Beautiful Scars

by Tom Wilson

  Somehow Bill got us to calm down and focus long enough for a few takes of each song, and he made us sound like a combination of garage band and Mystery Machine. The tape caught Barbara’s ear, but her boss at EMI didn’t get it at all, so she sent the tape over to Sony, where Mike Roth was busy discovering and developing great Canadian bands. He called me up as soon as he’d finished listening to the tape.

  The guy was a hustler, but wrote songs like he was shooting arrows. Fast and straight and true. We became friends somewhere within the first ten minutes of shaking hands, but I can’t tell you exactly how or why. We were nothing alike. I sat on the couch in his office looking right at him, watched him sit there looking off into space. He was talking music and his favourite writers and singers. He put on Tom Waits’s “Kentucky Avenue” and went into a trance. Our musical references didn’t all line up together, but then he asked me if I liked Neil Young. “Damn right I do,” I said, and he relaxed completely. He talked quietly but excitedly about Neil Young and about Ambulance Blues and Tonight’s the Night. I think he was just relieved to finally have someone in the Sony building to talk to about Neil Young.

  I can’t remember when he handed me a publishing deal memo, but it was after several meetings. I started my act. I came into his office, silent, emotionless. I slouched down on his couch like I was bored out of my mind being there with him, then I complained about the deal he was offering. “I don’t know how I’m going to make any money by signing this deal.” So he kicked me out of the building.

  I went home and thought about Mike. Of all the scamming industry types I was getting in with, he was the one who actually showed off his passion for music. So I called him up and said, “Okay, okay, let’s forget about that thing the other day, and let’s get to work.” And we did. We’d get into screaming fights, and I’d often leave his office in dramatic frustration and anger. (I slammed his office door off its hinges once.) But he never backed down. He should have been in Junkhouse because he was always up for a fight.

  Mike felt like I felt down on Queen Street. It was a fishbowl, a whole scene looking for a break, with hangers-on hanging on like bacteria culture blood samples. Junkhouse had to go there and play our asses off to get traction, but we didn’t have to like it. We did meet some kindred spirits there and got some helping hands from the Skydiggers, Rheostatics and Andrew Cash. We shared the stage at Ultrasound Showbar, upstairs from X-Rays, with cool contenders like Ron Sexsmith, Headstones, Barenaked Ladies and Lori Yates. The place was managed and curated by Yvonne Matsell and co-owned by Dan Aykroyd and X-Ray MacRae, who was a Kingston boy and brought a welcoming air to the place. He and Aykroyd also brought star quality and a much-needed cowboy element to the street. The Rolling Stones gathered around the downstairs bar alongside VJs from MuchMusic. I was just happy to get Junkhouse a door deal on a Tuesday night and enough money in my pocket so we could all get a falafel at the Hasty Market after the show and gas in the car to get back to Hamilton. Junkhouse had a long shot and a short window to make everything fall into place. And for a while it all worked.

  For the most part we were a bunch of guys who never imagined getting out of Hamilton. The best I figured I’d get was a 401 route—Detroit to Montreal and back again—that would take me to my grave. Like Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks years before, I thought I’d be playing in every draft room and Legion across the bottom of Ontario, and nothing more. But that was not the divine plan for Junkhouse. For us three knuckleheads from Hamilton’s East Mountain and one skinny redhead from Regina, the world was about to open up. After years of slogging it out, playing music to sell someone else’s beer, we got a hit.

  One afternoon while the band and producer Malcom Burn were in the studio doing overdubs, I wandered over to Mike’s office. He played me two chords on the guitar, D and C. And he played them over and over again and chanted in a low tone that made it hard to tell what he was saying. He reminded me of the patients I used to perform for up at Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital. The ones whose medication had not quite kicked in, who rocked back and forth, muttering, waiting for some relief to come their way.

