A new record has just come out by a band called Audioslave. They are being touted as a ‘supergroup,’ and feature the lead singer from Soundgarden teamed up with Rage Against the Machine’s guitarist/bassist/drummer. I’ve heard some of it and I like it. It’s right up my alley.

Rage’s guitarist, Tom Morello, is near the top of my list of guitar greats. He won me over with an album called ‘Renegades,’ which is actually a collection of covers done by Rage of other bands’ tunes, ranging from Volume 10 to the Stooges to the Stones.

I think it’s a brilliant album, but also illuminating in how it lays bare the similarities between styles of music one might think have nothing to do with each other. The riffs for rap numbers like EPMD’s “I’m Housin’” or Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man” could have been done by any hard rock band from 1966 to the present, and could have in turn been pinched from any blues great from Robert Johnson to Willie Dixon. ‘Renegades’ does a nice job of linking all this stuff together, most of it built on a foundation called the blues scale; a musical staple that forms the basis of blues obviously, but also of rock, and much of soul, funk, and rap.

The Blues--I’ll call it that for simplicity’s sake but I’m not just talking about the stuff you hear at the Yale--is like a language, with different dialects spoken by different ‘tribes.’ Robert Johnson recorded a song in 1937 called ‘Love in Vain.’ In 1969 the Rolling Stones did a superb version of the tune that is very much their own; it’s still bluesy, but with more rock and a touch of country. In some ways it’s hard to recognize, and yet you can still hear Johnson in some of the antique lyrics....

“I felt so sad and lonesome, that I could not help but cry.”

It’s absorbing to listen to the two versions back-to-back. To see how things changed over 30 years. To think that this language, spoken by some penniless, nomadic Southern black man living during the Depression came to be adopted by suburban English boys a generation later, who in turn cultivated their own idiom. And how far back did the roots of the song go before Johnson himself picked it up?

I love all this music. It is a language I love to immerse myself in. Not just music, THIS music. For the most part, if you can’t lay the blues scale on it in some way I start to loose interest.

I have often felt that learning and spreading this language is a valid pursuit. Maybe even something more than that. The 'Renegades' album takes it’s name from a song called ‘Renegades of Funk’ by Afrika Bambaataa. I like one of the lines in it:

“Now renegades are the people with their own philosophies
They change the course of history
Everyday people like you and me”

The last line is especially great, as it offers everyone a chance at something more than banality. There’s an unsung quality to the blues. Like folk, it offers the possibility of a kind of stardom without limelight, and the possibility that you can build on the language and create a dialect of your own.

But there’s another old songwriter I like. His name is Robert Burns. He has a line in a poem that, roughly translated, laments that we need someone to “give us the power to see us as other see us.”

That line came to mind over the past week. A relatively insignificant event transpired, and I won’t go into great detail, but will provide a brief summary. A gig was set up with three bands. On the evening of the show the gig gets cancelled. Some incovenience was incurred. For our part, we had turned down at least two other opportunities, and had to scramble to notify those who we knew were coming out that night (and judging by a rather irate message in our guestbook were not entirely successful).

Immediately the blame was assigned. At first on myself, which I bitterly and...how shall I put it...snarlingly refuted, and then on others, back and forth, up and down, all fucking over the place. All over a show in a pub by three bands few people know.

I suppose people have a great need to express themselves, and when that gets stifled they feel frustrated. In fact, the debacle I’ve just mentioned hinged on a band breaking up over the matter of which members’ songs would get played and who would sing them. Whether anyone else on the planet was listening to the songs was not the point. When someone needs to say something, and they can’t, they get upset.

When you use music as your language, the possibilities for rancour are greater, as you can become more dependent on others to say what you need to say. That dependence breeds resentment. The problem is, when things deteriorate it no longer matters whether it was over anything significant. The bitterness that builds along the way becomes the cause.

I have often found it curious to observe the musical behavior of Rob 'The Mule' Hughes. He has for some time painstakingly created albums on his own. He makes them all by himself. He releases them to about 20 people. And that’s that. They’re good records; I keep going back and listening to them, anyway.

Rob has always steadfastly refused to have any part of the “get your stuff out there” credo that I and most others have adopted as our mantra. I’ve never really asked him why. He’s a fundamentalist of sorts, but not a missionary. And it’s not that he needs everything his own way. When he makes his own records, they sound exactly as he wants them to, and yet when you play in a band with him it’s all good. Any idea is valid, any style is welcome. Just don’t send any of it to the local radio station.

Why is this? Is it because he figures that you have to keep this craving to express yourself in check to a point, or it will get the better of you and the way you deal with the people around you? That once you get beyond the basic purity of musical expression the rest can only be a distraction, or even a toxin, keeping you from further creativity?

I’ve always found it exhilarating to be spreading the musical gospel as I see it, even if I’m the equivalent of some kind of missionary preaching to a handful of disciples on the fringes of civilization. But at some point maybe you stop even being that. You become like Aguirre; you’ve wrecked everything and you’re floating around on a river in the jungle hectoring a bunch of monkeys.

You’re less and less in command of any language. You’re under the command of an addiction. Everything else suffers. I’ve rarely been as unhappy or as incomplete in my life as during those periods when I’ve been most immersed in music. You need more and more of it. You neglect things and people you shouldn’t neglect. Your behavior is destructive. Occasionally, when you step out of this opiatic place, you realize that you’re just like a junkie, encrusted in the same dissolution and decay as any addict, consumed by only one thing. The only option is to fix up and go back in.

Unless you break the habit completely. This language sounds sweeter to me than ever, but I worry that it’s just a Sirens’ song, and that maybe it’s time to salvage what I still can of the rest of myself.

"...it's curious that 'Stoked' (credited to Brian) sounds almost exactly like the Stones' 'Stoned', released half a year later, with the only difference that the Beach Boys sing 'stoked' and Jagger sings 'stoned'. Who did they rip off? The poor guy is left uncredited on both versions."

From a web review of the Beach Boys' "Surfin' U.S.A." album. Nothing I like better than a rock 'n' roll songwriting mystery.

And speaking of of the Stones, it turns out that Bill Wyman, not Keef, was behind the Jumpin' Jack Flash riff.

I've got to start my own songwriting bureau of investigation. Kind of like that Kenneth Star thing in the States that went on forever and exposed the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. I would have the judicial power to summon witnesses and such. Hmmmmm....

I've been meaning to write something for some time about the reaction many seem to have to the September 11/01 attacks. I call it the 'root cause' argument, in which a condemnation of the murder of civilians is followed by a 'but' and an apology for the crime.

I've decided that I'll let someone else make my case for me. My pinch-hitter of choice is Christopher Hitchens, a British journalist living in Washington. He's an abrasive guy who has vilified the likes of Henry Kissenger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton among others. His per se condemnation of religion makes me uncomfortable, but his insights into the menace of fundamentalism are worth noting.

I will only add that I think one of the roots of the 'root cause' argument is a fear of losing control. ie. If someone attacks me because of my behavior, then I'm still in control; I just have to change my behavior, and thus so will their reaction be altered. There's something perversely comforting in this. Much less comforting is the idea that nothing I can do will stop them from wanting to destroy me.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011008&s=hitchens

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/09/04/1031115884039.html

I’ve been boozing up a lot lately. Too much in fact. If this keeps going I might have to check back into the Lynx Head Recovery Centre. I kicked the deep fried lentil snacks habit, but this is something else.

It was that damned trip to New Orleans that did it. My capacity for alchohol was doubled in five days. I knew it was going to be an ACM kind of town when I was in Houston, waiting to board the connecting flight. A woman walked up to me, beer in hand, asking in a magnificent twang of an accent whether our section of the plane was boarding yet. En route, a 737 full of Texans heading to the Crescent City to see the Longhorns play Tulane got sauced in 48 minutes.

I headed out to the French Quarter that night, and found it to be a drinkers’ Disneyland. A liquour store practically every block. I tried to find some good southern bourbon for Smash but found the stores to be curiously well-stocked in Canadian whiskey instead, especially Crown Royal. There were people selling you pints of good beer (they’ve got some cool indie breweries down there) from the side of the road for a buck fifty U.S. You take the plastic cupfull and walk along, sticking your head onto the open doors and windows of various bars, soaking up the music.

I’ve been back for a month, but like a big bagful of Hallowe’en candy, the booze habit has lingered. It’s not all bad, though. When I have a drink or two by myself at home, I find I slip into a familiar habit.

I listen to Klagg.

More specifically, I listen to ‘This is Klagg.’

It is probably the best record I’ve ever been involved with. The first Klagg album was, as Leacock-winner Howard White once said of my editing skills, ‘a bit rough.’ There is of course the Stoke record, but though it has received accolades from California to Fredericton to Iceland, it is almost too Alec. It’s blackness and dry heaviness weighs it down like one of those thick Quebec beers. It’s tasty, but do you really want to drink a six pack of the stuff?

Decline had it’s moments, but never released an album (hey Rob, you’ll have to play ‘Please Don’t Kiss in Public’ in your Formula Vee show, though it suits me more than you now). The Huxley album comes close (I might have something to say about that soon). The glorious Boring Holmgrens contributed the lo-fi punk masterpiece ‘Blood in Bombay,’ as well as the insane ‘Silly Carnival,’ but neither stack up to ‘This is Klagg.’

I’m very pleased with my own contribution to the record. Bullishly so. I did not offer up a single riff to start, but was so inspired by some of Ian’s (aka JR Muc’s) bass lines that I took a few of them and started running. ‘Orange Cat,’ ‘Varispeed’ and ‘White Trash’ are the most obvious results. I also weighed in with riffs or words on ‘Sumuru,’ ‘Cordova Nova,’ ‘Glass Apple,’ and even for the middle eight (yes, my recollection of events is that anal) on ‘She’s A Curler.’ The guitar playing, if I may say so, is excellent, in a retro kind of way. My favorite guitar parts are all of ‘Cordova Nova,’ the whole iditiotic grandiosity of the last half of ‘Radio Central,’ and the stripped down six string economy of ‘Suitcase Pimp’ (some of which, to give credit where it’s due, is the Mule’s).

And what of the Mule? On the first Klagg record, he was the running back, taking the ball and carrying it for touchdowns. I watched with some awe as he would take snippets that I figured were useless and, in the words of the Mary Tyler Moore theme song ‘certainly made it all seem worthwhile.’ On ‘This is Klagg,’ he was less available to oversee the proceedings, leaving Ian and I to pick up some slack. I think the Mule presence on the record is a bit less pervasive than on the first record, but as a result the parts where he takes over all the more pronounced. Instrumentally, he raised the bar; the drumming is tight, with lots of Stoke-like bashing.

