Pickle Barrel
NORTHERN ROCK AND ROLL fans are lucky because so many of our musical memories are attached to seasons. Mono-climates narrow the breadth of one’s musical experience, but in Canada, our aural map is a seasonal journey across time.
Over the years, my musical life has been informed with many of these seasonal moments. In the 90s, a deal was brokered for us to backup Jane Siberry at the Hillside Festival in Guelph.
We started rehearsals with Jane in Toronto. At first, the sessions were a breeze. I still have recordings of them that reveal big, meaty grooves and wild guitars married to Jane’s perfect, fragile singing. But then… things went awry.
The Sib, who’d just released her album Bound by the Beauty, started to deconstruct all that we’d done. It was her prerogative, but we found it hard to support her musical anxiety — mostly because we thought it was all sounding good.
Martin, our guitar player, was asked to unplug his effects. Dave Clark was told to drum as if he were a beatbox and I was told to keep my foot off the fuzzbox.
In an attempt to breathe some life into our sessions, one of us suggested that we cover a song. Since Jane is quiet at the best of times, it was difficult to tell whether she thought this was a good or bad idea. Nonetheless, we adjourned to the studio’s listening room, poring over CDs to find the right song. In some instances, not more than a bar of a song would pass before Jane would say, “No. I don’t like it,” or “No, not this one.” We must have listened to 30 or 40 songs. Finally, I reached for a song that I consider to be the greatest summertime confection in the history of pop music: “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone.
I remember listening to Sly as a 10 year old driving around Florida on a family vacation. It was as if everyone in America was stepping to Sly’s delicious, low groove. The song’s elevated beauty (and genius) can be found in Larry Graham’s single-note bass line, and the way the verses move from one singer to the next, defining the essence of what it is to play in a band.
Jane hated it.
We struggled to patch together eight songs. Jane would pad the set by playing “My Mother,” a solo piano opus. Three thousand people came to see us. Before we were to go on, I stared out the stage entrance at the darkening sky and said, “Boy, the crowd looks really beautiful from here.” Then, Jane, in a dumb-jock voice, parroted my words. I turned and stared at her, disbelieving my ears. And then we walked on stage.
We survived until the third song. As the show started, we did our best to get into the performance, flying around the stage in an attempt to compensate (and probably over-compensate) for our lack of excitement with the arrangements. This only served to startle Jane and throw her off form. She’d never been on stage with an energetic, physical band before, and, as a result, she stayed tight to her microphone, keeping away from our thrusting headstocks.
It was around the third song that I stepped on my percussion egg. Needing to find something equally percussive, I grabbed a jangle-stick, and proceeded to keep time. I can’t remember which song we were starting, but I was doing fine until I flourished the jangle-stick over my head, at which point about 100 people standing directly in front of the stage laughed. Jane stopped singing, stepped back from her microphone, and announced to the crowd: “I feel like I’m on some kind of stupid game show.”
To this day, I don’t know why what I’d done was so funny to so many, but it was probably a case of my body language unconsciously trying to break the obvious tension. After the show, a friend told me that it was clear to everyone what was happening, and that the audience was also looking for something to break the ice. After Jane made her “game show” remark, there was an uncomfortable silence before drummer Dave Clark told her, “Sister, you’re part of the greatest game show of your life, let’s go!”
How we ever finished the set, I’ll never know. 
Post City Magazines’ new music critic, Dave Bidini, has authored books on baseball and rock & roll including On a Cold Road: Tales of Adventure in Canadian Rock. He is also the guitarist of the legendary Canadian rock band the Rheostatics.
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