HUMAN WRECKAGE

Date Night 

Ann leaned her shoulder against mine to whisper, “We’re surrounded by whiteheads.”

I’d been peering around, taking in the tableau. Our fellow theatregoers were all getting on. Some struggled with mobility issues. Others were too heavy for their height. The theatre itself was beautiful, brick walls crisscrossed with massive wooden beams anchored with iron joints. Our seats near the top were very close to the stage. I was thinking stairway railings were right up there with cup and mug handles, epitomes of functional design. I was reminded of the gallery of grey seats which hung at one end of the old Montreal Forum. Didn’t matter if the person in the row in front of you was wearing a stovepipe hat, the slope was almost vertical. A long way straight down.

Ann continued, “We fit right in, I guess, but I don’t feel as if we do.”

The play we saw was Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple which debuted on Broadway in 1965. The Edmonton Journal graced this local production with a rave review. That surprised me because the Journal these days pays more attention to Kim Kardashian press releases promoting her signature products which aspire to the stratosphere currently inhabited by Goop and orbiting vaginal stones – I digress. You know the play’s premise: Oscar and Felix, best friends, one slovenly the other fastidious, both divorced, attempt to live together.

I came of age in the early 70s watching the television sitcom on a black and white portable TV with tinfoil scrunched onto the rabbit ears. Jack Klugman played Oscar. Tony Randall played Felix. Oscar had a pretty sweet life, I thought. Drinking, smoking, gambling and writing about professional sports in New York City. There was at least a decade of delay before I finally saw the 1968 film starring Walter Matthau (Oscar) and Jack Lemmon (Felix).

The Odd Couple trifecta realized in reverse order. Enjoying Wednesday evening’s performance (I can’t name the actors, I didn’t keep a playbill), it struck me that I was now older than Simon’s characters and had lived through similar life experiences. I understand the script had been updated somewhat to reflect the mores of 2025 although the only difference I could discern was more slapstick, enough to make clear to the overly touchy and sensitive contingent that The Odd Couple is a comedy of its time. But, you know, a good joke or witty remark however old or whatever its subject needs no apology.

One aspect of The Odd Couple disturbed me, triggered me, made me cringe. Felix’s irrational compulsion to clean, straighten and tidy – all ups – summoned the ghost of my big brother Bob. He nicknamed me “Heloise” after the syndicated columnist who proffered helpful hints to homemakers long before social media life hack memes. It was not a compliment, more an observation. My friend Stats Guy still zings that sobriquet at me from time to time. Other friends call me “Martha Stewart.” Now that Ann and I are grandparents my inner Felix is in overdrive, turbo-charged: I’m no whitehead, I AM FELIX! It’s no gift to see yourself as others might.

The Varscona Theatre is a nondescript building. Its exterior suggests a Nissen hut, something you’d see in a war movie. Its interior is something else, done right, seed money well directed. It’s a staple of the Old Strathcona Theatre District, home to the Fringe Festival each August. Adjacent back alleys have been repaved and power-washed into inviting patio or meeting places amid the dumpsters. The exteriors of the surrounding walls feature murals or flaked and fading ads for long-forgotten commercial brands and services. There’s a jazz club nearby which backs onto Canadian Pacific Railway end-of-steel. A perpendicular boundary of the district is Whyte Avenue, one of those hip main drags whose vibrancy ebbs and flows with playoff hockey and the red or black ink in Alberta’s financial ledger, still too dependent on the price of oil. Whyte Avenue, like Fremont or Bourbon, is one of those streets that look better at night. A film director shooting on location would want to firehose the pavement, reflect all of the lights and signage in a black mirror. Moodiness to evoke either glamour or noir, script dependent.

Ann and I shared a light supper before the performance, an array of tapas. We’ve found that when we dine out, even if it’s just a pub lunch, the nature of our conversation changes when we sit facing one another. There’s no space for the commonplace at a table for two. Upcoming appointments, chores and errands give way to speculation about the fate of those ancient but comfy chairs in the den. What about a sectional instead? New furniture would be different, disruptive – we’d have to dispose of the old stuff and I’d have to repaint the room. Nightmarish, and anyway I've no complaints, always been content. Off topic, perhaps another trip? Where would you like to go?

