Falling Backwards: A Memoir (34 page)

I am not sure at what point this man started showing up at our gigs, but one night I took notice of a very tall, bearded fellow at the back of the room. He had thick, round glasses, and I thought he looked familiar. I remember David saying, “That dude’s been following us around.”

Night after night, for weeks, if not months, he’d come to see us play. No matter where we went, there he was. He sat with his back
against a wall, drinking coffee and listening to every note I sang. I thought he was a weirdo, but he seemed harmless and it wasn’t like he came up and harassed me. I had never spoken so much as a word to him. Just as the night was ending he always seemed to disappear. I’d look for him and he’d be gone. David was cautious about him. Although he had never even met him, he didn’t like him. It was like he was jealous.

One night on a break the man—Neil, it turned out, was his name—came up to me and said hello. David looked on from the bar. Neil asked me if some of the songs I performed that night were original, and I told him that they all were. Then he said, “If you’re serious about music, call me,” and handed me his card. It wasn’t a long conversation. Neil wasn’t the first person who had talked to me about the music business, so I didn’t understand why it bothered David so much. He was furious about the whole thing. “That guy is trying to fucking steal you from me. I know it.” I thought David was being dramatic.

“Steal me from what?” I said to him.

“From this!
Us!
The
act!”
I tried to put his mind at ease. I told him that I doubted that very much. Neil seemed interested in my songwriting, I said. I didn’t know that for sure, but I wanted to make David feel confident about our present situation. In my heart, I was intrigued by Neil’s interest in me. What if he could do something for me? I felt like Neil was very sincere and legitimate. I went home that night and put Neil’s business card on my nightstand. I kept picking it up and looking at it.

“If you’re serious about music,” he had said to me. I fell asleep thinking about the possibilities.

I
was
serious about music but I didn’t know what to do about it. David and I were now fighting about this guy we didn’t know from
Adam, and it was wearing me down. He kept going on about how Neil was trying to split us up, and I thought that was ridiculous. But David started wearing his teeth every night without my having to remind him. Then I knew for sure that he was worried about losing me.

After about a week or so of staring at Neil’s business card, I called up a friend of mine who was a lawyer and asked her if she’d come with me to meet this “music guy.” I told my lawyer friend, Karen, that I didn’t know what he wanted. I was stupid to think I needed a lawyer with me, but I really didn’t know any better. She told me that she’d be happy to go, and so I made the phone call and set up my first meeting with Neil MacGonigill. I didn’t tell David. I felt bad about that but obviously not bad enough to not go.

Neil turned out to be anything but a weirdo. I knew in my heart I had found a true champion. He had such a kind face and gentle spirit. Neil could have passed for a clean-looking lumberjack; he was a big man with a big presence but soft-spoken and peaceful. He had had a lot of experience in the music business and had worked with the likes of Ian Tyson and k.d. lang. He was a music junkie of sorts; he knew a heck of a lot of useless facts about obscure recordings from the fifties, sixties and seventies. I’d never met anybody who could drop so many names in a single sentence—and I would seldom, if ever, recognize any of them. He knew a nerdy amount about songwriters and publishing and marketing and everything else that had to do with the recording industry.

We met several times over the next few weeks. Each time I got to know him a little better. He told me all about himself, where he’d worked and who he’d worked with. He was honest and straightforward. He didn’t sit in front of me and make me a million promises. He knew how tough it was to get anywhere in the music business. He said he’d been watching me over the months and that he was completely impressed and amazed by my music and my voice. He
also told me he had been very disappointed from time to time when he had come to see me sing and I had drunk too much. He told me I had sounded terrible on those occasions. I knew he was right.

“I think you could be so much better than you are,” he said to me very firmly. “You’re not anywhere near reaching your potential. You don’t do any more than you have to. You’re lazy.”

It made me feel ashamed because he was right. I never worked harder than I had to, and that was a problem. He wanted me to think about the magnitude of the commitment I was going to have to make if I really wanted to pursue music as a career. He was serious about working with me and teaching me the ropes, but I was going to have to show up for my own party.

