A FAN’S NOTES

A New Stones Album

Sometimes, you know, I must remind myself to remember Gordon Lightfoot’s admonishment to a lover as advice for me: “Baby, step back.”

I was gearing up to write a SAINTS PRESERVE US post eviscerating Monique LaGrange, another in a long line of Albertan hot messes, a Catholic School Board trustee in the central city of Red Deer. She, overcome by a visit from the Holy Spirit who told her to “Go for it!” posted an internet meme (because internet memes pass as intellectual discourse) equating LGBTQ clubs in schools to the Hitler Youth. Bit of a reach. My scalpel was sharp, but I wasn’t sure where to make the first of a thousand cuts.

And so, I turned to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, the Banshee of Invermectin, whose government is now actively pursuing withdrawing Alberta from the national Canada Pension Plan, key webbing in a liberal democracy’s social safety net. This “Pay less! Get more!” scheme was not even a plank in her platform when the provincial election was held just five months ago. This calculated deceit, possibly a ploy to keep her party’s lunatic fringe in line (see above), suggests the absolute apex of cynical governance: It is in her party’s best interests to create new issues rather than solving existing ones. I have the unsettling hunch that this folly will snowball in to an avalanche. There’s no stopping the momentum of bad policy, admitting a mistake doesn’t poll well.

Beyond the myopia of my provincialism is the morass of national and foreign affairs, and the quagmire of international events. I was at the liquor store the other day, needing a box of beer. En route to the walk-in cooler in the back I paused before the shelves of Irish whisky. The bottle of Writer’s Tears I bought in 2020 is down to its last few fingers. These times we live in insist I stock up. Why can’t everybody just shut up, calm down and fuck off? Please and thank you. A dram of escape to remain mindful of Lightfoot “Baby, step back” and to apply the philosophy of Tim Curry: “Ideology is too much responsibility for me/I do the ‘Rock’ myself, when I can get it!”

Well, I did just that last Friday when Hackney Diamonds hit the record shops. Saturday and Sunday too. And I did it again on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m a keen student! The new Stones album is shockingly good. My expectations were less than zero. No surprise really. Crossfire Hurricane is a fine authorized documentary of the band, released sometime between its fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries. Tellingly, it wraps with the conclusion of the 1982 European tour. Thoroughly researched or scholarly histories of the Stones, no matter how well written, tend to revert to bullet point prose following the release of Tattoo You in 1981. The message is clear: nineteen or twenty years in they were spent as a cultural force. Fashionably irrelevant. Fair enough.

The novel on my night table is The Last Chairlift, John Irving’s latest. It’s a hefty hardcover, something of a strain on my arthritic wrists. It’s a work in the tradition of Dickens, a writer Irving greatly admires, filled with social commentary. The story ticks every box of the Irving oeuvre. Every device, trick, theme or trope Irving has employed since Setting Free the Bears was published in 1968 appears in this novel which can make paragraphs of it read like excerpts from an anthology of his selected writings. But it’s all new material and very good at that, and in the blink of my bedside lamp, I find myself some four hundred pages in. Hooked.

Should K-Tel have been the record label issuing Hackney Diamonds, it would’ve been called The Sounds of the 70s. You can picture the type font. I’m hearing fragments from Sticky Fingers to Some Girls and everything in between. I swear I’ve even picked up on the boogie-woogie piano riff of “Short and Curlies” somewhere within its grooves. But it’s all new Stones and very Stonesy at that. A shard of the glinting attraction of Hackney Diamonds is its traditional vinyl length, about twenty minutes of music per side. This was how things used to be done when song sequencing mattered. When this old band decides play to its strengths in whatever configuration, a fan realizes Mick and Keith et al are pretty good at what they do.

When the Stones were inducted in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Jagger quoted French artiste Jean Cocteau from the podium: “First you shock them and then they put you in a museum.” That venerable, institutional slide commenced in 1983 with Undercover. I will always argue the merit of that album, underrated, overlooked and left to languish without a supporting tour. Writing as a hopelessly corrupted lapsed Catholic, I can tell you I’ve learned more about the nature of faith as a completist, sad sack Stones fan than I ever did reading Soren Kierkegaard. I always took the leap with their subsequent sporadic, scattershot releases. Even during the worst of times there were always a few gems on a Stones album, they just took a little more time to dig. The semi-comic nadir reached its acme with the release of Honk in 2019. This particular compilation included “hits” previously available only on two previous hit compilations, Forty Licks and Grrr. In my defense, the Honk bonus disc featured a random assortment of live tracks. And further, just for the record, I don’t consider myself one of those unhealthily obsessed and creepy Stones fans; I can talk about other things.