Bodega serves the type of food Ann cannot prepare in our kitchen although I’m certain scrubbing her used pots and pans would be a lead-pipe cinch for my scour set. It faces the Princess Theatre across Whyte, shuttered since the pandemic. A late night showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show still camps it up on the marquee. Nestled between The Wee Book Inn and the gussied up Strathcona Hotel, Bodega occupies what has been a seemingly cursed, transient space since Elephant & Castle shut its taps something like a decade ago.

Elephant & Castle wasn’t just an overseas Tube station. It was a chain of English-style pubs in Canada. The Newcastle Brown tasted fine in Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton and wherever else. A reliable second choice or fallback. Conversely, if you were randomly teleported into any Elephant & Castle location, you’d have no idea where you were in Canada, an awfully big place. Bodega’s décor blurs lines, a mix of Catholic mission and Inquisition dungeon. Had Zorro wandered in looking to unwind with a bottle of red, I’d not’ve been surprised. The cunning fox would also have a cheroot clamped between his teeth, not that he could light it. Snuff that out, Don Diego, Cardinal Biggles has just arrived with bylaw enforcement. And they’re incensed. Bodega has no brittle surfaces, no fashionably modern minimalist pretension. Ann and I didn’t have to raise our voices as high as our flights of fancy.

We stole a moment in the dirt and gravel parking lot by the jazz club, shared a cigarette before the short drive home. Ann said, “We don’t do this often enough.” We don’t. I’m something of a hinderance. There is stability and comfort in everyday routine. And, saints preserve us, there are other people out there in public places. Mother of God, just look at them. But when we do change the backdrop, change our setting and scene, Ann and I have found that some of our fancies come to fruition. Sparks require switches.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond fucked. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress or other online vendors.

A FAN’S NOTES

The Boomtown Rats: A Bittersweet Appreciation 

My memories of the mid-seventies seem to dwell on desperately dire times. The music press’s consensus back then was that no rock band should or could have a lifespan longer than a decade or so. Key members quit or die. Others have troubles with alcohol, drugs and criminal code statutes. The Faces were disintegrating. I reckoned it was just a matter of time before the Rolling Stones shattered into scree. So. I casually began to cast my eye around for a new favourite, ear to the ground. The experience was eerily similar to attending a coed college after five years in an all-boys Jesuit high school. Lots to contemplate.

Some bands looked too stupid to be taken seriously, hair and costumes. Others were a bit too bombastic and flamboyant. J. Geils Band was a potential successor, a great frontman and blues hearts in the right place. I was devastated when they cancelled a Montreal Forum date I’d bought tickets for. Maybe Love Stinks aside, their studio albums never quite lived up to their live reputation (Blow Your Face Out, Full House). Aerosmith almost contended with their three-album run of Get Your Wings, Toys in the Attic and Rocks (their best), but at least half of each of those albums was Zeppelinesque sludge – which is all right to doze off to when you’re picking at your chipped black nail polish and too stoned to roll.

Social media Sunday, 13 July 2025: Facebook reminds me that it’s been forty-three years since Major League Baseball staged its annual all-star game in Montreal’s Stade Olympique. A good night out in the right field bleachers, almost touching heaven but blocked by a pre-fab cement overhang. Sunday also marked the fortieth anniversary of Live Aid, the mother of all telethons: two concerts on two continents to benefit a third one, cajoled and pulled together by Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, an Irish rock band.

Rock music has always twinned its premise. Simply put, cars, sex and getting wasted are good; war, poverty, racism and oppression are bad. Live Aid was the absolute pinnacle of rock’s inherent idealism and its somewhat insidious role as a positive force in popular culture. The satellite broadcast of “All You Need Is Love” writ massive. Alas, there’s only one direction from peak toppermost of the poppermost. Live Aid was the last signpost on rock music’s golden highway of hits. More personally, existing footage documents the demise of the Boomtown Rats. The timing was tragically right, they’d been at it for ten years (The survivors, including Geldof, have since reformed and are marking their fiftieth anniversary with a European tour).

