The Blues Band

Early in 2004, a few months after my fiftieth birthday (November 2003), I was going through some middle-age angst, and I decided to find a band to play with on weekends.

For thirty or more years, I’d worked with at least a dozen “wanna be a star” groups and artists between tours with Gord. They each had their own recipe for success, and to be fair, in some cases, the formula really worked. As a “hired gun” it was important to tow the party line if I wanted to function productively with them. This meant copying their records, note for note (obviously a cinch if I was the one on the recordings), or arranging new parts that I was required to stay with every show, never wavering. 

This isn’t a complaint, just an observation. Actually, I’m a fan of that kind of rigid structure on the concert level. 

On the bar level, though, particularly with a rockin’ blues band, all you need are the chord changes, the key and the feel (ballad, 6/8, straight 4, shuffle, etc.). Everything else is up for grabs. 

This is not to say that it doesn’t occasionally sound like shit, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun and great for the chops. Digging around looking for exciting and different things to play in real-time without any forethought, is, for me, a catalyst for that magical “FLOW” we’re hearing so much about these days. 

It was with this in mind that I googled the local KAJIJI, a free “Buy and Sell” website that also had a classification for “Bands Looking For Musicians,” and tried to discern, out of a dozen or so ads, which ones actually had musicians and not just posers with an account at Long & McQuade. L&M is our Walmart of music stores here in Canada.

Need keys for part-time blues band. Milton area.

Call (905) xxx-xxxx

I’m about 30 kilometres from downtown Milton, but as far as drive time goes, it beats the hell out of most areas of Toronto for me, so I called. 

A gruff-sounding voice answered. Then, after some brief telephone formalities, I launched into a list of my accomplishments. 

“Whatever…” was pretty much his reaction. “If you meet me here at my place this Sunday at noon, you can follow me up the mountain. There’s a shed up there we jam in”.

It sounded like he was about to hang up. “What’s your name?” I asked quickly.

“Romper”

Hard Luck Hill

He gave me the address for his farmhouse, and Sunday morning I loaded a keyboard and amp into my Chev Blazer and pulled into his driveway at 11:59 am. A guy who looked like a charter member of the local Hell’s Angels stood beside a pick-up truck, glancing at his watch. 

“Punctual!” he exclaimed as I pulled up beside him, “and you call yourself a musician?”

“Follow me, I’ll drive slow,” he said as he got into his truck.

He led me up the mountain on a densely wooded winding road. After about 20 minutes, he turned left into a clearing with a house and a large shed. 

Romper pulled up to the shed near some double doors and motioned for me to do the same.

“Haul yer stuff in and set up in the back by the Harley and the John Deere.”

The only person there when we went in was the harmonica (blues harp) player, but over the next half hour, more musicians and their friends rolled in with beer coolers and lawn chairs. The pungent odor of BC Mondo skunk weed began to waft through the air and a general party atmosphere started to build.

As the guitarists and bass player were tuning up and making the kind of cacophonous racket you can hear at Long and McQuade any Saturday afternoon, I was trying to make sense of my new overweight, overlarge, overpriced, Japanese Boeing DX-747 keyboard. It was my 50th birthday present to myself.

Still Easier To Operate Than A Television Remote

Eighty-eight keys and at least fifty switches and dials, each with an annoying blinking LED. Multiple banks of EQ filters, tone shapers and special effects, 5 speed transmission and a cigarette lighter. Sixteen different ways to plug it into an amp and a 300 page manual poorly translated from an Asian language.

Example: In event of bad sound try use better notes. 

Note: My editor, the Irish-Chinese philosopher Foo O’Shit, laughed hysterically over his contribution. “Ya gotta keep that in!” He was drunk at the time.

It had a gazillion sounds, most of them resembling bombs dropping or dinosaurs screeching. There were only a few usable ones and a single outstanding one: A killer B-3 organ with grinding distortion that sounded like ten thousand dollars worth of high-end audio equipment about to cack. 

Organ isn’t traditional for the blues, but neither is six white men in a rich guy’s garage a thousand miles from a cotton plantation or river delta. 

One of the musicians could claim some authenticity as a pioneer of blues-rock. He played in Janis Joplin’s band at the height of her popularity.

Back in my high-school days, I wasn’t a big fan of Janis, but she had one really exceptional album: Pearl. A band of mostly Canadians named Full Tilt Boogie backed her on that LP. They toured with her and even played the legendary Woodstock festival. And here, ready to rock in this rich guy’s garage, was the bass player from that band.

Ready, Set, Go

I was still adjusting my keyboard stand when someone yelled, “Fast shuffle, key of G.” The drummer counted it in, and an enormous tsunami of sound washed through the shed. Everyone was playing at once. Full throttle, no restraint, a drag race with tires screeching and engines roaring, continuing at high intensity for a few verses and with me ecstatically barreling along with steam-locomotive momentum.

There were some on-pitch, spirited, call and response vocals, something about “all night loving” followed by guitar and harp solos each receiving enthusiastic applause.

My Time To Shine

Then the guitar player pointed to me, indicating it was my turn. I let it rip. Swirling arpeggios, two-handed glissandos, cascades of organ riffs pleading for freedom from slavery and oozing with the angst of lost love and broken dreams. 

“Aha,” I thought, “they’ll be worshipping me as a Keyboard God.”

During the last few bars of my solo the drummer cued the ending and we stumbled to an abrupt halt and silence.

“Maybe it would be better on piano,” someone said.