Hackney Diamonds fades away with divine inspiration. The sparse acoustic cover of the Muddy Waters classic “Rolling Stone Blues” (sleeve spelling, too many other variants to list) is at once celebratory and elegiac. Back in 2016 I assumed Blue and Lonesome was goodbye. A fine album of covers made by two old mates who’d grown up together in a suburb of London seemed to close the circle. It could’ve been waxed and released in 1963 when Jagger-Richards was still an aspirational songwriting credit. The well had run dry and there was nothing left to say; I almost heard them sigh. Blue and Lonesome wasn’t exactly a sweeping exit but it sure sounded like a fine denouement. I was wrong.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site www.megeoff.com has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer. 

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Ew! Ick! THAT Smell

Olfactory time travel. I know I can never fast-forward just as surely as I can never know what will take me back.

There was a time in Canada’s major cities when “downtown” really was as magical as Petula Clark’s song. Perhaps only because I was just a boy back then. Neon signs, cinemas, nightclubs, musical traffic and swanky department stores - Eaton’s was one of the latter in Montreal. My first properly documented paying job, requiring a social insurance number and everything, was toiling in the kitchen of Eaton’s Tea Room, a gorgeous and narrow art deco space beneath a soaring curved ceiling up on the ninth floor of the downtown flagship store. (The only comparable room I’ve ever seen since is the bar of the Oxford Hotel in Denver, CO.) It was Montreal’s Olympic summer, 1976. I was 16; I was paid $3.55 an hour, significant cents above minimum wage.

Your grandmother enjoyed high tea there twice a month with the members of her bridge club. Your mother took your sister there on a special occasion for a special treat. The waiters and busboys wore black pants, white shirts, red vests, black bowties and white boater hats with red and white striped bands. I wore a khaki uniform and a disposable white paper hat. I stacked dishes, wheeling steel carts of searingly hot clean crockery into the main kitchen where the chefs worked plating meals. I sorted dirty dishes and cutlery into trays to be run through the dishwasher. I scrubbed French onion soup bowls clean by hand. Mostly I busied myself decrypting Mick Jagger’s enunciation: Was it “Marching, charging feet, boy” or “Marching, charging people (pee-pull)?” “Tumbling Dice” became something of a passion project. The ladies I worked beside on the line, as attractively adorned as I was but with hairnets, fetching Eaton’s couture, yelled at me in machine gun joual for working too fast. A non-union shop with union sentiments, prolong drudgery, stretch it out.

What looks large from a distance…In my memory the dishwasher was a massive silver dynamo, ten yards long. Compared to the relatively new Bosch in the kitchen of the Crooked 9, I’m talking IBM mainframe to an Apple iPad. Walter was one of its two operators. He seemed ancient to me and his first and only language might have been Polish. The other guy was Danny, a big guy, a couple of years older than me from a less affluent and much tougher neighbourhood than the one I’d grown up in. He was perfectly bilingual and so I’ve no idea what language he spoke at home. One of the waiters, a thin grey man, skin and hair, displayed an unnatural interest in my bare flesh. He liked watching me change into my uniform. He was overly curious about the growth pattern of my pubic hair. Danny had a quiet chat with him at high volume. (Should I ever experience the misfortune of being sentenced to hard time, I shall require an advocate and bodyguard like Danny. I hope life shook down favourably for him.) Neither Walter nor Danny worked Saturdays and so that’s when I got to run the great machine. It was a prime gig, almost fun, no sorting or stacking dishes, no scrubbing pots. The drawback was closing time for the Tea Room and the store, I had to clean the goddamn thing.

The kitchen in your home must be configured like Ann’s and mine. There are two main work areas. There’s the stovetop and the oven, and probably a smaller microwave-convection unit. Then there’s my turf, the sink with the dishwasher hard by, and the bins in the cupboard under the sink, garbage and compost. All very ergonomic. Ann and I usually host family dinners Sunday evenings, three generations around the table. You can eat off the floor here Monday mornings but not in a good way. A few weeks ago, we served a larger than usual crew, visiting relatives, invited friends. Chicken and salads and a delightful feta cheese and spinach dish – more brownie cake than spanakopita – and I can’t remember what else. The menu took a lot of planning and work. And clean up. Our party days are over, adults dislike staying up too late on a school night and, anyway, the toddlers must be put to bed. Guests began to drift away around the time when I start thinking about maybe eating my own supper. There’s a Crooked 9 family compact: Ann cooks and I clean.

