Cigar Box Banjo

by Paul Quarrington

  “I remember you said you liked that guy,” she said.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  I’d had another of Webb’s recordings—an LP, a flat plate in a cardboard cover, entitled El Mirage—years before. I’d enjoyed some of the songs, in particular “If You See Me Getting Smaller I’m Leaving” and the haunting “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.” But I think that album, El Mirage, appealed to me for two main reasons. One was the hauteur of the lyrics, which maintained a poetic opacity; when Webb was straightforward, I tended to skip the needle across the grooves. Also, the record was produced by George Martin, the elegant and refined Britishman who steered the Beatles to dizzying heights. George Martin is a great genius, although I’m not convinced it’s a good thing he ever existed. Bear with me here. Granted, Martin had done many fine things at EMI’s little Parlophone label—the label they used to release stuff they didn’t know what else to do with—such as guide Flanders and Swann (“At the Drop of a Hat”) and the lads from Beyond the Fringe (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett) to the outer reaches of fine comedy. Indeed, were it not for this penchant for humour, Martin might never have signed the Beatles. Listening to their audition tape, he declared their original songs “simply not good enough.” Then, being a tit-for-tat sort of fellow, he asked if there was anything about him they didn’t like. “Well, there’s your tie for a start,” came a comment delivered in a Liverpudlian accent. After that, everyone got along much better. But I sometimes wonder what would have happened had the Beatles been allowed to develop without guidance from a tweedy oboist. What I’m getting at is: can we be sure that Martin really enhanced what was startling and original about the Beatles? Isn’t there a chance he squashed some of that out of them? I’m certain he was fair and democratic in the studio. Still . . .

  Nonetheless, that Sir George Martin was capable of great feats of musical thaumaturgy (the piccolo trumpet solo in “Penny Lane,” the Bernard Herrmann–inspired string arrangement for “Eleanor Rigby”) is not in doubt, and he performs them aplenty on Jimmy Webb’s El Mirage. My favourite moment occurs in “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” named for a story by science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein. Just before the line “I fell out of her eyes,” there is a huge gushing of melodic sentiment, as though Jimmy Webb can stand on the manhole cover of his emotions no longer, nope, the sewers are backing up.

  Later that Christmas Day, stuffed with turkey and trimmings, I sat down in the kitchen and listened to my new CD. And I was gobsmacked.

  Let me back away from that statement for just one moment to render a more sober-sided assessment of Ten Easy Pieces. The production was sparse and understated. For the most part, the recording features Webb playing the piano, singing in a particularly baleful way. Webb struggles with the high notes; often his purchase on the precise pitch is weak. But he sings with gusto, and his self-accompaniment is juicy, the chords creeping with clustered menace underneath his voice. The producer had seen fit to colour each track, perhaps adding a guest vocalist—Shawn Colvin, Marc Cohn, Michael McDonald—or some tiny bit of instrumentation. I checked the credits on the CD jewel box—fifteen years ago, I could still make out the occasional line of print—and saw with some surprise that the producer was Fred Mollin, one half—with Matthew McCauley—of the production team that had contributed to Dan Hill’s great success.

  What most appealed to me about the album was something that had been missing in Webb previously, or something that I had had no eyes to see or ears to hear: his honesty. On Ten Easy Pieces, he presented an unflinching survey of his heart, as though it were a transparency projected at the front of a lecture hall, Webb standing there with a laser pointer, indicating all the lesions and swellings. “The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress,” in this version naked and unadorned, was no longer opaque, despite the high dudgeon and language. Other songs, clearly not autobiographical—“Wichita Lineman” is about, well, a telephone lineman in Kansas—were forthright and unflinching on other people’s behalfs. It struck me that many of the finest songs do this; they give voice to those who lack one.

  LISTENING TO Ten Easy Pieces got me thinking, and something else fortuitous occurred around the same time. To tell you about it, I must revisit an event described earlier in this narrative, the Butterfield Band concert at the Rock Pile I attended as a teenager. You may recall I mentioned three older boys who were also at that concert, unbeknownst to me. Martin Worthy you know quite well by now, and Chas Elliott and Stuart Laughton are about to join us.

