Bob Wiseman

Dave Davies isn't waving a little progressive-rock flag saying, "Look everybody, I'm in five." The basic pulse can be heard as five beats to the bar, often felt less as 1-2-3-4-5 than as an uneven grouping such as 3+2. That's crucial. Five can easily sound angular, Mission: Impossible territory, but in “Strangers” it feels tender and almost conversational. The missing symmetry gives the song a slight forward lean. You keep expecting the floor to arrive where four-beat pop music has trained you to expect it, and it arrives somewhere else. That's especially unexpected in the context of The Kinks. It's a fragile, direct song on Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One. The emotional simplicity disguises the structural peculiarity. I think that's where the brilliance lies. If you didn't count it, you might never think, five! You'd simply experience a spaciousness. The meter makes the song feel a little unsettled without the listener feeling unsettled by the meter. It's a wonderful songwriting lesson: odd meter doesn't sound odd. The cleverest compositional decisions are often like that: you notice their effect years before you notice their existence.

The orphalon was discovered by Freddie Cheesecake. He found it in the basement of a house outside Thunder Bay wrapped in a wool blanket beside three jars of peaches. It was the size of a cello but shaped like something remembering a cello incorrectly. The body was wooden, but nobody could identify the wood. Nine strings on the front, two on the back and one running through the inside where it could neither be seen nor, tuned. No tuning pegs. There were seven small brass wheels labelled with symbols resembling weather. The orphalon was played sitting down, except for one passage in the only known composition for orphalon, during which the instructions said:

STAND, BUT DO NOT RISE.

The right hand used a bow made from horsehair and copper wire. The left hand never touched the strings. It hovered several inches above them. Moving one's fingers altered the pitch. Closing your fist produced vibrato. Pointing at the ceiling lowered everything by a semitone. The orphalon had four sound holes. Three faced the listener. The fourth faced the musician. This was unfortunate because certain notes sounded completely different to the player than to everyone else.

The lowest note resembled a bass clarinet being heard through a frozen lake. The highest sounded like a wineglass remembering an argument. The middle register was the strangest. People three rooms away could hear it clearly while people standing beside the instrument sometimes heard nothing. Recording engineers hated it. Microphones captured sounds the audience hadn't heard and ignored sounds everyone agreed had occurred. One engineer spent six hours positioning microphones before announcing:

"This thing is lying."

Leonard played second trombone in the orchestra for thirty-seven years. He liked second because it allowed him to participate in enormous things without necessarily being blamed for them. The first trombone got the heroic entrances. Leonard kept the roof from falling on Mahler. Then he developed asthma. At first it an inhaler appeared beside the valve oil. Conductors continued waving their arms and Leonard continued supplying appropriate quantities of Mozart. Then one evening there was a passage he couldn't finish. His mind knew what to do. His lips knew. His hands knew.

But there wasn't enough air. This seemed particularly cruel. Air was everywhere. The concert hall was full of it. People in the expensive seats were breathing enormous quantities for free. Leonard simply couldn't get enough of it to pass a brass tube. For another year he negotiated doctors, medication, breathing exercises, various mouthpieces. He became an expert in appearing musical while almost suffocating.

Eventually his doctor said what Leonard knew. He retired. Everyone expected him to be devastated. But he didn't make devastation his publicist. At his retirement party he stood, "For thirty-seven years I blew air through a metal pipe and people paid me. This is not a tragedy."

Everyone laughed. He refused to describe himself as someone from whom music had been taken. He began attending concerts. That surprised everyone. Some retiring musicians never wanted to see the orchestra again. Leonard bought tickets. He sat close enough to watch the trombone section breathe. He began teaching. When students complained about long tones, Leonard smiled.

"Enjoy them."

Penticton confirmed. Oh joy. That's Vallican, Kimberley, Castlegar, Fernie, Robert's Creek, Powell River, Nanaimo, Vancouver and Penticton confirmed. Waiting on Victoria, Kaslo, Kelowna, Cumberland, Williams Lake, Crawford Bay. That's BC in late Jan early Feb.

It had been so long since Ray toured the East Coast. Some venues disappeared, along with promoters, record stores and radio stations. He remembered Halifax when you could arrive with two boxes of CDs and leave feeling like an entrepreneur. He remembered driving New Brunswick at night, CBC fading in and out, and wondering how many Irving signs he could count in an hour.

Now going back. Halifax. Moncton. Fredericton. Charlottetown. Saint John. Smaller places he had to look up on the map. Each confirmation produced the same little electrical charge. Someone still remembered. Or perhaps they didn't remember and were willing to take a chance. He was happy with either explanation. He began remembering. A woman in Nova Scotia brought him her son's cd after a show. A soundman who insisted Neil Young had once slept on his couch. A Cape Breton piano with three notes that sounded like somebody closing a screen door. A promoter who paid the cash from a cookie tin. A man in PEI who drove through a snowstorm because he'd heard one of Ray's songs on college radio in 1989.

But he wasn't returning as the musician who had left. His hands were older. His lower back developed sciatica. He accumulated songs, losses, marriages, funerals, arguments, books, mistakes, reconciliations and several thousand hotel key codes. He played differently now. Less interested in proving anything. More willing to let silence remain in the room without immediately sending other sounds to arrest it.

He wondered whether the East Coast had changed as much as he had. Of course it had. Everybody talks about returning to a place as though the place has been waiting patiently beside the highway. Nothing waits. The bartender gets married. The child who came with her parents is now forty-three. Someone dies. Someone moves to Alberta. Someone buys the building and turns it into expensive apartments with names like The Ritz.