The Mule has become a master of many styles over the years, and some of his offererings on the record are so evocative of this or that era that it makes your head shake. On ‘Radio Central,’ he gives you something that could’ve been off of Kiss’ first album. On ‘Racing to a Red Light’ we get some Black Flag-like punk (at least Rob says it’s like Black Flag; I have no idea what the hell they sound like). Heading over to another part of the 1980’s, he takes an Ian progression and turns it into ‘Swinging Ronnie,’ the best song the Smiths never recorded.

The ‘Sumuru’ riff makes me think a bit of Nirvana. ‘Suitcase Pimp,’ arguably the best tune on the disc, is like a blend of Gilby Clarke and Billy Corgan, pushed over the top by JR’s lunatic vocals. (Speaking of which, I remember Rob walking out in disgust when we were recording the vocals on the chorus. “They sound nothing like the ‘Destroyer’ album,” he lamented. After he left, Ian and I stripped them apart and re-did them, and the results, I think, are not bad).

Of course, comparisons to all these bands are pointless once they get to be so varied. They serve mainly to illustrate the disparate building blocks upon which the Mule’s own singular yet catholic style has been built.

And then there is ‘She’s a Curler.’ I tuned into XFM on the evenining of September 10th, 2001, and heard the song on the air. The idea of Rob singing a pop song on the radio filled me with glee. Those lyrics, and the Ric Ocasek delivery. Ha ha ha ha ha!! I practically skipped to work the next day, still on a high. Then the grim era of nine-eleven descended. Fittingly, though much to JR’s irritation, the song never got played on the radio again.

It is Ian who deserves the most accolades for the record. He doesn’t play the bass as much as he binges on it. He soaks up the contents of his record collection like Malcolm Lowry drinking booze in a Mexican cantina, then he sweats it all out in fits of riffing and wailing.

“Get out of the box!” Rob would yell at JR as he generated riff after riff around the same basic scale. But if the box works, it works. We’ve pinched a couple of the tunes for Stoke shows, and they’re inevitably favorites.

What I particularly like, though, is how Ian finishes some of the songs off. Like Bob Guccione during the making of ‘Caligula,’ he would often sneak back into the studio to work on things (sans Pets, of course). This kind of behavior caused ulcers in the Decline years, but this time he got it right. Most of his secret work came in the form of vocals, the best example being ‘Glass Apple,’ a perfectly excellent tune that can kick the shit out of most of what you’ve heard on FM radio over the past five years.

The production is the musical equivalent of dressing well out of a second hand shop; you can tell not a lot of money was spent, but it’s the right look. The guitar sounds Ian got are cool. After fighting in Trebas for the better part of a year to get a Marshall to sound like a Marshall, I’m more appreciative than ever of what Ian does. And what exactly is it that he does? Let’s see, he puts a mic up to an amp and presses record. What a great idea!!

He used up most of the eight tracks he had to work with on each song, insisting that it was better to have too much than too little. Then he would ride the faders to just the right mix. He would demand that I lay down entire tracks of guitar feedback, causing me much irritation, yet when I listen to it now (‘Varispeed,’ or ‘In a Shell,’ for instance) it sounds beautiful. He is a basement George Martin.

There is something in ‘This is Klagg’ that reminds me of the movie ‘Withnail and I.’ The key characters are at the end of an era in a way, mired in their various dysfunctions. I’m not sure that I’ll be part of something similar again. Pieces of a potential new Stoke record are scattered over various disks and DATs like the bottles and cans in my house. Whether the will or wherewithall exists to gather them up and cash them in is not completely clear. Another Klagg record is possible, but can it match the same ambitious abandon as ‘This is Klagg?’

This is a pretty long piece. It could have been longer. It’s possible that these ramblings are my own desperate self-delusions. But I don’t think so. Maybe you’ve never heard the record, and doubt it can be as good as I say. Maybe you’ve heard it, and think my objectivity is skewed. Maybe you just think that a little record, made in a basement and heard by only a few people, can’t really be worth noting at all.

Well, as the bass player for Stoke would put it:

“Fuck you, you’re wrong.”




stoke_acm@yahoo.co.uk

Why can't your average 'rock journalist' in this town write a review without it consisting mostly of a summary of their alcohol comsumption, financial status, co-workers & friends' idiosyncracies, shitty living quarters, high-school recollections etc. etc. You think you're getting a review of a record or band, and what you get is a fucking mini-autobiography. Half the writers around here spend more time reviewing themselves than they do the music they're supposedly reporting on.

Many of these scribes wear an unfading punk rock pose on their sleeve, yet they do more wanking in one article than the various members of Yes have managed to do in thirty fucking years.

I got some advice for these people: If you're gonna be so self-absorbed, pick up a guitar and join a fucking band like the rest of us.

SUNDAY

In the spring and the fall, like a pagan solstice ritual, my dad and I go to Gabriola Island.

In the spring we go to “open the place up.” In the fall we go to “shut the place down.”

Early Sunday morning we head off from my dad’s place. Not early enough, unfortunately, to avoid being tailgaited on the 2nd Narrows by some silly girl blabbing on a cell phone.

We get to Horseshoe Bay, get on the boat, and immediately head to the cafeteria. Ahhhh, nothing like a BC Ferries breakfast. And I’m not being sarcastic. The sausage is simply....sausage. The eggs are eggs. The coffee is coffee. There is no unique taste, no weird twist to the flavour. I feel myself start to relax.

There is a fog on the coast on this particular morning. A beautiful mist, serving to blend the sea into the air as one grey shroud. Along the way, you can barely make out shapes in the distance; another ferry; a tugboat and barge; and then, wonderfully, a few dolphins.

Off the big boat, and on to the little one. October Ferry to Gabriola. It’s the name of a novel by Malcom Lowry, published after his death. I go out on deck, and notice a clump of seagulls converging in one spot. As we pass by, a seal pops its head out of the water. Sticking out of its mouth is the tail half of a salmon. The seal goes back under, and the seagulls are squalking, waiting for scraps like dogs around a dinner table.

We get to the wee house by noon or so. We unload. There is a chill sitting inside the place. It’s not as bad as it is in the spring, when it can take up to half a day to drive out the icy spirits that move in over the winter.

The main source of warmth comes from an oil burning stove. The stove was pulled from a posh house in Victoria that my mother’s Aunt Phyllis used to live in. Phyllis had a child as a young woman with some guy, but got rid of him and then married an older guy named Carl Sangster. He owned the first transit company in Victoria. A rich guy. My mother and I used to visit her when I was a little kid. At that time, her husband long-deceased, the still-alluring Auntie Phyllis lived in a swank place in Oak Bay. Cadboro Bay Road, to be exact; I love that street name. She drove a huge white Lincoln Continental, always dutifully obeying the unofficial Victoria speed limit of eighteen miles per hour.

It takes a while for the oil stove to warm up, and my dad turns on a pair of electric heaters in the meantime.

“It doesn’t give off much heat,” I say, holding my had in front of one of them.

“It throws the heat,” says my dad. “Stand back a ways and feel it.”

But of course. It’s one of those ventroliquist heaters. I stand back, and still can’t feel a thing.

“See?” says my dad.

“Yeah,” I agree.

I head down to the beach while the place heats up, then come back. My dad wants to visit an old friend named Vera, the wife of a guy he grew up with and went into the navy with.

When I was a little kid, we used to visit Vera all the time. It is a common thing for little kids to call their parents’ friends ‘aunt’ or ‘uncle.’ Vera told my mom that she already had enough kids calling her aunt and uncle, and said I should call her ‘grandma.’ It was agreed, and to this day I still think of her as ‘Grandma Vera.’

She is an island matriarch. She lives at the south end, opposite from us north end islanders. Her property is tucked up at the end of a dirt lane. It’s full of curiosities...huge tree trunks carved into the shapes of camels, large life-like dolls sitting at tables having tea, big toy trains on railway tracks that run over small ponds...

When I was a kid she also used to have lots of animals, especially cats. At one point she had about seven Siamese cats, and one regular orange cat called ‘Charlie.’ Charlie was highly aloof, and would appear only sporadically, exuding a snow leopard-like elusiveness. As a child I thought he was the epitome of cool. The Siamese, on the other had, were irksome and clingy.

“She’s not home,” said my dad after calling her. “But she might be at the museum.”

She is one of the founders of the Gabriola Island Museum, which actually has few historical artifacts in it than does her living room. We decide to drive around the island, and stop at the museum along the way. Sure enough, she’s there. She comes out with my dad, but has to meet someone else at their house. We drive her over there, and along the way she notices that my Stoke cowboy hat is sitting on the back seat.

“What a hat!” she exclaims. She has the most excellent voice, full of enthusiasm and expression. “Boy is that ever neat.”

She tries it on, then asks that I put it on.

“Boy,” she says, “That hat is the nicest thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

We drop her off, head around the island, and get back to the house. My dad goes in, and I head off again to buy a magazine at the store. I make a detour out to Berry Point, along the north end of the island, my favorite part of the B.C. coast. Again more seals.

Back at the house, dinner is almost ready. My dad’s a good cook. He learned to cook when he was in the navy. For a while he was assigned to a tugboat, and used to play cards with the cook, picking up culinary tips. When the cook went on leave, my dad would take over by default. His cooking is simple but effective, and relies heavily on the frying pan.

Again I go for a walk, this time down to Malaspina Point. A deer on the road, and then yet another seal, this one asleep on a rock ledge at the edge of the water. I walk right up to it, and its eyes open. It looks at me for a bit, like it’s still not quite awake, then something clicks and it scurries back to the water, plunging under. It pops its head up after a few seconds, still looking at me, then goes under for good.

I go back to the cottage and we eat, and then comes the long haul of the evening.

“It takes a long time to make a night go by here,” admits my dad. He says this after about 45 minutes of sitting in front of a T.V. set that gets three channels. Every ten minutes he gets up to change the channel in the vain hope that something palatable has appeared one one of them.

Exhausting my copy of Guitar One magazine, I resort to a novel left behind by some visitor over the summer. It’s called ‘Ruling Passion.’ It’s a English murder mystery:

“She met Marianne’s quizzical gaze with the unruffled smile of one whose own buttocks were as compact as a boy’s.”

Yes, well....

I go back to watching T.V. Now David Suzuki’s on. Something about fire and water.

Look! He’s eating bacon and eggs!! HOLY FUCK!!!! The leading environmentalist in the country eats bacon?? Well. That’s revelation right there.

Finally it’s time for the news, and then bed. I was up early, and I’m tired. The loft has been made cozy by the rising heat from the stove, and I sleep easily.





stoke_acm@yahoo.co.uk

“Old age is not for sissies.”

