EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Two Paintings on a Wall

Our bedroom is at the rear of the Crooked 9, a corner room. The window on Ann’s side of the bed, in the far corner beside a vanity, overlooks our backyard. My window above my night table stacked with books is directly diagonal. My view is Mosquito Alley, a semi-neglected space between our home and that of our miserable solitary neighbour whose dog is some sort of large and expensive poodle cross bred without a brain. Mosquito Alley is where I upend the wheelbarrow for the winter and stack firewood that’s too risky to burn during spring, summer and autumn months; embers float and Edmonton’s been awfully arid these past years. Mosquito Alley has no sky, it’s umbrellaed by an overhanging branch of mountain ash. The red clusters of fermented berries are especially plump now. They weren’t plucked by a cartwheeling flock of waxwings on a bender this season. There’s been nothing to see. Instead, I’ve been looking to my left, studying the pair of paintings hung stacked perpendicular to my window.

Both of these oils are older than Ann and me. They’re modern in a way because the reputation of the artists supersedes the merit of their works. One was painted by Ann’s father Alec. He dated the signature on his canvas: 1935. He was twelve. The other was painted by my mother’s father, my grandfather Charles. It’s undated and he has abbreviated his given name (my middle name) to Cha’s, bottom right. Both paintings are landscapes.

If I were to see Alec’s painting in a museum, I would pause before it. It’s a rugged, wild, Alberta scene, mainly sombre colours. The sky above and behind the Rockies is white, cumulus clouds inflating and billowing, weather’s blowing in from further west. The closest peak to the viewer is purple-blue, one slope crusted with a glacier. The entire scene is divided unequally by a river, a ribbon in varying shades of blue, darkening toward the far bank, highlighted by delicate suggestions of whitewater. The river’s source must be the distant glacier. The balsam firs in the foreground on the near bank, evergreens, are half black. Their pine cone clusters are a ripened beige, almost glowing in the late September or early October morning sun behind the artist.

Books on art, the masters, comprise more than a few volumes in the inherited portion of our library. While I completely comprehend how economic depression in a remote Canadian prairie province quickly followed by a war overseas may impact a boy’s plans for his future, I am compelled to ponder, speculate about a road not taken.

Cha’s chose to paint a winter scene in rural Quebec, perhaps even just outside Montreal’s early to mid-twentieth century city limits. Even now the island is still not entirely urbanized. A sleigh-rutted road winds through a stand of patchy birch trees and past a farmhouse toward a wooden bridge. The cloudless sky is a hard pale blue. The snow shadows the same freezing shade. Charles’s perspective is hopelessly skewed, the road widens as it recedes. Maybe it’s a trick of the light the artist was working in at the time, but a rut becomes a snowbank on an S-turn or vice versa and sort of goes uphill from there. Charles did render his firs as Alec did, heavy with the black paint.

I was born in February 1960. Charles died in March. I don’t think it was my fault; most newborns are ugly or at least peculiar looking but I wasn’t exactly Rosemary’s baby either. The painting hung in my big brother’s Montreal bedroom while I was trying to grow up. It came to me when he moved to Edmonton in 1972. I wanted it because it was his. I wanted it because it was my only connection to a grandfather I never knew – a wit, I’ve been told, a charmer, something of a character; beloved. Charles’s landscape has hung everywhere I’ve ever lived since I left home in 1980. Its ornate frame, some type of plaster composite, is disintegrating – perfectly square chips decide to fall from time to time and lay where they may.  Prior to my moving out, his work wasn’t able to compete with the crucifix over my bed, a portrait of my guardian angel, Esso hockey posters, Spider-man and Mick Jagger.

I’ve seen all the things depicted in two paintings of disparate quality. Most of them I can see from the front porch of the Crooked 9 where I spend too much time smoking cigarettes and simply gazing at my surroundings. I’ve watched the puffy skies, thunderheads gathering, weather rolling in. I’ve seen skies so hard and blue I believe I could reach up and scratch them. I’ve studied the blue spruce towers along our street, black in most light yet ripe with brown cones or yellow with pollen; our front lawn birches’ papery white bark with artists’ sketchpad charcoal studies on it amid ochre stains left by running sap; blue and purple shadows cast on ice and snow.

I’ve seen all these things myself. These things or something like them are there for you too should you care to pause for moment and not take in the view so much as absorb it. The wonder of it all is I’ve also seen these things through the eyes of others, and I can’t help but see them differently. Alec and Charles taught me to look at things twice.          

