Driving Minnie's Piano (11 page)

^{As hiatuses go, this one was
ponderously long. Taylor Colby had fallen into a kind of cryogenic
suspended animation due to catastrophes in the publishing and book
selling world. Publishing seasons came and went and still Taylor
Colby remained dormant.}

^{I grew
concerned and there was a preponderance of phone calls and e-mails
over the plight of
Cold Clear
Morning
and for a while it
began to seem that dawn never would break over the harbour, that
Taylor Colby and his tale of woe and healing would be left in its
cryogenic numb slumber like Walt Disney's proverbial
head.}

^{And then one day, during a
foggy, sodden noon hour here at Lawrencetown Beach, a Purolator
truck appeared and my dog began barking as if we were being
attacked by a pack of wolves. It was the first batch of manuscript
pages with editorial corrections and suggestions - but mostly
deletions.}

^{It would be my job to say yea
or nay to the changes suggested by the elusive Mr. Carroll. Without
my glasses on, all I could achieve, at first, was a survey of the
literary landscape before me. Unlike Julia Swan (who had a light,
feminine touch with the pencil), Mr. Carroll had put a lot of wrist
and elbow into the work. Sentences and sometimes paragraphs were
crossed out in thick graphite lines. The page was like a
battlefield where mines had gone off, bombs had been dropped. Words
had been cut down where they stood. Sentences had fallen. Page
after page, I saw carnage. Indignant, I went in search of my
reading glasses.}

^{Comments in the margins said
things like, “I think we can cut this altogether, don't you?” and
“Not necessary. We get the point.”}

^{The editor admonished at one
stage, “I think the self-pitying and soul-searching goes on too
long.” Questions were put forward about baseball caps, water
temperature, species of trees and politics.}

^{At one point, I was challenged
with the comment, “A bit purple? Let's cut it.” This, over a line
about potatoes that went, “The potatoes had long, alien-like
sprouts on them as it was that time of year when a potato goes to
seed and self-destructs in its blind lunar thrust towards
reproduction.”}

^{Why would any sane man write
such a thing? I guess I had been carried away in an unguarded
moment of creative bliss. Clearly, the potato's “blind lunar
thrust” had next to nothing to do with Taylor working out his
destiny. I don't know why I thought describing potato sprouts was
so important as to expend a couple of lines giving it a cosmic
importance. What was I thinking?}

^{Now my head was beginning to
clear and I started to admit that Mr. Carroll was bloody right
ninety-four percent of the time. He was slashing and burning and
lopping off leggy potatoes for good reason. The problem was back on
my desk.}

^{I read every line, every word,
with great care and caution now. Michael had done most of the work.
I just had to agree that more wimpy lines, purple prose, whining
and pontification, all had to go. And then I took a red pen and
inked out some more.}

^{My biggest
fear was that after everything had been cut I might just end up
with a longish short story. That's the way it felt. But with each
stroke of the pen, I hoped,
Cold Clear Morning
was
improving.}

^{Reading my own novel for the
twenty-third time was not much fun. This final rewrite was more
painful than all the others and I wondered if other writers feel
this way at this point. Was I learning to suffer like the best of
them or was I just a bad writer trying to cobble together something
printable?}

^{There would be one final read
of the page proofs and then, after another hiatus, the Purolator
man would drive up, my dog would howl and a book would be delivered
into my hands. If the entire book industry did not shut down, the
novel would actually appear on the bookshelves of stores. It would
be loved, hated, or ignored.}

^{It's true that I would have to
help “promote” the book and I would pretend that it all came
together without any grief whatsoever. I wanted to hang onto that
myth and fool the public because I didn't want them to feel sorry
for me. I might even have to read from the book in public. I would
pick short passages that were not about potatoes and I would tell
long rambling stories like other writers do, rather than actually
have to read directly from the text.}

^{But for the most part, I would
not read my book again. My work was over and I prayed that it all
turned out well in the end. I was finished after all with the final
draft.}

^{I would hang
onto the belief that somewhere in Canada, someone would be enticed
by the cover of the book, by the blurb on the back cover - the one
that
should
read, “Choyce is not really a bad writer,
once you lop his first thirty pages, axe dozens of stupid sentences
and a lot of unnecessary language.” I visualized some stranger
actually buying the book, bending the spine and reading the first
line: “I saw the boat before I even saw the house.” The reader
would be transported thereafter to Nickerson Harbour and ultimately
to that cold clear morning where the journey began. And a story
would unfold.}

^{Origins of the SurfPoets}

^{A great
array of irrational factors led me back to performing music after a
lapse of nearly thirty years. Music has always brought out the best
and the worst in me. I'm a mediocre singer, I admit, but have
always assured myself that I have character in my voice if I use it
properly. The world can thank Bob Dylan for this. People like me
who can't hit the right notes figure out clever, insidious ways to
do
something
with the words until it sounds, well, at
least interesting.}

^{Nonetheless, music was in me
and it wanted some form of expression. Minnie was the one who had
taught me my first few notes on the piano. “Chop Sticks” was the
only tune in my repertoire for nearly eight weeks. And then, one
day, not long after my sixth birthday, she sat me down at her baby
grand piano. “Just hit the black notes,” she said, “in any order
you like.” I did and the results were magnificent. That's when I
realized music was not just memorization and structure but it had
limitless random possibilities. The six-year-old me would not have
expressed it this way but I felt it in my bones.}

