THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT

A Song on the Radio

Early one weekday in August, 2003 I was strolling along Calgary’s Stephen Avenue; my morning mass transit respite, a welcome one block stroll between a crowded bus and a crowded train car. As I passed the book shop I saw my name in the window, a poster promoting my first-ever book launch a couple of evenings hence. I took a seat on a public bench beside a trash can and lit a cigarette. My work at the advertising agency could wait for another six or seven minutes; I was usually an hour early to the shop anyway.

I remembered the typed letter I’d received from Quarry Magazine sometime during the winter of 1983. It would publish my short story “The Rites of Spring,” baseball and death, in the spring 1984 prose issue. The quarterly would pay me $5 per page plus five complimentary copies. And twenty years later, here was the publication of my first novel. Eventually I get around to things.

That was some kind of rush that particular morning. I knew my publisher was small time and I knew that was to be my fate too (that window poster hangs in the Crooked 9's furnace room so I'm able to recall that glorious evening each time I change the filter), but here was a middle finger to all those literary agents who’d rejected my manuscript telling me I was very good for a nobody writer, a pretend scribbler because I didn’t live in Toronto. And hadn’t my career path zagged from zigging: army man, hockey player, archeologist, historian, rock ‘n’ roll star, dishwasher, busboy, grocery clerk and freelance writer all the way to God, there’s got to be a better way. Who the fuck was I?

Didn’t I experience that same rush just this last Tuesday morning?

“I Got This” is the latest single by the Muster Point Project. The Muster Point Project is the musical alter ego of my friend Kevin Franco whom I’ve known for more than thirty years. We like the same bands although Kevin’s much more tuned in to contemporary music than I am.

I wrote the song’s lyrics. I tried to write a Chuck Berry song, a story with an O. Henry twist. Something like “No Particular Place to Go” in which the horny and frustrated narrator is parked on lovers’ lane with his girlfriend on the eve of seduction yet stymied “by a safety belt that wouldn’t budge.” Seatbelts were not standard features of American cars back in the fifties and so there’s a whole knotty bunch of allusion, euphemism and metaphor buried in those seemingly slight, comic lyrics. Chuck Berry’s style is not easy to emulate (and I’ve been told my fiction tends to lose the plot because there isn’t one). But I did manage to write a chorus whose meaning can be taken in two ways, so as Kevin sings the verses a boast becomes a lament.

Kevin composed and arranged infectiously up-tempo music, one of the hooks is the horns. What really makes “I Got This” touch all the bases as a single for me is his vocal delivery. Above and beyond the recording and production there’s a genuine sense that the singer is getting a kick out of telling his story. Kevin’s having fun at work. I picture comedian Billy Connolly giggling while still a digressive minute away from his punchline. The song’s sole spoken word, the doctor’s “Yep” diagnosis is delivered with deadpan schadenfreude.

Full disclosure: I may, maybe, you know, have a vested interest, but I believe “I Got This” has chartbuster written all over it.

Kevin told me he was pleased with his streaming numbers and YouTube viewership of the official animated lyric video. I thought it would be cool for Kevin (and me) to get the Muster Point Project on traditional radio. “I Got This” was worthy.  The only realistic avenue for that was CKUA, Alberta’s public station. As a former ad man I know my self-promotion skills are laughably inept; but promoting a “third” party like MPP didn’t strike me as quite so crass (and rejection would be more impersonal).

One of CKUA’s charms is the variety of its programming. So, much like an ad campaign or manuscript submission, I selected likely targets. I prepared a couple of emails with attached links and files. The logical CKUA host didn’t respond; fuck him. The weekday mid-morning man did, saying he’d check out “I Got This.” A week of radio silence passed. I confess to mounting feelings of agitation and annoyance and suggested to Ann we turn the Crooked 9’s dial over to CBC. I followed up: I reiterated “I Got This” was this summer’s catchiest indie single. Nothing. I fumed.

Tuesday morning I was running late. I was naked in our bathroom running the shower and restocking the toilet paper, multitasking. The door was closed. Ann started shouting from the kitchen. Our house must've been on fire; goddamn cigarettes.

“He just mentioned your name! Kevin’s on the radio! They’re playing your song!”

And I ran down the hall and I stood there grinning in the kitchen in all my glory. I didn’t care that the blinds were up. Thanks to a whole lot of help from my friend Kevin, my words were reaching more people all at once than ever before, more than my combined book sales. Way more. Sure, I once had a weekly readership of over two million when I was writing copy for Safeway grocery flyers, but those were different times.

The cleverly animated official lyric video for MPP’s “I Got This” is up on YouTube. This summer’s smash hit single is also available from all the usual streaming suspects. And, man, it sounds incredible transmitted over airwaves.     

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of embarrassing and awkwardly inept self-promotion since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from assorted retailers.