There’s a bulletin board on the wall above my round writing table. It displays what you’d expect, ticket stubs, pocket team schedules and the metal badges I used to pin on my jean jacket. The largest item is a 10”x8” black and white Mercury-Polygram promo glossy of the Boomtown Rats circa 1978. They look like a rock band, dressed a little differently from you and me and with better haircuts, but nothing ridiculous. Unforced, perhaps even uncalculated, cool. And the Stones appeared to be done, what with Keith facing down an extended tour of the Canadian penal system. And the Rats had, in my case, pedantic cachet: a double-barreled proper noun name lifted from a legitimate source (Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory) and easily abbreviated into a form of shorthand. If you said “the Rats” to somebody who knew, they understood you weren’t referencing the Good Rats or the offspring of Rat Scabies.

My first encounter with Geldof was in the pages of Trouser Press. I’d read the rest of the magazine. All that was left was an interview with some guy I’d never heard of. But he looked cool. This Irish fellow proved articulate, opinionated and contrarian. Hilarious too. He dismissed Springsteen as a pale imitation of Van Morrison and Thin Lizzy, a rip-off artist. I was in the record store the following day to pick up A Tonic for the Troops and the Rats debut, the cover of which showed a shirtless Geldof on his knees in a dingy hallway, suffocating beneath a cellophane shroud.

The Rats hit at a particularly fertile time for rock music. If you bought a record by a new artist in the seventies, I’m thinking Television, Police, Cars, R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Clash…acts not in your older siblings’ collections, you were guaranteed to hear something different. The Rats were no exception. Their songs were urban stories (“Rat Trap”), gritty fables (“Joey’s on the Streets Again”) and slices of teenage wildlife ("Kicks"). Modern girls and death. The lyrics were like clockwork: clever, witty, ironic. I was hooked; I saw my future without the Stones.

My second encounter with Geldof was in real time, the radio perennial of “first caller through.” The Rats were playing the Theatre St-Denis that night, touring in support of their brilliant third album The Fine Art of Surfacing. I had tickets, orange card with black ink. CHOM-FM was Montreal’s English-language hipster station even if it was already exhibiting the early stages of corporate uniformity disease. Geldof was on air, promoting the show. CHOM did not play Boomtown Rats music.

(CHOM did not play Lou Reed either. The deejay hosting Geldof had previously hosted Lou in the same time slot. He introduced “Charley’s Girl” as Charlie’s Angels and, well, you imagine how the rest of the session went.)

Surfacing’s pseudo-North American hit was “I Don’t Like Mondays”, a song attempting to make sense of the senseless, a high school shooting in San Diego, CA. It was controversial at the time because school shootings in the US were not yet part of the curriculum. If the Rats released “I Never Loved Eva Braun” today (Yeah, I conquered all those countries/They were weak and I was strong/A little too ambitious maybe/But I never loved Eva Braun), their taking the piss with Hitler would be far too subtle; the hand-wringing outrage too easy to imagine.

I asked Geldof about his first encounter with Springsteen. In an elevator, an awkward moment for an Irishman with a big mouth. “He said, ‘Are you the guy who’s been saying all those things about me?’ I just sort of… I couldn’t deny it.” The deejay figured it was time to cut me off. Geldof said, “No, don’t. Let him speak. This guy’s interesting.” I was more engaged than the media professional. I didn’t feel like a college kid, my school paper's record reviewer aspiring to a university undergraduate degree in English and Journalism. No, I felt I was bantering with an old friend. I telephoned real friends afterward and gushed like “Mary of the Fourth Form”: “I spoke to Bob Geldof!” It was going to be a great night! I was already high. Years later I was crushed whilst reading his 1986 memoir Is That It? – the bastard had omitted mention of our call; must’ve been an editorial decision, you know, page count, printers’ signatures and whatnot.

I somehow made it home from that show (I would see them again at the St-Denis on the Mondo Bongo tour) with the record company 10”x8” promo glossy intact, uncreased. I remain mystified as to how (and the how of its pristine state some forty years later). The Boomtown Rats were the real deal. They did not go on stage as curious bystanders. Geldof was a frenetic front man, not particularly graceful. A roadie unlocked his cage at curtain. His hands were always very busy, emphasizing lyrics with exaggerated gestures in the manner of an unskilled actor (although he would go on to star as Pink in The Wall film).