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 is a little dusty, but up to date. 

A FAN’S NOTES

Sparks Fly on E Street

Edmonton! You’ve just seen the earth-shakin’ soul-quakin’ educatin’ motorvatin’ legendary E Street Band!

The fans in our sold-out downtown hockey arena could not dispute that natural fact. While not quite all night, living proof stretched beyond three hours. Ann and I were primed; soul engines tending to baby boomer bladder management. A Bruce Springsteen concert is like “Suspicious Minds”, you can’t walk out.

E Street in Canada is like a confused comet, it comes around irregularly, infrequently. A newsworthy event. I’ve been lucky enough to see Springsteen in person at least once in every city I’ve lived in, a decade or more filling the spaces between encores. And every single time without fail, well, I’ve never seen anything like it since the time before.

Should you attempt to construct a bar graph of Springsteen’s songwriting through fifty years, you’ll find the promises in his romantic escapist sagas tightening into darker concise stories of resignation and despair; his thesaurus lost, red-shifted. There’s the guitar too, that one, the blonde Fender Esquire, the one with the finish worn off, the one he taught to talk. He’s pretty good at ripping off a solo, shredding. And Springsteen can sing, wrap his tongue around a hundred syllables at a thousand miles an hour while staying on key or howl like something out there in the night. He’s no Roy Hobbs with any of these burnished gifts, not the best there ever was. But combine them in concert and you get a real life giant like Willie Mays, arguably the most complete baseballer ever. Springsteen understands the stage is no place to loiter, look sullen and brood. It’s an entertainment platform. It’s the only entertainment platform.

And you’ve got to bring it night after night, after night, after night, after night!

The core of the E Street Band (do I even have to type their names?) is the Platonic ideal of a bar band: they can play anything. The expanded version (I counted around twenty people – my arithmetic has never been exact) is a steroidal soul revue with every member playing their assigned part, working hard to create the illusion of off-the-cuff spontaneity. And there’s always room for that, space built in. The entire travelling circus is presided over by a gleeful ringmaster prone to fits of preaching and giggling; the winking barker aware we know it’s all performance (and what a performance). But we also know this slick tout will not fleece us: there really is a one-of-a-kind attraction inside the big top tent.

Tuesday’s show was late, a year late although it kicked off on time. Our heroes age and encounter health issues, just like us. Up until curtain I was fretting a doctor’s consultation later in the week, blood work and other interesting tests. I was scared he’d tell me I ain’t that young anymore (I was right). Those fears evaporated with “Spirit in the Night” and I settled in beside Ann for the next three hours. Don’t take us back, take us there. E Street is nothing like a walk through your old neighbourhood or down the street the first insanely major love of your life lived on. Tonight, there’s no time for nostalgia or regret because you are awake and alive right here, right now. Besides, the lockdown-stymied Letter to You is the best full band album since 2002’s The Rising. That record’s theme, the intimations of mortality in the title track, “Last Man Standing” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams” coloured the night. Even the lights-on rave “Glory Days” poignantly surprised because while the lyrics don’t change, your interpretation does. It’s okay to grieve, it’s okay to look back, just don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line.

Steve! I think these people are tired! I think they wanna go home! (Steve mugs, shakes his head, No!) Steve! I think, I think maybe we’ve got another song! Just, you know, maybe, one left!

I’ve heard that one before. I hope to hear it again soon.  

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 is a little dusty, but up to date. New fiction coming in 2025 provided I stop fussing with the damn manuscript; it can be less imperfect.

A FAN’S NOTES

Down and Dirty with a Local Hero

Dirty & Down is the new record by Three O’Clock Train. Mack MacKenzie is its founder, leader and sole original member. And sometimes he’s just Mack MacKenzie. When I last saw Mack play Edmonton, he split a solo acoustic barroom bill with Mike McDonald of Jr. Gone Wild. A few months later I caught him on his home turf fronting a band in Old Montreal’s Centaur Theatre. You just don’t know; you never can tell. Both of these nights unfolded from soundcheck to encore months before my morning Globe and Mail began tracking an international story about a mysterious viral outbreak in an obscure Chinese city.

Port cities are magnets, confluences of cultures, always vibrant. When Three O’Clock Train hit Montreal’s music scene, I was waving my hands to get through the haze of an undergraduate degree at Concordia University. Its sound was like some sort of manic party line, CBGB or London calling patched through Bakersfield and Nashville. The local newspapers were on it because back then papers actually covered their city and worked to create compelling content; circulation was a competitive sport. How could this strange noise happen here? What was the source of this dynamo hum? Music critics’ enthusiasm spilled over into the page three city columns. What Three O’Clock Train was doing then, well, it’s everywhere now.