Bill McGillivray.


Who is Bill McGillivray, you ask? I don’t know. My dad quotes from the guy on a regular basis but who the fuck he is I have no idea.

I went to visit my Grandmother today. She’s 97, and lives in a seniors' home in the West End, just a block off Robson Street.

First of all I had to find parking. I went to a couple of meters, only to find they demanded a buck for 20 minutes. I didn’t have the change, and I had to frustratingly keep moving until I found a less expensive zone.

Eventually I got a spot, and headed up to Haro Park Lodge. I went up to the second floor. I knew that my grandmother had moved rooms since I had last been there, but wasn’t sure if she was still on the same floor or not.

“Who are you looking for?” asked one of the nurses.

“Catherine Betsworth,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “She’s on the first floor now. She’s been there for a while. You haven’t been here for a while?”

“No,” I admitted sheepishly.

I go down to the first floor. Or try to. The elevator doesn’t stop there. It takes me back to the lobby. I press the button for the first floor, but end up back at the second floor. One of the nurses who I saw previously on the second floor steps into the elevator.

“Oh,” she says curiously. “You’re still here.”

I explain that I’m trying to get to the first floor. She says you need to press a special code on the keypad to get to the first floor.

“Unless,” she goes on, “by first floor, you really mean the lobby?”

What the fuck is this, Lord of the Rings?

No, I say, I want to get to the first floor. She presses the appropriate code, and the elevator takes me to the first floor. I go straight to the nurse’s office, and explain that I’m looking for my Grandmother.

“Oh,” she said, “we took her down to the lunch room for tea.”

The lunchroom is on the same floor as the lobby. I go back down there. There’s a woman, I’d say about sixty, with a microphone. She’s singing songs like “you take the high road and I’ll take the low road...” and “when Irish eyes are smiling...”

No matter where you go, there’s always some hamfaced musician ready make a stage for themselves.

There are about twenty or so old folks watching the performance, most of them women. Twenty mops of grey hair, politely, if resignedly, watching the whippersnapper on stage.

From behind, I can’t tell which one is my grandmother, so I walk around, checking each of them out. They look back in a bemused way, most of them clearly ‘with it.’ Finally an old guy asks me who I’m looking for.

“Catherine Betsworth,” I say.

“Don’t know her,” he replies.

I wander back to the reception area. My grandmother used to simply get up and wander out on her own, failing eyesight and all. She would accost one of the beautiful people at random on Robson, demanding that they help her across the street so she could get to London Drugs to buy cigarettes. Is that where she’s gone? Surely not. She’s nowhere near that mobile anymore.

“Who are you looking for?” asks the woman at the reception desk.

I explain for what seems like the one hundredth time.

“She should be up on the first floor. They rarely bring the first floor people down here. They have their own lounge.”

A-ha.

Back to the first floor, again asking for directions, this time to the lounge. It’s down the hall, and a small group are in there watching T.V. Immediately I think I spot my grandmother, except I’m not so sure.

She’s become less recognizeable. Her features seem to be fading from her face, and I’m left with the saddening and shameful feeling of not quite being sure if I’ve got the right person.

Her eyes were closed, and I gave her a gentle shake to wake her up.

“No, no, no!” she says, in a surprisingly firm but highly irritated tone of voice.

“I wanna sleep. Just let me sleep!”

Yeah, that’s definitely her, I think.

She has never been known for her easygoing disposition. She’s always had a reputation as being a bit abrasive and aloof, but I always liked being around her. She has had four kids, and has outlived all of them except one; my aunt Nina, with whom she hasn’t been on speaking terms for a decade or two.

My grandfather died about twenty years ago. Him and my grandmother have lived in the West End for as long as I can remember. They used to have a place near Comox and Denman, on the top floor. You could see down to Denman Street from the window.

“It’s always busy here,” I once said to my grandmother, many years after my grandfather had died.

“Well,” she replied, “I like it busy. When you’re alone it keeps you company.”

I sat with her for some time while she dozed, then got up to leave. I went down to Robson. A Saturday afternoon teaming with people. I wandered around for a bit, soaking it up. I pondered my grandmother, always wanting to be in the midst of people, yet always keeping her distance.





comments on this or anything:

stoke_acm@yahoo.co.uk

4. "Stoked"
Time: 2:03 Sea Of Tunes, BMI
Master #39212 (Stereo) Recorded 2/12/63
Brian Wilson

Stoked

Stoked

Stoked

Stoked

Stoked

Stoked


Even I could remember those words. They serve as a kind of J.R. Muc-like vocal punctuation to what is otherwise an instrumental. It was also recorded by Southern California surf outfit The Lively Ones. Now there's a band name.

I'm feeling angst about the band name (ours not theirs). Maybe the band should modify its name. Anybody wishing to give feedback, on this or any topic, can do so by sending an email to:

stoke_acm@yahoo.co.uk

“Anarchy sounds good to me, but then I wonder....will the rednecks just play King of the Neighbourhood?”

Jello Biafra.


I read an article in the Globe and Mail the other day by right-leaning commentator Norman Spector. He said that unlike his fellow travellers on the political right, he doesn’t favour more defense spending. Spector, a conservative who is ill-at-ease with government spending, feels that Canada has no real need for a larger military. If we do spend more on the army we will, he says, just end up being soaked into an American defense infastructure anyway, so what’s the point?

This is a valid argument. Many (including, ironically, the American ambassador to Canada) link Canada’s sovereignty to defense. A stronger military is seen as a pre-requisite to a strong national identity. But the counter-argument to this is that Canada will never be able to come close to matching the trillions that go into the U.S. defense budget. We will at best produce a force of limited offensive capability, and this force will inevitably be integrated into an American chain of command.

Spector argues that Canada should find a niche, which in his view is intelligence gathering. He figures it is a vital area of security, and is much less expensive than fleets of F-18 Superhornets. He says it would involve less of an integration into an American infastructure, and would actually give Canada something to trade off with the U.S.

His last point is dubious to me, but nonetheless his overall argument is sound. The question is what is the niche? Intelligence? I’m not enough of a defense expert to provide a solid-enough answer, but this is at least a basis from which to start. I think the military does contribute to our identity and presence in the world, but it should be developed in as ‘Canadian’ a way as possible.

Of course, there is another side to this argument, which is that we should essentially spend nothing on the military. Army guys are ‘pigs,’ a bunch of freaks who use the military as a legal way to act out their fascist tendancies.

Well, whatever.

People sometimes say the same things about cops, but it doesn’t usually stop them from calling 911 when their house has been broken into, or when the neighbours are making too much noise. A society governed by the rule of law will by extension have a large enforcer ‘caste.’ Building inspectors, cops, parking checkers, fisheries officers, park rangers, etc. We think we hate rules, but we can’t stop making them, and they’re not much good if you don’t enforce them.

The same applies internationally. We are, hopefully, becoming a planet ruled by laws. If this is the case, the laws need enforcement. The alternative is a planet ruled by conflicts or empires, by nations who push their luck like a junkie breaking into an old woman’s house. If Canadians are to support a vision of the world in which the rule of law, not force, governs global society, then do we not have an obligation to provide some means of enforcing these laws?

In the late 1950s, a Canadian diplomat, Lester Pearson, won the Nobel Peace Prize for conceiving the idea of peacekeeping forces. It was an excellent invention, but Pearson succeeded with it because he had more to offer than just the concept; he had troops.

Canada emerged from the 2nd World War with the fourth largest military in the world. By the 1950s, this was no longer the case, but the military infastructure built during World War II, and sustained to some degree as a result of the Korean conflict, came in handy when Pearson made his case for a peacekeeping force. Pearson was trying to help solve a conflict in Cypress between Greece and Turkey. The fact that he was able to land a significant Canadian force on the island to proove that his idea could work was crucial.

Canada has milked this peacekeeping reputation for decades, but we are becoming more and more like an ageing British rock band running on its hits from the 1960s. The less we contribute, the more we leave for the other nations wealthy enough to do this kind of dirty work, primarily the U.S. This is not good thing, either for the U.S. or the rest of the world.

We’re going to have to offer something more useful, in the form of a military that can actually play a role in global security, if we want to maintain a noteworthy international presence, and reap the boost in national identity and self-esteem that comes with it.

Good grief. Another rock lyric mishap. I was in the studio today at Trebas, recording some vocals. One of the songs I did was called “Love Addict.” I got the name (didn’t I mention this already?) from the title of a pulp novel. One of the lines in the song is “You’re just a love addict, one hit and you’re ecstatic.”

I recorded the song last week, and this week one of the guys in the class was talking about it.

“Did you write the lyrics to that song? They’re fucking awesome.” He actually said it with some kind of European accent, so the words ‘fucking awesome’ sounded....well....fucking awesome.

“I like that line ‘you’re just a love addict, one hit and your hair’s static.’ That’s fucking awesome. Hey, Barry, isn’t that line fucking awesome?!?!”

He turns to me:

“The chicks will love that line.”

******

On another note, I’ve been getting aroused by Fancylady’s guestbook. All those women tossing around the word ‘bitch.’

But hey, what gives? Isn’t it a violation of feminist convention for a woman to bitchify another woman? Am I the only feminist left alive?

And this leads to another question I’ve always wanted to ask but have been afraid to.....

I’m lowering my voice.......

what about the word......





cunt.





Can a woman call another woman a ‘cunt’ and expect to live?

I don't think a man can.

A friend said to me once:

“One thing I have learned, women hate the word ‘cunt.’ I mean, they go fucking nuts. DO NOT use that word if you want to live.”

So, is this true? It’s worth knowing, because if the word is the linguistic nuclear device it seems to be, it may come in handy some day.

But then again, I’m too polite to use the word ‘bitch.’ I’d make a terrible woman.

“Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence....
We can’t even think of a word to rhyme.”

Alice Cooper.


Canada is no longer a nation worthy of the word. We are to the states of the world what a suburb is to a city. We are a cover band of a country.

We shake our heads sanctimoniously at American military involvement around the world, yet reap financial benifit from it. We happily accept the jobs in Ontario that come from putting together armoured vehicles for the U.S. Army; In British Columbia, we raked in millions during the Vietnam war from supplying hydroelectric power to the Boeing Aircraft plants in Washington State, themselves operating at bursting capacity making planes like the B-52.

We decry American unilateralism, yet offer nothing as an option. Our military, ignored like some weirdo kid at school, is increasingly unable to commit to any serious peacekeeping missions. And yet when the Americans step in, as they did in Somalia and Kosovo (on behalf of Islamic populations), we crap all over them, wonder why they don’t mind their own business, and point to these interventions as the ‘root causes’ of the murder of their own citizens.

