THE GARAGE SAILOR

A Man Out of Time

John Doyle, the snarky and often hilarious Irishman who scribbles as the Globe and Mail’s television critic has argued for years that intricate long form series have replaced the novel as the world’s favoured storytelling platform. He cites ‘The Sopranos’ as the seminal torque of transition, a show whose debut coincided with and encouraged the rise of specialized cable channels. His premise is difficult to refute.

There’s compelling anecdotal evidence on the ground. My nephew, a petroleum engineer under the age of 30, says none of his friends read. I know a couple of them and they possess university English degrees. There are too many other forms of entertainment readily available across a slew of electronic devices. In my circle of friends, the guys as they’ve aged have gradually gravitated toward non-fiction.

My novel The Garage Sailor is about the mostly male world of dedicated music fandom, B-sides, vinyl collecting and noisy chat boards. It’s a world I suppose I should’ve grown up and out of, a sort of sub-culture joy to be squashed by the realities of everyday life. But some old habits are so hard to shake. Upon reflection I realize I’ve spent five or six years writing a story which will appeal to no known demographic. Time well wasted perhaps. Then again, love, longing, greed and even nostalgia are universal human feelings, common traits. Does it really matter if your copy of Black Market Clash is the original EP, the extended CD or whether you even own it?

Alias Jones is a character in The Garage Sailor. A has-been, a dusty Canadian rock legend, a one hit wonder who sat atop the world in 1970, another man out of time, much like me. He was not all that difficult to conjure because my head is filled with useless information and trivia. I’m afflicted with the dreamer’s disease. Still, it’s peculiar what you retain through the years and what memories you tug at to create a character.

When I was growing up in Montreal the city had two competing English-language newspapers, broadsheets, the morning Gazette and the afternoon Star. Their Saturday editions were thick, stuffed with extra sections, colour comics and magazine supplements - square trimmed and saddle stitched. One Saturday I read and reread a magazine feature about Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Their album Not Fragile had become a massive hit; I was playing that record constantly in the basement on a cheap little Fleetwood stereo. The story mentioned in passing that Randy Bachman’s previous band, the Guess Who, had sold more albums than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1970. Hmm.

What would my aged teen idol be doing as the 20^th century morphed into the 21^st? In 1991 my ball club, the Just Abouts, entered an annual and provincially legendary slo-pitch tournament held in Edson, Alberta. The gas station-pancake restaurant on the highway through town was selling a book which irrefutably proved that the Rolling Stones were agents of Satan. The headlining music act for the Saturday night shaker was Trooper, regrettable AM radio kings from back in the day, the 70s, and unfortunately, still working. Hmm.

My rocker needed a name. One bonus of my mother remarrying was colour television and cable - three channels from American border stations. There was a short-lived western on air around 1975 called ‘Alias Smith and Jones,’ sort of a network’s take on Newman and Redford, Butch and Sundance. Terrible television. However, Alias Jones sounded like a cool sort of stage name, not Ziggy Stardust exactly, but… Hmm.

The Garage Sailor is in part about identities: proper names, Internet chat names. Why would someone like Alias Jones come to prominence again so many decades after the height he’d hit just once? What if during his time in the stratosphere he’d recorded a song with an ex-Beatle who sometimes called himself Sir Winston O’Boogie? Glory days, lost weekends, pure gold by any other name: if only he could get the lone recording of the song back and top the charts one more time. Hmm.

The Garage Sailor has set sail. Get aboard at Megeoff.com.