Music Before the Money

In 1932, during the first rough throes of The Great Depression my grandfather bought a 1928 Gibson L-5 in a pawn shop in Calgary. I don’t know how much it cost him but I do know he was playing it the day he died in May, 1970. He used it regularly at gigs with his Italian friends playing at weddings and parties and the instruments would have come out while camping and other family get-togethers as well. It must have cost him a lot to get the guitar because, at the time, even miners like him earned pretty low wages. But he was lucky to have had a job during those times and it was the only source of music in the house, sort of like an expensive stereo today. Later, in the late ’40’s, he bought an accordian and used it more.

The Gibson L-5 guitar was first produced by the Gibson Guitar Company of Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1922 by master luthier Lloyd Loar who was also an acoustic engineer. An accomplished musician as well Loar wanted an instrument that could hold its own against the louder brass instruments and other stringed ones. So, he took the f-hole tops of the violas and violins and fashioned them first for mandolin and then guitar. Later on he produced the first amplified instruments.

My grandfather’s L-5 went to me after he died. It was not in top shape because heavy picks had worn the area on the body above the strings and cracks ran from the end of the f-holes along ther body. So I decided to have it refinished.

Guitar purists (the same guys who belong to folk clubs where they gingerly take out their polished Martins that have never seen the inside of a club) chided me for it. “Now it’s devalued, Man! It’s only worth a quarter of what it would be if you had left it!” (These are also the same people who have toys in their original packages because they wouldn’t let their kids play with them.)

Yeah, but it looks great. The heavy-dark-brown sunburst and back is true to form and you can’t see where they fixed the cracks. Now it probably looks like it did when my grandfather first saw it in the pawn shop 75 years ago.

Twenty years ago last June my wife, Heather, and I went to Washington state to take the second part of Randy Revell’s “Context Trainings” course called “The Wall.” There were three parts to his training and we had taken the first course,”The Pursuit of Excellence,” two months earlier. Revell was an alumni of Mind Dynamics founded by William Penn Patrick, who was widely regarded as “the father of the human potential movement.” We were cloistered in a ski resort in the late springtime and, without going into too much detail, went to work on ourselves.

One of the biggest “a-ha’s” I received was the fact that getting angry about something is, believe it or not, “a good thing.” Our facilitator said, “As you work on yourself you begin feel like a guy who is walking across a lawn full of rakes lying with the tines facing up. Every few steps your foot triggers one and it springs up and the shaft hits you on the forehead, just like in te cartoons. Every hit of the rake is something that you should look at because it’s trying to tell you something about the thoughts you were having at the time.”

Well, I didn’t like being mad. I was a great guy. . . just ask me. I was funny and entertaining and, when I felt myself slipping, I went out of my way to be even more so. However, the exercise soon ferreted out my dark side and sometimes I found myself enraged to the point of wanting to go home. We even had forums so each individual could stand up and, if necessary, tell how the course sucked. And guess what? Half the people stood up at and said just that. Looks like they were getting smacked by rakes too.

But what we were supposed to find - among many other things - were our “unworkable positions.” These are holy icons that each of us hang onto for dear life knowing deep down that our lives will never change by continually exercising them. It’s like the old adage, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing day-after-day expecting different results.”

After I isolated a few of my greatest unworkable positions (this took days!) I was to write them on a piece of paper. Everyone else did likewise. Then, in single file we marched into the great room of the old ski lodge where a blazing fire greeted us from the huge stone fireplace. Then, one by one, each of us deposited our written foibles into the flames. The feeling of release was unbelievable but I felt it.

Things that make us angry are like fuses that pop to let us know that the load is too great. I still have my rakes and, as I was taught, I still look back on my episode to see what has to be written on a piece of paper for another hungry fire.

In 1997 my first published novel Ice Break was released, a story of eco-terrorists who hijack a Canadian icebreaker and take it out to the Grand Banks to destroy Spanish and Portuguese trawlers for their overfishing practices. I know this sounds like something Tom Clancy thought up after too many margaritas but it is based on an episode that actually happened in a bar in Halifax.

In 1993, I was a musician enjoying a dead night in an empty lounge, talking to Jonathan the bartender and wondering where all the people were. It was October and the summer rush was gone and the only action downtown were kids at the party places. Just as we were going to pack it in a group of 20-ish aged people came in and sat up at the bar beside me. They were very affable young people and I remember they ordered Guinness in the can because it had a charge of CO2 that frothed the mixture when it was opened.

