We'll Be Here For the Rest of Our Lives (10 page)

My fascination with Andy continued long after his premature demise. In fact, when his manager, Bob Zmuda, wrote a book about Kaufman, I bought it immediately. Imagine my shock, then, when I read Zmuda’s description of Tony Clifton’s appearance with me on Letterman. It wasn’t Andy Kaufman who played Tony, said Zmuda; it was Zmuda himself who played Tony. Andy was home that night taking it easy.

How heartening to learn that Tony is indeed alive and well! If only the same could be said of Andy.

A quarter century before Andy Kaufman, I was falling in love with the improbable and paradoxical nature of show business via our black-and-white TV set. What could be more unlikely than the joint appearance of Frank and Elvis?

Sinatra’s television show was sponsored by Timex, and the guests included Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, and Nancy Sinatra. Special lyrics by Sammy Cahn. It was the start of the sixties, the Rat Pack was swingin’, and Frank was flying high.

I watched the show in wonder. In a duet with his daughter, Frank didn’t sing, “You make me feel so young;” he sang, “You make me feel so old.” In turn, Nancy replaced the line, “And even when I’m old and gray” with “And I don’t need a dowry, Dad.” Frank’s lyrics also referenced Tommy Sands, Nancy’s fiancé at the time. The whole thing made the audience feel like part of the Sinatra family.

But the segment of the show that moved me most was Frank and Elvis, the kings of warring universes, singing each other’s songs. Frank did a big-band version of “Love Me Tender”
while Elvis Elvis-ized “Witchcraft.” Frank was constantly straightening his tie; Elvis had undone his. Frank was folding his arms; Elvis swiveled his hips. Frank was uptightsville; Elvis was loose as a goose. Frank was a good sport about it, but you couldn’t help but feel that he saw the future of music and it wasn’t him.

I was caught between these two worlds. And, to some degree, so was Elvis, who cited Dean Martin as an influence. Frank was my dad’s man. My dad also loved Arthur Prysock, whom Elvis credited as another influence. I knew Prysock’s one and only rock hit, “It’s Too Late.” My father knew it too but had little use for Elvis.

Without doubt, Elvis was a towering influence on future rockers around the world. Even in our frozen corner of Canada, we felt the heat. And although Elvis’s post-army songs were certainly charming—who could resist his reading of “Follow That Dream” and the honky-tonk piano that rocked the chorus?—other artists spoke to me more directly. For example, I loved the Moody Blues. I especially loved their preorchestral singles rendered in an R&B vein: “Go Now” and “I Go Crazy.” When I played those records, my dad would say, “That’s a black group, isn’t it?”

“No, Dad, they’re English.”

“I wouldn’t have believed that anything English could be that hip,” said my father. “When it comes to jazz, the English are so square.”

“Well, they’re not square anymore, Dad. There are these four youngsters from Liverpool who call themselves the Beatles. They’re playing rock and roll and they seem to be changing the world.”

I had wanted to change my world. I was tired of playing
the same old classical pieces for my high school assemblies. On the advice of my parents and teachers, I had always trotted out the classical numbers—a little Mozart, a little Chopin, a little Liszt—and played them with as much flair as the pieces would allow. The reaction from my peers was profound boredom. No one gave a rat’s ass about Mozart, Chopin, or a little Liszt.

The fateful day came in spring when the ice had finally fallen from the hard shells surrounding our Canadian souls. That was the day I came to the auditorium prepared for what was clearly an act of revolution. And if that revolution had a slogan, it was simply this:
Fuck the classics
.

I had prepared for this moment for years. In fact, when I began duplicating records by learning all the parts by ear and banging them out on the piano with unchecked ferocity, Mom got annoyed.

“Paul,” she shouted from the kitchen, “does it have to be so loud?”

“Mom,” I retorted, “it’s rock and roll!”

To her eternal credit, she never complained again.

That holy mantra—
Mom, it’s rock and roll!
—resonated through every cell in my body as, on this day of days, I sat at the piano bench, mustered up all my courage, and launched into a take-no-prisoners version of “Pipeline,” the instrumental romp made popular by the Chantays, a group of southern California rockers. The song had the new surfin’ sound, set in a minor key that had me playing my own surf-piano version with an impassioned fever. At the end, the fever spread and my peers shouted with delight. Yes, Shaffer had delivered a knockout! Shaffer had delivered his fellow teens from the tedium of the classics!

