Falling Backwards: A Memoir (33 page)

Not two hours after I got home that night, our phone rang; it was David from the Larry Michaels Country Show Band. He told me that I had unanimously been chosen for the job as backup singer. I couldn’t believe my ears. My mom asked me if everything was all right, and I told her that I had gotten the job in the band. My mom said, “See what happens when you try?” If only she’d known that I actually hadn’t tried at all.

The Larry Michaels Band was a step up from Executive Sweet. They were very talented, actually, and gave me a really fun opportunity to learn and grow as a performer. Singing harmonies wasn’t my strong suit, but I did get better at it as the weeks went by.

David spent extra time making sure my parts sounded perfect. I knew he could tell I was struggling a little bit, and he was extremely patient with me. Of all the band members, he and I especially hit it off. I probably spent three or four months doing weekend gigs with them, travelling around southern Alberta in a packed van, so we got to know each other quite well.

On one of the road trips I finally got around to asking him why they’d hired me and not one of the tall, pretty, country-looking girls who had shown up for the audition. I told David that I was quite sure I didn’t fit the ideal physical type everybody was looking for. He looked me in the eye and said, “When I saw you walk in, I didn’t even need to hear you sing. Like I told you, I had heard you sing before. I loved your voice back then and I was sure that I’d love what you were going to sing that day.”

I hadn’t really sung anywhere but in the middle of nowhere in British Columbia, so I couldn’t imagine where he’d heard me. I was
curious so I asked him exactly where he’d seen me sing. I wasn’t prepared in any way for his answer.

David told me that he’d heard me sing on a ship sailing from England to the “new world, three hundred or so years ago.” I wasn’t sure how to respond.

“I know you think I’m crazy,” he said candidly, “but I’m not kidding. It was you, as sure I’m standing here. It was you on that boat.”

I started laughing because I didn’t know what else to do. He’d heard me sing three hundred years earlier? What the hell? He explained to me that he was into something called Eckankar. Eckists, he told me, enjoyed many levels of existence and consciousness. He believed he had lived many other lives on this planet and had shared a few of those lives with me. I thought David was crazy but I humoured him anyway.

I asked him what I looked like on the boat and he told me that I looked the same—same eyes, same skin, same hair—only I was really fat! He told me that I was always singing. I apparently looked after all the men on the boat, and they all looked up to me like a mother. Good God, I thought, a mother to a bunch of toothless rum-drinkers looking for the new world. No wonder I had issues. I was smiling at this point. Part of me believed him even though it was so bizarre. I mean, who would make something like that up? A crazy person, that’s who.

David and I talked about the girl on the boat once in awhile. He was always happy to answer my questions no matter how nutty they were. He never changed his story. David told me I was the best singer he’d ever heard, then and now. It made me blush.

David and I ended up leaving the Larry Michaels Band and going off to do our own little lounge gigs. Larry was probably mad but David thought it best to move on to other things. I think when David met me, he saw his chance to get somewhere and took it. I was kind of nervous about working as a duo in lounges, but David assured me
that we could make some really good money and work in some really nice places. Both of those things sounded promising to me.

The first year we worked together was one of the most educational years of my musical life. David was a lot older than me, probably twenty plus years. He had fought in Vietnam (so he told me) and had come up to Canada from California to escape the “political bullshit” that he said haunted his every move. He was such an interesting man. For one thing, he had no front teeth. I never asked him how he lost them. I always figured he’d bring it up if he wanted to. I imagined his teeth being knocked out by the end of a machine gun in Vietnam although I was quite sure that’s not at all what had happened. I think it was more a case of bad dental hygiene. I’d have to beg him to put his dentures in when we played in public because I was sure he was scaring some of our patrons away. He looked so weird without teeth. His cheeks were sunken and it made him look eighty-five years old. He hated his dentures and I couldn’t blame him. I would have hated wearing them too. David smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, if not more. The fingers on his right hand were brown and yellow. Back then everybody smoked in bars so he could have a cigarette burning the entire time we played. He had an ashtray on his piano, and he lit one cigarette after another.

