Anyway: this boy hears of a contest, a banjo-playing contest, taking place in the next town, some ten miles away. Despite the fact that the kid has nothing like a show piece, he decides he will go compete. So (without informing his parents, I remember, simply heading off) he begins to walk the dusty road. As he goes along, the lad hears things—a bluebird’s song, for instance, the whine of truck tires, the lowing of a cow— and he imitates these things on his cigar box banjo, layering one upon another. By the time he reaches the contest site, he has an entire song. He plays this, and he wins.3
I loved that story, and I think it stands as a reasonable template for the creative process.4 As songwriters and novelists and musicians travel through their lives, they collect little themes and motifs and whistles and airs, and they string them together to fashion their wares. This book follows my travels down the musical road, and I intend to commence that forthwith.
1 I actually have nothing more to say about Mr. Lanois at this moment. I just wanted to introduce the notion of footnotes, and I thought his name afforded a good opportunity to get people to glance downwards. Thank you.
2 I learned later the technician was reacting to the fact that when he checked the X-ray, there was only a huge white cloud where the left lung should have appeared.
3 Ira Gershwin wrote in his diary: “Heard in a day: An elevator’s purr, telephone’s ring, telephone’s buzz, a baby’s moans, a shout of delight, a screech from a ‘flat wheel,’ hoarse honks, a hoarse voice, a tinkle, a match scratch on sandpaper, a deep resounding boom of dynamiting in the impending subway, iron hooks on the gutter.”
4 I have one small quibble with the recording: the prize is a brand-new, store-bought banjo, which the kid happily accepts. I pictured him tossing away his jerry-rigged trash with disdain. This has always struck me as a poor choice, story-wise. It would have been much better if the kid had danced with the one that brought him, if you see what I mean—if he’d politely declined the grand prize.
ON MY father’s side of the family, everyone is either a teacher or a musician, except for those hopelessly indecisive sorts—my cousin Doug is an example—who have opted to become music teachers. My great-uncles, my grandfather’s brothers, were all musicians, and that included Rance Quarrington, who was apparently a star of the radio waves, the possessor of wondrously mellow windpipes. (My brother Anthony B. Quarrington—Tony— claims that Rance starred in a movie entitled The Man from Toronto, but I have no evidence to support that. No evidence suggesting he didn’t star in such a film, mind you.)
My grandfather himself had a long succession of careers. He was a travelling salesman for a while, back in the days when that vocation was conducted mostly by rail. He accumulated years and years of bumpy seat-time, and during this period he learned to walk a coin across his knuckles. As a child, I was greatly impressed with this little piece of legerdemain, constantly inveighing the elderly Jewish fellow who was my grandfather to walk a nickel or a quarter back and forth atop his fist. (No, I’m not Jewish, but I’m pretty sure my grandfather was. If you saw a photograph of Joe Quarrington, you would be convinced.) He was also a photographer, and set up shop as a portraitist. This was in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and those times being what they were—every bit as strange as these times—my grandfather attracted many customers who were interested in having their Kirlian auras captured on film. “Please take my portrait,” they would say, “but not before I meditate for a few minutes.” I imagine these people concentrating so hard that their faces coloured and steam shot out of their nostrils, but when my grandfather emerged later from the darkroom, there was never any evidence of Kirlian auras. I like to believe it was because he could not abide their disappointment that my grandfather took to dusting cornstarch onto the negatives before slipping them into the chemical bath. The resulting image showed the subject surrounded by a halo of feathery cloud, the air pregnant with luminous parhelions. Business picked up quite a bit.
I write of these things—the coin-knuckle thimbleriggery and the photographic flummery—because they both, to me, indicate personality traits common to musicians. Let’s say, the willingness to invest thousands of hours toward a small, inconsequential end and the desire to please people. And indeed my grandfather could play many instruments and was a violinist in the no longer extant Ottawa Symphony.1
Tony, who is my older brother, acquired a banjo when we were kids. There was a folk revival going on, the movement that would spawn Bob Dylan. So Tony got a banjo, and the elderly Jewish fellow showed him how to play some chords. It was in this manner that live music entered our household. There were, to be sure, instruments in the house prior to this. An old, hulking piano resided in the basement. An African drum was spotted here and there, a small, exotic animal looking for a place to get comfortable. And there was an ocarina, too; my father would periodically pop the mouthpiece between his lips and wheeze out the theme from The Third Man.
Soon I wanted to play an instrument. (All this predates, by a few months, anyway, the advent of the Beatles, after which everybody and their brother decided to take up an instrument.) I started strumming along quite spiritedly on a mandolin, chosen because it was a small instrument and I owned a small hand. The first song I learned to play was a classic, “This Land Is Your Land.” As first songs go, this was a pretty good one. There is wonderful power and poetry in the lyrics, and in adopting “This Land Is Your Land” as an ideal, a basic template, I had (unknowingly) set the bar rather high. I say “(unknowingly)” because I was preoccupied not only with fingering the chords but with trying to remember the words. It is a geographical song, and at least off the top is concerned with naming places. I have trouble retrieving mere lists from the memory banks. Moreover, there was a Canadian version (“from Bonavista to Vancouver Island”), and I was torn between this version and the “real” one, so often I bellowed out an odd combination of the two.2
WOODROW WILSON Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1912, the son of a businessman, landowner, and Democratic politician. (I mean, his father was all those things; it wasn’t my intention to suggest some Satanic trinity.) Woodrow was a bright lad, and he read constantly. That didn’t prevent him from leaving high school before graduation. It is said he picked up harmonica by hanging around a street corner beside a black man and his shoeshine box. He learned a little guitar in order to accompany his cousin, a fiddler. And that’s what Woody was, a widely read kid who could play a little music, when he joined the thousands of Okies travelling westward to California, where, it was said, there was work. This was the Dust Bowl era, and out on the coast was the mythical “pie in the sky.”3
I don’t know at what point Guthrie became “politicized,” a word I’ve put in quotes mostly because it makes me kind of uneasy. I sometimes conflate Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck’s fictional Tom Joad. In The Grapes of Wrath, Joad is made increasingly aware of injustice and suffering; he discovers the worth of every single human being, regardless of wealth or origin, and he goes out into the world to fight for the dignity of all. I believe something like that happened to Guthrie; indeed, one of his most enduring songs is “Tom Joad.” Guthrie was also inspired to write a song about Thomas Mooney, a labour leader imprisoned for bombing the Preparedness Day march of 1916 (killing ten and injuring forty), a crime virtually no one thought he actually committed. But as the fine songwriter Steve Earle once