  By this juncture in the story, the four of us were entrenched in adulthood. Firmly entrenched, in fact. The last vestiges of youth had long ago been torn away by mortgages and marriages. Chas and Stuart had become professional musicians, and as such, found themselves at some point on tour in—I believe—Spain. Spain or France or some such European place with beaches, and during a period of respite from their orchestral duties, the boys were wandering along a beach discussing blues music. Now, I have never understood why they were discussing the blues under such circumstances (said circumstances would have included, would they not, bared breasts?), but they were. Chas and Stuart were bemoaning the fact that they no longer played the blues, that there was no outlet for this proclivity. Orchestral bass players like nothing better than slapping away on a electric bass—which, if nothing else, is a lot less physical labour—and Stuart, in addition to his accomplishments on the trumpet, had taught himself to play the guitar (like Mike Bloomfield) and the harmonica (like the great Bunky Butterfield himself). The two decided they would get together and “jam,” a word I have put in poncey quotation marks so that I can discuss it for a little bit.

  “Jamming” is what occurs when a bunch of musicians get together to play. It is not a rehearsal for an upcoming gig, and rarely is it a performance. (One could argue that most performances of jazz music are jam sessions, but, um, why not wait until I’m finished explaining before putting forth that argument?) In its truest sense, we’re discussing a one-off. The personnel are random, dictated by the Fates and the Muses acting in consort. There may be something resembling a standard line-up (bass, drums, keys, guitar), but nothing would prevent five tuba players from getting together to jam. (Nothing at the moment, that is; you might want to lobby your local Member of Parliament to see if he/she can’t introduce some sort of law.) Anyway, the line-up is assembled, or assembles itself, and then, usually, a song is played. Occasionally everyone just has at it. Purely improvised music does have a place in the world; it’s just that everyone hopes that place is far, far away from themselves. More often than not a song is suggested, so that the participants have a place to begin, a framework upon which to hang their ideas and inventions. Jazz musicians often look to the Great American Song Book, those classics that first saw the light of day on the Broadway stage or the Hollywood screen. “How about,” someone might suggest, “‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’?” And the others will nod, because the changes are well known. The song typically begins with a flat four minor seventh flattened fifth—oops, maybe the changes aren’t all that well known. They are, like those weird Beatles songs I could never figure out, sophisticated. (Now that I think of it, jazz ensembles often play Beatles tunes. Rarely do you hear them jamming on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” although I’m sure it has happened.) My point is, it’s part of a jazz guy’s job to know changes, the chords to all the classics and standards and a few hundred esoteric tunes.

  Blues musicians, by contrast, are really only required to know the blues. As a musical term, “blues” refers to a specific chord structure, the template for 99 per cent of all blues tunes. You may have heard the term “twelve-bar blues,” and here’s what we’re talking about: I (4 bars), I V (2 bars), I (2 bars), V (2 bars), I (2 bars). That’s it, with some minor variations. Sometimes a blues goes up to the IV on the second bar, and this is mostly dictated by how well the players know the song being performed. “Stormy Monday” usually doesn’t do it; Butterfield’s similar “Driftin’ and Driftin’” usually
does. If you are ever listening to some blues guys jam, pay attention to the second bar of every verse. I wager you’ll notice that, for the first couple of times round the block, there is some confusion there, some dissonance. The last pair of bars can also be divided up, so that the notes go from the tonic to the dominant seventh, which supplies drama and urgency.

  So: Stuart Laughton and Chas Elliott were walking along a European beach, ignoring bared breasts, discussing the blues. They had decided it would be fun to jam, and they wondered who else might care to join in. “How about,” one of them suggested, “Joel’s brother?”

  In the world of symphonic music, I am Joel’s brother. I have no complaint with that. After all, in the world of Canadian letters, he is “Paul’s brother.” Actually, it is more like “Paul’s brother Joel, that amazing bassist, and by the way, remind me what Paul has written.” Anyway, I was contacted, once those fellows arrived back in Canada, and a jam was scheduled.