Mack MacKenzie is an accomplished songwriter. He has shared the stage with John Prine and Guy Clark, both of whom were admirers. He’s up there with a few other Canadians who have been pretty successful at their craft too. Forty years of work honing a gift.

Canada is a big, regionalized country. And relatively empty. It’s a market about the size of California. A blanket, generic Canadian music scene is an impossibility. Three O’Clock Train will always be a Montreal band, just as Jr. Gone Wild will always be qualified as Edmontonians. If there’s such a thing as a national music conversation, it’s necessarily mainstream, dominated by the universal appeal of a few familiar faces. Three O’Clock Train is an outlier, always has been. So: I’m a fan; I’m an advocate.

Here comes the full disclosure part. Mack and I are acquainted. We met for the first time maybe ten years ago. A house concert in Edmonton. I was in my mid-fifties. We were the same age. We chatted about her, Montreal. We’d endured the same Ticketron lines for Forum concerts; we’d haunted the same record stores. We’ve since kept in intermittent touch. These past few days I’ve been an email nag. Essay questions, because I excel at overthinking pretty much anything. Mack’s a patient man.

meGeoff: My favourite Joe Walsh lyric is Pow! Right between the eyes/Oh! How nature loves her little surprises. My sense is your previous record Cuatro de Los Angeles was stymied by covid-19. No time for buzz, gigs, gate or merch sales. I believe there was even a production lag for the vinyl. How did the lockdown affect you, a working musician?

Mack MacKenzie: Cuatro de Los Angeles was cursed. We lost Tony Kinman (Tony and his brother Chip were the lynchpins of a few seminal alternative bands including The Dils and Rank and File) right when we had just finished the first song with him producing (“Lucky Day”). Bob Rock (Bryan Adams, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi…) stepped in to help and we moved production from Los Angeles to Vancouver. We gathered everyone who was still kicking from the first Dils recording (“It’s Not Worth It”), which Bob produced back in the day, and carried onward. Moving production to Montreal, all songs written in Los Angeles, hence the title of the EP. Covid-19 hit the planet and left me having to cancel an eighty-date tour in support of the release. ARGH! Or, as my people say, UGH! Also, we lost Zippy Pinhead (Dils drummer) right before the big launch in Vancouver at the Rickshaw Theatre.

meG: You staged a virtual concert and dropped the single “Send Down Your Love”. I don’t imagine streaming pays the bills.

MM: Universal Audio, a well-known audio equipment and recording company, chose twelve artists from across Canada to record during the imposed isolation. The challenge for each was to compose and record a new song with equipment they would provide for one month. I recorded “Send Down Your Love” as well as producing a video for the tune. Producer Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Leonard Cohen) approached me and asked if I was interested in recording with him at Hotel2Tango and we began work on an EP – which turned into an EP and a full album!

meG: Dirty & Down is the new EP.

MM: I took the chance of being locked down as a time to rebuild. Having a tour knocked out from under a touring musician was rough,  but I was determined to see things through as far as music goes. Rod Shearer (guitars, co-producer), in the band since the early nineties, and I started working with Howard. We recruited bassist Andy McAdam (The Planet Smashers, Boids) and drummer Mike Gassellsdorfer (Boids) as our official rhythm section. My friend Marc De Mouy (YUL Records) was generous with his time and money, helping me get everyone on board. The sessions worked like this: one song per session; the song for the day would usually be chosen the morning of, on the way to the studio. Whatever I felt was going to be different from the session before. This left the band flat-footed every day and having to learn a new song, allowing for a fresh performance. The songs all sound different and they all have the same basic lineup behind them. I’m gaining in years and don’t have the time I once spent having a good time. Ha! 

meG: The vocal on the title track sounds to me like obscene phone call audio, threatening, enticing. You wear war paint in the video, a fearsome sight. I’ve not heard a song so dangerous – unsettling in a good way – for a long time. How did you come up with that one?

