There were times when I blundered and got the dreaded look from the lads. But that was a good sign. It showed I’d attempted something I’d not tried before.
– John Bonham
Fills bring the thrills, but grooves pay the bills.
– Steve Gadd
The funk isn’t in what you play. It’s in what you don’t play. It’s in the space between the notes.
– Clyde Stubblefield
LOS ANGELES – JUNE 03: Drummer John Bonham of the rock band ‘Led Zeppelin’ performs onstage at the Forum on June 3, 1973 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
This week has been a full on, intensely stressful one at my day gig. One that saw the music vibes down to a trickle. These ones always drag. I’m the kind of character who needs to be creating something to feel connected and grounded. I’ve been recently reintroduced me to the concept of radical acceptance. It requires being cool with everything as it is, especially the hard stuff. Timely, but also difficult, trying to apply it to situations aflame with conflicting personalities and an avoidable disarray regarding the planning and execution of work.
It’s now Saturday morning in the window of the local. The sun is shining in. Friends pass by and we catch up. I sat with my coffee and listened down to my new tracks in their current state. About half of the record’s been recorded. The working title is Misfit & Rhyme. It’s all sounding great. The next phase of the recording is live drums.
I have the capacity to record almost everything at home but a full drum kit. I got in touch with an old friend, Cory Blackburn, of the Blackburn Brothers. We’ve been mates since high school. We share friendship, but also musical lineage: both of our papas were players on the Yonge St. scene in the mid-60s. Cory and the brothers have been doing amazingly. After years of slugging in out on the bar scene, they released a killer record and have been playing a lot of huge North American and European festivals. It’s awesome to watch. It’s also been hard to get our schedules together! We finally made it happen. Drum sessions are booked for later this month and I’m super pumped. I’ll send Cory scratch tracks of me singing and playing the acoustic. He loads them into his system and I’ll sit behind his drums for the first time in years and let ‘er rip. The kit is a beautiful Gretsch in silver sparkle and Cory, being a drummer himself, is a whiz at getting killer sounds. I’ve played this set many times and I know sitting behind it again will feel like coming home. There are fives songs in the queue.
I’ll spend the next two weeks laying down the vox and guitar bits and getting them mixed down for the sessions. I’ll send the lot to Cory, along with tempo. We’ll talk about how we’ll approach the recording. What sound we’re going for. All the juicy stuff.
It feels great to have the next wave of the project sorted. I’ve been feeling a bit rudderless for the last few weeks. I have something to hang my hat on now. And I haven’t seen Cory for a million years. It’s going to be a musical and family reunion.
“I want to wake up in the city that never sleeps…”
– Sinatra
“Now you’re in New York/These streets will make you feel brand new/Big lights will inspire you”
– Alicia Keys/Jay Z, Empire State Of Mind
“When you first took my hand on that cold Christmas Eve/You promised me Broadway was waiting for me”
– Shane MacGowan/Kirsty MacColl, Fairytale Of New York
“When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.”
– Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life (1978)
“I’m walkin’ here!!”
– Al Pacino, Midnight Cowboy
It’s been a minute. I’ve been missing the regularity of writing for you (and for me!) while the irregularities of the summer schedule play out. One of those irregularities was a very much welcome one; Ava and I recently took a four day whirlwind trip to New York City. It was Ava’s first time on a plane and, for both of us, our first time in New York. We got back a week ago and I’m still processing. I think I will be for a long time.
Anyone who’s been to New York might well attest to its immediate effect. We took an Uber from Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey, across the bridge into New York. Total gridlock at 1pm. The traffic and our hunger after travelling couldn’t quell the excitement. We landed at our AirBnb in Harlem and dropped off our bags. Our host had left us snacks, which we made short work of, so we could get outside and start exploring. We were three blocks east of Central Park. Our first afternoon and evening was spent exploring the immediate area and finding a bodega to buy breakfast supplies at. So to sleep…
I’m writing this morning, not to give you a total play by play of the trip. I think that would be a ponderous exercise. I’m writing because I need to get the experience out of my head and onto the page. Since getting home, I’ve been met with intense flashbacks of our experiences, to say nothing of the level of havoc the amount of walking we did wreaked on my chronic pain issues. I could’ve posted a bunch more quotes to lead off today’s writing. The ones above all directly apply. I always assumed that Frank Sinatra and writer Paul Anka were talking about living the high, showbiz life when they talked about the city that never sleeps. I’ve always pictured Broadway and the eyesore that is Times Square when hearing this line. It was also true in our little neighbourhood; there was noise all night long: trucks, people, voices…constant vibration.
Grand Central StationGrand Central TracksNYPL: The lions out front are called Patience and Fortitude. Patience indeed.The turtles of Central Park.Fay Wray and King Kong are somewhere in the mist.
I’ve not travelled much. When I have, it’s never been in the tourist spirit. I prefer to take enough time to feel what life there is like. Well, what life is like from the perspective of someone curious beyond tourism, but nonetheless on vacation. I won’t pretend to know what living anywhere is like without experiencing all the usual suspects of adulting. I’m a helpless romantic, but even my romance has limitations. Life is hard. The cost of living is real. I will say that my attraction and connection to New York City were immediate.
On the morning of our second day, Ava and I took the tube south to the Brooklyn Bridge stop. Leaving the station, we were met with the bridge itself, on a misty, rainy summer morning, disappearing in a vanishing point across the Hudson River. My breath caught. Shivers. It only got deeper and sweeter from there. We wandered everywhere. One World Trade still has a gravity to it. There we stood, in a place where, all those years ago, the stupidity of mankind resulted in a staggering loss of life. I recently read a quote that said something about not finding anything typical of America in New York. This was true for me. I’ve longed held the way by which America is run, and attitudes typical of that ignorance and self-proclaimed superiority, in deep contempt. The line between the people and it’s financial/political/military rule must be drawn. Everyone we met in New York was amazing (except the security guards at the Chrysler Building, who had too much time on their hands and not enough to vent their testosterone on).
