SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS–Fall Nationals The Horseshoe Tavern Toronto, ON. Night 4 of 13 (November 13, 2003).
This was the 4th night of the Rheostatics 13 night Fall Nationals run at the Horseshoe. Rheostatics Live has recordings of nights 1, 3, 4, 5 and 7. It was guest vocalists night with this lineup: Reid Jamieson, Mike Bell, Andy Maize, Dennis Ellsworth, Justin Rutledge, Jen Foster, Ron Koop, Kurt Swinghammer, Donna Orchard, Serena Ryder, Matthew Crowley, Paul Linklater, Leslie Stanwyck, Ford Pier, Dylan Hudecki, Jonathan Seet, Selena Martin, Amer Diab, Jason Plumb, Jose Contreras, Silas White, Greg Smith Sounds, Paul MacLeod.
The show opens with the instrumental introduction of “Four Little Songs” which turns into a lovely version of “Song of Flight.”
The rest of the show sounds very different from other shows. Obviously because of the different singers, but the band is quite restrained. Not phoning it in, but holding back, allowing the singers to really stand out. Songs are slower, fills are quieter and the band does feel more like a backing band (without the songs suffering).
And then the guest vocalists come in. Reid Jamieson sings “PIN.” He has the same tone as Martin. It’s a nice version. As he gets off the stage he says. “I’m naming my first child Rheostatics.” Someone warns him: “think of the school grounds.”
Mike Bell (from Dunville, Ontario and the post-hardcore band Chore) says “I just did a big shot of Buckley’s so bear with me.” He sings “King of the Past” but has rather flat vocals. The pace is slower too.
Dave tells the audience that it’s all guest vocalists and they are flattered that this could happen. And then there’s Andy. Andy Maize of Skydiggers sings “We Went West,” and says, “I lent my teleprompter to Mr Chretien for his farewell address, so I apologize for all my reading.” He sings raspy and great and I think adds some gravitas to the song.
Dennis Ellsworth sings “Northern Wish.” Dave asks him, “Do you favor the Melville version of the song?” “I do.” He has some gentle singing that works well with this song. When it’s over, Dave announces, “Ladies and gentleman Ward MacLaurin Cornell [a Canadian broadcaster noted for hosting Hockey Night in Canada] because of Dennis’ jacket I guess.
Justin Rutledge sings “Feed Yourself.” Dave says it’s not the first time he has fronted the group. “The first time was 4 days after I turned 19 (that would be 1998) at the Rivoli. He has a gravelly voice that sort of works with the song although he’s a little slow, maybe. But he really gets into it.
Next up, “Here’s Jen Foster everybody.” She sings the new song “The Tarleks” and adds an interesting spin to it with hr voice and delivery. There’s some fun wild guitar at the end.
Then Dave says, “Uh oh here’s the big money.” Ron Koop of Tim Mech’s Peepshow sings “Introducing Happiness” but first he asks, “Is this Star Search? I feel under-dressed.” Dave says, “I want to know is there a name for your beard?” “Dudley?” “Gunther?” Dave says just “The Koop.” He says, “I’m a backup singer I don’t know what to do without a bass in front of me.” Dave notes air bass didn’t really take of like air guitar did. Koop says he loves this song, and while not really lead vocal quality, he does a really fun job with it.
Kurt Swinghammer is a Canadian singer-songwriter and visual artist. He and Dave have a chat about a club owner named Jimmy Scopas, it’s pretty funny. While singing “It’s Easy To Be With You,” there’s a bunch of ad libs in the middle of the song.
Donna Orchard sings a kind of operatic “Jesus Was Once A Teenager, Too” which works nicely for the high notes.
Serena Ryder “The stage hog… can’t keep you away. How’d your set go tonight? “Really fun. I really enjoyed it a lot.” Dave: “You guys like it?” “That’s what they call popular acclaim.” She does a cool trippy rendition of “Digital Beach.”
Matthew Crowley is a mumbly singer of this mumbly song, “Earth/Monstrous Hummingbirds.” It’s a hard song and this version is a little disappointing.
Paul Linklater comes up to sing “California Dreamline.” Dave shouts “Hey, Link, those dirty Toronto winters will get you every time.” “You’re the bridge the half way point.” This version is echoey and trippy and sounds very different, Linklater gets a little crazy carried away by the end.