We piss on the United States for not signing on to international treaties like the Kyoto Accord. Then we sign them, and announce that we’re going to weasle out of their conditions.

We despise our politicians, forgetting that they are essentially us. Our media spends its time trying to destroy people who have the guts to get into political life. As a result we end up with the banal and the mediocre. On the left and the right, we are left with no originality, only the political equivalent of karaoke singers. No melodies or lyrics of their own, just embarrasing versions of old tunes.

Our national identity is provided for us by a beer company, contrived with craft and cynicism by advertising men working for a mutinational conglomerate. Meanwhile, the real things that make up the structure and character of the country--like Medicare--are allowed to rot.

Does any of this raise concern? No, of course not. The only matter of any real importance is the legal status of marijuana. Unimportant things like our health care system, our place in the world, our culture and our future as a nation are not worth discussing.

We have become like the indulgent, insolent, dissolute subjects of Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out;’ no class, no principles, no innocence. And so without inspiration or imagination that we can’t even figure out what the next line of the song should be.

I'm having an affair with a Les Paul Custom. I feel guilty about it, like I'm cheating on the Stratocaster.

The Stratocaster is svelte, versatile and reliable. But the LP has a seductive, voluptuous quality that’s really turning me on.

The Stratocaster has a slim, easy-to-finger neck. The LP has a fatter, bigger neck, but it’s strings are pliant and very receptive to aggressive bending. It also has incredible sustain.

The Stratocaster is easier to control. The volume knob fits nicely under your little finger; the pickups don’t give you too much output. The LP is harder to manage, and at times it spits out too much signal, almost to the point being completely unclear.

I can’t imagine leaving the Stratocaster, but I feel good when I’ve got the LP hanging around my neck. It makes me feel like a new man. And I get to thinking, in a way maybe the LP helps me reach my full potential...

I think I heard some wailing in the vicinity of Brewery Creek yesterday. I think it was Super Robertson, singing a variation of a line in ‘Pinball Wizard;’ “I just handed my postering crown to Stoke.” Or more specifically to Smash. All along Broadway I watched as passersby stopped to read the Stokespeak on the latest wave of advertising.

There is talk at city hall of bringing in tough new bylaws to deal with illicit postering. Toronto has just done so. Part of their initiative includes placing a number of new circular ‘poster holders,’ or whatever the fuck they’re called, around existing light poles so that posterers will have some more space to work with.

Of course this is horseshit. Any posterer worthy of the name targets not just neighbourhoods, but also specific shops, buildings and even events. In Stoke’s case, GM Place when a Rush concert is on, or Scrape records, or the Pic Pub. (This time I’ve been waging a fierce battle for space on a pole outside the Yale. The band we open for on Saturday are virtually a Yale house band, so it’s an obvious target.)

In this city, a guy named Izzy Asper owns both major newspapers, a radio station, and the television station with the highest ratings. Buying advertising, even the tiniest classified, in his papers costs hundreds. Asper is a well-known contributer to certain political parties, some affiliated with local politicians. Putting my conspiracy theory cap on, it looks like he helps people get elected who in turn block off avenues of do-it-yourself advertising, which in turn gives him an even bigger monopoly on the local advertising market.

Even free, independent local papers charge big money for advertising, making it more economical by far, even factoring in copying and labour, to simply go around and poster. No legislation or bylaw will change this economic reality.

It’s not very good for the environment, though, all that paper being used. But it does have the age-old feel of freedom of expression to it. Postering and pampleteering have accompanied most of the major democratic and social breakthroughs in the Western World since the printing press was invented.

Stoke posters usually vary. I design most of them. One of my favorites features a Zippo lighter. The lid of the lighter is open, and a stylish, hot-roddish flame is flickering up out of it. Etched onto the lighter is the image of a Fender Stratocaster. I was going to use this as the signature Stoke poster, but Smash recently offered me a piece of advice: “For future reference - posters with the lighters are cool, but posters with chicks work best.”

I have a lot of posters with chicks too, but I’ve been getting increasingly concerned that they’re too exploitative.

The thing is, I usually choose images that suggest a ‘vintage’ sort of vibe, a blend of the early 1960s (when Rock was down and out, but about to mount a comeback) and the early 1970s (the almost excessively triumphalist era of rock, when musclecars blasted out the latest Sabbath riffs). To me even the name ‘Stoke’ is a throwback to the surf rock of the early 60s. I think I’ve already mentioned that it comes from a Beach Boys instrumental, but it could easily be the title of a pulp novel, or the name of some low budget street/surf gang film.

To convey this vibe, I go for trashy, pop culture images. Covers of pulp novels are a favorite (they have yielded some song titles too; ‘Love Addict’ and ‘Hotrod Sinner’ for example). Hotrod pinups are another good source of imagery. Lately I’ve found that old record sleeves, especially of albums done by crooners of yesteryear like Englebert Humperdinck, offer an endless supply of ‘vinyl vixens’ to choose from.

The look of a pulp novel, or an old record sleeve, or a pinup poster, conveys some of what I’m going for in itself. But having a woman in the picture helps too, and not for the reasons that Smash thinks. Because women’s fashions and hairstyles change often, and are more easily linked to specific eras, pictures of women nicely convey the period they come from.

As for how women react to these things, as Super Robertson recently said: "Sometimes you just put these things out there and wait for the bullet." Women often seem (to me, anyway) obsessed with looking at other women. So maybe these posters garner more female attention than male attention. Maybe they're just an object of curiosity, and convey the style more than the sexual content. Or maybe they’re offensive. I’d be interested to get some feedback but, er, I can’t get the guestbook to work. Oh well.

And the irony of the whole thing is that whenever Smash does his own posters, they never have women in them. They always include pictures of himself.

“Comical little geezer...you’ll look funny when you're fifty.”

This line is from the film ‘Performance,’ and was aimed at a character played by Mick Jagger. Jagger was about 27 when the film was made.

I thought of that line the other night while watching Geddy Lee performing with Rush. This is not to say that I think Geddy Lee is a comical little geezer, but there are, believe it or not, some who do. In fact, there are some people who have used the word ‘ugly’ to describe him.

I have never read a Geddy Lee biography. I don’t know what his youth was like. But here’s what I suspect.

I think that when he was in his teens, Geddy was made fun of once or twice. I think, like many ungainly teenage boys, he reached for the electric guitar. I think he had special motivation to work at it, got very good at it, and in the words of Randy Bachman, got in “with the right bunch of fellows.”

Geddy Lee was a fairly major rock star about five or six years out of high school, and just kept getting bigger. In the 1970s and 1980s, Rush made the labourers who built the pyramids look like a bunch of layabouts. An album and tour per year, covering virtually every frigging square inch of North America and, eventually, Europe.

Unlike other rock stars, Geddy refrained from blowing his mind or his wealth on drugs or booze. He became a patron of other musicians, a lover of baseball, a family man with a couple of kids, a wine expert, a philanthropist, a member (or companion or some fucking thing) of the Order of Canada. Hell, I fully expect him to be made Governor General one of these days.

Whenever I have seen him interviewed he has struck me as a thoughtful, nice guy. No self-important arrogance, and equally strikingly, no bitterness. No ‘so you think I’m ugly, well kiss my Mercedes-driving ass, you fuckers’ attitude whatsoever. He simply appears to be too busy building and enjoying his life to worry an ounce of what others think of him.

And now he’s back on the road with Rush, and I must say, it was a stellar show. Perhaps the best I’ve seen them. It offered more than nostalgia; it was a combination of staging, musical flair and honest connection with the audience that recalls a superb show I once saw Roger Waters deliver. At the end of it, Geddy quietly thanked the audience for coming, and offered the ‘not done by a long shot’ possibility that we might see Rush make the rounds again.

Definitely not a comical little geezer. In fact, when I think of the kind of derisive remarks often made about Geddy Lee, whether about his voice or his looks or whatever, I think of one of my dad’s lines (I must say, the old man’s getting a lot of space here these days).

In the early 1990s, the Vancouver Canucks had one of the better teams in the NHL. We ware watching a game on T.V., and though the Canucks were solidly ahead, one of the commentators was finding all manner of fault with their play.

Finally, my dad, got fed up.

“Yeah they’re bloody hopeless,” he yelled sarcastically at the T.V. “The only thing they know how to do is win.”

Air was thick with polluted current over the weekend. Made it tough to breathe at times. Gives me a kind of mental asthma. Need to figure out a way to break through it.

And I need a date for the civic election. Will be the Presiding Election Official in high turnout Kerrisdale. As a Stoke fan from northern Alberta put it "the things we do for the almighty dollar." Have my lieutenants in place, but they've recruited spouses and the like. The scene will be annoyingly couple-oriented. Maybe I’ll place an add...

"SWM seeks female for romantic day at polling station. Date will last 14 hours or more. You will be paid. Charming company will be provided, not necessarily by myself."

I'll have to consult with JR Muc on how to attract the right response.

What else? Becoming dangerously interested in early Black Sabbath. Even purchased a used copy of 'Master of Reality.’ Again the fault of JR Muc. As my dad once said, "why don't you bloody kids grow up?"

One more thing. Am working on a theory of rock musicians/Star Wars characters Musical Personality matchups. Will have to develop a quiz, then send it irritatingly around the internet as my own contribution to insipid net humour.

So far I figure as follows (think of the following in musical/band terms):

Luke Skywalker - Boundless optomism in the face of all odds. Capable of tapping into the Force. Gunslinger type. Inspires others to action.

Hans Solo - A bit of a free agent type who seems to have his own plan, but he possesses charm, great skill and deftly commands powerful machinery, and as a result makes himself somewhat indispensible. A bit jaded.

Obi Wan Kenobi - Haggard and reclusive, but very good mastery of the Force based on instincts, experience and cultivation of skills. Must be coaxed into action by others.

Yoda - Intriguing, charming, self-contained master of the Force. Sought out and admired by others.

Princess Leia - Not necessarily a female. Seen by others as a natural for the throne, and as a result is able to get people to rally round her (or his) cause.

C3PO - Often pissed off and irritated by various things. However, has knowledge of several (musical) languages hardwired into his circuitry. Shouldn't be underestimated.

R2-D2 - Technician. Ability with certain types of machinery makes him/her a valuable asset.

Chewbacca the Wookie - Like Hans Solo something of a free agent, but essentially a tough, reliable mercenary type.

Note: In astrology, one can fall into one sign, but possess many attributes of another (ie. A Sagitarious with a Capricorn influence). Similarly, one can also fall into one category of Star Wars character, while having certain influences of another.