When the conversation got going it turned out that they belonged to the crew of Paul Watson’s ship The Sea Shepherd, a former Canadian Coast Guard vessel painted entirely black. The ship was in for repairs before they headed out to the Grand Banks where it was said foreigners were using “nets as small as screen” and were vacuuming the oceans of the last of the cod stocks. Watson’s’ ship would use guerrilla tactics to try and persuade the ships to go home.

One young lady went on to say how they were in the South China Sea during the past year using their metal boat to ram Taiwanese junks, which were made of wood. The Taiwanese were fishing with 100-mile long drift nets. She described how the boats would shatter when hit. The bartender asked, “Was there anybody hurt?” Wherein she replied, “Oh, no, we were in a metal boat and we just felt a big bump, that’s all.” We could scarcely breathe thinking about those poor, if not greedy, fishermen. “But they wouldn’t be killing all those beautiful fish,” she added without a touch of remorse.

The next night we watched the dark shape of the “The Sea Shepherd” slide out of the harbor whereupon Jonathan remarked, “Can you imagine if those yahoos got hold of a real icebreaker?” And that’s how the book started.

In the ’60’s and ’70’s, “cutting a record” was the Holy Grail of musicians. To be able to drive down the street with your song playing on the radio was the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest. You could die after the song ended and your life was complete. There was never any thought about monetary compensation or who owned what percentage of the royalties. It was about the feeling and knowing that people were listening to something you created. Unlike the great artists and musicians of the 1800’s you did not have to be dead to be recognized.

The studio itself was similar to the inside of a “boogey van”: plush carpets on the floor, and sometimes on the walls and ceilings. The whole world was revealed to the engineer through the triple-paned picture window in front of the console and the huge speakers suspended on each side of the room.

My first studio experience was called a “quick dip” and was done at Total Sound West Studios in Vancouver. For $500 (1978 money) you could get in for the day and have 2 songs recorded. Then it was pressed onto a 45 and you got 250 of those to keep. You didn’t get to keep the 2″ tape but they gave you the master. It was not an unpleasant experience but - as I found myself doing many times later - everyone watched the clock. The producer was renting the studio and his profit depended on the time. He was getting the 2 musicians for $25 a pop.

The musicians we had were great and a harmonica player showed up and played for $10, just enough to get a few beers afterwards before his next gig. It was his harp that made the songs.

It was good experience. I knew my songs and could sing them in the first couple of tries, because that’s all we had. The guitar player doubled on bass and the drummer used the studio kit. Because the producer was a rocker the songs were mixed drum-heavy.

And, y’know, they didn’t turn out badly at all. I guess I received a total of $97 in royalties over a couple of years and several TV appearances so, all-in-all, it was a great experience. I also got more work because I was a”Recording Act.”

I later went on to do an album - also a “quick dip”- which also received some airplay from the FM stations and a few TV spots. And some country DJ in Edmonton played a cut off the album for almost a year.

Relaxing is becoming a dying art. We feed ourselves, drink beer, exercise, take showers and pop pills, all in the effort to relax. The first two can lead to dangerous addictions - if we seek comfort there - as can the last one. Some exercise junkies suffer injuries and worn parts if they constantly take it over the limit. And people who take lots of showers - well, we won’t go there!

A non-invasive exercise to instantly relax is something we do naturally but rarely build on its virtues: breathing. From India we have learned yoga exercises, meditation and a vegetarian diet and from that country we have to learn a practice that even bablies do. But in Indian Buddhist philosophy, breath is sacred and is called “Prahna.”

For those of us who want to skip philosophy get to the nuts-and-bolts here is a simple breathing exercise that works and can be done almost anywhere. It is a 7-7-7-7 breathing system - and it works:

1) Inhale for a count of 7. (This can be as long or short a count as you want but it has to be equal for all stages. This energizes the system)

2) Hold for 7 (In this process, the metabolism slows down and and the body chemistry takes over to absorb nutrients and get rid of waste.

3) Exhale for 7: (Expels impurities and waste)

4) Hold for 7 (Body rests for the next round)

Do this 6 more times. At the end of it, based on my results, you will be energized.

Now, anytime you feel stressed, take a few minutes and breathe. It beats counting to ten.