How was I to know they were on the standard ten-year rock band plan? Their fifth and sixth albums, V Deep and In the Long Grass, were spotty, indifferent contractual obligations but not without a few gems amid the exhausted dross. They were done by Live Aid, placeholder filler on a very long and busy day. I believe I have all or most of Geldof’s solo albums; hard to find, generally ignored, but very good. He or they will always sell their latest album in this country – provided I’m aware of it. The Boomtown Rats will get their Hot Rocks treatment come September when a double retrospective is due. I suspect I already have everything on it, but I’m all in anyway – you know, new cover art, thorough liner notes and the sequencing might be interesting, even revelatory.

Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones are polishing their follow up to Hackney Diamonds. I don’t understand anything anymore. Not that I did then.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond fucked. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress or other online vendors. 

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Sweet Victoria 

We spent most of last week down island on Vancouver Island. Ann and I flew ninety minutes west from Edmonton to hang around with her brother Jim and his wife Shannon. We made token efforts to present as utile burdens, good guests. One of those trips that’s more about visiting than sightseeing (although I did manage a couple of pints of Smithwick’s at the Irish Times). We knew that long before our bumpy touchdown. Other relatives and friends reside there too.

I had telephoned my high school chum Peter to give him distant early warning. He’d introduced me to what I consider “prog” way back then and some of that music has since stuck. His regrets were sincere. Peter and his wife were taking their daughter, a newly capped and gowned high school graduate, to Paris and London “before she hates us.” I laughed. Growing up in the olden days hadn’t been a complete fog.

But everybody else got together, three generations. The event was a performance by Majesties Request, a Stones tribute band. The event was staged at a pub called The Loft on Gorge Road. The Loft is atop a Days Inn. One of those travellers’ havens you’re desperate to checkout of as quickly as possible, no spare time to spend, no free day to waste away amid cinderblock and nylon. Where you can’t help but fret about the hygiene habits of your room’s previous occupants and the thoroughness of the housekeepers. Gorge is a ritzy street, until you drive to the other end and reach the Days Inn.

But isn’t that just dirty, lowdown of rock ‘n’ roll? The Loft’s walls were adorned with airbrushed images of Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison – you can picture black velvet renderings in Kresge, Woolworth and Army and Navy bargain basements, can’t you? The men’s room was a hive of miniscule black flies. I contemplated a moustache comb for my pubic hair. I ate a cheeseburger, relieved that the filler in the patty tasted more like cereal than emulsified abattoir floor scrapings. God, you know, sometimes bad food is damn good.

The Blushing Brides are Canada’s best, and possibly the world’s best Stones tribute band. I’ve seen them in every Canadian city I’ve lived in. They’re a fun night out every ten or fifteen years or so. The singer and the guitarist try to look like Mick and Keith. Sometimes the illusion is real. They strike the poses we’ve all seen as stills in the music press. Majesties Request had no such pretension. The guitarist resembled a member of Guns n’ Roses or Robin Zander of Cheap Trick. The drummer sang all the Keith songs and he sounded like Keith did in 1972 even though he wasn’t born yet. The hefty lead singer’s intonation and phrasing was corporate Jagger, more Stripped “Wild Horses” than Sticky Fingers, a slight nasal twang though not shotgunned to shreds. He was smart enough not to try on any moves.

I asked our friend Carol to dance. We’d caught up earlier in the week. This night Carol was at the wrong end of a table for eight, conversation was impossible. Out on the floor in front of the band, Carol asked me if I’d teach her to dance like Mick. I said, “You have to prance and mince.” Pout. Clap as if you’re deaf, fingers to palm up by your ear. When you strut move your arms like a flightless bird with broken wings. Thumbs forward for a waist clutch. If you put your hands on your hips? Profile only, curled wrists to bone. Point like any one of the nuns who taught us in Catholic elementary school, admonishing and angry. Jagger scolding is very different from Bruce Springsteen’s inclusive pointing. Twirl like a celebrated Soviet ballet defector (a high barre for Mick); James Brown and Tina Turner too. And pout. 

Carol was laughing on the dance floor. The Majesties Request singer was watching me, a bar band needs energy. I noticed a couple of senior ladies giving me long looks. That was the “it” or “thing” about Jagger in his prime: your partner was now forever inadequate; boy or girl; rebel, rebel.

