Читать книгу Strange Way to Live - Carl Dixon - Страница 15

Once back home in Barrie, I made the most of the band that would have me. Boots, with Hal Hake, Blair Duhanuk (a.k.a. Duke), and Chris Bastein, with their neighbour Brad Noble on sound, was now the proving ground for my unfocused ambition. With fresh determination, it was time to get serious. A name change was in the works.

I still remember the heat of the day when I returned from Toronto, with our faithful roadie Brad clutching a copy of our new band photo, which now styled us as Primecut. Astro Talent Agency, which had agreed to represent our fledgling unit, had made up the new name on the spot as we stood in their office because they said “Boots” would make people think we were a country band. Stompin’ Tom Connors had his Boots Records label, for one thing. Astro’s staff quickly printed up promo photos for us to take away. Our drummer, Chris, was the first band member we saw on our return, so we unveiled the great new name. Chris’s eyebrows shot off his forehead in surprise. Then he swore at us, said this was idiotic and the worst name he’d ever heard, and jumped into his Trans Am to tear out of his driveway in a fury, tires squealing. Brad and I looked at one another and said, “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

Once we’d come to our senses, nobody liked the new name, but we needed an agent to like us and get us jobs. We swallowed our distaste and convinced Curly (as Chris was called) to just go with it for a while until we thought of a better alternative. In the month or two that followed we played as Primecut.

Then one day Astro called. “We have a gig for you in Parry Sound at the Kipling Hotel, but it’s this week, can you guys do it?”

“Wow, great ... yes, thanks! I was hoping something would come up.”

“There is one catch.”

“What?”

“You have to tell them that you are Hollinger.”

“What do you mean? Why? Who is Hollinger?”

“Hollinger is a group from Timmins. They were booked to play there this week, but they had an accident on Sunday. Some of them are hurt. They can’t play but we don’t want to lose the booking.”

“Wait a minute ... we have to pretend we’re some other band? How will we do that?”

“It’ll be okay. Hollinger play kind of the same music as you guys. The trick will be that they’re a five-piece, so you’ll have to make up a story why you’re only four.”

“We’ll have to make up a lot of story to pull this off. I don’t know, this all feels kinda weird.”

“Do you guys want to work or not? Just say you’re Hollinger when you get there and it’ll be fine.”

So we were Hollinger for a week. It would have been fine too, except on the second night one of the bar owners started asking us things about Timmins. We deflected. Then he suggested we must have been named after the big Hollinger Mines up there. “Uh, Hollinger Mines? Umm, I don’t know about that. It’s just a name.” We’d never been to Timmins, didn’t know the first thing about it. He looked at us quizzically.

The week was a moderate success but we weren’t as good as the real Hollinger. We also drove back to Barrie after the 1 a.m. closing each night because the guys had jobs or school. On one of those drives our new name came to me, as I felt the pressure of a return to the detested Primecut name after our Hollinger masquerade.

The band name we chose, finally, was Alvin Shoes, after a shoe store I’d heard advertised on a Parry Sound radio station on the drive home, but I’d misheard it as “Elvin” Shoes. After our beginning as Boots it may have looked like we were fixated on footwear, and then it turned out the store really was called Alvin Shoes, so we were in fact named after a shoe store. It was just a silly compromise born of desperation. Could be worse, I suppose, and probably an improvement on being named after a steak (hey, The Guess Who hated their name, which was a promo guy’s idea).

After a short time we left Astro Talent Agency, who hadn’t been very successful at shepherding us to the big time. I used the contacts I’d made in my short stint with Olias to get us taken on by a company called Pizzazz Productions, an agency that mostly specialized in “show bands.” You don’t really see show bands anymore, but they were once a big-earning fixture of the live music world. All the starving rockers considered it “selling out” to join a show band, a fate worse than backing an Elvis tribute. A show band was where you’d go once you’d given up on the rock ’n’ roll dream and wanted to make some decent money (three hundred dollars a week instead of the seventy-five to one hundred that bands like us were left with; three hundred dollars sounded like all the money in the world back then).

After watching us perform, Dan, the agent, told us we scored almost a zero on his checklist of attributes for selling a band. We were pretty green, and there were no bad boys among us who knew the ropes, who’d been around a little bit.

“Four nice guys from a small town” was the way agent Dan described our identity — that is, our lack thereof. He made us go to Honest Ed’s discount shop in Toronto to buy ridiculous new stage clothes. I had a misguided notion that we were supposed to look crazy or outlandish in our new stage get-ups, and among other regrettable purchases I got a pair of heavy blue-felt paratrooper pants with suspenders, genuine army-surplus items, which were huge, hot, and clownish when worn under circumstances that did not involve dangling from a silk parachute at ten thousand feet. Between that costume and other unguided choices, I did not present a fetching image.