  I went over to Chas’s house (his then-house, as he and his lovely artist wife, Alex, seem to move a lot). I pulled out a borrowed electric guitar and an amplifier of the same ilk as the one I’d used to blast out “Satisfaction” all those years ago. Stuart Laughton was toting a beautiful black Gibson guitar (the same style played by one of his great heroes, B.B. King) and a Fender amplifier,1 along with a battered suitcase full of harmonicas and peripherals. By “peripherals” I mean things like cables, tuners, picks, and capos. I assumed upon seeing the suitcase that Stuart was a well-equipped and organized man, but I was soon to learn this was not true. Despite the fact that the case was crammed full of stuff, no particular and needed item could ever be located. It was kind of astounding. Likewise with his harmonicas. It was almost like a magic trick: “You see here, I have twenty-nine silver harmonicas. Name a key, any key, the more common the better! Hmm? G? There is no harmonica in the key of G!!” Chas, for his part, produced a bass that seemed to have been sculpted by Degas, exquisitely contoured and well maintained. His amp had been attenuated, and the compression levers adjusted with microscopic precision. It’s interesting how one’s personality can be announced through one’s musical equipment. Chas showed himself to be fastidious, an appreciator of the finer things in life. Stuart gave evidence of a more than passing acquaintance with chaos.

  The first song we played was Nick Gravenites’s “Born in Chicago.”

  After a while, we went upstairs, where there was a vast kitchen full of top-of-the-line knives and sauté pans and so forth, and Chas prepared a simple but fabulously delicious pasta. Chas Elliott is the finest amateur chef I know.

  We had opened a fine bottle of Beaujolais, and we sat there and stuffed our faces and got a little snockered.

  “This,” we told ourselves, “is the blues.”

  THE THREE of us did that for many months, maybe almost a year, and then I phoned Marty and asked him to join in. It’s not that I had been hesitant to approach him—quite the contrary—but the twelve-bar blues aren’t very interesting to drummers. Actually, the twelve-bar blues are interesting to only a handful of people, when you get right down to it— typically emaciated guys in their forties and fifties. They lack teeth and smoke cigarettes and wear a small denim jacket regardless of the season, the same one they’ve had for years. Most other people find the twelve-bar blues a bit boring, especially drummers, so I held off on calling Martin until Chas and Stuart and I had done enough lead-footed plunking and were, as a musical group, ready to head off down the road. Happily, he was game to give it a try.

  The first incarnation of Porkbelly Futures—for that is what we decided to call ourselves—found an occasional home at the Black Swan, a venerable institution that proclaimed itself “Toronto’s Home of the Blues.” The Black Swan operated on two levels. On the ground floor was what we once referred to as a “beverage room.” (When I was embarking on my drinking career, there were two entrances to such places, one marked “Men” and the other “Ladies & Escorts.”) Above the beverage room was a long, narrow space, in places only as wide as a couple of bowling lanes. There were two old pool tables at one end, and at the other was a small stage.

  Now might be a good time to discuss the origins of the band’s name, since many people ask about it. They ask about it in this tone: “Where did you get that name?” Well, seeing as we were a blues band, I thought we should have a bluesy-sounding name. I have always been taken by the three-part names one encounters in the genre: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy, Sleepy John Estes. I felt Porkbelly Futures had the same rhythm, and the fact that it also referred to some financial arcanum was an ironic bonus, because our collective intelligence was very far removed from financial arcana. When I first imagined the name, it was spelled “Pork Belly Futures.” When Chas produced our first posters, working wonders with his Photoshop and such, the first two words got mashed together.

  With that little piece of history out of the way, we return to the Black Swan to witness a typical Porkbelly Futures performance. Sometime near the end of our second set—when the crowd (a term I use loosely) was at its densest and liveliest, having ingested enough liquor to make them talkative and eager to dance, but not enough to make them turn the corner into snarly moroseness—I would crank a knob on the Johnson and play an E major 7. The Johnson was an amplifier with a built-in, um, thing, that electronically changed the guitar’s sound. It had hundreds of settings; you could select options like “Fuzz” and “Super-charged” and “Jimmy Page stoned on acid at the Isle of Wight, 1969.” Of these hundreds of settings, I used exactly two. One made my guitar wail like a thirty-four-pound cat that wanted inside—now—and the other combined phasing and tremolo to make my guitar ethereal. It was this latter setting I employed near the end of our second set, setting free that E major 7 chord. It flew away in the air, and then I played a D major 7, a whole tone drop. Heads would lift slightly, ears would be cocked. It was familiar, somehow, and yet still felt strange. True enough, it is a distinctive musical meme. Rock and rollers are used to the whole tone drop—Bo Diddley did it a lot, strumming out that distinctive Bo Diddley beat, E (bumpbadumdum), D (bumbum), E. Or something like that. But the major seventh chords imbued the bluesy drop with a delicate beauty.