Neil wasn’t talking about working with Hart and Soul; he was talking about working with me. I knew I was going to have to make a decision, and I knew that that would mean having to break things off with David. He would have to cancel jobs and lose money, and that made me feel sick. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. He had a family to feed and bills to pay. I was torn. I didn’t know how to go about telling him that I had to leave.

I kept hearing David’s voice in my head saying, “I’m too old and too ugly, Neil’s gonna split us apart. He doesn’t want an old fart like me, I’ll drag you down and you know it as well as I do.” It was like he had predicted exactly what was about to happen. Maybe it was his Eckankar background kicking in. Neil told me that he would talk to David if I wanted, but I thought that I should be the one to explain what was going on.

Neil felt that my time would best be spent writing as much and as often as I could, and that meant removing myself from the lounge scene for the time being. He told me that I needed to think beyond the Calgary city limits. He said that if I was willing to trust him and commit myself to my music, he’d be able to get me a record deal
within five years. I was twenty-five years old at the time, and I thought five years seemed like forever, but I was willing to give Neil the benefit of all my doubts.

When I finally did tell David that Neil had offered to work with me and that I had accepted, David was very good about it all. He sat at his kitchen table and listened to me go on about all the things that Neil wanted to do with my songs and what the possibilities could be. I could tell that David was trying his best to be supportive and had the generosity to tell me he knew our parting was inevitable.

“You deserve better than me,” he said. “You have a chance to do something in this world, Jann. I don’t.” I felt like bawling. He said that he couldn’t wait to see what I was going to do in this life and he felt lucky to have worked with me as long as he had. I asked him what he was going to do about the gigs and he said that he would try and find somebody to take my place. “They won’t be anything like you, though. I’ll never find a
you
again.”

And then he laughed that crazy, cigarette-coughing, wet laugh that almost made me think he was choking.

“You want a beer before you go?” he said. I said sure. We sat there and had a beer and a cigarette and didn’t talk much. We’d already said everything. I got up from the table and went outside to my car. David walked me out past the door and gave me a hug.

“It’s been good, kid,” he said quietly. He hung onto me a few extra seconds and then said, “Go on and get outta here. Say hi to your mom and dad for me.” I started backing out of his driveway, holding in the urge to cry. I rolled down the window and told him that I would, and then waved goodbye. I never saw him again.

Neil started working on a plan for me almost immediately. He told me that, first off, we would need to get me out of my parents’
basement and into a proper apartment. He had seen a “For rent” sign about a block away from where he lived and thought that it would be a perfect spot for me to settle so I could start “power-writing.” He could keep an eye on me there, being so close and all, is what I was thinking to myself.

It was a basement apartment, so I wasn’t technically moving up in the world. I was still a subterranean being. My parents helped me move all my stuff into the tiny 500-square-foot space. I was more or less living in the furnace room of a giant house. It was so bloody hot down there. (Too bad the world didn’t know about hot yoga yet because I could have sublet my little place out to somebody named Bikram for some extra cash.)

Thankfully I was short, so the six-and-a-half-foot ceilings weren’t a huge problem. The rent was $325 a month, and I was almost always late paying it. Thank God my parents still had the video store so I was able to work there and spend the rest of my time writing songs for Neil. He told me that I would have to hone my craft in order to get the attention of a label. “You can’t just be a good songwriter, Jann, you have to be a great songwriter,” he said. All he wanted me to do was write, write, write. So that’s essentially what I did in that little apartment for the next few years.

I’d sit at my desk with a pile of blank paper in front of me and a box of black pens and wait for the words to fall into my head. And they did fall, fast and furious. I opened myself up to the ever-expanding universe and let it do its thing. I wrote for nine or ten hours at a time. It was probably the most creative time in my life. I was piling up songs as the days passed. Some were good and there were even a few that were great. As soon as Neil felt we had enough great songs, we’d go into the studio and do some demos.