MM: When the lockdown started, Howard asked if I wanted to do a quick, down and dirty EP with him. It inspired the title and the song just wrote itself. “Dirty & Down” was the first song to be recorded. I showed it to the band and we learned and recorded it in an afternoon. Jonathan Cummings smoked the lead solo. I wanted the vocal to be creepy, to contrast the roaring chorus. Creepy like Frank Zappa’s vocal on “The Central Scrutinizer”. A simple hand-made megaphone did the trick. I wanted to make a video similar to the early MTV era, pre-interweb. “You Might Think” by The Cars, a crazy green screen type of thing. Playhouse lead singer Peter Cat often wears makeup for his performances and the black heart on his right cheek inspired me to play with face paint. The war paint is actually a precursor to the upcoming album Badly Bent Arrow Boy, which is another story for another time.

meG: What really hooked me on the Stones was the rest of any particular album. The songs that weren’t singles. I’ve heard you cover the Stones in concert. I’ve always figured should you ever decide to record a Stones song you’d go digging. Maybe something from side two of Exile. But you chose “Luxury”, Mick’s faux Jamaican accent and all. That’s not just out of left field, it’s from the parking lot behind the outfield wall. What prompted that? Coincidentally, It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll turned fifty this month.

MM: 1974: I was fourteen and It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll was awesome! This track stood out for me. It was the first reggae groove that the Stones recorded. Harder! Harder! It just pushes the one drop beat. The original recording sounds like it would easily fit on Exile.

meG: I can’t count the hours I spent staring at the album cover. During the lockdown I bought a jigsaw puzzle of the sleeve. Love that track. The version on El Mocambo ’77 really cooks.

MM: There’s also another bootleg from some Detroit show during that period. I may have the city wrong….

meG: Trains, locomotives are such evocative images and metaphors in music, blues, country, soul, gospel, you name it. The first song you wrote was “Train of Dreams”. There’s the name of your band of course. The other cover song on the EP is “Big Train” by Chip Kinman. You’ve worked extensively with Chip and his late brother Tony throughout your career. Why do you think you guys are so sympatico?

MM: David Hill, bass and co-founder of the Train introduced me to Rank and File. We were both bucking trends at the same time. I finally met Chip and Tony back in 2015 and we pretty much hit it off. I remember Chip invited me to a BBQ at his place in Burbank one Sunday afternoon. He cooked up a pile of burgers, sausages, chicken, and prepared a slew of salads and sides. No one showed up except for myself. I teased him about having so many friends. We had a bite and then broke out a bottle of fine whiskey and listened to some early Kanye; Chip said my songs were similar. Good times.

meG: Really? How so?

MM: Well, I vaguely remember him saying we had similar sentiments. That’s Chip. Myself, I don’t hear it.

meG: “Pyjama Girl” is country, catchy, cautionary – not that I was expecting Bryan Ferry, but the title is suggestive. When the words come, do they take you in a certain musical direction? Does the melody dictate the lyrics? Or is your creative process messier, mix ‘n match, more organic?

MM: “Pyjama Girl” was fun. The scenario was the lockdown and most people were stuck at home in their pyjamas, webcamming, usually in a small room. The chorus knocks those walls down. We threw every “extra” idea collected during our sessions and used most of them for this song. The three acoustic guitars were all done at once in two takes. Cecil Castellucci, who sang on “I’m Not Your Indian Boy” back in 1996 was the voice I heard in my head for this song. Sara Johnson (Bran Van 3000) and Chris Velan (Montreal-based artist and producer) also lend their voices. Finally found a song to play with my ebow too! Good times!

Dirty & Down and more Three O’Clock Train music is available from Apple Music and streams on Spotify. Badly Bent Arrow Boy coming soon. There’s a Three O’Clock Train YouTube channel, a Facebook page and of course Instagram. You can also dig a little deeper with a visit to www.threeoclocktrain.com.                                        

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 is a little dusty, but up to date. New fiction coming soon.

A meGEOFF EXCLUSIVE!

Inside the Tragic Death of the Great Pumpkin

“Aw, God,” Lucy van Pelt says. She stubs out her fifth Marlboro Gold. Her hardpack of 20 won’t last an hour. She is rueful, full of regret. It’s not yet noon. Lucy peers around the dim, shabby barroom, taking everything in except the visage of her ex-husband Charlie Brown. They’ve been estranged for years, but their relationship seems as fraught as the subject of the discussion: the Great Pumpkin.

Charlie sighs. “I feel responsible somehow.”

“It wasn’t just you,” Lucy says. “It was everything. When did the Halloween special come out, ’66? All its scenes were cut. Like Kevin Costner’s in The Big Chill. I counselled Pumpkin for years. I tried interventions. I tried everything. There was no talking to it.” Her plucked and bladed eyebrows arch. “I had my own problems to deal with.”