“I got this.”

The kitchen garbage bin was stuffed with juicy chicken unrecyclable Stryofoam trays. I scraped the dirty plates into the green food scraps bin. I rinsed the dishes and loaded the dishwasher. I filled it, so I ran it. I washed the indelicate IKEA wine glasses by hand. I work to rule and so I took a collective bargaining agreed break on the front porch with a cigarette and a beer before shaking out the dining room table’s cloth and power washing the highchair and carrying both down to the basement.

By this time our dishwasher, a miraculous pandemic purchase because it was not only on sale but in stock, had just completed its cycle. It’s an incredibly efficient machine. Works fast at a high temperature. When I opened the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink, the smell of overheated, almost steamed, garbage and food scraps overwhelmed. That awful smell, not like somebody else’s vomit or shit, or rotten potatoes, but near enough, tripped my gag reflex down memory lane. Rancid organic waste.

Eaton’s industrial dishwasher incorporated a system of traps to catch debris as the water drained. They were steel baskets that could’ve done double duty in a deep fryer. Maybe they did. They were almost but not quite too hot to handle; my hands had toughened up over the course of the summer. What plopped out of them was revolting, the entire Tea Room menu compacted into perfectly formed ziggurats. These stinking, steaming clumps were generally a tinned pea or seasick green. They went straight into the garbage bins which already stank.

The only waste separation I ever saw in the kitchen of Eaton’s Tea Room had to do with untouched bread rolls. If the busboys weren’t “in the juice” they’d take a couple of extra moments to compete, lobbing elegant arcs of white or whole wheat in to the garbage from five, ten feet away, underhand and overhand. Swish! One less task for me. Laughter and banter. Well, didn’t the manager walk in on one game, an impromptu inspection. Maybe her blue hair was curled, waved and sprayed a little too tightly that day. She lost that prim, formal composure that was supposed to be maintained and constrained by her cream hued dress decorated with a brooch, a flower or an insect, pinned above one spinster breast. I didn’t know where to look while she screamed at the busboys to fish the perfectly good buns from the bins for replating. She was a close friend of my aunt’s, a fellow Anglican church lady, glasses of Heinz tomato juice and a ring of Jell-O shrimp salad for a family dinner, praise Saint Peter for Miracle Whip and Velveeta, which was how I got the job. I really didn’t know where to look, up, down, left, right, behind? To this day, I will not eat complimentary rolls in a restaurant, but I will puncture their crusts with my thumb.                             

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site www.megeoff.com has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer. 

THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT

Take a Load Off Kevin

The Muster Point Project is the musical alter ego of my friend Kevin Franco. The multi-instrumentalist writes songs and sings them. His latest release, now available for purchase in its entirety from Apple (not that Corps), is an EP called 5 KG: five new songs with a creative twist, lyrics written by me. 5 KG: Kevin, Geoff – get it? And you should get it.

Together through “I Got This,” “Grub Street,” “I Love that Song,” “I Did What I Did” and “The Little Things” we tell stories. Online music press (is there any other kind anymore?) notices from sites around the globe have been positive, almost enthusiastic. It’s gratifying to be described as an “acclaimed” novelist. Please. I’m also Kevin’s front man according to some, his lead singer. Apparently, I’m still supple enough to perform all the bathroom mirror Jagger moves I perfected in high school. Now that is gratification.

I’ve been working on the first draft of a sequel to my novella Of Course You Did for these past 17 months. I took a welcome six weeks off from my manuscript last spring (I was stuck and contemplating setting it aside) to write a dozen pages of lyrics for Kevin; all on spec following a casual electronic conversation: some were dreadful, some didn’t suit him, some obviously inspired him. My work on 5 KG was a distraction for me and its potential cost to Kevin was modest, a percentage of our publishing agreement.

I’m one of those left-handed scribblers who drags his hand over the medium point ink. Most lefties avoid that by using an awkward, palsied technique, curling their wrists over the last line, trying to keep ahead of their smeary selves. Once I’d finished my job for Kevin, I just washed my hands – the Governor of Judea would’ve loved the pandemic. Over the course of the summer, I began to appreciate the scope of this particular Muster Point Project. Kevin is something of a force and so the velocity didn’t surprise me, but there were so many elements flying around at once it was a perfect ponder why they didn’t collide.