  Mike played me what he had and said, “There, write the rest.” The studio day turned into night without any change in the room lighting. The band was heading out for dinner. Gary Furniss, the studio engineer at that time, and Malcom Burn were joining them. I stayed behind. I wanted to work, not eat. I retired into one of Sony’s boardrooms. I’d been writing a lot after hours, after the office staff and executives had disappeared home, and I found the spaces in the boardrooms liberating. The possibilities for something good to happen were better in a larger space, it seemed to me. I had room to walk around. Room to think. I could climb up on one of the giant boardroom tables, stand with my guitar and perform the new songs from a different perspective. I sat at the table and started playing the chords over and over again, building up a backing for the chant Mike had started. I saw no need for any other chords. Just the D and C would do. I started singing, “I’ve been wasted….I’ve been drowned in your arms.” I was writing a love song for my hometown as I sang, an east-end Steeltown love song for the woman who kicked ass and took names. I wrote “Out of My Head” in about as much time as it took to sing it back. When the band returned from dinner, I was ready to record. They knocked it out of the park. It was all done in two or three takes.

  It’s the song that changed our lives for a while, taking Junkhouse out of Hamilton and off the 401 circuit forever. It put us on tour for two years straight and almost killed us as a band and me as an individual. The song went on to hit number one in Europe, and the top ten in Canada and Australia. We boarded private jets and stepped onto stages with everyone from Bob Dylan to Green Day. We even played a castle in Scotland with Jeff Buckley and Oasis. Crazy times. Times that made us crazy.

  In any situation, the more drugs there are, the lower the quality of life you end up living. The people that come hanging around, and there are plenty of them, are not interested in your well-being. They just want to get there, wherever there is. Into the mystery of the dressing room, bring you drugs and do the drugs with you. You end up like a frog in a saucepan of water. The heat gets turned up and you don’t even notice you’re turning into someone else’s dinner.

  Junkhouse got to the point where we were outnumbered. There were more strangers in our dressing rooms than there were band and crew members. Bikers, dealers, see-through women in dresses that seemed to fall off when they walked through the doors. All looking for something, and acting like that something was to hang off our belt buckles. We never had the egos to let our success spoil us. We were Hamilton guys. Nothing was ever expected, so everything that came our way was a delightful surprise.

  We were soaring. We’d signed a giant American record deal. What we had all worked for. The pot of gold. The only problem was we were a bunch of ex-cons and thugs and the crimes committed were tied like bows, or rather nooses, around our necks. Believe it or not I was the only clean guy in the band. The rest of them had one long criminal record that no one at Sony was aware of or suspected, although they should have after taking one look at us. The list of offences delayed the band from getting into the States. It killed our momentum and marked the beginning of the end for Junkhouse.

  We rode a bit of fame from 1994 to 1997, then I had to leave. The booze and drugs and women were even easier to come by once I had some gold and platinum records on my wall. Funny how that works. I felt like the silliness of rock and roll was going to kill me, and I was right.

  I had worked like a dog to get to the point where I had songs on the radio. Hits, in fact. I’d turn on a TV in my hotel rooms around the globe and there I’d be on MTV, or MuchMusic back home in Canada. My career was going just all right, and as Bill Withers said, “When you get to all right, take a good look around and get used to it, because that may be as far as you’re gonna go.”

  BLACKIE AND THE RODEO KINGS

  I was drunk. It was November 1996 and it was damn cold already. I h
ad to leave the Rank and File show at Lee’s Palace early in order to catch the last bus back to Hamilton. I had the loosest feet in town, eating up the freedom I had established for myself with Sandy, who was back home with the kids well into a night’s sleep. All together in one bed, no doubt. I still remember how that felt, stripping down and crawling under the blankets with Sandy and the babies all sprawled out sideways, arms and legs everywhere, snorting and spitting with mouths open…paradise.

  I walked, stumbled, tripped and fell across Bloor Street and down Spadina Avenue, past many of my old haunts, including a rooming house I would hole up in for sex, boozing, laughs and sometimes brawls. It was a crash pad, lit by a dim, bulbed lamp on a dirty window ledge. The mattress was on the floor and the bathroom was down the hall, and the sound of footsteps from people constantly coming and going echoed into the room. Like Dylan Thomas in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, I was gathering my research, loading my gun and waiting for the right time to fire.

