Hail, Hail Rock and Roll

A Band of Duffers

GQ Magazine

Much of what I now think of as our kind of music can be played simultaneously by people intent on playing really well and by people trying to get from the beginning of a song to its end without too many disasters in between.  This combination would be us

After years of nothing much, I’m happy to have something to say when someone asks, “What’s new?”   But when what’s new turns out to be that I’m in a garage band – a basement band, actually; a basement band called Three Chord Johnny to be perfectly precise --  people are not inclined to share my enthusiasm.  It’s not a subject that gets conversation rolling.  Dinner guests don’t want to know about the way we do “Shame, Shame, Shame.”  Luncheon companions don’t want to hear about  our “Tears of a Clown.”  No-one  wants to learn how long it took me to achieve a level of distortion that sounds as if I dropped my amp while unloading it from Ike Turner’s car and into the Sun Studios one day in Memphis in 1951 – just the right knife-through-the-speaker buzz for the guitar riff on our version of “Rocket 88.”

I am almost fifty years old, and I’ve never been in a real band before.  (A real band being, by my non-critical definition, one that gets together for regular practices.)   I played guitar a little when I was a teenager, but of the campfire-strumming “Blowin in the Wind” variety.  Nothing wrong with that, and nothing much came of it either.  So let’s skip the next thirty-five years to a day when for reasons that won’t bear much looking-into (“You did what??? my wife asked with what we might politely call incredulity) I bought a Fender Stratocaster. 

I can’t explain it.  I just did.  Will “because I’d been listening to the Rolling Stones’ 1963 cover of  Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now” even point in the direction of a reasonable answer?  I didn’t think so.

So I’ll grant you ridiculous.  At least it could  look that way, from the outside.  Mid-life crisis, Peter Pan syndrome, diminishing virility, threatened vanity, general male silliness.  I won’t argue.  One can very easily protest too much when it comes to denying one’s demographic predictability.  Affairs, motorcycles, teeth-whitener – they all come with the territory.  However, there is one , and perhaps only one good thing about being somewhere past the middle of middle-age.  It has obvious bearing on why a group of mostly fifty-ish men are capable of getting together with evident enthusiasm to play rock and roll in the basement, and then sit around afterward having a beer and listening to the 17 year-old Stevie Winwood doing “Georgia” with the Spencer Davis Group in 1963, or Don Covay’s 1964  “Mercy, Mercy.”   And the good thing is this: not giving a fuck about appearing ridiculous.

About a year or so ago a friend of mine --someone with whom I’ve worked one way or another for most of my professional life -- heard that I  was fooling around on an electric guitar.  This struck a chord with him.  E would be my guess.

John Macfarlane is the editor of Toronto Life magazine.  I am a writer who lives in Toronto, and in the past twenty years we have both so often had to tell people that we are not related that we should probably have the explanation tattooed on our foreheads.   One day, not long before last Christmas, he invited me out for a drink.  I imagined he wanted to speak to me about some terrific magazine assignment.  But John, who is a little older than I am, and who as a kid listened to the pre-Elvis black music coming out of Buffalo on WKBW on his transistor radio, and who, as he put it, “almost peed myself the first time I heard the Everly Brothers do “Wake Up Little Susie,”  it was so good” wanted to talk about forming a band. 

The idea seemed quixotic.  In my quest to master the electric guitar I wasn’t very far beyond strumming “Blowin in the Wind.”  I’d concluded that on a scale of pop musical prowess that had Jimi Hendrix at one end and my father’s tuneless whistling of “Row, Row Your Boat” at the other, I was somewhere in the middle.  A kind of Switzerland of funkiness.  I was so neutrally talented, in fact, that I was asked to play my guitar at a Christmas Carol party in our neighborhood that year.

There would be a piano player there, as well.  And I discovered two things at the party.  (1) “Good King Wenceslas” is way harder to play than “Wild Thing.”  And (2), the pianist, Dave Wilson, a writer and editor, had musical interests beyond “Come All Ye Faithful.”  Talented,  knowledgeable about rock and roll, R&B, and blues, he was eager to find some people – some “guys” was the precise musical term used --  with whom to play.    Feeling a certain momentum building, I called another Toronto writer, David Hayes, who I knew to be a good bass guitar player.  David had played professionally for some years, before trading in the uncertainty of a career in music for the extravagant wealth and rock-solid security of freelance writing. 

Thus we arrived at the time-honoured quandary of all nascent bands:  where do we play, and who will be on drums?  For obvious reasons, these two questions tend to go hand in hand.  Whoever has the drum-kit, gets the band.