The opportunity cost of creativity is time spent on more practical endeavours or elegantly wasted. The digital revolution has reduced expenses for independent artists, but still. Kevin needed time to compose music and lay down demos. Kevin needed to hire a studio, a producer and guest musicians. While he conceives and directs TMPP videos, there are post-production costs. Marketing and promotion take time and money. Minor concerns are constant, such as ensuring his band’s thumbnail streaming identity, its visual consistency, across multiple platforms and past TMPP releases.

Kevin’s music lends itself to more ears than my prose does to eyes. He sends me spreadsheets from time to time, screen captures. His audience numbers, modest in a disrupted industry, are of a quantity I’m too much a of a realist to even fantasize about for my own stuff. But all those streams, those penny fractions don’t add up to much more than one red cent. Indie artists, those not groomed as cash cows by Svengalis or corporations, stake their claims in culture knowing the odds are against them, the game is fixed. Kevin doesn’t make music for money. Kevin makes music because he must. The key to TMPP sound is that it’s true to its creator, it’s not on trend, it’s not piggybacking on hashtags, it’s real. His only calculating is composition. If you’ve added a few of his songs to your playlists or watched the TMPP YouTube videos a couple of times – “Grub Street” set to Depression-era, colourized footage of My Man Godfrey is genius – you may wish to buy the 5 KG EP complete as an iTunes download. Consider that. Kevin’s just looking to break even so he can afford to make more music. There’s a link to purchase at my other site and all that pertinent information is immediately, directly below this sentence.                                 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site www.megeoff.com has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer. 

EAT ME

The Commodore Café

The Commodore Café has existed as a family-run business on Jasper Avenue since 1942. It’s beside Audreys Books and near the old CKUA studios. It’s something of an institution by virtue of its age. And it’s become something of a hipster destination too, perhaps because it’s evocative of a different era, a time when every main street in every prairie town featured a working man’s café specializing in CHINESE and WESTERN FOOD: fried egg sandwiches or chicken fried rice and egg rolls.

The Commodore is one of those places Ann and I have been meaning to get to. It’s closed on Mondays and otherwise shut after the lunch trade has dwindled. Its hours rarely coincide with our visits to Audreys. We finally got to the Commodore last Thursday with half an hour to spare. It occupies a narrow space, one surprisingly as long as my memory.

We selected a table near the entrance, against the wall with a view of the lunch counter and the working space behind it. Gum, breath mints and antacid pills were displayed on glass shelves in an enclosed case supporting the cash register. The wall opposite us green, olive drab. There were two empty wall-mounted display refrigerators, a line of Campbell’s soup tins atop one of them, and between them an erasable board with the day’s specials. The waitress had immediate access to a four-slice toaster, a milkshake mixer, a Bunn coffee machine and cans of chilled soft drinks. The lunch counter was split in two, a through passage to the tables. The top was brown Formica (possibly Arborite, a competing Canadian layered, laminated and wipeable product) with a darker wood grain pattern. The shiny silver stools were affixed to the floor. The colour of the seat coverings was designer plastic Band-Aid. Perhaps they exuded a rosier hue in a different age; I couldn’t remember.

I said to Ann, “I’ve been here before.”

“Really? When?”

When I moved to Edmonton in 1990, I found an apartment on 113 Street, steps, or the length of one strip mall and its parking lot, away from Jasper. I lived across the street from the Moto-rant, fine dining, and the Gas Pump, fine drinking. Still, I got around a little bit, I would’ve blown past the Commodore hundreds of times because dingy and sketchy didn’t constitute curb appeal.

“Nineteen seventy-five,” I said.

Or maybe 1974. Those were the summers when my divorced parents flew me west from Montreal at my big brother’s behest. Bob was nine years’ my senior. I know now that his intent was to provide me the sort of parental guidance my father, now living in Ottawa, could not; no one ever asked me if I’d prefer to live with my father or my mother. I landed my first real summer job in Montreal in 1976. After that my trips to Edmonton became shorter and less frequent (this pattern repeated itself with Ottawa weekend bus rides to visit my father). Bob died in 2012. It still hurts my heart knowing I’m now older than Bob ever was; we had a friendship like no other I’ve ever known, combustible, comedic and true. Blood, and mine without cancer markers. Christ.