Leslie Stanwyck from The Pursuit of Happiness and Universal Honey is gonna do a song [“Claire”] that appeared on two records…
Tim: “Is it not on the live record?”
Dave: “I don’t think so?” [It is]
Martin: “We like this one a lot.”
Dave to Leslie: “Are you familiar with the Howl Brothers version or the Rheostatics?” Rheostatics! Her version sounds great.
Ford Pier comes out and they tell him he’s got a lot of nerve going back into the archives. Ford: “Entirely my own idea.” They play “Chemical World,” a song from 1986, from “our second demo tape ever.” They do a good job with it too.
Dylan Hudecki wonders, “How can I beat that? This is so awesome. I feel privileged.” Tim describes the night as “Karaoke with a capital K.” Hudecki says this a song [“Satan is the Whistler”] for all the people who went to Whistler and wondered what went wrong. There’s lots of fun vocal nonsense at he end Martin even gets out his mechanical robotic voice.
Jonathan Seet does a sweet version of “Take Me in Your Hand,” and then Selena Martin comes out: “The word is dazzling.”
Selena says, “Pretty fuckin 70s, eh?” Dave: “Look at you in your 70s outfit. Any particular reason you chose “Dope Fiends?” She says a friend made her a mixtape and “then I heard this fuckin’ song. The rest is history.” I wonder if it’s in a odd key—no one seems to be able to hit the notes.
Amer Diab gets the beloved “Horses.” And he does a good job, but not as angry as Dave does it.
Jason Forrest Plumb was the lead singer and front man of the Waltons. Dave asks how things are in Saskatchewan. “Cold, snowy and the ‘Riders aren’t making it to the cup this year. Bad calls all day that day.” They play a slow and moody “Shaved Head.”
Jose Contreras, frontman for By Divine Right, José Contreras says, “Rheostatics changed my life.” Dave: “for the better I hope.” Jose: “For the better. They taught me and a lot of other people a great lesson to dare to be glorious.” He notes that this [“Triangles on the Wall”] is an autobiographical [he can’t get the word out] song. “Am I singing this in the first person? It’s kind of waltz in the key of D.” He gets really into it with a bunch of ad-libbed jokes and whatnot.
Silas White does a good version of “Queer.” In the end of the song Dave asks twice, Silas do you miss British Columbia?” But we never hear the answer.
Dave says he’ll pay acoustic for this one. Greg Smith the bassist Weakerthans, makes “Self Serve” sound a bit more twangy–“what went wrong with martin? Is he on some kinda drug or something?” As the song ends, they introduce Paul MacLeod also of Skydiggers (he sounds just like Martin at beginning of “Record Body Count.” The song starts chaotic and fun and it’s a great ending to the main set.
Dave says they sent out an email about a week ago but since there are a lot of luddites among us, some people didn’t respond to the request to come up here. So,”we will invite as may people as can fit on stage. Don’t be shy. Purple shirt guy be the first. Lots of room, folks.” They wonder if they can get the entire bar on stage.
The whole club sings “Legal Age Life,” with occasional singers stepping up to the mic. And Dave shouting in the last verse: “Eagleson ripped off Bobby Orr.”
[READ: December 30, 2016] Hear the Wind Sing
After reading the Madras Press Murakami Slow Reader issue. I decided it was time to read some more from the man himself.
So I decided to start with his first book–which I’d read about in the New Yorke essay. Incidentally, the New Yorker essay that talks about his writing style is expanded on in the introduction to this version of the book (which is technically called Wind/Pinball and is a collection of the first two stories).
The essay is called “The Birth of My Kitchen-Table Fiction.” While the New Yorker essay covers a lot of his life, this essay focuses on his early days–and gives more detail to some of the ideas he mentioned. He says he hated the idea of working for a company so he opened a jazz club (it cost a lot less to do this back in 1974). He shares details of the club and talks about how hard he worked.
Then he talks about the baseball game that inspired him to write. In that previous essay he mentioned the game, but in this essay we get a lot more detail. He went to the Central League season opener: the Yakult Swallows vs the Hiroshima Carp (he was a Swallows fan, despite their perennially poor record). He says he stretched out on the lawn with a beer and when he heard the crack of a bat, “for no reason and based on no grounds whatsoever, it suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.”
He bought writing paper and a fountain pen and every night before dawn he would sit and write.
The novel took a long time (even though it is short) because he didn’t know how to write a novel. Whenever he read back what he had written he found it boring. He said he had to stop trying to write something sophisticated and just put down his feelings.