T
he old three-storey brick house I had moved into was owned by a woman named June. She was in her sixties and as cranky as you could possibly imagine. To say she was stern would be a grave understatement. June lived in the lovely, spacious suite on the main floor, right above my head, so I knew her comings and goings very well. It always sounded like she was having six pirates over for dinner and as if each of them had a wooden leg and a talking parrot. I slept many a night with earplugs stuffed into my head. They didn’t help much.

June, for whatever reason, had no time for me whatsoever. I tried so hard to get her to like me but nothing worked. I said a big happy “hello” whenever I saw her. I felt like I was a Walmart greeter, but she barely managed to grunt a “hi” back. Maybe she was tired, or lonely. I knew she was a divorcee and maybe that was a good part of her problem.

The way June acted towards me, you’d have thought I was the worst tenant in the world. I had a five-inch television in my tiny kitchen that I’d watch from time to time, and she’d always come
pound on my door and tell me to turn it down. A five-inch television set with a half-inch speaker—how could it possibly be too loud? It was a good thing I still had my lip-reading skills from my parents’ illegal satellite signal days because most of the time I watched TV with the sound off. When I sang I did it
very
quietly—June made a point of telling me that the floors were thin and she could hear everything I did down there. (How comforting.) She also told me I did too much laundry and used too much water. She didn’t like that I came home late and that I had people over on occasion. She didn’t want me burning candles or cooking things that might possibly stink up the rest of the house. She basically hated me. That’s how I felt, anyway. She threatened to kick me out every month. But every month I managed to get her the $325 to keep the locks from being changed. If I didn’t have the money, my parents or Neil would lend it to me, thank God. I was very lucky.

One night as I sat at my wooden desk eating curried goat and burning a dozen candles with the TV on really loud, lo and behold I came up with a song about what it was like living under June. It was a big hit with Neil. (I’m kidding about the curried goat, it was actually llama.)

I loved having my own place; even though it was crummy, it was mine. I had a poster tacked up in my tiny bathroom that said, “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds”—an Albert Einstein quote that became my mantra. I worked at the video store and played my guitar. That’s what I did day in and day out. I felt like a mushroom down there in the dark most days (minus the shit). There wasn’t much light that came in through the tiny windows. Some days I’d write three songs and then go a week without a single thought in my head. Still, I’d never worked so hard at anything. I was learning about passion and bliss and goals. I’d never had a goal in my life until that point. (I’d never even scored
a goal when I played hockey.) Meeting Neil changed everything. Not only did he open a door, he took the hinges right off the thing and threw it into the ditch. I felt like something big was happening.

My parents, in the meantime, kept buying me used furniture at yard sales. They hauled all of it into my apartment, piece by horrible piece. After I’d lived there a few months, my quaint little space started to look like some bizarre furniture emporium. Nothing matched. The last straw was when they brought in a fluorescent, psychedelic, puffy armchair they’d bought at an auction. My mom thought that it would look “cute” in my living room. My dad, of course, mumbled “Goddamn this goddamn chair, Jesus Christ!” as he carried it awkwardly down my little staircase. I was officially out of space.

I would meet Neil a few times a week and play him the songs I’d written. He’d have lots of notes and make suggestions about what I should change or work on. It was the first time I had ever had that kind of constructive input. We talked structure and content and how I could be economical with my lyrics. Most of my songs were simply too long. I had to learn to say what I wanted to say but preferably in under sixteen verses. Neil was hard on me sometimes, but he wasn’t trying to be mean; he was trying to get me a record deal.

At some point Neil decided it was time to reintroduce me to the live music scene. He got busy making calls and asking favours, determined to put together the best band he possibly could for me. He knew many musicians and had a firm grasp on how he wanted to put it all together. I was relieved to be working with someone who knew what he was doing. We would need to have extensive rehearsals because I was going to be playing some covers alongside my own songs, and Neil wanted the whole set to make sense. He definitely had a vision. He wanted it to be not just a regular bar gig, but a showcase where he could bring in important label people to hear me sing. He wanted
to have hype surrounding the show, so he was very particular about when and where he had me play. He thought that the best way to get my name out there would be to create the illusion of success. He wanted people to think that I was much bigger than I was. Neil was a clever man with a plan.