it’s improbable that he had the beard at fourteen, but he grew it at the first available opportunity and has owned it ever since. These days, that beard is somewhat out of hand. It ambles off his face and rests on his sweatshirt, which is an essential component of Michael’s preferred wardrobe. Burke—I usually refer to him as “Burkie” or “Mickie” or “Burkle,” as in “Mickle Burkle”—has often averred that he chose his course in life so that he could avoid jackets and neckties. His course in life revolved around computers. When we were boys, he took Computer Science very seriously. In those days, the subject involved punch cards and farm machinery. Burkie and another lad, Rob Dunn, lacking sufficient access to the actual mechanical works, would take turns writing programs (punching out chads on those damnable yellow cards) and then passing the stack of cards to the other, who would act as the computer and execute. Fairly geeky behaviour, it’s true, but both boys went on to find great fortune in the burgeoning field of personal computing. Some years ago, Burkie started a company that, as he puts it, “decided to concentrate its efforts on a little-known thing called the Internet.” Specifically, the company made and distributed firewalls. All of which is to say, Burkie soon had money, lots of it. He sold the company to become an arts entrepreneur; he started a record company. (This reminds me of the stories you hear about people who receive a huge amount of money through inheritance or some other windfall, and are then driven by guilt to throw or fritter it away.)
Mike Burke owns the company that released our second CD, Porkbelly Futures, so he will figure in this story in various ways. But for our current purposes, his significance is this. Mickle’s fortune has allowed him to indulge his long-lived passion for the Beatles. He has, in a lovely house in Victoria, British Columbia, a room devoted to record albums, reel-to-reel tapes, all manner of recorded rarities created by the Fab Four. I happened to be visiting not so long ago when Michael played me the most interesting thing, a recording of Paul McCartney teaching the other Beatles the chords to his new song, “Yesterday.”
“F major,” we hear Paul saying. “E minor, A seventh, D minor—” McCartney leaves off his rhythmic intoning momentarily to instruct, “Don’t watch my hand. The guitar’s tuned down, so I’m playing in G.”
The importance of this may well be lost on you, but me, I was stunned. I had spent much of my life grumbling about the fucking F chord that begins the song, and all this time McCartney wasn’t even playing one. He’d cunningly tuned his guitar down a whole tone, so that he could strum a Cowboy G. And that little term, “Cowboy G,” deserves a footnote.4
WELL, THEN, the Beatles arrived, and we started forming groups.
My brother Joel and I immediately came up with plans that involved a) pop music and b) total global domination of the sort demonstrated by the Liverpudlians. (Tony was never really attacked by the British Invasion. He seemed to know the chords to all the Beatles songs, but he persisted in his folksy ways, forming a bluegrass band called the Gangrene Boys. He hung around Toronto’s Yorkville area, the Village, and was sitting around someone’s kitchen table one day, drinking wine and smoking grass, etcetera, when Neil Young rushed in and announced that he was driving to California. “Anyone want to come?” Tony had academic ambitions in those days—he was assiduously studying Ezra Pound’s Cantos at the university—so he declined. There is a dent in his butt where he’s been kicking himself all these years since.) Anyway, Joel and I started a group. The instrumentation was somewhat fluid. We both hammered away on guitars, and sometimes I pounded on the piano. There was even a snare drum/cymbal combination that I’d received as a Christmas present, which seems to indicate that maybe my parents were hitting the liquor cabinet a little heavily that particular holiday season. But we needed more people for our group, which I had decided should be called PQ’s People.
Now, I understand that groups had existed before the British Invasion. Indeed, because of my brother Tony and his folkie ways, I was acquainted with all sorts of groups. The New Lost City Ramblers, as I’ve mentioned. The Kingston Trio. Bluegrass music was nothing but groups; there’s really no such thing as a bluegrass solo artist, and Bill Monroe had his Blue Grass Boys. But, perhaps because there was such a massive tsunami of publicity material, the Beatles impressed upon us that a group was made of distinct and disparate components, with the whole being much greater than the sum of its parts. There was quiet, introspective George, rebellious John, romantic Paul, and, um, whatever Ringo was. The implication was that none of these guys could survive on his own, that their individualism would otherwise not allow them to function in society. That concept appealed to those of us who felt we couldn’t function in society. When I was a lad, that included everyone except Vance Milligan and a couple of girls in grade eleven. So, in assembling a group, Joel and I had extra-musical considerations. It was all right that we were brothers—the Kinks had brothers, Ray and Dave Davies— and better than all right, since Joel was red- and curly-haired, and my hair was dark and straight. But we needed to be complemented by other distinct types.
My father had a colleague, Dr. Hill, and occasionally these two men would encounter one another, at the grocery or liquor store, or simply strolling along the sidewalk. Dr. Hill was a large man, tall and burly, as was my father. Sometimes both men had offspring with them. Joel and I would hide behind our dad and take suspicious peeks at the two kids who were hiding behind their dad. The older one was named Danny, the younger, Larry. When Joel and I formed PQ’s People, we remembered that Danny had some musical ability, that he was taking guitar lessons and had been heard to sing songs. So we auditioned him. We held the audition down in our basement one day when our fathers were upstairs drinking beer and being colleagues. We were all pretty short back then, and Danny climbed up on a table, employing it as a makeshift stage. He used a drumstick as a microphone—no, it didn’t work—and such was his eagerness to perform that he didn’t wait for Joel and me to pick up our instruments. Not that we knew the tune he sang, anyway, which was, I seem to recall, Sinatra’s “Summer Wind.” Danny crooned in a very Las Vegas fashion. He even had a repertoire of cheesy moves, which he threw at us without self-consciousness or irony. My brother and I didn’t know what to make of it. Danny would have been a good addition to PQ’s People; he was a good-looking kid and exotic to us, being as his mother was white and Dr. Hill black. But his style didn’t seem right, so we thanked him for his time and told him we’d be in touch.
WE CONTINUED searching for candidates, minuscule musicians willing to join PQ’s People. (By the way, Joel went on record early on, declaring the band name to be stupid. But I was his older, bigger brother, and while I certainly didn’t win every fight, I was willing to go to the mat on this one. So PQ’s People we remained.) We encountered a young lad named Conrad, and he had the most wondrous of all things, a set of drums. At least, he had access to a set of drums, as his stepfather was a drummer.
Conrad lived in the maisonettes a few blocks away. (Where I come from, the nascent suburbs of Toronto, Ontario, we didn’t really measure distances in “blocks.” We tended to mark destinations by what lay in the way: a street, a school, the ominous ravine.) Down in the basement of his townhouse was a music room. Can you believe that, a music room? It contained not just a set of drums, which sat in the centre of the room with proprietorial majesty, but the makings of several more sets. Tom-toms, snares, and kick drums were strewn about everywhere. Gleaming golden cymbals leaned against the wall. There were strange percussion instruments as well, African gourds, djembes, and congas. Joel and I would haul our equipment over there, and Conrad would climb aboard the stool behind the kit, and we would play “Satisfaction.” I will try to help you imagine the sound, because the Rolling Stones version is no doubt playing in your mind, and that is not the same as the rendition performed by PQ’s People. The cheapness of our amps and guitars is germane. Joel and I had both blown the paper cones of our speakers, so along with the music came much chittering distortion. My guitar was a Zenon, a solid body with very hard action. I don’t mean to keep getting technical on you, but “action” refers to the ease with which strings can be clamped down onto the fretboard. It required much concentration to wrestle with the Zenon’s strings, so the famous “Satisfaction” riff stumbled out as though it were wearing clumpy leg braces.5
Now,