^{There was no particular
logical path to my musical career and still there is none. It was a
costly enterprise financially and even emotionally. It involved a
lot of complicated equipment that could and would screw up. All of
the cohorts involved in my brand of music seemed to be as complex,
moody and unstable as I am. Sometimes it all turned to mush. Other
times to shit. And then, every once in a while, the band slipped
into some other universe entirely where the words and the music
created their own rules, and their own beautiful codified
enthusiasm for a celebration of life. And then we soared above our
individual frail human limitations.}

^{At the heart of the SurfPoets
was a creative cocktail of three great elemental forces of the
universe: music, poetry and surfing. While we did not emulate old
surf music from the Sixties, we did have an underpinning of surf
language, surf stories and surfer philosophy that carries the
intellectual weight of the band's “message.” And I decided early on
that our songs should mostly have just two or three chords repeated
over and over. I get easily confused by too many chord
changes.}

^{Like all bands, ours evolved.
We began in the basement of a recording studio on Gottingen Street
in Halifax, six blocks up from Halifax Harbour. Halifax is the
biggest surf town on the east coast of Canada, even though many
people in Nova Scotia will still state with inaccurate bravado that
“Nobody surfs in Nova Scotia.” Some ideas die hard and I think it's
a generational thing. What they really mean is, “Nobody surfed in
Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century.” Which was probably mostly
true - the exception being the odd Mi'kmaq canoeist who put to sea
and then caught a wave back to the beach on a warm summer
day.}

^{But people do surf in Nova
Scotia and they also create surf poetry and record it on CDs for
public consumption. This occurs even though there is a minuscule
audience for surf poetry in Canada. In truth, most Canadians would
tell you that there is no surfing in all of Canada. The problem
there is that most Canadians live hundreds of miles from the three
oceans.}

^{Of course, the SurfPoets
ignored all of these realities and went ahead and coalesced there
in the basement on Gottingen Street in late February of 1993.
Actually, there were only two surf poets coalescing: myself and
Doug Barron, aka Hal Harbour. Doug had a keyboard that sampled
beats and sounds. I had an electric guitar with a fuzz box and the
masterful skill of strumming an A minor chord over and over again.
Years later I would tell the press, “Life is like an A minor
chord.” If you know what an A minor chord sounds like on an
electric guitar, you'll know what I mean.}

^{I also had sheaves of
unpublished poetry, some of it even about surfing. Our first ever
tune was called “Traction.” It was about cars, not surfing. Now the
Beach Boys did surfing and then cars. We did cars first and then
surfing. Brian Wilson, after coming out of a couple of decades of
seclusion and mental illness, would explain to the media that the
Beach Boys actually sat around trying to determine the next popular
obsession to sing about after they milked surfing to death. Brian
would say something like, “So we had done surfing and it worked,
even though most of the country didn't have an ocean nearby. But
then we realized that everybody had a car.”}

^{And so the SurfPoets would
begin with cars - a long surreal, hyperventilated spoken word poem
about a nightmarish landscape that was automotive. It was all just
one chord with a synthesized driving beat and an amazing embroidery
of sampled sounds and voices that ranged from William Burroughs to
a chanting Gregorian choir. I played some really frenetic high
squeally notes that hurt the SurfPoets' ears if played too loudly
in the basement.}

^{Part of the lyric went like
this:}

^{Hands on the rim of all
possibility, I'm haunted home}

^{barricaded on four sides by
darkness}

^{while up above the universe,
unhinged,}

^{dazzles me like a rowdy
all-night service station}

^{with check-the-oil slingshot
eyes}

^{and how's-the-air-in-the-tire
politeness.}

^{I know this feeling, this
comfortable bucket seat of longing}

^{'cause I've been harnessed
here before, heading home,}

^{pistons lighting up underneath
the hood like nova stars}

^{burning tips off spark plugs
down}

^{inside the throat of my
ambition.}

^{So we had one song in our
canon and no where to go but up. But we were not out of the
basement yet. In my own head, I was formulating a “SurfPoet
philosophy” in hopes that we might eventually become bigger than
the Beach Boys or their arch-rival the Beatles and I'd actually
have some profound ideas to share with the world. I was formulating
surfing, poetry, music ideology and had configured love into it as
well. Unlike the Beatles who proffered, “All you need is love,” I
was offering a more complex recipe, something like, “All you need
is love, poetry, music, and surfing.”}

^{It was around that time that
local radio was getting rid of DJs who were not at all cost
effective and replacing them with walls of CD machines programmed
to play music punctuated at plentiful intervals with commercials.
DJs were being fired left, right and centre and that included a
friend of Doug's named Stan Carew, a.k.a. A.J. Stanley. Stan became
a local legend on his last shift of live radio at rock station
Q104. Just as he was about to be replaced by twenty-five CD
players, Stan gave a distinguished sermon on air about how
pissed-off he was that automation was taking over and then he left
the building, leaving the radio audience to sample ten minutes of
dead air.}

^{With loads of free time on his
hands, Stan was lured into the SurfPoet conspiracy still hatching
in the recording studio basement of the same building where a young
alternative group called Sloan had cut their first recordings.
Sloan was already huge in a Canadian alternative sort of way and we
knew that soon we'd go upstairs and cut similar
hits.}

^{Now, Doug surfed a longboard
he had brought down from Toronto, which is only a semi-surfing
town, if you count surfing on Lake Ontario. Surfer kids who come to
Nova Scotia from Ontario say they like to surf near the nuclear
power plant back home “because it's warmer there.” Nova Scotia
surfing, as you know, is very cold. And it's the cold surfing
experience that is primal to SurfPoet music. Stan Carew, however,
has never surfed. But he was a lead singer in a country band. He
also played acoustic guitar and ushered in two new innovative
concepts to the SurfPoets. The first was the idea of adding a
second chord to our songs.}