Unbeknownst to me, sitting in the audience that day was a
certain Rick Shadrach Lazar. A year older, a decade hipper, Rick was the edgiest junior high schooler in Thunder Bay. He was of Assyrian descent, an exotic-looking kid with a dark complexion and pudgy build. He was deeply into music as a tenor saxist and later a drummer. He saw me as a kindred soul.

We were in high school before he introduced himself to me with a question.

“Wanna jam?”

Rick’s employment of the felicitous word
jam
brought to mind an earlier episode in my childhood when Dad and I were watching Benny Goodman on Ed Sullivan. In the middle of a song, Goodman pointed to himself and then started to solo.

“It’s a jam!” my father shouted excitedly. “They’re having a jam session. The leader points to a musician—in this case him-self—who is spontaneously asked to improvise. Isn’t that great, Paul?”

Yes, it was great: great to have a father with a firm understanding of a fundamental jazz principle. That principle served me well when I took Rick up on his offer.

“Cool,” said Rick. “Meet me in the music room after school.”

Rick arrived smoking a cigarette. As he unpacked his sax, picked out his reed, and adjusted the horn, he kept smoking. In fact, he smoked and played at the same time, blowing a stream of white vapor into the instrument itself. His sax stunk of cigarettes.

“Do you know ‘Take Five’?” he asked.

Fortunately, because of jazz-loving Bernie Shaffer, I knew the Dave Brubeck/Paul Desmond tour de force, a tricky number if ever there was one. Rick stated the melody and nodded for me to follow. It was my first jam and I was limited to blues
licks, à la Ramsey Lewis and his “In Crowd” rock-styled hits. Halfway through, Rick stopped, only to say, “Shaffer, you’re still wearing your parka. Aren’t you warmed up yet?” I took off my coat and got hot. The licks started cooking. It was fun and ended only when the janitor came in to say he was locking up for the night.

“Come over to my house,” said Rick when we were through. “I’ve got some magazines to show you.”

Rick had his own brand of cool. He didn’t just have a bedroom in his parents’ home; he had a self-contained basement apartment. The kid had a pad while still in high school. Against the wall, sitting under a James Brown poster, were two piles of magazines that climbed halfway to the ceiling: on the left were
Playboys;
on the right were
Down Beats
.

Rick riffled through his stash of LPs and pulled out one called
Paul Butterfield Blues Band
.

“Check out the notation on the cover,” said Rick, pointing to a sticker that read, “Best enjoyed when played at full volume.”

Rick cranked the volume and the music hit me hard. With stellar blues guitarist Michael Bloomfield crying over Butterfield’s harmonica, I found myself in a field of music that was as thrilling as anything I’d ever heard.

Every young man needs a friend like Rick to cheer up his childhood.

Not long afterward, Rick Shadrach became Funky Ricky and recruited me as the keyboardist for his band, the Fugitives. Every Friday night we’d play a school dance, and every Saturday night we’d play the local hockey arena. It was freezing in there, but, hey, I was in a
band
.

When we unloaded the gear, the first pieces of equipment out of the trunk would always be the Beatle boots. Funky Ricky
understood the importance of putting the fashion in the funk. The Beatle boots, imported from Toronto and featuring stylish Cuban stacked heels, pumped us up. The girls would have to notice.

But if the girls did notice, we certainly didn’t hear about it. In truth, the girls didn’t seem especially drawn to us at all—which led me to this sad conclusion:

Thunder Bay was the only place in the world where being in a band didn’t get you laid
.

In my beloved hometown, high school honeys did not hang around the bandstand; did not wink and flirt with band members; did not offer their young nubile bodies in appreciation of the music being played. In my beloved hometown, not only couldn’t we musicians get the girls to lie down, we couldn’t even get them to applaud. Here’s how it worked:

The girls would gather together in the center of the arena. The boys would circle them, checking them out. The bravest among the boys would approach a girl.

“Wanna dance? No? Okay.”

Shut down, the boy would shrug it off and move on.

This scene would repeat itself countless times. At evening’s end, no more than six couples would be dancing, while the others continued to circle.

