THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT

“Grub Street”

There is a three-block stretch of Calgary’s Centre Street, just up the slight rise from the Chinook C-Train station, on which every hot tub dealer in town has an outlet. You are familiar with artists’ colonies and other hives of like-minded businesses or individuals. Some sort of congressional black hole gravitational force always seems to be at play. Some two hundred and fifty years ago London’s hacks, freelance writers who for a fee provided content for what would become and what we now perceive as mass media, tended to gather in the taverns along a long since disappeared street called Grub Street.

At the close of the nineteenth century George Gissing published a novel called New Grub Street, a story about two competing writers, one of whom has no scruples. Fifty years later Joyce Carey published The Horse’s Mouth, a novel about a talented, wildly erratic and eccentric painter named Gulley Jimson (the movie stars Alec Guinness). The books’ common theme is integrity as self-sabotage, or like the 10cc single, “Art for Art’s Sake.”

I read both books in my first semester at university. A Brit Lit course explored the gap between the Edwardian era and the “Angry Young Man” movement. My professor’s name was Tobias. She sported a purple ‘do with a Bride of Frankenstein nicotine streak. She was tenured long past her best before date, but during those lectures when she could summon the energy to inflate her withered passion, man, she knew her stuff.

Around this time, I used to spend a lot of time with a newish friend of mine named Glen. I’d dated his sister, Susan, and he and I remained in touch after she and I split up. Our apartments were in the same Montreal neighbourhood; he was closer to Guy Street and I was a little farther west, closer to the Montreal Forum, ambling distance. He could’ve taught The Horse’s Mouth; and you’ve got to read City of Night – that line from “L.A. Woman” – and Hubert Selby and Tom McGuane and this, and that. Oh! And this too! Glen made his way out west from Montreal about ten years before I did, so, maybe forty years ago. We lost touch.

Susan and I had bonded over music; we were both in our college’s creative arts program. She hosted a show on the campus radio station; I wrote album reviews for the newspaper. About fifteen years ago when I was still working for a Calgary ad agency, sometimes as a hack, Susan came to town for a media conference. We caught up over happy hour drinks. I asked after Glen and asked Susan to please pass on my regards.

Social media did not exist when George Harrison released “Devil’s Radio” in 1987. My footprint in the global village’s town square is minimal, I’ve had a Facebook account for a decade. The platform doesn’t even cross my mind should I be seeking hard news or an informed opinion while wasting time online (and I prefer to pull the appropriate reference book from the shelf rather than use Google). My feed is music, books, baseball and a sprinkling of my hometown and its hockey team. I’ve also been able to reconnect with a number of people I cared about all those years ago. So, Glen and I, actual friends, a little long-lost, are also twenty-first century electric friends.

Glen sent me a note a few months back not knowing I was busy working on song lyrics for Kevin Franco’s Muster Point Project, remarking on a picture of me I’d posted on my Facebook wall. He said I looked like Gulley Jimson. I thought, “Oh, great, grey haired and grizzled.” I laughed, and in that moment, I was inspired to frame the lyrics for “Grub Street.”

I remembered all those books Glen and I used to talk about. I remembered the elegiac chain-smoking wreck that was Professor Tobias, sadly beautiful in a Replacements sort of way. And, dear me, Don Henley’s “The Heart of the Matter” (Graham Greene, 1948; The Horse’s Mouth was published in 1946). It took me two cigarettes on the front porch to conclude that “Grub Street” would make a great song chorus, lyric hook or title. The link between George Gissing and Gulley Jimson wasn’t too tenuous, an author and another author’s character, although separated by contemporary literary convention and two world wars, were addressing the same dilemma, essentially talking the same language. The proper nouns together could combine to create a memorable line. And, God help me, I know Kevin sometimes sweats singing so many sequential “S” sounds for some reason.                 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.