Featherless Bipeds Read online

  richard scarsbrook

  © Richard Scarsbrook, 2006

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Accesss Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Scarsbrook, Richard

  Featherless Bipeds / Richard Scarsbrook.

  ISBN-10 1-897235-05-4

  ISBN-13 978-1-897235-05-8

  I. Title.

  PS8587.C396F42 2006 C813'.54 C2006-900503-6

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Typeset by Thistledown Press

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  118 - 20th Street West

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its publishing program.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author would like to thank Susan Musgrave for her wise and intelligent suggestions while editing this book; Melanie Fogel at Storyteller: Canada’s Short Story Magazine, who published short story versions of “Skin”, “Rule Number One” and “What’s Inside”; and Camilla Gibb who chose “Lost and Found” to be published in Descant (in a significantly different form). And, to all of the people who read Cheeseburger Subversive, attended my readings, classes, and other appearances, and kept asking me, “What happens to Dak and Zoe?” — thanks for making me want to know, too.

  CONTENTS

  SOUND CHECK

  Overdrive

  SET ONE

  The Rock 'n' Roll Moment

  Skin

  Deaf Man's Garage

  Socrates Kicks Ass!

  The Crossroads

  SET TWO

  Lost and Found

  What’s Inside

  Anyone Can Write a Rock Song

  Glass Half Empty

  SET THREE

  Hello, Theodore!

  Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting

  The Big Break

  Rule Number One

  Love Song

  Lola’s Greatest Hits

  ENCORE

  Harmony

  The Featherless Bipeds Discography

  For The Nerve, The Know, Guilt Trip, and other bands unnamed

  For Twelve Tribes, Easy Access, Disorderly Conduct

  and The Knight Service, too,

  For the Queen E II and Crestwood Prep Rock Bands,

  For the legions of karaoke crooners and screamers,

  For garage and basement and bar bands all,

  The Featherless Bipeds salute you.

  SOUND CHECK

  OVERDRIVE

  The tires of the van roar over the gravel road beneath us, churning up dust like the vapour trail of a heaven-bound rocket, and I get that rumble in the centre of my chest yet again: the thunder of love. I love rock ‘n’ roll. I’ve got to play it, sing it, write it. I’ve got no choice about it. Music is my heartbeat and breathing; it’s got to happen for me to stay alive.

  Tristan, the band’s documentary filmmaker, aims his video camera at me. The radio thumps a crunchy, guitar-driven anthem. I raise my fist in the air.

  “I love rock ‘n’ roll!” I cheer.

  “Me too!” Akim says to Tristan’s camera.

  Tristan aims the camera at his own face, and says, “Me three!”

  Before a gig, even at a place you’ve played a dozen times before, there’s this feeling unlike any other. It’s a mixture of anticipation and dread, nervousness and calm, butterflies and iron balls. You know you’ve got the goods, you know you’re capable of knocking ’em all on their asses, but will you? Will they let you knock ’em dead, or will they put up a fight? Will they want to hear country music? Will they want to hear thrash metal? Or will they want to hear something that you actually want to play? Will their ears and minds be tuned to the same frequency as yours? Will their eyes be on your hands as you coax the sounds out of your instruments, or will their eyes be on your amplifiers and guitars, which they will later try to steal? Will they want to clap and cheer, or boo and throw bottles?

  Playing a new place is wandering into an unknown. It’s either adventure, or just survival. Playing a place you’ve played before, though, can make you even more nervous. Will we be as good as we were the last time? Will we meet the expectations we’ve set up? Are we in at this place for the long haul, or are we just a one-hit wonder? The adrenaline churns inside us all. We’ve done this a hundred times before, but the feeling never goes away.

  Tristan is sitting sideways in the passenger seat, with one foot up on the van’s dashboard, his left hand surfing the rushing wind outside the open window. His video camera is stowed away now, and he’s giving a rapid-fire monologue about the strengths and weaknesses of different bass guitars (he prefers the feel of the wider neck on the Fender Precision Bass, but the Jazz Bass, with its twin pickups, has more sound versatility . . . ).

  Akim is in the driver’s seat, nodding along with Tristan’s commentary, saying little as usual. He can already feel the guitar strings bending under his thick, strong fingers, cooing and wailing and crying at his touch. Although his clamped-jaw composure conceals it, Akim’s insides churn with adrenaline, too.

  Before we hit the big time, before it all fell apart, when we were nineteen-year-olds playing small-town bars for the first time, we would wedge a couple of original tunes in between the familiar standards. And, once in a while someone would pay attention, which would eventually lead him to me. I’m Dak Sifter. I play the drums, I sing a little, and I write the lyrics for the songs.