“My son’s a drummer,” I said.  And so, unbeknownst to Blake, who was at the hour of our genesis,  in the second of a double math period in grade eight at Deer Park Public School, he was hired on the spot.

We had the bodies.  We had the place.  We had the instruments and extension cords.  But  I have to say things did not look promising.  We had two good musicians – on keyboard and bass – both of whom I was sure would quickly get bored with the rest of the talent.  We had two self-described duffers on guitar, both of whom I thought would quickly run out of familiar chords.    So far as I knew, nobody could sing.  And we had a thirteen-ear old drummer – a devotee of Weezer and Moby  --  who was facing the prospect of playing really old stuff with really old guys, one of whom was his Dad.  Blake had agreed to give it a shot, but with a certain lack of wild enthusiasm.  Clearly, there were Rubicons of ridiculousness he would not cross.  Singing “Tears of a Clown” with me was one of them.  I  also had the feeling that were I to show up for our first practice in a pair of red Converse high-tops, a silk scarf,  and with a bottle of Jack Daniels, he would be gone.  Real fast.

On the other hand, there were a few auspicious signs.

The elderly couple who live in the adjoining house are both going deaf.

As well, my concerns about the two good musicians tiring of the neophytes have proven groundless.  I’d like to say that the neophytes turned out to be far more talented than we thought we were.  But no, actually.  Our estimation of our skills was reasonably accurate – as evidenced by the yawning gulf that opened up the first time we reached the guitar break in “Roll Over Beethoven.”  It’s just that the good musicians among us, like so many good musicians, are generous souls who are happy to play.  Not quite with anybody.  But almost.      

On top of which, the basement has been transformed.  By clearing the area of life-jackets and skates and broken chairs and garden hoses,  I’d miraculously discovered the only kind of room the dingy, catch-all storage space could convincingly  become other than a dingy, catch-all storage space.  Suddenly, it looked like a band room – a comfy, worn-down,  subterranean, who-else-would-want-to-come-down-here kind of space where we could make a lot of noise, huddle around the CD player listening intently to Big Joe Turner’s version of “Corrine, Corrina” or Paul Butterfield’s cover of “Look Over Yonders Wall,”  and talk about  riffs and licks and grooves without sounding too idiotic or pretentious.  There was even an adjacent bathroom – with a toilet seat, I noted with some satisfaction, that remained permanently up.

And most importantly, my wife didn’t object to all this.  She liked everyone showing up at our place for “band.”  On Sunday mornings, “the boys,”  as she charmingly referred to the non-resident players, arrived at our place with lattes and croissants, and she called upstairs, again, to get the drummer out of bed.  There was something familiar about her role, and eventually I realized it was that of the friendly Mom who didn’t mind if the neighborhood kids just walked in without ringing the doorbell.  She was also our first encouraging, if one story-removed audience.  Three-Chord Johnny has met once a week every week since the depths of winter, and for our first month or two we tended to sound better through floorboards than thin air.  But the first time we managed to play  the sweet, 1963 Johnny Rivers song, “The Poor Side of Town,”  Janice came down to the basement immediately.  “Hey,” she said, and I could tell that this was the last thing she had expected.  “That was kind-of good.”   

Kind-of good had never occurred to me as a possibility either.  It seemed  wildly and unreasonably ambitious.  I was still fumbling around on the fretboard, was terrified at the propect of singing, and seemed sometimes incapable of the most elementary progressions.  It’s hard to make a lot of mistakes if you’re just playing the chords in “Midnight Hour.”  I managed. 

But we made two key decisions that brought kind-of good within our range.  Searching for something that would keep both the musicians and the duffers in our midst happy, we decided to stick to straight-ahead blues, basic R&B, and early rock and roll.  This worked.  Many of the greatest songs of what I now think of as our kind of music can be played simultaneously by people who are intent on playing really, really well and by people who are trying to get from the beginning of a song to its end without too many disasters in between.  This combination would be us.  The decision has also plugged us in to some fantastic music – Jimmy Reed, Little Junior Parker, the Coasters,  Carl Perkins  – music that was often as much a revelation to me as to my son.  Whether you’re thirteen or sixty, the experience of trying to play in a band means that you never listen to pop music the same way again.  And when you hear the really good stuff – let’s take Don Covay’s 1964 “Please Do Something” or The Spencer Davis Group’s cover of “Searching” as examples --  you marvel, if you’re sixty, at how simple it is, and how difficult simplicity can be to achieve.  Or, if you’re thirteen,  you look up from your homework,  and give a little lower-lip curling, worldly nod of acknowledgment at how cool it is.    

