My father had a colleague, Dr. Hill, and occasionally these two men would encounter one another, at the grocery or liquor store, or simply strolling along the sidewalk. Dr. Hill was a large man, tall and burly, as was my father. Sometimes both men had offspring with them. Joel and I would hide behind our dad and take suspicious peeks at the two kids who were hiding behind their dad. The older one was named Danny, the younger, Larry. When Joel and I formed PQ’s People, we remembered that Danny had some musical ability, that he was taking guitar lessons and had been heard to sing songs. So we auditioned him. We held the audition down in our basement one day when our fathers were upstairs drinking beer and being colleagues. We were all pretty short back then, and Danny climbed up on a table, employing it as a makeshift stage. He used a drumstick as a microphone—no, it didn’t work—and such was his eagerness to perform that he didn’t wait for Joel and me to pick up our instruments. Not that we knew the tune he sang, anyway, which was, I seem to recall, Sinatra’s “Summer Wind.” Danny crooned in a very Las Vegas fashion. He even had a repertoire of cheesy moves, which he threw at us without self-consciousness or irony. My brother and I didn’t know what to make of it. Danny would have been a good addition to PQ’s People; he was a good-looking kid and exotic to us, being as his mother was white and Dr. Hill black. But his style didn’t seem right, so we thanked him for his time and told him we’d be in touch.
WE CONTINUED searching for candidates, minuscule musicians willing to join PQ’s People. (By the way, Joel went on record early on, declaring the band name to be stupid. But I was his older, bigger brother, and while I certainly didn’t win every fight, I was willing to go to the mat on this one. So PQ’s People we remained.) We encountered a young lad named Conrad, and he had the most wondrous of all things, a set of drums. At least, he had access to a set of drums, as his stepfather was a drummer.
Conrad lived in the maisonettes a few blocks away. (Where I come from, the nascent suburbs of Toronto, Ontario, we didn’t really measure distances in “blocks.” We tended to mark destinations by what lay in the way: a street, a school, the ominous ravine.) Down in the basement of his townhouse was a music room. Can you believe that, a music room? It contained not just a set of drums, which sat in the centre of the room with proprietorial majesty, but the makings of several more sets. Tom-toms, snares, and kick drums were strewn about everywhere. Gleaming golden cymbals leaned against the wall. There were strange percussion instruments as well, African gourds, djembes, and congas. Joel and I would haul our equipment over there, and Conrad would climb aboard the stool behind the kit, and we would play “Satisfaction.” I will try to help you imagine the sound, because the Rolling Stones version is no doubt playing in your mind, and that is not the same as the rendition performed by PQ’s People. The cheapness of our amps and guitars is germane. Joel and I had both blown the paper cones of our speakers, so along with the music came much chittering distortion. My guitar was a Zenon, a solid body with very hard action. I don’t mean to keep getting technical on you, but “action” refers to the ease with which strings can be clamped down onto the fretboard. It required much concentration to wrestle with the Zenon’s strings, so the famous “Satisfaction” riff stumbled out as though it were wearing clumpy leg braces.5
Now, what I’ve been withholding from you is that Conrad’s stepfather wasn’t simply a drummer. He was Ed Thigpen, whose musical career included stints with people like Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and, most famously, Canada’s own Oscar Peterson. Ed Thigpen was a bona fide jazz legend. Mind you, the term “jazz legend” didn’t signify much to me back then, and it’s only now, in adulthood, that I realize what an honour it was to make his acquaintance.
Which I did in the following manner. Imagine the lads down in the music room, gritting their way through “Satisfaction.” We performed it with grim sobriety, our entire beings occupied with technical matters: the riff, the structure of the song (recall that at one point, everything falls away except the drums; leastwise, that’s the plan), the lyrics. Ed Thigpen entered, listened as we arrived clumsily at the musical finish line, and then waved Conrad off the stool. “Let me play with these boys,” he said.
Okay. Conrad hopped down, Mr. Thigpen took his position, and Joel and I began the riff. Ed—I guess I can call him Ed; after all, we were jamming, weren’t we?—allowed us to execute the lick once as establishment, and then he began to play along.
Well, I never. My initial thought, I’ll confess, was that Conrad’s stepdad was lying about being a professional drummer, because he appeared to be, well, spazzing out, waving his arms in broad circular motions, the sticks just happening to deflect off cowhide and metal. Drummers were supposed to move with robotic precision, and if they wanted to hit a cymbal, it seemed to me, they should turn and look at the thing for a full two seconds, addressing it, making sure it hadn’t moved away somehow, before whacking it. Ed’s eyes were elsewhere, and while I don’t suppose they actually rolled up into the inside of his skull, that is certainly the impression I received. But soon I became aware that there was a presence in the room, a force with the power of a tidal wave. At least, it was far, far stronger than my twiddling little Keith Richards lick.
This was rhythm.
I had never encountered rhythm at close quarters before, certainly had never been trapped with it in a basement, where it bullied me up against the wall and slapped me around. “This Land Is Your Land” does not prepare a fellow for rhythm. Oh, certainly, that song has rhythm, but it has rhythm like an old woman might have a poodle, a dog with clipped fur and papers that give its legal name as “Lancelot of Les Halles.” This rhythm was like an atavistic mastiff, only a mutated gene away from ferity.
It was scary.
Joel seemed to be battling rhythm more valiantly than I. He was playing with exhilaration, and a broad grin had blossomed across his freckled face. Indeed, if rhythm were a bucking bronco, he did his eight seconds. But you’re right, I should dispense with metaphors, not only because I keep mixing ’em up, but because they are weak and unnecessary. Rhythm is elemental, something we have inside us like bile and marrow. The access can be a little problematic, since it is protected by self-consciousness and notions of seemliness. Let me put it this way. The fear I felt as Ed Thigpen played the drums was not like the fear I felt when I considered asking Mathilda to dance—it was exactly the same fear.
I’M TALKING about the fear of giving oneself over, I guess, of abandonment to the unknown, surrender to the moment. I suppose that’s the connection back to my new thematic material. I’m not referring simply to the fear of death—we will talk about that in the pages to come, I’ll warrant—but the fear of losing control. Especially since everyone wants to wrest control away from you. The people who love you want to take care of you, which makes sense. In their eyes, you may be demonstrating an inability to take care of yourself. People also have much advice: how to spend the few months left to you, how to best deal with this thing they call “cancer.” People come to visit, which is great, except that sometimes you need to be doing other things. I wanted to write; I had this second draft to complete and a television show to develop. I had songs to write and record. I probably wouldn’t have time to write another novel, but I thought a novella might be a possibility, perhaps just a long short story. But people had all sorts of notions of things I could and should be doing. Visiting Ireland, for example. My friend Jake communicated an offer from my fishing buddies,