  It was romance at its highest high back then, and Sandy and I would spend a lot of time roaming downtown Toronto and playing out parts in our little movie. We’d drink at the Library Lounge upstairs at the Imperial Pub on Dundas, about a block east of Yonge Street. The bar served up quart bottles of beer to the patrons—guys with army and prison tattoos resting on arms that looked like they worked hard for a living—and a jazz jukebox played Django Reinhardt, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles and Charlie Parker records. The place was way ahead of its time, without trying to be. It had an old-world hipness to it, hipness that punched you in the face and threw you down the stairs if you got out of line. We felt right at home there drinking Bushmills and making out all over the place.

  I passed the old rooming house and kept heading south, past the El Mocambo. The Rolling Stones played there. That’s what everyone used to say. Keith Richards got arrested the next day for heroin. Elvis Costello did two nights there right after My Aim Is True came out. Lots of people said that too. I think about the El Mocambo because I used to do six-nighters in the downstairs bar. I dug a trench there several times a year, and I loved being there because the El Mocambo was the place Bunny and George used to drink when he first returned from the war.

  I was going to take the lakeshore bus, not the express. It stopped everywhere I never wanted to be. Mississauga. Oakville. Burlington. It took about two hours to get to Hamilton. No rush. I welcomed the darkness and the smell of beer and smokes and fast food. I loved watching the city go by. The crosses and the Ford plant. It was a ride I could have stayed on forever.

  City to city

  Dusk to dust

  It’s all in my head

  Traffic and God and then we rot out in the sun

  Lovers, shacks and prison yards

  For the lonely ones

  I arrived at the old Elizabeth Street terminal with time to spare. I used a pay phone to call my answering machine to pick up my messages. I heard Colin Linden’s voice asking me to call him, and I did.

  It was about 11:45 p.m. and Colin picked up immediately.

  I first met Colin Linden standing in a field in Gage Park in Hamilton in 1977. It was at the Festival of Friends, and Colin and I were probably the youngest performers on the bill that year. Colin was seventeen years old and I must have been eighteen. We came from different places. I mean he was a genius and savant. A prodigy. A student of North American roots and blues music and the men and women who dedicated their lives to it. He was a master at a young age and he could switch to Texas blues, take you to Mississippi, or up north to Chicago with a ferocious intent that left the audience that afternoon spellbound. I believed Colin was the reincarnation of an African-American slave, that he escaped his chains and ran for his life through the night across the blackness of Mississippi. How else could he have such a deep love and understanding of what he was doing? How could his hands uncover the mysteries and pull back the strings with such passion?

  Colin and Stephen Fearing were putting a Willie P. Bennett tribute band together and wanted me to be the third member. There was nothing to think about. I said, “Yes—of course. When do we record?” We made plans to get together and play some Willie songs over at the apartment of Colin and his wife, Janice Powers, to figure out what shape the record would take.

  I don’t think I actually met Stephen Fearing until he showed up from Vancouver at the studio to record. I did run into him once at the Railway Club in Vancouver, but I was three sheets to the wind and busy with a couple of blondes. We may have shaken hands minutes before I ended up on the floor under the table. Another time I said hello in passing while he was coming off a stage at Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto.

  He was a master acoustic guitar player in the tradition of Richard Thompson and Bruce Cockburn, and he could sing. He had perfect pitch, tone and expression. A giant too. Tall, skinny Irish guy who could write heartbreakingly beautiful songs about the spirits on the high seas and about trains crossing Canada.