Meanwhile, the band worked in vain to get things going. I had confected a girl group medley that I was certain would excite the crowd. I seamlessly went from the Chiffons’ “One Fine Day” to the Raindrops’ (actually writers Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry singing their own song) “He’s the Kind of Boy You Can’t Forget” to the Exciters’ “Tell Him” to the Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel.” At the end of this ingenious string of songs, though, the action on the floor remained minimal and the
response to the music nonexistent. Nothing but silence. Thunder Bay audiences were murder. Forget New York. If you could make it in Thunder Bay, you could make it anywhere!

Funky Ricky, a man ahead of his time, had a never-say-die attitude. He’d make the party rock if he had to invoke the great James Brown himself to do it. And, in fact, that’s just what Ricky did. He’d break into his best JB mode with a killer version of “I Got You (I Feel Good),” slipping, splitting, and sliding his way across the stage. When we did Mitch Ryder’s version of “Little Latin Loopy-Loo,” before the last chorus Ricky and I would engage in a little hipster dialogue:

Paul: “We gonna try it once again and this time …”

Ricky: “This time we gonna rock out, Paul, baby?”

Paul: “Yeah, you right, baby, this time we gonna try to get a little more feeling, yeah, yeah.”

And we’d kill—but then come off to silence.

We’d walk out into the frozen night air, schlepping our instruments to our cars. While other guys were in the backseat with their heated-up honeys, I was nestled up against my cold amp and numb portable organ.

That was rock and roll, Thunder Bay—style.

Before I left Thunder Bay, I did glean other valuable musical lessons. The Guess Who, for example, came through every winter on their way home to Winnipeg. These were the days before their original hits like “American Woman” and “These Eyes.” To Thunder Bay audiences, the Guess Who was the ultimate cover band. That was good enough for my peers and, in truth, also good enough for me. I loved the Guess Who. Their version of “Penny Lane” sounded more like the Beatles than the Beatles. (Lead singer Burton Cummings was so proud of his authentic Liverpudlian pronunciation of the word
customer
—“in
Penny Lane the barber shaves another coostomer”—he’d say the word twice.) They did a moody “Moody’s Mood for Love” that they learned from Georgie Fame. But most wondrous was their “Louie Louie” medley, a masterpiece of musical association. They began with the classic reading—the Kingsmen’s version—and moved to the Kinks before launching into the Beach Boys’ interpretation of the rock classic. The grand finale was their loving and faithful re-creation of the greatest show band in the world, Paul Revere and the Raiders. They performed the Raiders’ act, starting with “Louie Louie,” and then continuing into “Just Like Me,” “Oo Poo Pa Doo,” only to segue into a full twenty minutes of jaw-dropping fully choreographed rock-your-socks-off Raiders rock and roll.

Watching the Guess Who, I came to this conclusion: Not only was it enough to be a cover band, it was perhaps the highest calling. After all, if you could play music recorded by others, stay true to the original, and still add fire and flare, why not? The Guess Who’s shows left me entirely satisfied.

Why write?

Why not just cover?

Besides, to cover is to pay tribute to the original artists who gave your psyche a deeper shade of soul. To cover them is to love them.

The Guess Who wasn’t the only name band who made it to Thunder Bay. Our modest rock ensemble also opened for the Troggs, the red-hot English rock band. Before the Troggs, dressed to the nines in their Carnaby Street splendor, came out to entertain our local hockey arena music lovers, we Fugitives did our version of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” We sang the melody with as much hot soul as we could muster in the ice-cold arena. Reg Presley, head Trogg,
was actually listening offstage and made it a point to stop us and say, “Hey, you guys are good.”

“Why, thank you, Mr. Presley,” I replied, feeling a bit like Jimmy Olsen addressing Clark Kent.

When the Troggs hit the stage, Presley introduced their first song.

“Here’s a little ditty that was banned in Denmark.” Then they broke into “I Can’t Control Myself.”

After that Presley said, “Our next number caused a scandal in Sweden.” And with that, they played “With a Girl Like You.”

“They threw us out of England,” Presley continued, “when we performed this.” Then they hit with “Night of the Long Grass.”

The climax of the whole thing came when Presley said, “Here’s the one you’ve been waiting for. This one scandalized the world.” “This one,” of course, was “Wild Thing,” their signature scorcher.

The Thunder Bay crowd was convinced they had heard things that were strictly off limits. The Troggs devotees were pleased, but still not enough to applaud.