  Now, I know it would sound a lot cooler, a lot more rock ‘n’ roll, if I said that the people who want to know more about my lyrics are all wild, beautiful young women who throw their panties onstage at the slightest provocation, but this is seldom the case. Mostly, the people who want to know about the lyrics are sincere, clear-eyed young guys who also want to be rock ‘n’ roll songwriters. They believe that playing in a rock band and writing rock songs will make them more attractive to the young women who they watch longingly from the sidelines, the girls who shake and bounce and gyrate on the dance floor. They think that writing rock songs will entice the girls to shake and bounce and gyrate for them.

  “So, Dak,” one of these young, wannabe-rock stars might say (they always seem to call me by my first name — the “brotherhood of musicians,” I suppose), “that last original tune you guys played kicked ass! Where did you get the ideas for the lyrics, man?”

  “I don’t like to talk about where I get the ideas for my songs,” is my standard-issue reply. “I want people to bring their own experiences to the song, so that it means something to them.”

  This, of course, is bullshit. The truth is, I’m not entirely sure where the words come from. They come from experience, they come from imagination. They come from outside, they come from inside. They come from everywhere, they come from nowhere. They just come.

  And the words are coming right now, so I’m hunched over my knees, scribbling frantically on the back cover of an outdated Ontario road map with a stub of pencil I found beneath the driver’s seat of the van. Not so long ago, I wrote what became one of our biggest radio hits — a song called “Little Spaces” — on the back of a Tim Horton’s bagel bag while bouncing
along in our Econoline van to a gig in some hick town in the middle of nowhere. You have to grab hold of the words whenever they come.

  This is the way it usually happens. A bunch of seemingly disconnected things — images, words, questions, ideas, feelings of varying temperature — all these things are carried in by an outside current, they float around for a while on the surface of my tide-pool mind, then they suddenly sink. And, at the precise moment they disappear, for that tiny, split second, I see the connections. For only a moment, the words and images and feelings come together to form a fuzzy, out-of-focus meaning, and I’ve got to write the words down before it all sinks beneath the surface.

  Usually I’m too late — I wind up with nothing more than a crumpled piece of paper and a feeling of loss. But sometimes something sticks, and a new song is born. This is what I’ve got so far:

  A good beer (or two)

  a patio, a porch

  a cottage dock

  or anywhere else you can hear yourself breathing

  A clubhouse sandwich

  Heinz ketchup bottle

  A pastel and chrome cafe

  Free coffee refills

  On the bill the waitress writes

  “Have a great day! luv Jo”

  Guitar strings

  Drum sticks

  Fingers and limbs

  Laying the thunder down

  The sound of words like “thunder”

  and “crunch” and “buzz” and “scream”

  Streetlights, Moonlight

  Foggy mornings

  The roads between destination cities

  Eric

  Jimi

  Stevie Ray

  (and sometimes even me)

  The comfort of a scarred-over wound

  Or emerging from a tunnel

  before the train roars through

  Being saved sometimes from what we don’t see coming

  The rest of the time eventually healing

  Real Tube Overdrive

  Screamin’ Strat

  Hammered Thin Crash

  The in-your-chest rumble of Subwoofer Bass

  A new tribe of girls dance in front of the drumset

  In the groove, in the groove

  Playing deep in the groove

  Hmm. No chorus. No rhymes. Jimmy T would hate it, which makes me like it even more. Maybe this isn’t a rock song, anyway; maybe it’s more like a confession. But there it is. It exists. It breathes on its own.

  I think I’ll maybe call this one, “Where She Is”. And, of course, it’s about rock ‘n’ roll. And, like so many other things I’ve written, it’s partly about Zoe. I hope she makes it to the show tonight. Everything depends on it.

  The van comes to a stop.

  “Here we are,” says Akim.

  Here we are, indeed. Harlock’s Rockpile, the rock bar where the Featherless Bipeds were born, and where, if the fates allow, we will be born again. Tristan raises the video camera to record the momentous occasion.

  I stuff the lyric-covered road map under the back seat, and step out of the van. With my snare drum under one arm, I walk towards the crumbling yellow-brick building, followed by Akim. Tristan stands back and films me as I reach for the handle of the door with the peeling paint that reads, “Stage Door — Performers Only”.

  As I take a step forward into the familiar old joint, my mind races backward through all the memories, retraces the steps that have brought us here again.

  SET ONE

  THE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL MOMENT

  It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment in time when a person becomes what he or she is, but maybe less so for rock ‘n’ roll musicians. Each of us has had one of those rock ‘n’ roll moments, when we are transformed from ordinary, everyday people into drummers, guitarists, bass players, singers, songwriters.

  Tristan’s rock ‘n’ roll moment came when, as a twelve-year-old, he discovered his dad’s knock-off ‘Beatle bass’ during one of his every-other-weekend visits to his father’s place. The small-bodied bass guitar was tucked behind some junk in the same closet where his father’s Hustler magazines were hidden. In front of the big vanity mirror at the foot of his father’s bed, Tristan stood with his feet wide apart and started plunking on those thick, corroded strings, feeling for the first time the potential to be something other than a introverted science geek with a video camera attached to one hand.