Charlie sighs again and shrugs. He’s looking everywhere else too. He says, “The whole thing, it probably wrecked our marriage.” He adds, “What do you have to do to get another drink around here?”

“Ditto, balloon head.” Lucy sneers as she fires up another lung dart.

The Great Pumpkin was found fatally blue in the toilet of a legendary Hollywood motel on this exact date three decades ago. The Los Angeles County coroner’s report confirmed an overdose of cocaine and heroin, a “speedball” in hardcore street parlance. And the Tropicana on Santa Monica Boulevard was hardcore before its demolition: home to vagrants, touring rock stars and Tom Waits. Sandy Koufax, the Baseball Hall of Fame Los Angeles Dodgers ace was its owner.

“I lived down the hall from Pumpkin at the time,” Waits recalls. “I crashed there for about six months. Good for my image. Very bad influences. It was a very jazzy place, more Charlie Parker – smack and whiskey – than Vince Guaraldi. I never saw Pumpkin. It was like the elephant in the room, like clinical depression. Peppermint Patty was always hanging around though. Some other girl too. Marcie? Maybe she had red hair. Trashed. Wasted. They were mules, groupies. Bringing stuff in. What do I know, no Polaroid memories. Me, I just fake it; watch, it’s an act, always has been. Pumpkin was the real deal. And Schroeder was always there too; I do recall that little toy boy, always up for a jam session with me. Knocking on my door, which was always open by the way.”

Linus van Pelt, alone in his luxurious Century City condominium sits guru-like, cross-legged on the floor on a tattered blanket. "The Trop was close to the animation studio. Pumpkin moved in there just to be close by. Standing by, so to speak. Poor bastard waited for a call that never came. I sensed it wouldn't end well. It was a crazy scene. The whole thing, it makes me very sad."

“I was Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man’,” Schroeder insists over the line from his permanent residence at the Betty Ford Centre in Palm Desert, a mountain range away from the Tropicana’s infamous and notorious sleaze. “I really was. But when Tom wrote ‘The Piano Has Been Drinking’ about me, I realized I had a problem. Pumpkin was into way harder stuff. It was happy to share. I remember Lucy tried to help us but to no avail. And Pumpkin told Linus to ‘fuck off and die’ straight to his face, that poor fragile kid. I remember that; I was there. Can you imagine? Pumpkin's biggest disciple, apostle, fan or whatever.”

“I was the sort of de facto leader of the Peanuts gang,” Charlie says. He sighs heavily. “So, yeah, when I found out the greatest baseball pitcher of all time owned a Hollywood motel, of course I wanted to hang out there. I mean, that’s just what you’d want to do, right? I was working on my curve and slider. The team had to get better. I had to get better. But Sandy was never there. He was like the Great Pumpkin in that way. Good grief, it was all very frustrating.”

“Like kicking a football, Charlie Brown!”

“Not my best sport,” he tells Lucy.

When Lucy laughs, she emits a lovely, wet chesty sound, at once crapulent and captivating. She clears her throat. “Pumpkin was more insecure than the bane of my life sitting across the table here,” Lucy says as she points to Charlie. “All Pumpkin needed was a cameo in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown or maybe just one panel in the newspaper.” Lucy continues, “Charlie always had creative control, so Spike, Franklin, whoever, whatever, got their moments. But not Pumpkin. It’s Charlie Brown’s fault. It’s all his fucking fault. Fucking Snoopy got all the ink. Nothing left for Pumpkin! Snoopy! Snoopy! Snoopy!”

“That’s not true!” Charlie Brown slams the table, his fist clenched. He sighs. He grimaces. “We actually had that fleabag put down before we got married. They’re hard on furniture, hardwood floors especially. They shed. You wouldn't believe the vet bills.”

Lucy places her hand over Charlie’s. She says, “It was a long time ago. Best forgotten. Wounds have healed.” Lucy smiles. "You really should treat yourself to a new t-shirt."

Charlie Brown agrees ever so gently, ever so reluctantly with Lucy van Pelt. There is a softness in his voice. “Everything was a long time ago,” he affirms. “We can’t change it, not the Great Pumpkin's fate, not anything. We were all, in our own way, casualties.” Charlie's head droops. The great bald orb weighs heavier than usual. He sighs. "I mean, good grief, those were the times. And fuck Charles M. I never wanted any of this. I don't think any of us did."                                    

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 is a little dusty, but up to date. New fiction coming in 2025.