Here goes, starting with myself:

ACM - Obi Wan Kenobi. Fitting, given that the character was played by ALEC Guiness.

Smash - Luke Skywalker.

Mule - Yoda, but also a possible Princess Leia if he chose to summon disciples for a series of ‘Mule and Friends’ performances.

Shockk - Yoda, just barely, with a strong Luke Skywalker influence.

Super Robertson - Tough to call. A less optomistic Luke Skywalker, with a Chewbacca the Wookie influence. (Perhaps I should say a Luke Skywalker with a Chewbacca influence and a touch of C3P0.)

Andy - Hans Solo.

Two Sticks- Don’t know him well enough, but perhaps a Hans Solo? He may disagree, in which case I apologize (although that’s actually a compliment...and Hans Solo got the chick). Maybe a bit of R2-D2 in the mix as well.

JR Muc - Also tough to call. I’d say mostly C3P0 with a pinch of Princess Leia and a streak of Luke Skywalker.

I have theories of Marq DeSouza (Princess Leia?), JLS (interesting blend of Yoda, Chewbacca and R2-D2), Shawn Sheers (Chewbacca) but will withhold definitive comment, as I don’t know them well enough.

Now excuse me while I go listen to ‘Into the Void.’

“Rock and roll is a bit like fishing... many do it for the big bite.. The thrill’s just around the corner.”

Super Robertson.


And sometimes a bite comes, and you complain it’s the wrong kind of bite.

As a kid I did a fair amount of fishing at Gabriola Island, most of it with my dad. My dad has notoriously bad luck at fishing. My older brother, who is a passionate and efficient fisherman, often teases my dad about things, but even he finds my dad’s fishing ability too gravely inept to ridicule. The two of us spent many hours in a small cartop boat, trolling back and forth along the north end of the island, waiting in vain for the big bite.

Actually, there were a lot of big bites, just no big catches. There were also a lot of big snags and big tangles.

It’s not that there were no fish. Others seemed to catch fish. I could catch them myself off Gabriola’s famous Malaspina Point. Mostly rock cod, but also ling cod and the occasional perch. The seemingly hopeless kid next door got a sole one time. I seem to recall that even Larry ‘Have You Ever Thought of Fixing This Place Up?’ Wong caught something with his sponge. The guy had a dried sponge with fishing line wrapped around it. He stuck the hook into the sponge when he was finished. He brought it everywhere.

But my dad didn’t want cod. He wanted a salmon. Plentiful enough in British Columbia, but as elusive as a snow leapard as far as my dad was concerned.

He went to great lengths to fish. The beaches of Gabriola strech out magificently, especially off the north-west length of the island. Gabriola is the northernmost of the Southern Gulf Islands, and when the high pressure systems come in, they drive clockwise, in a south-westerly direction, kicking up winds and big waves that have been driving into the sandstone shore for thousands of years.

The result is a stretching, wave-etched beach of curving, rocky, mini-mountains, scattered boulders and little tidepool lakes. Very scenic, but an obstacle when it comes to getting a boat from the cabin to the water. My dad’s solution was to build a boat rickshaw. He was a plumber, and put it together out of pipe. It had two bicycle tires, which, because of their size and bounciness, enabled him to steer the thing over the rough beach terrain. It worked well. If he had fastened it to a bike he could have made a living hauling freight on the streets of Calcutta.

We would usually go out in the late afternoon, and stay out until dusk. This is when the tide was coming in, and the fish would come in with it.

We would start by trolling for our prey. After a few hours of nothingness, my dad would switch to the fishing equivalent of nuclear weapons; the downrigger. The downrigger is a small winch. It is fastened to the side of the boat, and has an expanse of heavy cable with a weight the size of a small cannonball at the end. You take your fishing line, and attach it to the weight. The weight takes the line right down to the bottom, or close to it.

My brother, when told of our downrigger use, would hiss contempt. The very use of the downrigger was an admission of defeat. 'You can’t catch a salmon, so you’re going for a rock cod,' which, of course, we could’ve gotten in about a fifth of the time just by standing on the end of Malaspina Point.

We did get one or two cod this way. My dad would serve them to me for breakfast, delusionally referring to the reeking dish as a ‘treat.’

“This is what they eat in Scotland,” he would say, providing an inadvertent explanation for over a century of Hebridean emigration.

The other thing we also managed to catch--in addition to the ever-accomodating rock cod--was dogfish. For some reason, the dogfish is the pariah of the sea. I often wondered why we couldn’t just eat one; could it be any worse than cod for breakfast?

Dogfish are little sharks. They’re as big as a good-sized salmon, so when one bites you really think you might have something. There were many times when a dogfish would start tugging the line, and the exhilaration of a real strike would flare in our little boat.

My dad would ferociously haul the line in, I would get the net ready, then the sleek, rubbery form of the dogfish would emerge in the waves.

My dad is a fairly bouyant person. When he gets frustrated, however, his voice takes on a theatrical mix of rage and agony, similar to Charlton Heston’s in the final scene of Planet of the Apes.

“Awwwwwww Christ,” he would say, using about five different inflections of tone for the word “awwwwwww.”

He would haul in the dogfish. The hook, a strangely blunt object when it came to fastening on to the mouths of salmon, was always well embedded in the dogfish. My dad would reach for an old machete that he would bring with him.

Whack. Whack. Whack.

WHACK.

WHACK.

WhackwhackwhackwhackwhackwhackwhACKWHACKWHACKWHACK...

WHACK....WHACK.................WHACK.

Having finally gotten the hook out, he would then humanely release the fish back into the sea.

“Go on, ya bugger, get outta here!” he would yell after it as it lamely swam off.

When I was eleven, my dad, mom and I went to visit my oldest sister in New Zealand. We were eating one time, having fish. It tasted, well, like fish, acceptable as fish goes.

“This is lemon fish,” said my brother in law.

“I’ve noticed it in the shops,” said my dad. “What is lemon fish, anyway?”

“Well,” said my brother in law, “it’s actually dogfish. They just call it ‘lemon fish’ here because they figure people will be more likely to eat it with a different name.”

Saw a band tonight at the Pic called 'Bad Wizard' purely by accident. Credit goes to Smash. Another one for his 'never doubt me' file.

HOLY FUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ROCK AND ROLL IS ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ARRRRGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!

Angels really are like insects. Blind but focused, unaware but enlightened, labouring to carry little pieces of fate to an ethereal liquid hive that pumps blood that you flow through, and that flows through you, sometimes swelling into currents you can ride, sometimes drowning you like a black tide.

If too many bad angels are in your blood you can try to kill them by poisoning your bloodstream, but they become immune to your pesticide.

“The Maxim machine-gun was adopted by the British Army in 1889. It was first used by Britian`s colonial forces in the Matabele war in 1893-94. In one engagement, fifty imperial police fought off 5,000 Matabele warriors with just four Maxim guns.”

That’s the kind of gun you need when the angels turn against you, but it still likely won’t be enough. There are too many of them.

"Wake up, it's time to die."

Rutger Hauer, "Blade Runner."

I seem to be gradually turning into a cross between the Kevin Spacey character in 'American Beauty' and the Anthony Hopkins character in 'The Remains of the Day.'

I felt 'American Beauty' was an over-rated film. 'The Remains of the Day' I liked much better, but the film is not as good as the book (a cliche, but true in this case). The novel by Kazuo Ishiguro is laced with dry humour that the movie doesn't covey as well.

I've also noticed that I've become attracted to Condoleezza Rice. I like the gap in her teeth. Did you know she's a musician?

I saw a couple of movies recently on video. One was called ‘Shackleton,’ and starred Kenneth Branagh. It a was about the British explorer Sir Earnest Shackleton, and his disastrous expedition to the Antarctic in 1914. Shackleton and his crew of 28 had set out to cross Antarctica (the big prize of being the first to reach the South Pole was taken by Norwegian Roald Amundsen in December of 1911). As they were heading south in their ship, the ice closed in, and they got stuck.

The ship was broken up, and the the crew were stranded in Antarctica at a time when no communication with the outside was possible. Antarctica is a big place, maybe the size of the continental U.S. When you include all the ice that surrounds it, it’s actually much bigger. Through incredible perseverence and deft leadership, Shackleton got the whole gang out alive, and notched one of the greatest survival stories in history.

A couple of things struck me. First of all, after spending from December 1914 to August 1916 stranded in an icy netherworld, many members of his crew then promptly enlisted in the army and served in the trenches in the First World War. I mean, holy glutton for punishment, Batman. Truly a different generation.

Secondly, what is the fucking point of crossing the South Pole? Shackleton had a notable history of Antarctic exploration, and was part of Robert Scott’s first assault on the pole in 1907. Nonetheless, it’s still kind of a manufactured exploration. But it came at the tail end of an era when exploration was an exalted profession, and explorers were rock-star-like celebrities. People like Shackleton would wander off somewhere, plant a Union Jack on some ice flow or on some mountain, then come home. At that point, they would begin a lecture tour, maybe write a book. Sell the story to the newspapers. They were celebrities, and would make their living this way.

Men like James Frazer, David Livingston and Henry Stanley spent the 1800’s romping through Africa, perhaps the last unknown (at least to Europeans and Americans) part of the world. By the turn of the 20th Century, explorers were running out of unknown places, and they turned to Antarctica. Their expeditions were in many cases privately financed. Your average industrialist, getting rich off of weapons manufacturing during the arms race that lead to World War One, would get some sweet talk from a guy like Shackleton.

“You know, Sir So-and-So, if I happen to come across some island in the Antarctic circle that no one has found yet, I can always name it after you.”

And exploration really captures the imagination. Whenever I’m over at Gabriola Island, and I climb through some expanse of bush to reach some neat little beach I didn’t know existed, or row the boat to some inaccessible piece of shoreline, I am filled with a sense of satisfaction.

I’m pleased to be one of only a few who would have made the effort to get that far. To be the only one would be an even greater feeling. It’s a neat concept to be the only one on Earth to have taken a particular path.

Now, take geography, and replace it with your own life. You are the only person who has taken the route you’re on. Feel good about it?

As often as not, we don’t, because it is drummed into our heads from all sides that there is a basic plan that we should follow. And yet many great people in history, many artists and leaders, have followed oddball paths, and it is exactly this that has put them in the position to create something unique when they needed to.

The best thing about Shackleton's fame is that it partly rests on how he made something out of a total screw-up. If things had gone perfectly--if he had simply hiked across Antarctica as he planned--he would likely have been a lesser historical figure.

Luckily for him, things got all fucked up.

I recently saw Super Robertson perform a short accoustic set. It was well done; he’s got a handful of tunes that are both catchy and suitable for an accoustic guitar. They’re varied enough to keep the set interesting, but are all still unmistakably Robertsonian.

The problem is, he can’t seem to figure out how to end the songs. He gets into them, goes for a couple of verses/choruses, then abruptly drives them off the road. He reminds me of that episode of the Beachcombers where some gung-ho kid takes off in a float plane, only to find that he doesn’t know how to land it.

He seems to do this stuff under the stage name of ‘Folk Robertson.’ I think so, anyway. He’s got more personas than Peter Sellers in ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ For a guy who calls himself ‘Folk,’ though, he seems to mumble a bit too much.

Of course, unintelligible lyrics are all part of rock and roll. But I always see folk musicians as different. The lyrics are a key part of what they’re all about. Can you imagine Paul Robeson railing against descrimination in garbled phrases that no one could understand?

I’m not much better at anunciation, and I’ve often thought that it would be helpful to have Stoke lyrics in CDs, but Smash, the bass player for Stoke, steadfastly opposes the printing of lyrics. He says that people should discover the lyrics bit by bit, that this is part of the magic of getting to know a song.

There is some merit in this argument. I remember as a kid being into a heavy metal band from France called Trust. Unlike other European metal bands (and perhaps typical of Frenchmen), they initially refused to sing in English. By the time their second album, ‘Repression,’ came out, however, they started releasing records in both French and English. The singer, Bernie Bonvisan, would re-do the entire vocal track for each record in a painstakingly constructed English translation.

When I first listened to the ‘Repression’ album I came across a song called ‘Sects.’ It had a line that went like this:

‘Dean Jones where did you come from?
Dean Jones was it for fun?
Dean Jones, is that your name?
Dean Jones, you die for fame.’

Later in the song they alter the last line:

‘Dean Jones, is that your name?
Dean Jones, A SIGN OF DEATH!’

I figured they were talking about American actor Dean Jones, star of Disney’s ‘The Love Bug.’

‘Fuck,’ I thought to myself. ‘The French must be really pissed off about EuroDisney.’

It was only after a few months that I realized it wasn’t ‘Dean Jones,’ that Bernie Bonvisan was singing about, but ‘Jim Jones.’ When he screamed it out with his French accent it sounded like:

‘Djeeeeeeeeem Jones, eeees zat your name?
Djeeeeeeeeem Jones, A SIGN OF DEATH!’

(Jim Jones, for those who don’t know, was a cult leader in Guyana who killed his followers with poison Koolaid.)

I remember another time when a guy was going on to me about a Slow song called ‘I Have Nothing to Say.’

“That is a great line,” he told me one day. “That’s the ultimate punk statement.”

And indeed it might have been, in a Seattle grunge kind of way, except that the song was actually called “I Have Not Been the Same.” Just another (admittedly rocking) tune about losing at love. When I informed him of this he was utterly deflated.

Getting back to Mr. Robertson, one of the highlights of watching his band Roadbed perform is a rendition they do of the Jackass Has Haybreath song ‘Bengal Tiger.’ I’m intimately familiar with the lyrics to ‘Bengal Tiger,’ as I’m the one who ‘wrote’ them. And Super is singing the wrong words.

In a way, though, I like his version better, so I’ve decided to keep quiet.

I’m looking for role models. The first I’ve come across is Sir Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister from 1939-1945 and 1951-1955.

Winston Churchill was convinced of his own greatness from a young age, but the more full of himself he got, the more things went awry. A member of the British Cabinet in the First World War, he was the architect of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, a crazy idea wherein the Allies (largely Australians and New Zealanders, who remain pissed off to this day), would drive to Germany through the 'soft underbelly' of Turkey. They never got past the beach.

After the war, he switched parties, unable to decide which ‘team’ was the best vehicle for his talent. He failed to grasp the changing social fabric in Britain, belligerently endorsing the crushing of the British coal miners’ strike in 1926, earning him the hatred of the British working class. By the 1930s, he was on the outside, scorned and mistrusted by all but a few devotees.

So there he was, in the political wilderness, looking back on his own indecisiveness, fucked up opportunities, and pondering the end of his political career.

But he persevered. And his hour came round at last in 1940, when he was able to assume the Prime Ministership, partly because everone's first choice for the job (a highbrow called Lord Halifax) turned it down. He was almost seventy years old.

LESSON ONE - Hang in there.

Once leader, Churchill looked for victories, and his military leaders began creating them almost out of nothing. Squads of commandos (many Canadians among them) attacked German positions from Norway to the South of France; Air raids were launched on German targets in the face of huge Luftwaffe air superiority. Finally, in 1941, he poured troops into Egypt in order to reverse the German advance across North Africa, managing, at great cost, to stop the Afrika Korps at El Alamein. It was a long way from the action in Europe, but it was a solid victory in a large battle, and was instantly adopted as a turning point.

His greatest personal contribution was that he was positive. He never allowed himself or his people to believe that failure was a possibility.

LESSON TWO: take your victories where you can get them. No victory is too small, as each one creates momentum.

He was humble enough to recognize that he needed allies. He did what he could to get the U.S. into the war. He put aside his hatred of Communism to work with Stalin. He soothingly cultivated Charles de Gaulle as a leader of 'Free France,' in spite of the fact that everone else hated the Frenchman's guts. Churchill conceded that that De Gaulle was the best and fairest choice to symbolize France's liberation; another leader might have presented himself in that role.

The same thing applied on the home front. He brought prominent opposition politicians into his cabinet. He kept Parliament running throughout the war, and allowed criticsm of his own management of the war to be voiced. He restricted civil liberties as little as possible.

LESSON THREE: Look for your allies where you can, and don't be too much of a prick, or too much of a perfectionist. Don't be so vain as to think you're never going to have to compromise. Accept that compromise, when properly applied, can result in great victory.





With that done, the rest started to take care of itself.

Regret gets into your bloodstream like alchohol, but it doesn’t wear off. Instead it seems to grow exponentially. After a while it’s like you don’t have blood in your veins anymore, just a bitter, red bile. It makes you miserable and second guessingly-indecisive, both of which simply re-inforce its effect; the more miserable and indecisive you are, the less likely you will be able to overcome the source of your regret.

A couple of weeks ago I found time to sew two buttons onto a favorite shirt of mine. A big deal to me, as I am notoriously lacking in domestic skills. But it got me thinking....where did I come across buttons recently?

Then I recalled it was at work. A couple of co-workers were commenting on H.R. Pufnstuf. One made fun of the other because of her lack of Pufnstuff knowledge. Trying to be helpful, I did some research, and came up with the following:

“H.R. Pufnstuf began when young English boy Jimmy, out playing his flute Freddie, was beckoned out to sea in a colourful boat bound for Living Island. As it drifted toward the island, the boat turned out to be a trap set by the evil Witchiepoo, who wanted to add Freddie to her collection of magical belongings.

“Jimmy narrowly escaped his fate by jumping overboard, only to wash up on the beach of an enchanted isle, unconscious. The boy was promptly rescued by the local mayor, H.R. Pufnstuf, a giant orange and green cowboy/dragon. Jimmy and Freddie the Flute found themselves stranded on Living Island, where everything was alive with its own personality: books, candles, and mushrooms all talked, some houses had hay fever, and money was measured in buttons.

‘”Alarm, alarm, Witchiepoo is coming, Witchiepoo is coming!’

“Each week, the evil Witchiepoo, along with her henchmen--vulture Orson, hapless orange spider Seymour, and the aptly named Stupid Bat--would hatch a plan to steal Freddie from Jimmy and keep them both trapped on Living Island.

“Other memorable characters included Pufnstuf's deputies Cling and Clang, sister Shirley Pufnstuf, Lady Boyd, Judy Frog, and Ludicrous Lion (‘Buttons, buttons, who's got the buttons?’).”

Yeah, that’s why I was thinking about buttons. But what I really liked about this Pufnstuf precis was the idea of a character called 'Stupid Bat.'

And I got to thinking, a certain amount of stupidity can be a real asset. It’s like when you are inoculated, you are given a bit of the disease. A bit of stupidity in your system may taint your blood, but it also leaves you less psychologically vulnerable; you aren’t as plagued by the paralyzing reflection and over-consideration that often comes with intellect.

In short, you don’t think too much.

The problem is, simple-mindedness is a tough skill to learn.

“Imagine a football team winning the Super Bowl one year, and then losing to injury, free agency, or retirement its starting quarterback, and its best receiver, running back, defensive lineman, and cornerback, as well as its coach and half the front office, all over the course of the next season. Not likely to win another championship, or even a game, for quite some time.

“That's not too far from the plague that hit rock 'n' roll in 1959-60. Within little more than a year, (Buddy) Holly--easily the brightest young star of the moment and possibly the wave of the future--was dead, Elvis had been drafted and was stationed in Germany, Chuck Berry was arrested and indicted under the Mann Act for transporting a minor across state lines, Little Richard gave up music to become a preacher, and Jerry Lee Lewis was vilified and ostracized for marrying his underage cousin. Meanwhile the recording industry was hit with a major scandal over payola schemes between record labels and disc jockeys, a controversy that would bring down some of the most innovative independent studios and revered jockeys, including the legendary Alan Freed himself. The Day the Music Died, indeed.”

I offer the above quote, from some guy named David N. Townsend (www.dntownsend.com), as a forward to what might have been titled, in the days of Shelley or Keats, “An Apology for the Beach Boys.”

I know, I know. The mere mention of the words “Beach Boys” conjures up some not altogether pleasant connotations. I realize they were favorites of Nancy Reagan. I realize the song ‘Kokomo’ is a homocide-inducing piece of dogshit that falls just short of qualifying as a crime against humanity. I realize they’ve degenerated into a bunch of squabbling nuts, addicted to personal gurus and surrounded by packs of lawyers (at least those them still living, anyway).

But a long time ago they helped hold the rock ‘n’ roll fort during a critical period.

Let’s have a little more early ‘60s rock history from Mr. Townsend (I have no idea who the fuck this guy is, by the way, but he appears to know his shit).

“On the charts, the top slots were handed over to the likes of Paul ("Put Your Head on My Shoulder") Anka, Connie ("Everybody's Somebody's Fool") Francis, Brenda ("I'm Sorry") Lee, Bobby ("Volare") Rydell, Ricky ("Travelin' Man") Nelson, Pat ("Moody River") Boone, Bobby ("Take Care of My Baby") Vee, and the wonderful Frankie Avalon. If anyone doubted that rock 'n' roll had crashed and burned, these frightening wraiths were convincing proof.”

In 1963, Bob Dylan announced that ‘the times, they are a changin.’ But at that time only a few select folkies were listening. The Beatles and Rolling Stones had been toiling away throughout 1962 and 1963, but their success was local. In fact, the Beatles had actually packed off to Hamburg in early 1962 after a British record executive had informed their manager that “groups of guitars are on the way out.”