Those first couple of summers Bob lived in a high-rise situated about halfway between the North Saskatchewan River flats and downtown up on the ridge. He went to work every day but tried to ensure I wasn’t entirely an instrument of the Devil. I attended a baseball camp at the creaky wooden ballpark (the current retro brick field on the same site wasn’t even a dream yet) beside the Rossdale Power Station down by the river. The camp was run by a couple of Edmonton Tigers, Class D players whose names I still can recall (they never made the Show) - American boys who roomed across the street from Bob’s one-bedroom where I bunked in the living room and who seemed much older and more worldly than me although, in retrospect, our age gap was less than the one separating me from my brother. Sometimes I’d see the Tigers instructors lounging in the sun outside their less palatial digs sipping A&W soda from orange and brown quart cartons. Even though they’d been teaching me fundamentals that morning, base running, cutoff throws, I never worked up the nerve to cross the street and say hello. And I often rode shotgun in a delivery truck driven by a teammate of Bob’s (hockey or softball, possibly flag football), delivering wholesale fruits and vegetables to places like the Commodore Café. Of course, I was frequently left to my own devices.

I walked uphill to downtown, passing the Ambassador Inn on my way to the main drag, Jasper Avenue. I generally turned right at the corner, following the descending street numbers. I had a route (this pattern repeated itself with Montreal’s downtown record stores). My first stop was Mike’s News to browse or buy music or sports magazines. The porn section was certainly eye opening. And I’d never seen so many newspapers from so many other places all in one place before. Beyond Mike’s was a bookshop whose name escapes me. I remember buying a novel there called Cross of Iron by Willi Heinrich. The film by Sam Peckinpah starring James Coburn and Maximilian Schell would make its cinematic debut in 1977. Heinrich’s prose would eventually direct me to H.H. Hirst, author of the Gunner Asch stories and Night of the Generals. There was a restaurant called the Carousel where I enjoyed the hamburgers. Its red and yellow sign suggested a graphic carnival ride. One of its neighbours was The Silk Hat whose name indicated every item on its menu was sure to be fifty cents too rich for my budget. Classy joint, ritzy. My U-turn point was Edmonton Centre, a newish downtown mall two blocks off Jasper, anchored by a Woodward’s, a now defunct department store chain from British Columbia that never expanded eastward beyond Alberta. Very exotic. Like all department stores in those days Woodward’s had a record department and that’s where I bought my first “current” Bob Dylan album, the Before the Flood double live set featuring The Band, his lone Asylum Records release.

I infrequently turned left on Jasper after leaving Bob’s apartment. That direction on the strip struck me as much less interesting to explore. Part of the reason for that impression was the railway bridge traversing the avenue’s dip at 109 Street. The elevated black steel band (not too long gone, by the way) barred the way, visually and psychologically. An A&W Drive-in (not a drive-thru) was just on the other side. I knew that’s where the ballplayers went, but it seemed a block too far – I love this, bear with me: Around the time of my Jasper wanderings to the left, Ann’s big brother Jim, closer to Bob’s age than mine, used to hang out at that A&W weekend nights, not for the burgers and root beer so much as skidding out of its pea gravel parking lot. Whoo!

There was never much to eat in Bob’s apartment. I don’t remember ever going grocery shopping although we must’ve visited Woodward’s Food Floor on occasion. One day, after having turned left on Jasper and being hungry I stopped in a café that promised CHINESE and WESTERN FOOD. I took a silver seat, maybe its covering was red, a stool away from the gap in the brown lunch counter marbled with fake wood grain. I was facing a dull green wall. I ordered a hot dog. Five minutes later I was presented with a perfectly grilled wiener quartered on a toasted hamburger bun. No ketchup, thank God, the lone condiment was sweet relish. I was too taken aback and too young to complain about the utter wrongness of my hot dog, the likes of which I’d never seen anywhere, not back home in Montreal the day before Mom’s shopping day, not even at Bob’s where we’d recently spooned egg salad out of a cereal bowl because there was no bread. I ate it. Tasted fine.

Ann ordered the traditional special, chicken fried rice, sweet and sour chicken balls and, a modern twist, spring rolls. Her meal came with tomato rice soup as a starter and butterscotch pudding for dessert. I contemplated the hot dog, but finally opted for a Denver on toasted rye with a side of house-made potato salad. It was good, all of it. And we ate the old-fashioned way in the Commodore Café, without pretence.                               

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. 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.