Still, the roads would be there. The ocean certainly would. Raymond began practicing songs he hadn't played in years. Some resisted. Others returned instantly, dogs hearing the family car. One evening he found an old set list from his last Maritime tour folded inside a guitar case. Beside one song he'd written:

NEVER PLAY THIS AGAIN.

He couldn't remember why. Naturally he began practicing it. The song was better than he remembered. A month before departure he started assembling the new show. Old songs beside new ones. Instrumentals beside stories. Pieces written by the young man who had once toured the East Coast and pieces written by the older man returning there. For a moment it seemed they were two different musicians. Then he played a chord he'd been playing since he was twenty-five.

There it was. Same chord. Different hands. That was when Ray understood what returning really meant. You don't go back to see whether the place remembers you. You go back to discover what remains when neither of you is the same. And maybe, somewhere, somebody opens a door, and for ninety minutes all the years between visits disappear into sound.

Five of the twenty shows I have lined up for January and February 2027 are now officially confirmed, meaning contracts signed and deposits paid. I remain extremely grateful to Jen Claveau for teaching me to be persnickety about such things. In the old days I flew fast and loose, believing a person's enthusiastic "Absolutely!" meant absolutely. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it means "Absolutely, until I change my mind, forget our conversation, leave the country or become interested in someone from Sloan doing a solo tour." People are not always on the up and up. Contracts are good things, boys and girls.

The other fifteen should firm up soon. Six months out, there is nothing alarming about that. In fact, having 25 percent already contracted with deposits feels luxurious. A good sign. Yesterday Langley confirmed! I've never played Langley. There are actually quite a few places coming up that I've never played before, which excites me very much. Every new town means another room, another piano, another collection of strangers, another chance to discover a motel with soundbites in my mind of Ronley Teper saying she travels with her own sheets.

I like touring Canada this way. Every time another town gets added to the map, the country becomes a little less enormous. Eventually I hope to have the whole thing down to the size of a neighbourhood.

I've been trying to learn how to run Meta ads. This is apparently what being a musician means now. Once I thought the job involved learning chords and writing lyrics. Today I am studying conversion events, pixels, ad sets, placements, cost per click and something called Advantage+, which sounds like prostate medication endorsed by Gretzky.

I make an ad. Meta says it is Learning. Good. So am I. The fascinating part, trying to understand who I'm talking to. Meta asks me to define my audience. People who like songwriters? Piano players? People within forty kilometres of Sudbury who are free Thursday night and have recently experienced an unexplained yearning for an old man sitting at a piano?

Apparently the machine knows.

I give it twenty dollars and say, find my people.

The old system wasn't necessarily better. You stapled a poster to a telephone pole, called the newspaper, mailed something to a radio station and hoped somebody noticed. Now I can theoretically locate the exact person who likes John Cage, Keith Jarrett, Judee Sill and stories about raising kids.

Which is incredible.

Meta assures me these people exist.

There are 1,700 of them.

For another $14.63 Meta will introduce us.

Somewhere an algorithm is learning about my audience.

Somewhere I'm learning about the algorithm.

And somewhere between the two of us, Troy buys another ticket.

Kurt Vonnegut loved music
because it had the decency
not to explain itself.

Nobody asks
what position it takes
on capitalism.

The drummer hits the snare.

A trumpet plays B-flat.

So it goes.

Vonnegut imagined once
human beings communicating
without language,

which seems reasonable

considering what language
has accomplished.

Wars. Contracts. Campaign speeches.

Music had another proposition.

Here is a vibration.

Here is another.

Put them together.

See if you feel less alone.

He played clarinet,

the instrument most likely
to sound like a duck.

Perhaps that's why
he understood artists.

You practice for years

to become capable
of making something

that disappears
the instant you make it.

A note. Gone.

A whole symphony

vanishing successfully
for two hours.

The universe is doing
the same thing.

Someone invents bebop.

Someone else complains
it isn't music.

Then everybody dies.

So it goes.

But before that happens

a piano waits
in somebody's living room.

A child discovers middle C.

An old woman remembers
a song her mother sang.

A saxophonist takes a solo
and accidentally plays

something he has never
played before.

For eleven seconds

the universe
doesn't seem meaningless.

The band keeps playing.

Nobody has solved anything.

Perfect. Vonnegut smiles.

Kanye looked at college
and saw a building
selling permission.

Stand here. Read this. Pass that.

He called the first record
The College Dropout

and made leaving school
sound like a kind
of enrolment.

Professors had office hours.

Kanye had drums.

The next one called
Late Registration,

And next called Graduation,

Maybe there is danger
declaring yourself
your own university.

No professor saying,

You might want
to reconsider that sentence.

No classmate
raising a hand.

The dropout becomes
the teacher,

the teacher becomes
the institution,

and one morning
the man who fought the academy

discovers

he has tenure
inside his own head.

Judee Sill put Jesus
in the passenger seat

beside desire, he**in, Bach,
and whoever hadn't called back.

No seatbelts.

Her chords kept opening doors
behind other doors,

a hymn became
a love song,

the love song
became mathematics,

then angels everywhere

looking embarrassed
to have been discovered.

She sang softly,

strange, considering the size
of the things she was singing about.

God. Death. Salvation. S*x. Loneliness.

The usual.

Other singers tried
to reach the stars.

Judee Sill seemed more interested
in discovering who tuned them.

And then she disappeared.

The terrible ordinary business
of being gifted, wounded, alive, then not.

The records remained.

Quiet little machines
asking big questions.

Put one on and her voice enters the room.

She sings about heaven
like someone who checked the map

but isn't entirely sure
the road is open.

Then comes another chord,

stranger than the one before it,

and you understand

Judee Sill was trying
to find the hidden harmony

that proved

there had been another world
inside it

the entire time.