And yet it was exactly at this nadir of rock ‘n’ roll that The Beach Boys rose to fame. To me, the Beach Boys largely begin in 1962 and end in 1964. That’s when they earned their stripes. Most of their biggest songs (‘Help Me Rhonda,’ ‘California Girls,’ ‘Good Vibrations’) came in 1965 and 1966, and it’s true that 1966’s ‘Pet Sounds’ album is credited with pushing the Beatles to pull ‘Seargeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ out of their hats, but none of that was real rock ‘n’ roll. There were plenty of others who could write good pop songs by then. What the world didn’t have in 1962 and 1963 was plenty rock ‘n’ roll bands.

The most notable tunes the Beach Boys recorded during this early period include the following: ‘Surfin’ Safari,’ ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.,’ ‘409,’ ‘Shut Down,’ ‘Little Duece Coupe,’ ‘Fun, Fun, Fun,’ ‘Little Surfer Girl,’ ‘I Get Around,’ and the unfortunately titled but still rocking ‘Be True to Your School.’

During this time, most of the band were teenagers. The core of the group revolved around bassist Brian Wilson, and his younger brothers Dennis (drums) and Carl (lead guitar). Cousin Mike Love was added as a Shirley Partridge-like pseudo-lead vocalist/keyboardist, and neighbourhood pal Al Jardine played rhythm guitar. Mike Love was the oldest, maybe nineteen or so in 1962. Carl Wilson was the youngest; only fourteen when the group started.

This is the first thing I like; they’re a neighbourhood garage band. The early rockers, like the ones mentioned by Townsend in the opening paragraph, were solo artists, some of them, like Chuck Berry, with many years of playing behind them. The Beach Boys were one of the first prototypes of the Do It Yourself teenage rock ‘n’ roll band. In fact, much of Brian Wilson’s vaunted skill with harmony and production was practiced by himself as a kid in his parents’ garage, with the help of a rudimentary multi-track recorder.

Which takes us to another hallmark of the group; they were the prototypical nerd band. Yes, they wrote songs about surfing, but they wouldn’t go near the water. Al Jardine and Mike Love were clearly geeks, and of the Wilson brothers, Brian and Carl were portly and unathletic. The only guy who looked the part was drummer Dennis Wilson, and his athletic ability in the waves (unlike the others he really could surf) was undercut by his curious lack of flair behind the drum kit. Most of the rhythm in the Beach Boys’ music comes from the bass and the guitars.

This is the next thing I like about them: they were an early example of a guitar band that could lay down a groove. I’d say Chuck Berry was the key influence on their early tunes, and they combined the Berry chugging with the reverb-drenched sound of surf stylists like the Surfari’s and Dick Dale (Carl Wilson may have ripped off Chuck Berry’s signature ‘Johnny B. Goode’ intro in ‘Fun, Fun, Fun,’ but he laid it down with great skill for a kid in his mid-teens.) The real star of the show, however, is Brian Wilson’s bass. His playing is like the surf itself, ebbing in the background one minute, then swelling into pulsing lines that carry the whole band along the next. Brian Wilson, in addition to being a first rate songwriter, was likely the first bass hero in rock.

Lyrically, the early Beach Boys songs are more ‘50’s than ‘60’s; they’re still of the era when rock ‘n’ roll was written for teenagers. Simple, yes, but so what? The drag race play-by-play of a song like ‘Shut Down’ is great fun, made by kids for kids. A song like ‘I Get Around,’ despite it’s swaggering title, is actually a kind of revenge-of-the-nerds style anthem:

“My buddies and me are gettin’ real well known
The bad guys know us and they leave us alone.”

I thought rockers were the bad guys? Not in this case. Here we have a bunch of geeks who manage, just by playing some mean guitar, to establish a detente with the goons who would otherwise be beating the shit out of them on a daily basis.

By 1964, Brian Wilson stopped touring with the group after suffering a nervous breakdown. A few years later, despite a valiant attempt to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the likes of the Beatles, he simply went to bed and stayed there for a year, wiped out and riddled with demons. The band was creatively finished from that point on. It was eventually revealed that the Wilson family home of his youth was a bit fucked up; not at all like ‘My Three Sons.’ The whiteass suburban-ness of the band may well have been an assett in 1962 and ‘63, but there was a David Lynchian underside to this story.

And this underscores the what I like best about the Beach Boys. The shiny escapism that is so present in their sound, and which so irritating to some, is actually the point. It’s not the audience that is really doing the escaping, it’s the band, especially Brian Wilson. For me his writing, a technical virtuosity not for its own sake, but at the service of a simple, consistent vision, represents the ability of music to transport its creator completely out of his own skin. For a while, anyway.

I spent last weekend comfortably ensconced at the family country house in Burnaby while the clan patriarch visited his estates on the Island. I feasted on a variety of foodstuffs, including the inevitable frozen scones and no-name brand oatmeal cookies. The biggest difference between that place and my own, though, other than its tidiness, is the presence of cablevision.

It wasn’t easy, but at one point I actually found something worth watching. It was a film called “Hail Hail Rock ‘n’ Roll,” made in 1986, a tribute to Chuck Berry on his 60th birthday. The birthday bash was held in a theatre in St. Louis, Berry’s home town, and involved an all-star band put together by Berry’s most prominent disciple, Rolling Stone Keith Richards.

Naturally there were interviews with various rock notables, including Little Richard, Bo Diddly, Eric Clapton and Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen had a particularly amusing story of being asked to back up Berry in 1974 or so. Berry walked into the auditiorium about ten minutes before he was supposed to go on. Springsteen’s band members asked Berry what songs they were expected to play, to which Berry replied “we’re gonna play some Chuck Berry songs.”

Simple songs perhaps, but Springsteen noted that a lot of them were in wierd keys. Not the usual open string E, A, D anchors of guitar rock, but oddball sharps and flats and so on. Obviously, this made the whole business of keeping up with the duckwalking dervish (or should that be ‘detonous duckwalking dervish’?) a bit of a challenge.

The most interesting comments in the whole thing, though, came from Keith Richards. There are few things I like more than listening to Keef rambling off his slurred musings on all things rocking. I’ve discovered that if you can actually make out what the fuck he’s saying it’s often quite interesting.

According to Richards, Berry’s songs are only in wierd keys if you look at them from a guitarist’s perspective. If you look at them from a piano player’s point of view, they make complete sense. The songs, says Richards, are in ‘piano keys,’ and not ‘guitar keys,’ because a piano player wrote much of the music.

The piano player he was talking about is a guy named Johnnie Johnson. Johnson actually started Chuck Berry off, bringing him into his group around 1951. Johnson, however, was bashful and introverted, and Berry’s over-the-top antics gradually made him the frontman. The guitarist was as ambitious as he was extroverted, and began crafting lyrics and jamming up riffs with Johnson. In 1955, Berry went to Chess records in Chicago, and was rewarded with a record contract. These were they days when the 45 was the central medium of music, and Berry fired off a string of hit singles over the next half-decade.

Johnson, meanwhile, stuck with Berry as a backing musician, but received no credit for any of these songs. (Berry’s first hit, ‘Maybelline,’ actually lists disk jockey Alan Freed as a co-writer, a condition imposed by the payola-soaked radio celebrity in return for playing the tune). Johnson eventually left Berry’s side, though he kept playing in and around the St. Louis area. But whereas Berry managed to rake in a pretty good living (Springsteen believed he was getting as much as $10 000 a set as far back as the mid-’70s), Johnson lived a much more mundane life.

By the time Richards (the hero of this story in some ways) pulled Johnson back into the scene in 1986, the piano player was making a living driving a bus for elderly people. In the making of “Hail Hail Rock ‘n’ Roll,” he seemed as self-effacing as you could get, a kind of big shinking violet. But he was clearly the steadiest member of the band. There is one scene where Richards and Berry are hectoring each other during practice over how a particular tune should be done. They launch into the song and both sound ragged as hell, all preen and no polish. All the muscle came from Johnson. Apparently driving the elderly around on a bus is a better recipe for rock ‘n’ roll longetivity than drugs and debauchery.

A few others noticed this as well, and after the St. Louis reunion Johnson went on to enjoy some limelight of his own. He’s recorded a handful of albums, and has played with the likes of Richards, Clapton and Paul Shaefer. He has also been inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and, most recently, has gotten round to suing Chuck Berry for royalties owed on all those old classics.

This is where the story got a little sour for me. Not that I mind Johnson trying to force Berry to give him a bit of the credit. It just seems that a nice story, heading for a bit of a fairytale ending, comes crashing gloomily back to Earth. In any case, they were a good pair. One guy supplied the groove and the progressions, the other layered it with signature riffs and licks (still widely copied) and almost era-defining lyrics. Johnson’s steady, rockin’ delivery may have been a great foundation, but without Berry’s on-stage antics and, more crucially, his off-stage hustling, there would be nothing for either of them to fight about today.

There’s a bit more to this; a bit of a sub-plot.

I was intrigued to find that one of the songs Johnson claims to have laid down the music for is ‘Sweet Little Sixteen.’ I noted this because I came across another reference to this tune recently. Chuck Berry received all the credit for composing the Beach Boys’ 1963 classic ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.,’ essentially because the song was considered to be a rip-off of ‘Sweet Little Sixteen.’ The progression is the same, and the stop-start verse that expodes into a rocking chorus was used to full effect by Beach Boy writer Brian Wilson (in a further goofy twist, Wilson took no credit for writing his own lyrics on that song). Of course, if Johnson gets the credit he's seeking, he will by extension presumably be able to lay some claim to the music for ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’

When I was 12 or so some kid brought a record to school that had ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ on it. He was an erstwhile friend of mine, and he was curiously into old vintage rock, Elvis and such. I had nothing against any of it, but none of it (or any other music, for that matter) really got me wanting to play music until I heard that song. I immediately went out and bought the ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ album. The Beach Boys had not yet fully defined themselves at the time of its making, and much of the record was instrumental, in the veign of the Surfari’s or Dick Dale. One of the instrumentals was a tune called ‘Stoked.’ I always liked that title. Whenever I think of it I’m reminded of being 12 years old, and just getting into something new and exciting.

And I like the idea that some quiet, solid guy is behind ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ I owe you one Johnny, and I like the fact that it’s you that I owe.

