs and then go a week without a single thought in my head. Still, I’d never worked so hard at anything. I was learning about passion and bliss and goals. I’d never had a goal in my life until that point. (I’d never even scored a goal when I played hockey.) Meeting Neil changed everything. Not only did he open a door, he took the hinges right off the thing and threw it into the ditch. I felt like something big was happening.