  It was an almost funereal cadence: E major 7, D major 7. The band would join me in playing that figure, Chas adding ballsy foundation, Martin splashing away on his cymbals, Stuart contributing harmonica, lorn and lonely. Then I would lean into the microphone, press my lips against the spit-mesh, and pull out a rumble from the bottom of my register. “Hovering by my suitcase / Tryin’ to find a warm place to spend the night . . .”

  I’d say that moment represented a zenith as far as personal sexiness goes. I’m not being immodest to suggest that my rumble loosened a few loins, because, after all, it was not me so much as the song: “Rainy Night in Georgia,” written by Tony Joe White, also known as the Swamp Fox. The song’s lyrics are remarkable, and the story they tell has a heartbreaking eloquence. The singer wanders around a southern train yard, lonely and outcast. Every sound he hears is mournful, and the busy-ness of the nearby city only serves to remind him of his isolation. He has two sources of comfort: his guitar, which he has been lugging around with him on his sorrowful pilgrimage, and a small picture of someone he loves. He clutches this picture to his breast and claims—not that anyone is buying it by this point—that he thus feels fine.

  In that version of Porkbelly Futures, we were a “cover band”—that is, we covered other people’s material, and “Rainy Night in Georgia” was one of the most popular songs we played. We did a lot of other covers—all, like that one, kind of dated, obscure to anyone under a certain age. And many people in the crowd were under a certain age, so they would frequently demand that we play other songs, songs we had rarely even heard of. We did play a lot of blues, which possesses a certain timelessness. The twelve-bar blues is a little like a canoe, in that no further tinkering is required. During the End Times, when personal space pods zip through th
e smog-choked troposphere, people will still be playing those tonics, sub- and dominants in the same order, flattening the sevenths every chance they get. So we were never booed off the stage or anything. Indeed, we could often win the audience over by playing something, like “Rainy Night,” that sounded vaguely familiar.

  We were no longer rehearsing at Chas’s house by this time. We were no longer rehearsing at anyone’s house. It was hard to find a wife who would abide it, in those early days. So we rented some facilities on bustling Broadview Avenue. A musician named John operated the enterprise, sound-proofing the rooms that surrounded the small inner chamber he lived in. (At least, there was a mattress there.) John had shoulder-length hair and drove a Hummer, and his taste in music was evident from the way he equipped the rehearsal space, with huge Marshall amplifiers, Gibson SGs, and Flying V’s.

  Let’s discuss instrumental taxonomy for a bit, even though it is not my specialty. The Gibson SG was, originally, a redesign of the popular Les Paul model. Mr. Paul didn’t much care for it and asked that his name be removed, so they dubbed it SG, the initials standing merely for “solid guitar.” The Flying V was originally manufactured in 1957. It was meant to represent the guitar of the “future,” at least, the rather wrong-headed future we were all imagining in the fifties. My, were we wide of the mark. (We don’t, these days, dress in white jumpsuits and suck dinner from a tube labelled “turkey, mashed potatoes, and peas.”) But I guess Ted McCarty, Gibson’s president at the time, was more prescient than most, because you still see people playing the Flying V guitar from time to time. What kind of people? Metalheads. The Flying V of the body—the point of the V attaches to the guitar neck, with two huge divergent points exploding after the picking hand—allows the player to reach notes at the very upper limits of the fretboard. When you run those bent high notes through a Marshall amplifier—or the famous Marshall “stack,” a single head surmounting at least two speaker cabinets—you get a sound that rips your eyebrows off your face.