We Alvins now set out together for wherever Dan and Pizzazz Productions sent us. In a mood of what we thought was witty silliness (williness?) we decided to have a gimmick, à la the Ramones. We all were named Alvin, and that crazy coincidence was what led us to form a band together. We had Alvin Slicker, Alvin Duker, Alvin Boomer, Alvin Dick Leroy (me), and Alvin Herb Elroy. People were mainly unconvinced and only mildly entertained by this yarn. It became a short-lived test of how gullible or willing a girl was if she believed any of this malarkey. Not that we took advantage of any girls, gullible or otherwise. We were nice boys with girlfriends at home. The fabled rock lifestyle remained veiled to our naive eyes.

So we set off and took all of road life’s blows square on the chin. This resulted in a fair amount of stress, but I managed to convince the others to keep their chins up and plow ahead. I had to; they were all unwitting pawns in my undefined quest.

Our first round of hard lessons was a tour of northern Ontario in the winter of 1979. Schumacher, Dryden, Schreiber, Marathon, Hearst, Timmins; one hot spot after another played host to “The Shoes.” In Hearst I was amazed to find a completely French-speaking town in Ontari-ari-o; it’s more common than you’d think. I also learned that sometimes men thought I was a pretty boy, possibly gay, and wanted to hurt me for it. This mystified me because I’ve always been a very hetero guy with macho leanings. Someone threw an ashtray at my head in Hearst and barely missed doing damage. There was no market for rookies like us in the bigger towns like Sudbury, North Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, or Thunder Bay. We set about earning our wings wherever they would have us.

To an unbiased observer it would have looked like a fiasco. At the end of the run we felt we had emerged bloodied but unbowed. I was the band’s money manager for no reason other than that my mom had lent us the money to buy a used cube van for getting around. I did not possess any business acumen or experience. One of my first moves was to drive away from Timmins on a Sunday morning with our entire week’s fee forgotten in my hotel room.

Our cube van was a two-seater, with a couple of our parents’ old armchairs set up at the front of the box and a folding lawn chair set up between the cab seats. This was to carry five people plus our gear. Short straw drew the lawn chair, which wasn’t much fun on a five-hundred-mile drive. The heater wasn’t adequate for the forty-below temperatures we sometimes encountered, and we’d be so cold as we drove that on one trip Duke had ice forming on his beard inside the van as his breath condensed and froze there, like those photos of Antarctic explorers. Duke remembers having moose stew at the bar and watching the Super Bowl with the Dryden locals. Near the end of the tour somebody in the North finally took pity on us and shared the trick of placing cardboard inside the engine’s front grill to create more warmth in the car’s heating system.

On our final night we were so keen to get home after six weeks away that we lit out driving after our Saturday night load-out only to find there were no gas stations open for over a hundred miles, and we hadn’t filled up. The gas gauge dipped below the empty line for our final very nervous fifty miles, and the temperature was once again dipping below the minus-thirty mark. Just as our engine coughed its last combustion, we crested a rise to see a Husky service station several miles in the distance. In my excitement and relief I roused everyone from icy fitful slumber and shouted, “Get out and push the van while we’re still rolling so it’s not a dead stop! We can make it to the station!”

Poor Duke responded to the alarm cry before he was even awake. He rolled out with the rest of us onto the frozen tarmac under the starry northern sky in running shoes and no jacket but gamely took up a corner of the van in the frosty night. Four strapping young men set to work pushing the five-ton load two miles up the highway with every ounce of their strength. It was like a bizarre dream we were caught up in together, as a final kick in the arse from the North.

When we at last rolled the van across the deserted highway into the Husky station, a man who’d been watching our approach with interest wandered outside. He offered this helpful thought: “Why’d you push your truck all the way here in the freezing cold? You should have just jogged down here and I’d have taken you up with the tow truck to put some gas in it.” If our heads hadn’t already been flushed bright red with freezing, he would have seen us blush with embarrassment. It’s funny now, but at the time it all seemed kind of normal, part of the experience called “being on tour.”

Performing four shows a night, six nights a week, and then driving all day on Sunday to get to the next town; staying in seedy hotels and eating every meal in cheap diners: that was the routine. We’d try to save money by keeping a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter in the room, maybe bananas or hot dogs on the window sill to keep them cold; learning to live on seventy-five dollars a week. The quest for cheap food occupied a great deal of our time, and many touring musicians’ idea of heaven was to be invited home by a local girl who could cook. Everyone in travelling bands got skinny.

So, if you overlook the hunger, the living conditions, the cramped travel, and the low pay, what is left for the aspiring musician? What’s left is the opportunity to perform on your instrument for an audience, and if you’re any good at all, to entertain them and feel their approval. That is a powerful intoxicant, powerful enough to keep people persevering through unbelievable stuff. However, if what you’re getting from the audience is hostility — or worse, indifference — the whole thing starts to look pretty bleak. That’s when musicians start to reassess their prospects, decide it’s not too late to go to law school, and chuck the whole thing. For many that’s a sensible decision. Many are called, few are chosen. At some point later, though, people always regret putting down their instrument.