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CHAPTER 3

I’M GOING to continue detailing my musical education. Condensing it to a few pages, however, whilst useful in terms of pacing, fails to adequately convey the time given over to the process. I spent months, maybe even years, sitting in the basement. It might take, say, a week to learn a song, which involved much lifting and replacing of the phonograph needle on the platter. Even though I tried to do this gingerly, I purchased a new needle practically every other day. After the week spent learning a song, another week would be devoted to playing that song, executing it with pride and exultation.

It is during this early period in a musician’s life, I believe, that he or she acquires a unique cluster of predilections. Some tricky little licks, through a quirk of anatomy or some other manifestation of blind luck, come more easily to the fingers. A chord change affects some dim recess of the soul. Why? Who knows? Some combination of personal memory and cultural resonance, probably. And these become a songwriter’s personal memes, the basis upon which the compositions that lie far ahead in the future are built.

Are you familiar with memetics? I hope you are. Otherwise, what I’m about to say may confuse you. The “meme,” according to Richard Brodie, author of the book Virus of the Mind, is “the basic building block of culture in the same way the gene is the basic building block of life.” “Memes,” Brodie states, “are the building blocks of your mind, the programming of your mental ‘computer.’” The concept of the meme was invented by Richard Dawkins, so there is an easily discernible neo-Darwinian context. Let us say that caveman Og, beating a hollow log with a bone, hits upon a rhythm that has a curious appeal, not only to himself but to the others gathered nearby. This makes Og more sexually desirable than Nood, who insists on emphasizing the first and third beat and never approaches what we might call ur-funk. In these terms, rock stars are the epitome, using music to make themselves sexually attractive and then disseminating their genes far and wide. Indeed, this is how Charles Darwin accounted for the existence of music in the first place, likening it to the peacock’s lurid herl. I also like to imagine that musical memes contribute to the evolution of music itself, that they shape it to become increasingly beautiful and stirring. My thinking here has very little scientific credibility, so take it with a grain of salt. But, for example, I believe I have identified one such “meme,” a small musical idea: five-one-two, so-do-re (in solfège). To me, that little phrase has deep resonance; it states the interval of the fifth, the note that splits the octave in half, and then it launches into the unknown, leaving us without solid musical footing. That meme serves as the beginning of Handel’s “For Unto Us a Child Is Born.” It turns up several times in Brahms’s work; think of the lonely oboe that announces the arrival of the lovesick piano in the First Concerto. I myself use it all the time.

So, as I’ve said, every songwriter has his or her memes. A Randy Newman song has a distinctive quality. Newman is from a musical family—his uncles Lionel, Alfred, and Emil all wrote music for the motion pictures—and Newman’s memes (the intervals and inversions he chooses, his chord structure, the melodic intervals) come from a very particular place. To my way of thinking, they have the same poignancy as, say, the musical memes of Charles Ives or Aaron Copland. Newman’s success has as much to do with the genius of his lyrics as anything else, I should add, but we’re not discussing lyrics, we’re discussing memes.

Memetics were at play during my own formative years, then, but any kind of payoff was still years in the distance. PQ’s People failed in our quest for global domination. Joel became distracted by the double bass, anyway. He’d been allowed into the music program at our junior high school, shunted into the string section. When asked by the teacher which instrument he’d prefer, Joel pointed at the hulking, oversized viol standing in the corner. It is my opinion that his reasoning proceeded thus: that thing over there is big; if I were a guy who played that thing, I would therefore myself be big, despite all the physical evidence, which would indicate that I am kind of a shrimpy little fella. So he began to play the double bass right then, and indeed, he has not played anything else since.¹

As much as I came to love the Beatles—hold on, I should admit something. In 1964, at the height of Beatlemania, I was in Grade 6, and there were two distinct factions. There were those kids who felt that the Beatles were the greatest thing ever. And there were those kids, of which I was one, who felt that the Dave Clark Five were every bit as good, if not a little bit better. Yeah, I know. I have a history of such decisions. For a while, I preferred Donovan to Bob Dylan. Let me explain that I’ve always admired tuneful singing over idiosyncratic intoning or stylization. I can’t really defend this stance, as it has caused me to dismiss many artists that I should have paid attention to. I have made a handful of good choices over the years, too, however. My favourite of all the British groups were (was?) the Animals. True, Eric Burdon bombilated more than he sang, but even then I could recognize the magnificence of his pipes.

But though the Beatles set the tone in the sixties, I soon came to realize I had trouble harmonizing. I was pudgy, saddled with spectacles, and long hair exacerbated my acne. They didn’t seem to have any groovy clothes in the Husky section of the children’s clothing department at Eaton’s. To top it all off, when I was fifteen my mother died, which made me surly and silent.

DOROTHY MADE an appointment for me to see Xiaolan. Actually, several people had suggested that I see Xiaolan, as she has a reputation for healing that is formidable. Moreover, Xiaolan is attached to the literary world, because she has written books (one was co-authored by my friend Marni Jackson) that were published by Anne Collins at Random House (my fiction editor). The short story on Xiaolan Zhao is that, although she trained in and first practised Western medicine, she decided that it was wrong to turn her back on more ancient practices. Acupuncture, massage, herbs, and unguents: that’s the kind of medicine she advocates. So off Dorothy and I went to the clinic, a squat brownstone on Prince Arthur Avenue staffed by many women wearing starched white lab coats. On my first visit, I was examined by Xiaolan, who declared that she could help, but that my health ultimately depended on myself. Then she proceeded to work on me, a process that involved things like sticking her fingers up my nose and in my ears and placing pins in various parts of my body, including the top of my head. Xiaolan never announced her intention of doing any specific thing, so for that hour I was in a state of constant surprise, even shock. I’ve been back a number of times since, and this is a trait shared by the doctors there. They simply do things to you, things like laying a forearm to the small of your back with the sudden intensity of Sweet Daddy Siki or the Sheik. One practitioner, Mariko, did mutter something one time, apparently asking permission. I didn’t quite catch what she said, but it was something about “cups.”

“Good for drawing out toxins,” she said. “Is that all right?”