I won a prize. Not for my rubber band man performance. No, for trivia. Who doesn’t know “It’s All Over Now” was written by Bobby Womack for his Chess Records soul band the Valentinos before the Stones turned it into a UK number one in June 1964. I mean, c’mon. The prize pack was Majesties Request promotional merch, lovingly packaged in a cardboard VHS cassette shipping box: a few stickers, a foam insulator for beer cans and bottles, and a ballpoint – black ink; disposable swag I loathed sourcing during my advertising career (Marla, God bless you wherever you are. I knew one call to you would keep my burgeoning insanity in check. Thank you!).

A random Friday night in Victoria. Family and friends, a pub, live Stones music complete with reminders of my obsession and career, and a pen. My life writ awfully small in a funny sort of way.         

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond fucked. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress or other online vendors. 

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Keep Calm and Ostrich On 

Personal trauma? Bury it. A troublesome corpse? Bury it. Evidence of corporate malfeasance? Bury it. Scandalous allegations of ineptitude, corruption, sex and graft? Bury them. Commissioned studies that don’t arrive at a desired conclusion? Bury them. Mountains of refuse? Bury them. Used radioactive metals? Bury them. Carbon emissions? Bury them.

We bury everything, including history. And just when I figured there was nothing left to bury excepting a few old grudges of mine, Alberta strong and free in all her majesty and an outlier on Canada’s political scene, is seriously contemplating burying water. But not just any kind of water.

Many commodities are buried too, they must be mined, quarried or dredged. Consider sand beyond Vaseline, beach volleyball and a sunny holiday. It’s the bed under a properly paved road. It’s in glass and concrete. It’s the abrasive in fracking fluid – which is mainly composed of water. Sand in some form is as omnipresent as water in your life. The manufacturer of your shampoo likely lists its main ingredient as aqua. When Nestle sells 500 mL of your own tap water back to you, it used way more water than that to produce its convenient plastic container. Clean water, like sand, is a highly valued industrial commodity.

Alberta is Confederation’s angry mini-petro state, a province with republican fantasies. The source of its mismanaged resource wealth and its tired boom or bust economic cycle is the tar sands, gooey fossil fuel deposits up north around Fort McMurray. Extracting heavy bitumen and gussying it up for further downstream refinement requires a lot of fresh water. When I wash the sand-based crockery here at the Crooked 9, I fill the kitchen sink with potable water though I wouldn’t drink it after my chore is done because I know my greywater is a tepid soup of detergent and diluted debris and, anyway, it would taste like McDonald’s coffee. I open the drain knowing it will be treated and maybe even come through my tap again one day. Tar sands wastewater is something of a misnomer. It’s liquid slag whose additives include bitumen, sand and chemicals. As sludgy as most of Led Zeppelin’s catalogue. It’s collected, pooled in artificial basins called tailings ponds. They tend to leak and their toxins tend to seep or spill downstream. They do look good from above, ask a dead duck.

A commission convened by the United Conservative government of Alberta to study the environmental impact of tailings ponds (something of a shock in itself) and chaired by the Honourable Member from Fort McMurray suggests one solution to dispose of mining wastewater is burying it. Naturally, the effluence would be decontaminated before interment deep within the earth’s crust. If that’s the case, I wonder why it’ll still need to be buried. Tailings injections bring us halfway to China and the world of Jules Verne, drilling down into impermeable rock. Suitable sites aren’t abundant. Proposed captured carbon storage sites compete for space. Draining tailings ponds will necessitate pipelines. The Universal Law of Wham! applies to pipelines as much as anything else: If you’re gonna do it, do it right, now! Pipelines are efficient conduits, but improper installation and neglectful maintenance are valid concerns because there’s a whiff of Boeing ineptitude wafting over past projects. And there’s no revenue in moving dirty water and no profitable payoff to be realized in goodwill.

Love Canal was neither a soap opera nor a porn flick. Evidence has surfaced showing fracking fluids will eventually permeate groundwater. Still in dispute is whether their highly pressured injection into subterranean rock fissures triggers earthquakes. So. What could possibly go wrong burying mining wastewater tailings?

I don’t know. I’m no cynic; I’m a realist whose brain is pop culture wired. All I can picture is that last scene in Carrie. Nothing buried stays that way. As for ostriches, I assume it’s best not to see it coming.                     

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is inane. I’ve no recourse, no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress.