LNOYL

Dareck was always the better songwriter because he’d say the words that you couldn’t say. When I first started to write, everything I did stemmed from this guitar rhythm, that chord sequence, or some melody that I had reached for on the strings. We were still in school, when one day, Dareck picked up this old acoustic guitar, and asked me to show him a few chords. I obliged, but the only purpose of showing him the chords, as it turned out, was so he could figure out how to stick his fingers on the fretboard (those of you who have ‘The Plan’ have an illustration of this). I never had to show him anything else, because in only a few months, he was coming up with new songs. It was as if he did not learn the guitar per se, but learned his method of songwriting instead. The guitar was subservient to that process, and as a result, you never really see Dareck gravitate to standard open chords – his songs just never asked for them.

By the time I had made my trek to Vancouver Island, and found myself on the front porch of Trish and Scott’s house, Dareck and I had started to trickle songs back and forth to each other. We had quit talking to each other for over a year, and sending these songs back and forth reestablished some type of meaningful contact. He’d email a thirty second song demo, and I’d send my meandering recordings, and it was like we were picking up again from first principles. The first car load I stuffed in the corolla to put in Trish and Scot’s house for my week long house-sitting gig were the drums. The drums were a low point for me. I started piecing the drum kit together a year and a half earlier when Dareck and I began to fall out, and to my ears, the kick drum still sounded like failure and frustration. The night I got that kick drum, there was phone call from my sister, crying to come pick her up at the strain station in London. She couldn’t stay there anymore. I picked her up, and Dareck, myself, and my sister lived in a one bedroom apartment for a while.

Trish and Scott’s place was a neat little house, located on one of the towns main streets. Nice big window in the front, and an art studio up in the converted attic. I was farther from the ocean than the basement – but distance is relative in a small town; the ocean was just a five minute walk down the hill. There was a tiny noodle shop a few doors down that I began to patronize, and a hardware store a few doors down further owned by a pair of sisters. Apparently the sisters played in a band as well, but I never saw them while I was there. Once the front porch pile of recording equipment, drums, amps, keyboards and guitars was stacked and ready to go inside, I opened the front door. I looked at the living room, and then all the instruments, and then found my point n’ click and took photos of their living room. I knew I would have to move things around to fit the instruments and gear, but I wanted to be able to put things back in their exact spot. During my two and a half years on the island, I eventually became good at capturing photos of carpets, couches, runners and coffee tables in such a way that I could accurately judge their exact replacement location. One couple actually said their place looked neater than when they left…

On the neighbouring island, which was called Saltpring, there was this guy that built these tube microphone preamplifiers for recording, out of old vintage reel to reel players. For those of you unfamiliar with the jargon, a preamplifier to a microphone is like a guitar amp to an electric guitar. You plug the microphone in it so you can hear and record what the mic is pointed at. The old, high voltage vacuum tube preamplifiers are desirable because sometimes they can alter the sound a certain way that is complimentary to the recording you are trying to make. Instead of modern age guts, they are full of those old tubes that light up and get really hot, kind of like the ones you see in 1950′s supercomputers. I got a great deal on this archaic preamp, and went to go get it. I drove my car to the ferry, and made the short trip to Saltspring Island. Being new to the west coast, the ferry trips were still novel for me, and I thought they were cool – drive on up, watch the water, and listen to tunes. The boats seemed like they were built (or at least renovated) in the 80′s, and the bigger ones had multiple decks with gift shops in them. They also served a hybrid of cafeteria and movie theatre food, but managed to combine the worst of both worlds (refined white bread and everlasting cheese sauce).

The guy I met where Saltspring meets the ocean had a big beard and donned a well worn jean jacket. He handed me a cardboard box, that had the retro looking, tube device inside. It was his prototype (it broke within two months, and he got around to fixing it two years later. If the pace on Vancouver island can be said to be slower than Ontario, then on Saltspring, it’s pure molasses). I hid the box with metal and tubes sticking out on the ferry ride back. I figured that a medium dark skinned, single male holding a big metal box with flick switches and tubes in it, on a boat in the middle of the ocean, was something nobody wanted to see.

Back at the house, the recordings took on shape. Most of the songs had arbitrary names, although a few derived from the stories that I started writing – throwing stones, ash, and the gimp. Little by little, I was coming to grips with the pallet – observing how some sounds just fit together, and other instruments, no matter how much you massaged them, would always fight each other to be noticed. I referred to those sounds as the tones of jealousy, and they would always destroy the true sonic intent within a song. I learned that if I stuck strings the size of rail road tracks on a ‘crafted in Japan’ P-bass, the bottom end sorted itself out with no questions asked. I learned that if you used a certain mic, at just a certain angle on the Frontalini pump organ, you could jack up a certain frequency on the EQ that would make it sing. I also discovered that dbx made these little consumer tape devices in the 70′s that squished and compressed sounds in a way that sometimes worked. My guitar and drums sounds were still not good, no matter what I tried. It was evident that the right the instruments, carefully chosen, and not just the right recording gear, was going to be key to developing a sound that worked. A very dim tungsten bulb went off in my head (it would take me another year and a half to understand these things enough to really make use of it) – it always starts with a core of very simple things. Big gauge strings. A nice room…

I took my cue from the vertical blinds in the living room – when the sun streaked through onto the couch, it was time to tear down for the evening (when you are living somewhere for free, you don’t make the neighbours upset). Sometimes I’d move the drums over, and stretch out on the couch. One evening, I flicked through the channels and started watching a documentary about Muhammad Ali. It was about his match with George Foreman, and was dubbed “Rumble in the Jungle”. The fight took place in Zaire, Africa, and documented some of the turmoil in race politics at that time. Although I cant describe myself as an avid boxing fan (although I named one of my turtles “Rocky” as a kid), the story these boxers have are often compelling. The recently filmed “Tyson” demonstrates the same thing. These guys will break their back for what they can’t have. The emotions they project are harsh and so brutal that they simply must be true. The world rides those emotions to a pay check when they are on top, but the beginning is always a lonely road indeed.

Addendum:  All those guitars that go ‘pop’ in ‘Got a new kitty’ got run through and squished by those little dbx units. The frontalini keyboard with its ‘counter bass’ never made it onto any final recordings for the album. The big metal tube box, once it was fixed, was used to record the cello’s on “Message in the Machine”. Kirk’s first impression listening to the playback was ‘they don’t sound like cello’s'…they now sounded like the machine.

k