The Shirley Years Part 3

If you haven’t read parts 1 or 2 the artist is Shirley Eikhard

Shirley Years Part 3
The third week of February 1977, I got a phone call from Shirley. There were a few gigs booked and she wanted to know if I was interested. She already had a drummer and a bass player, Bill Cymbala and Bob Doidge, who were the house musicians at Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton. 
“We’ll probably only need one rehearsal,” she said as if I needed to be sold on the idea. 
So we got together at Bill’s place one horrendous freezing rain afternoon, went through the tunes, and made plans to meet and play at a college in Sarnia Ontario that weekend. 
It was magic. These guys really had a feel for Shirley’s music. 

Next, we played a week in a bar in Peterborough. We set up on a Monday afternoon, had a short soundcheck, and Bill and Shirley left to check into their rooms. Bob stayed back, and we talked for a while. A relatively normal looking guy about our age wandered over and introduced himself. He was, he said, a local composer, and asked if he could sit down at the  piano and play us a song. There were customers in the bar at the time, but the PA wasn’t on, so why not? 
“Go ahead,” I said, and this articulate, neatly dressed fellow sat down at the piano and proceeded to hit three of the most dissonant chords I ever heard and howled like a dog caught in a leg trap. A flourish or two, another howl and he turned and said, “I’ve got more”. 

It didn’t seem to me that any of the patrons even noticed. 
“Maybe they’re used to it,” I thought, resolving not to drink the local tap water.

The week was a success as once again, the audiences were smitten with Shirley’s refreshingly unassuming stage presence and flawless performance backed by musicians who played for the song, not for themselves. Yes, I’m uncharacteristically including myself here. 
I didn’t hear much for the next two months other than an occasional “how’s it going” phone call, but in May, Shirley came up with more work, and she wanted to add a guitar player. 
Daniel (Danny) Lanois was going to join us for this set of shows which included venues like Toronto’s York University and Gage Park in Hamilton. 
The most unusual show was to be in Inuvik NWT as part of Canada’s July 1st 110th birthday celebration. An ambitious five-hour live television special featuring music from all parts of Canada was in the works, and our segment would be far up north on the Mackenzie River, just about at the Arctic ocean. 
Danny turned out to be a great addition, and with one quick rehearsal, we were doing concerts around Southern Ontario and looking forward to the northern adventure coming up.
June 29th, the five of us flew to Edmonton on a big roomy DC-8. We then boarded a cramped half cargo, half passenger converted Boeing 737, and traveled one thousand two hundred and twenty-five miles straight north. 
During a nail-biting landing in which the pilot had to swoop around three times (Danny sitting right behind me threatening to throw up and Bob eagerly pinned to the window going “Cool, they never do this on Air Canada!”) we got our first glimpses of Inuvik. Like something out of a science fiction movie, the town was a network of oddly shaped buildings interconnected with shoulder-high, tunnel-like “utilidors”. These were the life-lines supplying heat, power, and water to each structure, a spiderish matrix meant to keep those necessities protected from the heaving perma-frost.

If Inuvik was like a scene from The Outer Limits, what happened next was from The Twilight Zone.
Nobody knew we were coming. There had been no problems with our air and hotel reservations or the rental truck, but we could find no information about how to proceed and certainly no organizers or directors. We spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what to do. Well, some of us. 
Priorities being what they were, Danny, Bob and I figured we should purchase some wine and beer for later. I was nominated for that mission. 
That was a trip. Inuvik, from the second week in June to midway through September, was a giant mud bath. None of the roads were paved back in those days. Like  an old western town there were boardwalks along the sides of the streets but to cross at any intersection meant sloshing through six or eight inches of a reddish-brown ooze while at the same time trying to avoid the wake of any cars or trucks that zoomed by kicking up dense tsunamis of viscous sticky clay and mahogany muck. As I made my way carefully along the three blocks to the liquor store I met up with Shirley and Bill coming the other way. Bill, a fastidious kind of guy, not a dandy by any means but generally neater and cleaner than most musicians, was covered in mud. Shirley was the same. They both seemed shell-shocked but while Shirley had a “what can you do?” glint in her eye Bill was livid.
“What the hell are we doing in this out-house?” he raged.
A word about those vehicles we were dodging. They had no headlights. Well, they had places for lights but all were smashed. Later I was informed that on the first day each year that the sun doesn’t set, around mid-May, the locals kick out their headlights in what seemed to me to be  some bizarre “Festival of Light” celebration. With twenty-four hours of blessed daylight after the usual long and very dark winter, I suppose the Fall equinox seemed a long way away. The end of August into September was a busy time at the small Canadian Tire store selling and installing headlight bulbs. 
The school where we were supposed to perform had heard nothing about any “show”. So we (two other groups from Ontario and one from Quebec), had a day and a half to organize it. And we did! The television people never did show up, but we put on a great concert for the town on July 1st and flew home the next day. The last I heard it was still a mystery.
The next week we did a show at Gage Park in Hamilton, one in Ottawa, and that was it for that configuration.
In December, Shirley called with an eight-show headlining tour in the Atlantic provinces beginning a few days into the new year. She wanted to put together a new band to do that tour and some local gigs, possibly right up into June.
The story of that eventful tour will kick off Part 4.