Читать книгу The Fiddler Is a Good Woman - Geoff Berner - Страница 12

Her Kitchen, Fernwood Neighbourhood, Victoria, 2014

Our band loved Rosalyn Knight. We loooved her. Why did we love her? Oh, come on. You’ve toured with her. You know. All right, all right. Let me count the ways.

She was quick. She still is. Always ready with a snappy remark for any occasion. I remember sneaking backstage at Roots Fest mainly just to see her in action. We had just made it in back there. We saw some hippy volunteer come up to her and say, “Do you know there’s no smoking here?” and, like a shot, Rosalyn replied, “No, but if you hum a few bars I can play along.” Later, in the beer garden, some hipster CBC guy shouted, “Hey, Rosalyn, Minnie Pearl called, she wants her outfit back!” and she just shot back, “Hey, Grant, Don Rickles called, he wants his jokes back.” The chick from the Cowboy Junkies had snubbed her, and that was a big mistake because Rosalyn was the MC. They were taking a long time to set up before their show. She leans into the mic and broadcasts, “Boy, for a band that made its best record fifteen years ago with a single microphone, they sure have a lot of gear to set up!” Saw her come off the stage when she opened for k.d. lang at the big theatre. “Thanks very much! It’s been a pressure!” Somebody asked her what she had in her setlist one night before she went on at Tuesday’s — “Gonna play a medley of my hit.”

Yeah, we worshipped her. She was cool. She dressed in awesome thrift-store cowgirl clothes. She always had a smoke and a glass of red wine going. She was the only woman we knew who was making a living playing music. She was doing it. And we could see her. She was at the bar. She was at the Market on Yates buying spinach. She was riding her bike past the bakery. You know? And she wrote fucking amazing songs. “I’ll Make You Pay For It,” “Column A and Column B,” “Duchess of Esquimalt.” Holy shit. We would buy her albums and take them home and try to learn the songs. They seemed pretty simple and hummable, but when you took them apart, this shit was complicated. DD would have a little notebook and she’d just scratch out a mark every time we came to a new part of the song, and it’d be like, “Oh, shit, she didn’t go back to the A section, and she cut the bar in half before that — how many sections has she done? Six? This is the F section of this song. Jesus, what a woman.” That was how we felt about Rosalyn. She was our hero.

She didn’t really know us. We were just little punk kids to her. One time after we’d learned a bunch of them, we got shit-faced for courage on Golden Wedding and showed up on her doorstep at 3:00 a.m., and played five of her songs in a row. By song three she came out in her pyjamas, glass of red wine in her hand, and just smoked and drank and listened. Brody, her guitar player, came out and she just said, “Look what the sexy children are doing on our porch!” When we were done she invited us in for snacks. She gave us wine and made bruschetta. We got so drunk she let us crash on the floor of her living room. As we lay down she said, “John Carroll spilled a bottle of Talisker Special Cask on that floor last night, so if you get thirsty there’s probably seventy dollars worth of whiskey you could suck out of the carpet.”

I told her that, to us, she was like a mix of Nelson Mandela, Beethoven, and Simone de Beauvoir or something. I said if there was ever anything we could do for her, we would crawl over broken glass for her, we’d do anything for her. Without skipping a beat, she exhaled her smoke and said, “Got a place I could park my van for three months?”

She needed somewhere to park her Plush Monster, an ’82 Ford Econoline that used to be some kind of BC Hydro service vehicle and then got “customized” by some dude who clearly dressed it up to lure high-school girls. It was a beautifully creepy thing. She was going to Europe with Mykola I think, some trip out to Scandinavia or something. It was the kind of awesome glamorous thing that she did. Of course she could park her van with us! It was an honour.

So later when we realized that if we were gonna be real musicians, we had to go on the road, and we realized we were gonna need a vehicle, we just looked out the window at the driveway, and DD said, “Yep.”

When Rosalyn got back, I approached her at the Hullabaloo Open Mic at Tuesday’s about buying her van. “Are you sure?” she asked. I offered her five hundred bucks for it.

“Okay. Send the funny little fiddler kid with the missing teeth. Tell her to meet me on the bench at Beacon Hill Park at high noon on Sunday. Tell her to have the five hundred, in cash, in a paperback book. I’ll have the van papers in a book. We’ll do the switch there.” Rosalyn always had to do stuff as if she was a spy. I’m not sure why. At the time she didn’t even have a bank account, so The Man couldn’t track her down. She was an outlaw.

DD and I went to Russell Books, the used bookstore there on Fort Street, and looked for the perfect book. We found a pulp soft-porn novel from the fifties called The Timid Virgin. That seemed appropriate, since we were tour virgins. As a band, we’d never played further away than Duncan.

When DD returned from her “clandestine” meeting, the book she had with the papers in it made us feel like the van was a Vehicle of Fate. It was a paperback from the same series as The Timid Virgin, called The Happy Hooker. In the book’s margins, Rosalyn had handwritten a list of bars and house concerts that spanned the country, along with their contact numbers. How we vibrated over that. The whole exchange had been done in complete silence. They had both worn hats with brims that covered their faces. Looking back, I think Rosalyn was already recruiting DD, back then, for various purposes. She was laying tour eggs to catch a future road dog, for sure.

On our way to the ferry, we stopped at Chambers Towers to say goodbye and thanks. It was 1:00 p.m. Rosalyn came down, bleary-eyed, in her bathrobe. “Oh, you’re going now? All right then, kids. Have a good tour! Drive fast, take chances! Safety third!”