We both drank too much. People were forever buying us drinks and sending them over to the piano. Who could say no? It was free, after all, and free was good. David loved it when people bought us drinks. It meant that they were drinking too and that our tips might be higher. Sometimes we could make an extra few hundred dollars a night, and that made a huge difference to each of us.

My mom and dad were a bit leery of my new singing job, but I felt like I was living the dream. I was singing full-time now and making a wage as an honest-to-God singer! If somebody wanted to send me a drink, so be it. My parents liked David, although my mom
said she felt sorry for him. I didn’t feel sorry for him ever. He was so strong and so certain. He had two great kids and a really nice girlfriend, so I was very comfortable staying at his house to rehearse when we weren’t working the circuit. I guess my mom saw something in him that I didn’t. She was intuitive that way. My mom could see right through people’s intentions. She still can. Not that David’s intentions were ever bad, she just saw how troubled he was, and how broken. He never let on to me or anybody else how hard his life had been. There were a lot of secrets kept inside his heart.

Before meeting David I hadn’t really been exposed to great music. I knew nothing of Motown, Detroit, and the brilliant black divas that carved a path so wide that every other singer in the world ran right through it after them. There was so much music he played to me, and all of it just about made my heart stop. It was all so good! I couldn’t believe the new sounds I was hearing. I couldn’t believe the soul and the depth of the singers he was introducing me to. For the first time in my life I could feel the heartache and hurt they were singing about. It was tangible.

He spun Nancy Wilson and Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone records. (Nina made me think about Leslie.) He would play DJ for hours on end. He would put on Tom Waits and Frank Sinatra, the Staple Singers, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Ray Charles and Mary Wells. It was a long list of amazing vocalists and hearing them changed the way I thought about songs and songwriting. Where had I been? Fishing, apparently.

He loved turning me on to new things: new grooves, new melodies. He told me I could sound just like them if I wanted to, or at least incorporate some of that soul into my own music. By this time, David had also talked me into putting some of my original songs into our act. I was reluctant at first but he told me that I needed to start singing my own songs and wondered why I hadn’t been
singing my own songs to begin with. He made me feel like they were really good, even great. I trusted his opinion and I didn’t think he’d tell me my songs were good unless he meant it. He would quite often tell me that he didn’t like a new song when I played it to him. He’d say “You need to work on the bridge” or “The melody could use some work.” He was always honest.

After just a few months we had quite the eclectic crowd following us around the Calgary nightclubs. Most of the clubs were holes in the wall but we’d always manage to pack the people in. David had us earning about $1,200 a week, which I thought was fantastic. I was used to making maybe a hundred bucks a week, if that. Playing the nightclubs was like winning the lottery. I was happy to not be working full-time at the video store. I think my folks missed the manpower, but they were happy for me to be doing what I loved just the same. (Keep in mind, I was a terrible employee.)

I don’t think David and I had more than two up-tempo songs in our entire set list. All our songs were dirges, including the ones I’d written. That’s what I liked to sing and that’s what David liked to play. We were a perfect team. People would sit around their little candlelit tables, drinking wine and puffing away on cigarettes with their eyes closed, and be lulled to near death by our sombre, depressing tunes. In between songs, I’d tell funny stories and jokes just to let everybody off the hook. Nobody can stay in the dirge zone for four straight hours, not even me. We’d start around 9 p.m. and finish at one in the morning. Most people stayed the entire night.

After that first year, David realized that we didn’t really have a band name. We were David and Jann. Not all that original. One night when he was introducing us, he said, “Hello, guys and dolls, we are Hart and Soul … I’m Mr. D. Hart, and
this
(he pointed at me) is
Ms. R. Soul …” Everybody laughed hysterically. They got the joke, I guess. The name stuck.

Hart and Soul had eight or nine lounges that we played on a regular basis. We would rotate from one room to the next, playing a week at a time. Our calendar was booked for months ahead. It felt good to know what I was going to be doing. I wasn’t used to that.