  Tristan was leaping, Pete Townsend-style, from the rails of the king-sized bed, the neck of the bass cutting through the air like an ancient sabre, when his father walked in. Tristan’s dad smacked him on the side of the head and told him to never again touch his stuff without permission.

  So, Tristan began delivering newspapers and taking odd jobs cutting grass and raking leaves. He saved his money and bought a well-used Rickenbacker-copy bass and a huge amplifier from the shadow-eyed widow of an unknown punk bassist who had been dismembered in a car accident while high on cocaine. Some of that punk-rock karma must have somehow radiated into the otherwise mild-mannered Tristan though the neck of that Gothic-looking axe, because every other weekend Tristan honed his bass-playing skills by shaking plaster from the walls of his dad’s small house with blasting, rumbling notes, until his father finally agreed to give his ex-wife sole custody of his son.

  Akim’s rock ‘n’ roll moment is also the stuff of legend. His mother, who had made it all the way to second chair violin in the orchestra in university, but never managed to get a job playing for any philharmonic, had forced Akim to take classical guitar since he was old enough to walk, hoping that some of her unfulfilled talent might come to fruition in her only son. Akim’s nimble-fingered renditions of Baroque classics were awarded top prizes by humourless white-haired judges in ill-fitting tuxedos, and won him the chance to audition for entry to the country’s top music school. Despite the glory his guitar playing had brought his mother, she refused his request for an electric guitar when he turned thirteen, informing him bluntly that no son of hers would be allowed to waste his talent on “banshee music”.

  At the audition that would have certainly gained Akim admission to that highfalutin music school, Akim declared, “This performance is dedicated to my mom”. Wearing the bug-eyed expression we’ve all seen when he’s about to lose his temper, Akim defiantly plunked out the power chords of “Smoke on the Water”, then smashed his classical guitar into kindling on the gleaming floor of the audition stage. Looking first at the dumbfounded principal of the music school, then at the drop-jawed face of his mother, Akim paraphrased John Lennon, saying, “Thank you all very much. I hope I passed the audition.”

  Now that’s rock ‘n roll.

  Comparatively, my own parents were pretty easygoing about my early musical aspirations. They promised to buy me a beginner’s drum set if I would just stop denting up the kitchen table by banging my fork and knife all over it at dinnertime, and if I would limit my practicing to right after school, when they weren’t home from work yet and wouldn’t have to endure the racket. My dad figured that since I didn’t play any sports, at least I would get a little exercise pounding the drums every day, so he bought me an inexpensive red three-piece kit for Christmas. Hitting the toms on this drum set reproduced the rich tonal qualities and powerful resonance of empty cardboard boxes, and the lone cymbal faithfully replicated the sound of kicking an empty pop can along the sidewalk, but I loved that drum set more than any other gift I’d ever received. For the first time in my life, it seemed like my Dad actually understood what I really wanted and, to this day, I still play red drums.

  All through high school, I pounded on my drums but didn’t yet play them, and I scribbled down lines that sort of rhymed, but I hadn’t yet written a song. Unlike Tristan and Akim, my own rock ‘n’ roll life began much later on, not with a burst of defiant anger, but with an eruption of passion. It began with Zoe Perry, the girl I’ve been in love with pretty much since Kindergarten. By the end of high school I had finally convinced her to be my girlfriend, but then I did s
omething stupid on the night of our senior prom, and she broke up with me.

  Losing Zoe was the most painful thing ever, and seeing her again tonight at a pub at the university we both attend has only made it worse. After she leaves the place, I decide to catch up with her, to ask her to be mine again, to beg her if I have to. It happens like this:

  I am running, almost out of breath.

  Then, out of nowhere, there comes a storm.

  Before it hits, there is a lull, an eerie peace. Everything is just a bit too quiet, the silence too vacuous to be anything but temporary. I stand in front of Zoe’s apartment building, wondering what I should do next. I have run all the way, but once I arrive I just stand still, frozen in place.

  Then, there is a distant rumble.

  rrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrr The sky is a bruise, greyish-purple and soft. Fingers of cloud spread overhead like a wounded hand, then the whole palm cups the sky, obscuring the pinpoint lights of stars.

  tick

  A single raindrop strikes the glass of Zoe’s room on the second floor. Behind the sheer curtains, Zoe rises from her purring-cat position near the window, parts the drapes and looks out. A slight current of air ruffles her hair, which hangs loosely about her shoulders.

  I read her name, Z. Perry, on the panel of buzzer buttons beside the entrance door. tick

  tick tick tick

  Just as I am summoning the courage to push the button, Zoe appears at the door, steps outside, her feet bare and tentative upon the cool, stony concrete of the building’s single front step.