  Colin had the best band in Canada, bar none. The band members stood head and shoulders above all of us, so I knew I was in for a treat. Johnny Dymond was on bass. Johnny played with k.d. lang. I saw him perform with her on Saturday Night Live. He was a skinny little fucker with a giant Fender Precision, and he owned the instrument. Gary Craig was on drums. He was a powerhouse, a machine—the best of the best at driving the bus down the road. And the one and only Richard Bell was on piano and organ. I used to stare at him on the back of Janis Joplin’s Pearl album. He was the one standing on the left, leaning in and laughing like he’d just told himself the funniest joke. As a kid I was mesmerized by him and his playing on that record.

  I was pumped. I had found inspiration watching Willie P. Bennett at the Knight II Coffee House. Willie’s songs were tattooed on my tongue. As a kid of sixteen years old, I dreamt of being the hero in “White Line,” a lonesome artist, standing on the road, alone in the cold. I had become what I’d wanted to become. I had asked the gods to deliver me there, and the gods had handed it to me.

  At the legendary Grant Avenue Studio, we made that record in three or four sessions, which were some of the best of my life. Colin had a different producing style from what I was used to. Every note played somehow found its way onto the recording. You needed to be sure about the choices you were making there on the studio floor. Everyone had their eyes and ears wide open. Three or four takes and it was over. We’d move on to the next song. I loved it.

  At the end of the sessions I said my goodbyes. I was heading off to Costa Rica to make a video for Junkhouse. I thought that was the last I’d see of Colin and Stephen for a while. I figured we’d run into one another down the road, backstage somewhere, and have a few laughs. Little did I know that twenty-one years later we’d have put in thousands of miles together and hours of stage time and have ten albums under our belts as Blackie and the Rodeo Kings.

  Little did I know that, with them, I would step onto the stage and perform at the Grand Ole Opry, tour and become pals with Merle Haggard, be invited to sing with Buck Owens, catch the ears of Johnny Cash and duet with Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams and Rosanne Cash. That the show offers would come through the True North Records office in Toronto, and the guy answering the phone would be Bernie Finkelstein, the father of Canadian music and someone who took chances no one else in the country was willing to take. That we would be managed by Allen Moy, a master at keeping me just calm enough through some pretty hairy times, then and now. None of this was considered as I stepped into a taxi on Grant Avenue and headed to Pearson airport that night.

  FINDING THE DITCH

  I was living at the Inn on the Park, up on the corner of Leslie Street and Eglinton Avenue in the northeast end of Toronto. The area was considered the outreaches of the city when the hotel was built in the early sixties as an upscale suburban getaway, a resort and business stop that was perfect for celebrities and rock stars and their hangers-on. The Sony studios bordered on the hotel’s lush grounds, so it was easy to check in to the hotel for
the summer of 1999 and record in a small studio space that my publisher, Gary Furniss, had outfitted for me.

  Glenn Gould had once lived in the hotel. He set up a piano and a little recording studio in a suite in the old tower. His spirit was everywhere in that place, representing a bygone era of polyester and suede, the sexual revolution, mad bastards in grey suits and hard liquor. He was not one of them. He was one of his own. But his ghost hung around the pool, where he appeared dressed in winter coat, scarf and boots, sitting on a chaise longue in the July heat. His loneliness owned the place. I could feel him down every hallway. He wouldn’t share his genius with me or inspire me to create. Somehow the weight of his madness brought out my own madness and cued up my addictions. I had the means to get heroin and cocaine delivered directly to my hotel room by downtown dealers. I discovered that if you spend enough money, often enough, you can get people to drive anywhere for you, even North York.

  I drank the mini bar and watched movies on the TV while chasing dragons and knocking back blow every night. I crashed around seven every morning. I wouldn’t eat for days at a time and then would gorge myself with bad food. I gained fifty pounds in three months, and I had to go over to a Don Mills mall, where, without trying anything on, I bought myself some cheap suits to wear around the neighbourhood. The cuffs on the pants would hang over my boots, and the sleeves rode high on my forearms. Sometimes I would park my Crown Victoria over at Bob Bannerman’s Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep dealership and drink wine and do lines of coke until the sun started to come up.