All the tube station names are done in this beautiful mosaic tile. Old New York.James Davis Smith, Died December 1769.St. Paul’s GraveyardBrooklyn Bridge in the morning mist.
Since our return, some folks have asked what the highlight was. It’s almost impossible to pick one, but if I had to, it would be the revelation we received in the graveyard of The Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. The Basilica is an old church with catacombs beneath. Ava and I went in to ask what the tour was all about. Their 11:45 tour group didn’t show. We ended up having a private, guided tour of the church by a chap called Lee, who’d grown up in the area. He has a vast knowledge of local history. Martin Scorsese grew up in the neighbourhood, went to school across the road and was an altar boy at the church. The real life events from his film, The Gangs Of New York, took place where we were standing. The wall surrounding the church was put up explicitly to keep the church form being damaged by the warring religious factions. Ava and I are fond of graveyards and cemeteries, so this stop and our walk through St. Paul’s graveyard earlier in the day were high points, with their sacred sense of history and the Divine. We saw gravestones dating back to the 1700s. I still haven’t mentioned the highlight. While in the graveyard, Lee gestured to a building adjacent to it. It was an old brick buidling with a modern, grey addition added to the roof. Lee pointed out the terrace visible from where we stood. It was David Bowie’s condo from the time he bought it in 1999, up until the time of his death in 2016. Ava and I got all wide-eyed when he told us this. I have more shivers in the retelling. I pictured Davey coming out on to the terrace of a morning, coffee in hand and looking out across the big city. I saw him leaving the building to head to the studio to cut Blackstar, his last record and brilliant epitaph. I saw him in his final days, after the well-recorded courage with which he navigated his disease. This last image is the hardest, for obvious reasons. Oof.
The wall at the Old Basilica, where the Gangs of New York held court. 285 Lafayette Street, Bowie’s digsDavid Jones’ terraceWe’re huge Ramones fans. Had to stop by Joey’s old neighbourhood.Bad Brains mural in the Bowery.
The other highlight for me happened unexpectedly, on our way to the subway to begin our journey back to Toronto. We started the day at a cafe near the AirBnb, I didn’t get the name of it. Coffee and pain au chocolat were excellent, as was our host. The scary part was paying for our stuff and needing the bathroom, only to find it occupied by some dude who was taking his time, if you know what I mean. After a few days of restaurant food my bowels were, aherm, compromised. I began to sweat, literally, but willpower trumped biological need, as I felt strongly that shitting my pants on our last day in New York City would be poor form. To be clear, not shitting my pants was not the highlight. Read on…
I was about to fork over about $175 CAD for the Uber back to Newark. There was a chap on the back patio of the cafe, with his babe sleeping in the stroller beside him. He was clearly a regular, as the owner came out to chat with him. I told them we were on our way back to T.O. and asked if they knew about flat rates with the NYC Yellow Cab Co. They didn’t, but it turned out that the young Dad, called Ajay, grew up in Scarborough. He told us how to get to the New Jersey trains down at Penn Station, which went directly to Newark Liberty. This info saved us a ton of money. It meant more legwork, but, even though the crush to get on the Jersey trains at Penn Station is intense and overwhelming, it was worth it. Reason being is that we had to walk across the top of Central Park to get the right line going south. On the walk, which happened to coincide with a car free Saturday morning in the area, not dissimilar to Pedestrian Sundays in Toronto’s Kensington Market, we came across Malcolm X Boulevard. This was unexpected. Ava was curious as to why I wanted a pic, as she and I have never discussed Malcolm’s legacy. Malcolm is a hero of mine. I read his autobiography in my twenties and it was hugely inspirational. That someone could emerge from where he started, as a criminal in the streets of Chicago, to where he ended up, is something. After his trip to Mecca, in the face of being blacklisted by the Nation Of Islam and subsequently assassinated by members of the same, he returned to America with the realization that there was hope for black and white to coexist. Mecca was the only place where he’d experienced being treated with love and equality by human beings with blue eyes and blond hair. His was a life of evolution and great courage. I feel glad in my heart that this was my final experience of New York.
The view from Central Park, looking east.Poseidon flanking the Dakota apartments. Heavy energy here, where Lennon lost his life. Mugs.Me and my travelling mate.RIP El Hajj Malik el Shabazz. Here’s to Brother Malcolm and unity between black and white.
When we landed at Billy Bishop in Toronto and got in the Uber to head home, the first thing I noticed is how clean our city is. I was chuffed to come across Fran Lebowitz’s quote. It’s really true. I’m happy that my city is not filthy, but clean is not enough. There’s something about every aspect of New York City that gives it its depth. It’s magnetic. The city is magnetic. My most excellent travelling companion and I plan to return as soon as we can. We saw so little while we were there. What little we did see left indelible marks on our hearts and spirits. I see us being there together again. I see me playing shows there. I see more of New York in our lives.
Thanks so much for reading. I realize this is a longer entry and it’s not linear. It’s representative of the way the images and feelings of the trip continue to hit me, at random, inducing a fluttering of the heart and a wistful feeling for a city so new to me, yet so familiar. New York City had always been something that was almost a fictional point of reference. Some place I saw on a map and in movies, music and culture. Now it’s in me. So many cultural dots were connected on this trip. My world is a little bit smaller for the experience. There’s so much more to say, but I’ll leave it here for now. Maybe the rest will appear in song at some point…
