Strange Way to Live. Carl Dixon
shoe store. It was just a silly compromise born of desperation. Could be worse, I suppose, and probably an improvement on being named after a steak (hey, The Guess Who hated their name, which was a promo guy’s idea).
After a short time we left Astro Talent Agency, who hadn’t been very successful at shepherding us to the big time. I used the contacts I’d made in my short stint with Olias to get us taken on by a company called Pizzazz Productions, an agency that mostly specialized in “show bands.” You don’t really see show bands anymore, but they were once a big-earning fixture of the live music world. All the starving rockers considered it “selling out” to join a show band, a fate worse than backing an Elvis tribute. A show band was where you’d go once you’d given up on the rock ’n’ roll dream and wanted to make some decent money (three hundred dollars a week instead of the seventy-five to one hundred that bands like us were left with; three hundred dollars sounded like all the money in the world back then).
After watching us perform, Dan, the agent, told us we scored almost a zero on his checklist of attributes for selling a band. We were pretty green, and there were no bad boys among us who knew the ropes, who’d been around a little bit.
“Four nice guys from a small town” was the way agent Dan described our identity — that is, our lack thereof. He made us go to Honest Ed’s discount shop in Toronto to buy ridiculous new stage clothes. I had a misguided notion that we were supposed to look crazy or outlandish in our new stage get-ups, and among other regrettable purchases I got a pair of heavy blue-felt paratrooper pants with suspenders, genuine army-surplus items, which were huge, hot, and clownish when worn under circumstances that did not involve dangling from a silk parachute at ten thousand feet. Between that costume and other unguided choices, I did not present a fetching image.
We Alvins now set out together for wherever Dan and Pizzazz Productions sent us. In a mood of what we thought was witty silliness (williness?) we decided to have a gimmick, à la the Ramones. We all were named Alvin, and that crazy coincidence was what led us to form a band together. We had Alvin Slicker, Alvin Duker, Alvin Boomer, Alvin Dick Leroy (me), and Alvin Herb Elroy. People were mainly unconvinced and only mildly entertained by this yarn. It became a short-lived test of how gullible or willing a girl was if she believed any of this malarkey. Not that we took advantage of any girls, gullible or otherwise. We were nice boys with girlfriends at home. The fabled rock lifestyle remained veiled to our naive eyes.
So we set off and took all of road life’s blows square on the chin. This resulted in a fair amount of stress, but I managed to convince the others to keep their chins up and plow ahead. I had to; they were all unwitting pawns in my undefined quest.
Our first round of hard lessons was a tour of northern Ontario in the winter of 1979. Schumacher, Dryden, Schreiber, Marathon, Hearst, Timmins; one hot spot after another played host to “The Shoes.” In Hearst I was amazed to find a completely French-speaking town in Ontari-ari-o; it’s more common than you’d think. I also learned that sometimes men thought I was a pretty boy, possibly gay, and wanted to hurt me for it. This mystified me because I’ve always been a very hetero guy with macho leanings. Someone threw an ashtray at my head in Hearst and barely missed doing damage. There was no market for rookies like us in the bigger towns like Sudbury, North Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, or Thunder Bay. We set about earning our wings wherever they would have us.
To an unbiased observer it would have looked like a fiasco. At the end of the run we felt we had emerged bloodied but unbowed. I was the band’s money manager for no reason other than that my mom had lent us the money to buy a used cube van for getting around. I did not possess any business acumen or experience. One of my first moves was to drive away from Timmins on a Sunday morning with our entire week’s fee forgotten in my hotel room.
Our cube van was a two-seater, with a couple of our parents’ old armchairs set up at the front of the box and a folding lawn chair set up between the cab seats. This was to carry five people plus our gear. Short straw drew the lawn chair, which wasn’t much fun on a five-hundred-mile drive. The heater wasn’t adequate for the forty-below temperatures we sometimes encountered, and we’d be so cold as we drove that on one trip Duke had ice forming on his beard inside the van as his breath condensed and froze there, like those photos of Antarctic explorers. Duke remembers having moose stew at the bar and watching the Super Bowl with the Dryden locals. Near the end of the tour somebody in the North finally took pity on us and shared the trick of placing cardboard inside the engine’s front grill to create more warmth in the car’s heating system.
On our final night we were so keen to get home after six weeks away that we lit out driving after our Saturday night load-out only to find there were no gas stations open for over a hundred miles, and we hadn’t filled up. The gas gauge dipped below the empty line for our final very nervous fifty miles, and the temperature was once again dipping below the minus-thirty mark. Just as our engine coughed its last combustion, we crested a rise to see a Husky service station several miles in the distance. In my excitement and relief I roused everyone from icy fitful slumber and shouted, “Get out and push the van while we’re still rolling so it’s not a dead stop! We can make it to the station!”
Poor Duke responded to the alarm cry before he was even awake. He rolled out with the rest of us onto the frozen tarmac under the starry northern sky in running shoes and no jacket but gamely took up a corner of the van in the frosty night. Four strapping young men set to work pushing the five-ton load two miles up the highway with every ounce of their strength. It was like a bizarre dream we were caught up in together, as a final kick in the arse from the North.
When we at last rolled the van across the deserted highway into the Husky station, a man who’d been watching our approach with interest wandered outside. He offered this helpful thought: “Why’d you push your truck all the way here in the freezing cold? You should have just jogged down here and I’d have taken you up with the tow truck to put some gas in it.” If our heads hadn’t already been flushed bright red with freezing, he would have seen us blush with embarrassment. It’s funny now, but at the time it all seemed kind of normal, part of the experience called “being on tour.”
Performing four shows a night, six nights a week, and then driving all day on Sunday to get to the next town; staying in seedy hotels and eating every meal in cheap diners: that was the routine. We’d try to save money by keeping a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter in the room, maybe bananas or hot dogs on the window sill to keep them cold; learning to live on seventy-five dollars a week. The quest for cheap food occupied a great deal of our time, and many touring musicians’ idea of heaven was to be invited home by a local girl who could cook. Everyone in travelling bands got skinny.
So, if you overlook the hunger, the living conditions, the cramped travel, and the low pay, what is left for the aspiring musician? What’s left is the opportunity to perform on your instrument for an audience, and if you’re any good at all, to entertain them and feel their approval. That is a powerful intoxicant, powerful enough to keep people persevering through unbelievable stuff. However, if what you’re getting from the audience is hostility — or worse, indifference — the whole thing starts to look pretty bleak. That’s when musicians start to reassess their prospects, decide it’s not too late to go to law school, and chuck the whole thing. For many that’s a sensible decision. Many are called, few are chosen. At some point later, though, people always regret putting down their instrument.
preparing for luck
In those early days of touring with Alvin Shoes, I would find my voice giving out by mid-week. Something had to change if I was going to keep singing, so I found a singing teacher in my hometown. She kept an ad in the classifieds that said, “Miss Jessie Bradley, vocal instructor.” I went to see her one weekday afternoon in her Edwardian brick house. Miss Jessie herself appeared to be of the same vintage because it was a very old, stooped lady with a smart reddish-brown bobbed wig, be-rouged cheeks, and a circumspect look who greeted me at the door. I stepped around the stacks of old music method books and song sheets as she led me through to the drawing room, where she kept an upright piano.
Jessie put me through my paces with a series of scales and sounding-out exercises and then some kind of a song. I was twenty and this was my first singing lesson. What