Featherless Bipeds
richard scarsbrook
© Richard Scarsbrook, 2006
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Accesss Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Scarsbrook, Richard
Featherless Bipeds / Richard Scarsbrook.
ISBN-10 1-897235-05-4
ISBN-13 978-1-897235-05-8
I. Title.
PS8587.C396F42 2006 Â Â Â C813'.54 Â Â Â C2006-900503-6
Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie
Typeset by Thistledown Press
Thistledown Press Ltd.
118 - 20th Street West
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6
www.thistledownpress.com
Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its publishing program.
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank Susan Musgrave for her wise and intelligent suggestions while editing this book; Melanie Fogel at
Storyteller: Canada's Short Story Magazine
, who published short story versions of “Skin”, “Rule Number One” and “What's Inside”; and Camilla Gibb who chose “Lost and Found” to be published in
Descant
(in a significantly different form). And, to all of the people who read
Cheeseburger Subversive
, attended my readings, classes, and other appearances, and kept asking me, “What happens to Dak and Zoe?” â thanks for making me want to know, too.
CONTENTS
Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting
The Featherless Bipeds Discography
For The Nerve, The Know, Guilt Trip, and other bands unnamed
For Twelve Tribes, Easy Access, Disorderly Conduct
and The Knight Service, too,
For the Queen E II and Crestwood Prep Rock Bands,
For the legions of karaoke crooners and screamers,
For garage and basement and bar bands all,
The Featherless Bipeds salute you.
T
he tires of the van roar over the gravel road beneath us, churning up dust like the vapour trail of a heaven-bound rocket, and I get that rumble in the centre of my chest yet again: the thunder of love. I love rock ân' roll. I've got to play it, sing it, write it. I've got no choice about it. Music is my heartbeat and breathing; it's got to happen for me to stay alive.
Tristan, the band's documentary filmmaker, aims his video camera at me. The radio thumps a crunchy, guitar-driven anthem. I raise my fist in the air.
“I love rock ân' roll!” I cheer.
“Me too!” Akim says to Tristan's camera.
Tristan aims the camera at his own face, and says, “Me three!”
Before a gig, even at a place you've played a dozen times before, there's this feeling unlike any other. It's a mixture of anticipation and dread, nervousness and calm, butterflies and iron balls. You know you've got the goods, you know you're capable of knocking 'em all on their asses, but will you? Will they
let
you knock 'em dead, or will they put up a fight? Will they want to hear country music? Will they want to hear thrash metal? Or will they want to hear something that you actually want to play? Will their ears and minds be tuned to the same frequency as yours? Will their eyes be on your hands as you coax the sounds out of your instruments, or will their eyes be on your amplifiers and guitars, which they will later try to steal? Will they want to clap and cheer, or boo and throw bottles?
Playing a new place is wandering into an unknown. It's either adventure, or just
survival
. Playing a place you've played before, though, can make you even more nervous. Will we be as good as we were the last time? Will we meet the expectations we've set up? Are we in at this place for the long haul, or are we just a one-hit wonder? The adrenaline churns inside us all. We've done this a hundred times before, but the feeling never goes away.
Tristan is sitting sideways in the passenger seat, with one foot up on the van's dashboard, his left hand surfing the rushing wind outside the open window. His video camera is stowed away now, and he's giving a rapid-fire monologue about the strengths and weaknesses of different bass guitars (he prefers the
feel
of the wider neck on the Fender Precision Bass, but the Jazz Bass, with its twin pickups, has more
sound versatility
. . . ).
Akim is in the driver's seat, nodding along with Tristan's commentary, saying little as usual. He can already feel the guitar strings bending under his thick, strong fingers, cooing and wailing and crying at his touch. Although his clamped-jaw composure conceals it, Akim's insides churn with adrenaline, too.
Before we hit the big time, before it all fell apart, when we were nineteen-year-olds playing small-town bars for the first time, we would wedge a couple of original tunes in between the familiar standards. And, once in a while someone would pay attention, which would eventually lead him to me. I'm Dak Sifter. I play the drums, I sing a little, and I write the lyrics for the songs.
Now, I know it would sound a lot cooler, a lot more rock ân' roll, if I said that the people who want to know more about my lyrics are all wild, beautiful young women who throw their panties onstage at the slightest provocation, but this is seldom the case. Mostly, the people who want to know about the lyrics are sincere, clear-eyed young guys who
also
want to be rock ân' roll songwriters. They believe that playing in a rock band and writing rock songs will make them more attractive to the young women who they watch longingly from the sidelines, the girls who shake and bounce and gyrate on the dance floor. They think that writing rock songs will entice the girls to shake and bounce and gyrate
for them
.
“So, Dak,” one of these young, wannabe-rock stars might say (they always seem to call me by my first name â the “brotherhood of musicians,” I suppose), “that last original tune you guys played kicked ass! Where did you get the ideas for the lyrics, man?”
“I don't like to talk about where I get the ideas for my songs,” is my standard-issue reply. “I want people to bring their own experiences to the song, so that it means something to
them
.”
This, of course, is bullshit. The truth is, I'm not entirely sure where the words come from. They come from experience, they come from imagination. They come from outside, they come from inside. They come from everywhere, they come from nowhere. They just come.
And the words are coming right now, so I'm hunched over my knees, scribbling frantically on the back cover of an outdated Ontario road map with a stub of pencil I found beneath the driver's seat of the van. Not so long ago, I wrote what became one of our biggest radio hits â a song called “Little Spaces” â on the back of a Tim Horton's bagel bag while bouncing along in our Econoline van to a gig in some hick town in the middle of nowhere. You have to grab hold of the words whenever they come.
This is the way it usually happens. A bunch of seemingly disconnected things â images, words, questions, ideas, feelings of varying temperature â all these things are carried in by an outside current, they float around for a while on the surface of my tide-pool mind, then they suddenly sink. And, at the precise moment they disappear, for that tiny, split second, I see the connections. For only a moment, the words and images and feelings come together to form a fuzzy, out-of-focus meaning, and I've got to write the words down before it all sinks beneath the surface.
Usually I'm too late â I wind up with nothing more than a crumpled piece of paper and a feeling of loss. But sometimes something sticks, and a new song is born. This is what I've got so far:
A good beer (or two)
a patio, a porch
a cottage dock
or anywhere else you can hear yourself breathing
A clubhouse sandwich