We also decided that we wouldn’t do songs that were overly familiar to absolutely everybody on the planet.  No matter how good your chops, if you do “Brown Sugar,” you’re going to be compared to you-know-who.  And since the guitar section of our band didn’t actually have any chops, we felt the comparison would not be to our advantage.

This was wise,  although the wisdom was not mine.  I still cringe at some of the songs I suggested we do before it became clear to me who we were – musically speaking.  Stares come no blanker than the one John Macfarlane shot me when I wondered outloud whether Gordon Lightfoot’s “Go-go Round” (“Only a go-go girl in love with someone who didn’t care…”)  might be a number for us.  There were a few Bob Dylan songs that didn’t get very far off our basement floor.  When I proposed that we try The Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee” Dave Wilson looked at me quizzically.  “Pretty song,” he said.  “Which one of us should play the cello?”

The day the floor monitors, the mixer,  and the microphone stands arrived was not my happiest.   Even if, from a décor point of view,  they did accentuate the bandishness of the band room.

We had been playing with cobbled-together equipment.  We had one mike, but no boom stand, and we had to lean it over the keyboards so that Dave Wilson – who turned out to have a fine voice -- could sing “Poor Side of Town,” and “Memphis,” and, “Mustang Sally.”   We struggled like this for the longest time; I can’t now think why – although it may have had something to do with commitment.  At our rocky outset – and outsets don’t get much rockier than the first time we tried Lucinda Williams’ “Can’t Let Go” or Mark Knoppfler’s “Junkie Doll” – it was by no means clear that we were going to keep doing this.  But, apparently, we were. 

The lattes kept coming on Sundays;  the e-mails shot back and forth by the dozens every time we tried to schedule a practice (I  don’t know what bands did before computers; Three Chord Johnny is so dependent on e-mail that for a while we considered calling ourselves No Subject); the obscure Charlie Rich and Ike Turner CDs circulated among us; Blake actually loaded his discman every now and then with music that was before my time, let alone his;  I found myself looking forward all week to “band” and I began to think that I had never had more fun; with nowhere to go but up, we improved.  And one day – maybe it was the day we realized that “kind-of good” was not beyond the realm of possibility – we suddenly remembered that four out of the five of us were grown-ups with jobs and bank accounts.  We realized that we could go out and get the equipment we wanted without asking permission, or borrowing money from our parents, or getting paper routes.

So we did. 

The great disadvantage of floor monitors, and a mixer, and microphones is that you hear yourself.  As opposed to imagining yourself.  This can be a brutal shock.  The first time I got up my nerve and sidled up to the microphone, it wasn’t Sam Cooke’s, or Otis Redding’s, or Mick Jagger’s voice that came out.  It was my own – quavering and tentative and weak.  We play, standing in a circle in the band room, and I had the unfortunate fatherly experience of watching my son bite his lip, trying to hold back his laughter, as he drummed his way through my attempt to be Smoky Robinson.

But this probably won’t come as news to you.  Most people know that it will be a brutal shock to confront their own vocal inadequacies and musical failings. Wild horses couldn’t drag them to a microphone.   That’s why most people don’t get involved with middle-aged garage bands.  Most people prefer not to appear quite so ridiculous.

Which is fine.  But the remarkable thing about being in a band is that things do get better.  It is possible for a person, and for a group to find a voice.  And anyway, there are a few things about being in this little basement  band of ours, this gallant few, that make the risk of appearing ridiculous seem small potatoes indeed.

The first would be friendship.  It’s not easy at my age suddenly to make new friends, or to shift old friendships into some new and unexpected gear, but that’s what has happened to us.   We enjoy sharing musical enthusiasms, and we enjoy one another, in the strange, new light we’ve found in the band room.   I don’t really care if we’re good or not – although I’m happy to work, even to work hard,  toward improving.   I just know that sometimes, when we’re pounding through one of our songs, I start to laugh at the giddy pleasure of it all, and I can’t recall when that last happened.

The other delight, of course, is playing with my son.  He’s good.  Unlike his old man, he actually has real talent.  But even if he didn’t, I’d consider all this a great stroke of paternal luck.  “A gift,” as John Macfarlane has put it.  It’s not always easy for a father and son to have such fun together.  It’s not always easy to find common ground.  But once a week, we do.  The other night, he came up with the band motto, and it still makes me laugh when I think of it.  “Play hard, play hard.”  And whenever someone – feigning interest at a lunch or dinner – asks who plays with me in this band, I say, “Four good friends.”  None of whom laugh anymore when I sing.

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