One of the first movies I remember really being captivated by was the James Bond film ‘Thunderball.’ I saw it on television when I was about 11, and though I knew little about James Bond at the time, I thought the flick was about the coolest thing I had ever seen

Thunderball was made in 1965, a year after Bond creator Ian Fleming died. It was the fourth in the Bond film series, coming after Dr. No (1962), From Russia With Love (‘63), and Goldfinger (‘64). By the time it was made, Sean Connery had become a big-name actor who was getting a little bored with the franchise. The film was loaded with the Bond movie hallmarks, and assembled with the largest budget of any picture in the series to date. It broke box office records on its release, although many critics dismissed it as rather meandering, and lacking a resonant-enough villian.

Actually, I disagree. Although it doesn’t have the characters of a movie like Goldfinger (Oddjob, Pussy Galore, Goldfinger himself), it has a neat plausability about it; a warplane with nuclear weapons is highjacked by bad guys. As for the villians, there is no superstar megalomaniac, but rather a series of Mohammed Atta-like role players. It is as a whole, rather than as individuals, that they add up to something menacing. In this respect the film nicely defies the usual Bond formula.

Anyway, I’m getting off the point (and there is one, I assure you). I started monitoring the TV listings for old Bond films after seeing Thunderball, and soon enough started reading Fleming’s novels. Written in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, they are steeped in a Cold War ambience that many of the films play down or eschew altogether. In many cases the plots of Fleming’s stories bear only passing resemblance to those of the movies produced in their name. For instance, the outer-space nonsense of the movie Moonraker, surely the shittiest film ever made, is a far cry from the book, which is set entirely in England and revolves around a British arms-maker who is a Soviet agent.

In a sense, Fleming’s books are a bit of a rogue cousin to the Cold War spy stories spun by the likes of John Le Carre and Graham Greene. But where Le Carre and Greene gave us exquisitely-crafted plots and genuine characters, Fleming gave us...

Well....sex, violence, chicks with cool names, Italian handguns, more brand-name alchohol than a Pamela Anderson/Kid Rock hotel suite, more faraway locales than the entire Lonely Planet series, all powered by fast-moving narratives and underpinned by Fleming’s flair for detail.

One of most enjoyable of all the James Bond books is called ‘Colonel Sun.’ Described by one reviewer as “especially violent,” ‘Colonel Sun’ takes place mostly in Greece, and has a plot that involves, among other things, Red Chinese spies and bisexual Albanian girls. It has a vivid but but grim feel to it, more so than many of Fleming’s books. The thing is, it isn’t written by Ian Fleming. It’s written by a guy named Robert Markham.

I first came across ‘Colonel Sun’ as a boy, shortly after becoming a Bond guru. The kid next door had a copy.

“How typical,” I thought to myself when I spotted it among his collection of half-finished model planes and non-scholarly books on dinosaurs, “He doesn’t even have a real Bond book. He has some imitation Bond book.”

It was only recently that I discovered that Robert Markham, like some sly Bond villain, is not really Robert Markham. Robert Markham is Kingsley Amis.

Yeah, Sir Kingsley Amis, the Booker Prize-winning icon of post-war British literature. Amis rose to fame in 1954 with the publication of his first novel, ‘Lucky Jim,’ which is regarded as one of the great comic masterpieces in English writing. By the 1960’s he was a well-established cornerstone of the British literary establishment.

What happened was this. Amis liked Ian Fleming’s books. He liked them because they were entertaining. Amis hated books that weren’t entertaining, regardless of their supposed literary merit. When Ian Fleming died in 1964, Amis began discussing with Fleming’s publisher the possibility of continuing the Bond series under a pseudonym. He did not want to become a permanent substitute for Ian Fleming, but simply wanted a crack at writing a Bond novel in the Fleming style. Mindful that his own now-famous name might skew the reception of the novel, he adopted the pen name of ‘Robert Markham.’ His Bond novel, ‘Colonel Sun,’ was published in 1967.

There are some things to be learned from Kingsley Amis. Chief among them, I think, is his realization that he had things to learn from others, including those considered by many to be beneath him in stature and ability. Ian Fleming, for instance.

All of the crazy Bond characters--Pussy Galore, Dr. No, the megalomaniacal Blofeld, the Japanese agent-vixen Kissy Suzuki--may have been fantastical, but they were also great fun. All of the referances to Chesterfield cigarettes, and Stolichnaya Vodka, and Beretta pistols may have represented a “fetish for brand-names,” but they were also pretty cool, and were a huge bridge to the reader; ie. "Bond drinks Stoli. Maybe you’ve tried it too." Fleming may not have been Shakespeare, but at least he knew how to have a good time, and he knew how to connect with his audience.

In short, Ian Fleming knew how to do some things that Amis felt were worthwhile; it was a challenge for Amis to see if he could pull the same tricks out of his own sleeve. Amis had wit, craft and intellect. But he never took for granted that all of that made him a good read.

Maybe it’s a hallmark of real artists that they are always ready to learn, and don’t mind who they learn from. Freed up from the ball-and-chain of absorbing only what is ‘critically’ acceptable, an artist can actually study all manner of work that may be useful or relevant to his own stuff.

As a rocker, one of my favorite examples is Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, and his admission of a strong Black Sabbath influence in his music. Like Ian Fleming, Black Sabbath were always highly-regarded among fans of their genre, but to much of the rock critic establishment they were not to be taken too seriously beyond that. Cobain, though, recognized that the groove-soaked heaviness of Sabbath, if combined some melody and delivered with his own punkish abandon, could render a formidable result. He was right. Good thing he didn’t, like many of his posturing punk contemporaries, write Sabbath off as a bunch of dinosaurs and decide that they had nothing to offer him.

But what I love most about the Cobain/Sabbath thing is the way rock critics--from the start great champions of Cobain--began upwardly-revising their views of Sabbath as Cobain’s regard for them became known. Typical, eh?

Similar, I suppose, to the way I upwardly-revised my own view of Robert Markham’s work once I found out he was actually Kingsley Amis.

About a week and a half ago, on a Saturday night, I had dinner at Super Roberson’s funky new pad.

I got home...I don’t know....midnight or so, and stayed up for a couple of hours. Feeling good and tired, I went to bed at twoish, but in typical fashion for me I couldn’t sleep. Finally I got fed up, and got out of bed at about 4:30 and decided to go for a walk.

I walked across West 6th Avenue at the Laurel Street overpass, and headed toward Kits beach along the False Creek seawall. I had the whole place to myself until I passed the Burrard Marina, where I encountered at quartet of young people, late teens or so, walking in the opposite direction. I kept going, and encountered a power walking woman, who said good morning to me. A little further, right in front of the Maritime Museum, I passed a young couple.

Now, they weren’t holding hands. They weren’t arm-in-arm. But they were smiling and talking quietly as if they had just discovered something in common. A little further I went down onto the beach itself, not THE Kits beach, but that little piece of sand just to the west of the Museum, kind of around the corner from Kits beach. There was a little driftwood shack, like the one that old Scottish guy had in the movie Local Hero. And there were the remnants of a fire burning beside the shack.

Hmmmm. I surmised that the couple, and perhaps the youthful quartet a ways back, had been hanging out at the shack. After all, it was mid June...grad time.

The first thought that came into my head was the obvious one...

TEENAGE ORGY!!!

Controlling myself and reviewing the facts, however, I came to a different conclusion. There were six grads hanging out at the beach. Four got up and left, but two, maybe lingering over a conversation, got up a few minutes later to leave. I liked the last couple. They seemed nice.

Anyway, I kept going, and soon I get to Kits Beach. It is, of course, littered with debris from the previous Saturday’s volleyball playing, sun bathing, meat marketing, and so on. But I think that maybe I’ll have it to myself while the sun’s coming up.

Or not.

There’s one fucking guy down there, going along the beach with a fucking metal detector.

For Christ’s sake.

I turn around, and head back along the beach toward False Creek, walking close to the water. He’s up higher, near the logs, moving in the same direction. What is he looking for?

Has this fucker gotten himself up at 4:30am on a Sunday to look for a few loonies? I doubt it. What he’s looking for is something better....the lost wedding ring, watch, necklace...something that he can cash in for some real dollars.

I’ll tell you something. I’m prone to loosing things. Through my own negligence I have lost the perfect mate, an excellent pair of sunglasses I got in Los Angeles, a Peavey microphone I got off the superb guy who used to run Burnaby Music, a watch my grandfather gave me, and a very nice celtic cross I brought back from Wales for a girlfriend many years ago.

Well...I guess it was not me who lost the cross, it was her. But if felt like my loss.

I bought it at a little town called Conwy, along the north coast of Wales. The town is enclosed by a wall, built in the 12th century by the English king Edward II, during his campaign against the Welsh. I have my moments of exquisite taste, and this cross--it was on a necklace--was perfect. It was tasteful yet eye-catching, a real find.

My girlfriend was very pleased with it. Shortly after my triumphant return from the old country (as my parents called it) we went to a play. A musical in fact. A friend of hers wanted to see ‘Hair.’ She dressed beautifully for the occasion, and wore the cross around her neck.

Now, I’m going to digress a bit here and tell you that ‘Hair’ is undoubtedly the shittiest fucking piece of theatre you will see anywhere, anytime. It is a crushing, obliterating indictment of the Baby Boom generation.

“We gave the world the Beatles, and all that other great music,” they tell us. Fine. But this fucking musical, by itself, turns their surplus into a deficit faster than you can say ‘Trudeau fiscal policy.’

There’s one decent song; it’s called ‘Age of Aquarius,’ during which the cast take their clothes off. Well that’s great, but if I all I want is to hear an adequate tune accompanied by nudity I may as well go to the Number 5 Orange; I don’t need to sit through two hours of shit.

Anyway, that’s when she lost the neclace. Some time that evening. We got back to her place and she grasped around her neck, and a look of horror came over her face, just like in a movie. It’s painful to recall. We phoned the cab company, they didn’t have it. I went back down to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre at....I guess it might have been around 4:30am. Of course it was hopeless, but I had to look for it. I found nothing but a pair of wine glasses, left outside by some theatre-goers and not collected by the staff. I have them to this day.

The necklace, though, was gone for good.

It was a bad omen, I think. I brought back some other stuff...a broach made of porcelain from Scotland was one thing...but it all sucked compared to the pewter cross.

I thought of that when I thought of the guy with the metal detector. I don’t want this prick finding things. I want the young couple to find some treasure. I wan’t the guy to find some cross in a sand and put it around the girl’s neck. That way, someone’s loss is someone else’s gain; not someone else’s material gain, but someone else’s emotional gain.

As I walked home the sun was coming up. The thing is, it didn’t rise way over in the east, it rose over the North Shore mountains. Is this usual? It seemed odd, but cool. At least that was something. When I got home the day was bright and getting warm. I went back to bed and finally fell asleep.