As we were being thrown out of Canada the other day, the immigration officer coldly said to me the words that truly hurt:
“You’re just not offering any benefit to Canada.”
And I know he meant that in an economic sense. But still. Ouch.
We were driving from Michigan to play a show in Toronto. We had no work permits, but we did have a letter from the promoter of the show saying that everything was on the up and up. And yet at the Port Huron border the Canadian man gave us a yellow slip and waved our van to the side and searched it and made us go into a little office and stand in front of the window while the officer behind the window sighed and shuffled his papers and pulled out a large binder with lots of information in it. After an hour of looking through that binder, making phone calls and talking to his co-workers, he told me flatly in legal language that we weren’t going to get in to Canada that day. I felt like we were on trial and I was the lawyer, me in my blazer leaning on the counter, my rag-tag band sitting on the hard plastic seats behind me. I can’t even remember any of the words that he said to me, save for the ones I quoted above which have been ringing in my head ever since. And maybe Canada is just a trifle to some people, just another barren state too far North to bother with, but to me it is a special place. I was married to a Canadian for four years. I had my heart broken by a different Canadian. My first real tour was across the long expanse of Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver. My first real shows were in Toronto, playing with The Be Good Tanyas, and Geoff Berner and Veda Hille. (At one show, Geoff Berner was playing accordion after having probably seven whiskeys, and at the end of his set he said, “This next song will be my last… unless you all cheer wildly, in which case I’ll play The Greatest Song Ever!”)
Well, in any event, we weren’t allowed in, and the real drag was that we had to drive the long way around Lake Erie, which just happens to be so big that it’s technically Great.
This was the second show of the week where we were supposed to play but didn’t. I’ll tell you about the other one, but first I want to mention Igor Stravinsky.
On May 19th, 1913 Igor Stravinsky debuted his new ballet, “The Rite of Spring” in Paris. All indications were that this would be a lovely evening. Many prominent composers and members of high society were there. Cultured people.
“But from the opening bars of the music, played in an unexpectedly high register by a solo bassoon, many of the audience became outraged. Saint-Saens stormed out, furious about the “misuse” of the bassoon. As the music’s barbarous qualities became evident and the Pagan nature of the ballet’s story began to emerge, it became obvious that this was not the genteel evening starring delicate ballerinas in tutus that ballet-lovers had been expecting.
The shouting and restlessness increased until the dancers were having difficulty hearing the orchestra at all. Diaghilev tried turning the house lights on and off several times, both Ravel and Debussy tried to calm the audience—all to no avail.
The wonder is that the conductor, Pierre Monteux, and the orchestra didn’t give up. And one also wonders how some of the audience managed to remain enthralled by what they were hearing given the noise of a large number of angry rioters. Yet one man reported afterwards how he was so captivated by the music that it took him some time to realize that the pain in his head was caused by the man behind him pounding out the rhythms on it with his fists.”
(excerpt taken from here )
It got worse. People tore up the theater. They actually rioted.
And so, things didn’t go well for Stravinsky that night. Which is comforting in several ways. First, it’s charming to think that less than a hundred years ago someone could actually care so much about the integrity of music that they would be upset about the “misuse of the bassoon.” This was a ballet after all, and it ended in a RIOT. A man pounded on the head of the man in front of him! Also, it makes even the worst show my band has ever experienced seem not all that bad. Which, come to think of it, brings me to:
The Worst Show My Band Has Ever Experienced
We drove into Chicago last weekend to play a gig that we had just set up last-minute. (This was before our failed attempt at getting into Canada.) We had found a place that hosted a comedy night on Sundays. Via email, the owner told me that he liked to have a band follow the comedians. The nights usually went well, he said, and there was a good crowd of people who would stick around to listen to the bands. (By the way, don’t ever believe what people you’ve never met tell you via email. Sometimes they’re honest, but sometimes they are pretending to be Nigerian kings with massive fortunes.)
We got to the club and set up our gear before the comedians went on. There were maybe five people in the audience, all of whom were comedians waiting to go up and talk. A drunk MC named Junior gave long rambling introductions that went nowhere as a means of bringing up comedians who gave long rambling monologues that went nowhere. One guy got up onstage and said the following, verbatim:
“So do you think girl penguins are happy to get menopause? I mean it’d be like you’re in the arctic and whoa! wait! here comes another hot flash… Ah, that was nice… Well, I think they’d like it… You know, no more periods… or hormones… Well whatever, it makes sense…”
But it didn’t make sense. Nothing anybody said made any sense. It’s like they had been given a couple boxes of refrigerator poetry magnets and were told to make up stand-up routines from the available words. And this went on for two hours. And the whole night it was just the comedians, the bartender, the owner, and our band. And nobody laughed after any of the jokes. Not even the other comedians would laugh. Many of the jokes were so poorly executed that the comedian had to say afterwards, “That was a joke.”
Did I mention this went on for two hours, while we, the band, were sitting there patiently? A couple people wandered in and said they were looking for the hip-hop open mic. Junior said he that he listed the show as that on some website to trick people into coming. At one point, Junior pointed at our musical equipment onstage and said it looked like “Arcade Fire after the rapture.” Even if that reads funny, believe me, his delivery didn’t back it up. While all this was going on, Nathan was writing feverishly on a piece of paper. Nathan asked Junior if he could go up and deliver something. “Is it funny?” Junior asked. “Well, it’ll make you laugh,” Nathan said, “Is it a poem?” Junior asked. “Well… no,” Nathan said as he looked at the piece of paper he was holding. “It’s sort of a… a tribute… to our band’s deity.” Junior was stumped by this and so ceded the microphone to Nathan, who proceeded to give an offering to the Traveler King, right there on that stage in front of those ten or so people. And this might not sound blasphemous on the surface, but keep in mind that offerings to the Traveler King have only ever been performed in dark alleyways at two in the morning, around bonfires in front of one or two people, or in empty fields and so on. The offerings are not done for applause, and they are torn up immediately when Nathan is finished reading them. They are solely for the benefit of the Traveler King, who protects us on the road. Doing it onstage into a microphone was a first for Nathan, and even though he was the most entertaining performer on that particular night, and even though he was funnier just by being honest than any of those comedians, he did feel bad afterwards, as though he hadn’t done right by the Traveler King.
After Nathan finished, Junior again picked up the microphone and rambled on with another incomprehensible joke as the last of the remaining people in the audience filed out. He kept making allusions to having the band come up and play, and then he would just keep talking, talking until everyone left, even when we screamed out, “How about letting the band play?” And so, ultimately, we just quietly went up to the stage and unplugged our equipment, packed it up, loaded up our van and left, while he was still talking into the microphone. We didn’t say anything to the owner and he didn’t say anything to us. I’m sure we were both thinking that we would just pretend that the whole night never happened.
I guess that’s not really analogous to a riot at a ballet. Mostly I was just thinking of what it would be like to be Stravinsky on that night in 1913, going home to sleep after the debut of his new work, thinking to himself as he brushed his teeth, “What happened? Did I do something wrong? Did I do something right?” I know I said before that our show wasn’t as bad as his, but on second thought, at least Stravinsky got to experience the actual performance of his music, even if the theatre he was performing it in was getting torn up while it happened. What made it the worst show we had ever experienced was that we didn’t even get to play music at all. The one redemption for the long drives and the heavy equipment and dealing with all the people who don’t care about your band is the few minutes you can get onstage and play your songs. Which just makes us more appreciative of the times when we do get to play music for people who care. And plenty of those days are to follow.