And he decided to mix things up “to write the opening of my novel in English–my ability in English composition didn’t amount to much–I could only write in simple short sentences–the language had to be simple–expressed in an easy to understand way. And a rhythm began to take shape.”
He “translated” the chapter into Japanese and continued from there.
He later got a call that Hear the Wind Sing was shortlisted for the prize that he;d submitted it to. It was almost a year after than baseball game and he had kind of forgotten about it–he had sent his only copy to the competition.
He says he was out walking on another Sunday where he found a wounded bird with a metal tag on its foot. He turned it in at the police station and was struck: “I was going to win the prize.”
And he did. With this story. This book was translated by translated by Ted Goossen. An earlier version was translated by Alfred Birnbaum and is also available.
This story turns out to be the first of three stories that focus around an unnamed narrator and his friend The Rat. They are also in Pinball, 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), before the later epilogue Dance Dance Dance (1988).
Mostly they sit in a bar and talk.
The story opens “There’s no such thing as a perfect piece of writing.” And it talks about the narrator’s struggle to write anything–for eight whole years. He says that he learned to write from Derek Hartfield (who is fictional). Hartfield jumped of the Empire State Building in 1938 clutching a picture of Adolf Hitler in his right hand and an open umbrella in his left.
After all of that introduction he tells us the story begin on August 8, 1970 and ends on August 26.
The narrator met The Rat three years earlier although he’s not sure how. They were both wasted and driving in The Rat’s car, which he proceeded to crash–they both walked away unscathed. The Rat said this proved they were lucky. The Rat hates the rich (even though he comes from a rich family) and he decries them every chance he can. (He also uses the phrase, To be blunt” a lot).
The “plot” such as it is, involves a woman. The narrator woke up naked next to this naked woman. He couldn’t remember her name. She woke up three hours later and assumed that he took advantage of her. But he promises he didn’t. He says he found her drunk on the bathroom floor of J’s bar (where he and The Rat drink beer all night) and brought her home. The bartender of J’s Bar, was “a Chinese.” The narrator once commented that J’s Japanese was better than his own.
The girl (who was missing her little finger) wonders why he crashed there instead of going home and he says that a friend of his died of alcohol poisoning, so he wanted to stay with her.
He was getting pissed off at her tone since he had done a good deed. But finally she just put on a dress and left for work. But what kind of work was none of his business.
Midway through the story we hear from a DJ of The Greatest Hits Request Show. Then the narrator’s phone rings. Inexplicably he the DJ says that a young lady has asked us to dedicate a song to you…by a girl who lent him The Beach Boys record five years ago. He says he lost the record and never gave it back.
The next day he went for a walk and headed to a small record store where the girl from the other night was working. She is startled and wants to know how he found her. But he says it is coincidence, he just wanted to buy a record.
Soon after she calls him up and asks if she can see him. And yet by the end of the book she has disappeared just as she appeared in his life.
Meanwhile he reminiscences back on his older girlfriends. The first was my classmate and girlfriend in high school. We broke up a few months after graduation. The second was a 16 years old hippie girl I met in the Shinjuku subway station. She stayed in my apartment for one week and left. The third was a girl I met in the university library. She was studying French. In the spring of next year, she was found to have hung herself in a forest. At the time he was really into numbers. For about eight months he converted everything in his life to numbers. During that time he attended 358 lectures, had sex 54 times and smoked 6,921 cigarettes. When news of his girlfriend’s death reached him, he was smoking #6,922.
The Rat is troubled about some woman but he did not disclose the details to the narrator.
The Rat didn’t like to read but then he started writing his own novel. Every Christmas The Rat would send him a photocopy of his latest book–there is no sex and none of the characters dies and he always writes Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas as a dedication.
The end of the book bookends about Hartfield and how he collected all kinds of guns. His most prized possession was .38 revolver of which he said “I’ll use this baby to revolve myself someday.”
So yes, it’s a strange little book. But as Ian Sansom wrote in the Guardian: “No one reads Murakami for the plot, though… What keeps the reader engaged are the Murakamian swerves, the long shots, the non sequiturs and the odd adjacencies.”
And this book has them. If you like books about “boy-men and rather vague, disturbingly sexy women, with generous splashes and hints of the surreal,” this book is for you. And it does serve as a good introduction to Murakami’s work (which is mostly much longer than this).
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