One of our regular gigs was at Marty’s Diner. A five-hundred-pound guy named Marty (surprise, surprise) owned it. He and his eighty-pound wife, who looked like Olive Oyl, ran the joint. I know it’s horrible, but I always wondered how in heaven’s name they had sex. I tried hard not to think about it but once in awhile a disturbing vision crept into my head and I’d have to shake it out onto the floor as quickly as I could or go straight to hell for conjuring up such a dirty scenario.

Marty’s was a quaint place, warm and woody. They had a rustic menu of sandwiches and soups and a few deep-fried delights. For the most part they served specialty coffees and an assortment of wine and beer. It seated thirty-five or forty people comfortably. On a good night Marty might be able to squeeze in another ten but it would be cramped. David and I played there every few months to a sold-out house. I loved being able to sing in front of people, but even more than that, I loved making them laugh.

I had no grandiose ideas about taking what we were doing to a professional level. David used to go on about how old he was and that no one in their right mind would ever want to work with an “old ugly fart” like him. I knew he was right but I never said so. I simply stayed the course and felt glad to be working, period.

Since I’d moved home from Vancouver I hadn’t seen my brother Duray all that much. It was the norm for him to be in jail for some sort of minor offence. He’d serve a few months here and get out and
do something all over again and serve a few months there. It was hard on our entire family. He was drinking all the time, smoking a lot of pot and hash. He would take any kind of pill he could get his hands on too, and not worry about the consequences to his body and soul.

My parents dreaded the phone calls that would inevitably come in the middle of the night from the police asking if they knew a Duray Richards. They’d hear that he’d been pulled over for drunk driving or that he’d threatened somebody or that he had assaulted some poor prostitute.

One night Duray found himself in a horrible fight at a house party. The house apparently belonged to a friend of a friend of a friend. Duray was always looking for a party to go to. It didn’t matter where it was, or even if he knew anybody there. He’d simply show up. Duray told us later he’d been having an okay time. He was having a beer and a cigarette and talking shit to the drunk people around him. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Around midnight, he noticed that the guy who lived in the house was making a huge commotion in the kitchen. He was wrenching the arm of his little boy, shaking him and yelling at him to get to bed. Duray said it went on for a long time. Everybody at the party was noticeably uncomfortable but didn’t make any attempt to do anything about it. The little boy was crying his eyes out and was obviously very upset. Finally Duray couldn’t take it. He told the guy calmly to back off and take it easy. He told him he shouldn’t be doing that to a kid, that it wasn’t right. That didn’t go over very well at all, and the guy got very aggressive very quickly, telling Duray, “Get the fuck out of my face and get the fuck outta my house!”

The guy started dragging his son towards the hallway. The little boy was hysterical. Duray told the man again to leave the kid alone. They exchanged a few more heated words in the crowded kitchen
and then all hell broke loose. The guy grabbed a seven-inch kitchen knife and thrust it at Duray. Duray can’t remember exactly what happened next, but he said that he managed to grab a big plant and get it between the knife and himself. There was dirt and leaves flying everywhere. Duray threw the plant at the guy and then started throwing punches. People were yelling and screaming and freaking out. By the time things calmed down, Duray realized he’d been stabbed in the stomach and was bleeding profusely. He said he didn’t feel a thing, he just noticed the blood.

Someone at the party had the sense to get him to the emergency room. My brother had to undergo surgery that removed several feet of his small intestine and part of his colon and they took out a chunk of his stomach as well. He was in the hospital for several weeks. The doctor told Duray that the blade came within a quarter of an inch of severing a major artery and if it had done that he’d have bled to death in minutes.

Not even a near-death experience slowed Duray. We thought it might change him and get him back on track, but it didn’t. He got worse.

David and I kept gigging around town. Once in awhile we’d play in Banff, which was lovely, more like a holiday than a job. We had the days to ourselves to walk around town and take in the sights. I was still going nowhere, but I didn’t dare think about that for long.