Those Guys.

“Those guys,” said h, “are the Kives boys, and they’re showing us the future!”

He poured himself a sliver of scotch and sat down in the beanbag chair. “Let me tell you about K-Tel.”

It turned out that Phil and Ray Kives, first cousins and owners of K-Tel, were based out of Winnipeg, h’s hometown. h had done some acting for them in some of the early Veg-O-Matic commercials. Check it out: that’s him, filmed from the turtleneck down, shoving carrots and potatoes into the blades in the julienne scenes. In ”68, he won a prize for this role—best digital performance—at the Winnies, a prairie version of the Gemini awards. In spite of an unfortunate, disfiguring accident—an experiment with the Veg-O-Matic and a hockey puck during a break in a commercial shoot—h’s hands are still recognized in public from time to time. His incognito look is a pair of snowmobile mittens.

The Veg-O-Matic sold like hot-cakes, and K-Tel, known in the business as an “As Seen On TV” company, thrived. By the mid-60′s, Phil had made a fortune selling a variety of iconic housewares—the Teflon Non-Stick Frypan, the Feather-Touch Knife, the Miracle Brush (and later, branching into jewelry and applied psychology, the Mood Ring). Ray came on board in ’67, when they expanded into the music market.

“The point is,” said h, “it doesn’t matter to them what they sell. Frypans, knives, jewelry, records—widget upon widget upon widget. People want the stuff they see in the magic box,” he said, waving his glass at The Littlest Hobo loping across the TV screen.

But it did—does—matter to us. Rock n’ roll used to be dangerous. In the 50′s, Ozzie and Harri-ites were afraid that Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Elvis, among others, would contaminate their teenagers with evil sexual urges associated, for some reason, with black culture. When it comes to American racism, the civil war ended nothing, man. In the sixties, it was a fear of sex, drugs and insubordinate ideas that struck fear into the heart of the establishment until they—the powers that be—got smart.

“Therein lies the genius of the Kives boys,” said h. “They’re taking our music—in its cheesiest form–and peddling it to the middle class.” He clamped the Ray-Bans back over his eyes and rattled the ice in his glass. “Hail hail rock n’ roll—it’s the new soundtrack to capitalism, baby!”

Then and Now.

Why is instrumental pop music passe?

Some would say that music itself—real music with teeth, soul, and a beating heart—has largely disappeared from the airwaves and has been replaced by corporate shlock, or as our guitarist Dan says, “Music for people who don’t like music.”

Corporate shlock? By that I mean music conceived, created, manufactured, and sold by committee, like deodorant, canned spaghetti, and underwear. There has always been shlock in the music business—How Much is that Doggie in the Window? comes to mind—-but it didn’t rule the glory days of rock ‘n roll.

h saw it all coming way back then in the early 70′s. We were hibernating at Jak’s gerbil ranch up on Baffin Island, licking our wounds after the Anne of Plutonia scandal had driven us out of Toronto. These were dark days for Rubbaboo. It was the dawn of political correctness, and we’d been accused of racism for celebrating the existence of Godzilla in Japanese pop culture. We were holed up in a Quonset hut on the edge of Frobisher’s Bay (now called Iqaluit), grinding through the endless arctic night eating blubber-ka-bobs, sipping single-malt, and watching snowy re-runs of The Littlest Hobo on CBC. One evening (or was it daytime?) during a commercial break, a revolving turntable appeared on-screen bathed in an eerie wash of cherry-red light and accompanied by a hyperactive voice-over:

“New—from K-Tel Records: 22 Explosive Hits! 22 Original Stars!”

The announcer then recited a list of tunes, each accompanied by a 3-second sample of the track while an out-of-sync list of song titles scrolled down the screen:

“Olivia Newton-John!” —-”If not for you…”

“The great Sammy Davis Jr.!” —”Oh, the Candyman can, ’cause he mixes it with love…”

“Fortune!” —”Here comes that rainy day feelin’ again…”

“Hot Butter’s ‘Popcorn!’ and many more—22 original stars on one great stereo album—-only $3.99!”

“That voice—the announcer—sounds familiar.” said Bob.

“Is that the Miracle Brush guy?” said Jak. “Sellin’ records?”

“Pure evil genius!” said Dan.

h pushed a TV table aside and stood up from his bean bag chair, as if in a trance. He raised his Ray-Bans onto the brim of his toque. “Wait a minute!” he said. “I know those guys!”

Dare to be Square.

Instrumental bands seem to be unfashionable these days. Not that they’ve ever given any vocal band a serious run for its money when it comes to prolonged, multi-hit success on the charts, but in earlier times, it was possible for instrumental groups to scratch and claw their way into the top 40. All of these artists had hit records in the 60′s:

-Duane Eddy (Peter Gunn)

-The Ventures (Hawaii 5-O)

-The Surfaris (Wipe Out)

-Floyd Cramer (San Antonio Rose)

-The Mar-Keys (Last Night)

-The Bar-Kays (Soul Finger)

-The Champs (Tequila)

-Mason Williams (Classical Gas)

-Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass (The Lonely Bull)

-Cannonball Adderly (Mercy Mercy Mercy)

-Ramsey Lewis (The In Crowd)

-Booker T. & the MG’s (Green Onions, Time is Tight, Hang ‘Em High—masterpieces of the genre, in this writer’s opinion).

There have been others since the 60′s, but they are few and far between. Those of us in contemporary bands sans voix—the dinosaurs of pop music—dare to be square, in the eyes and ears of today’s public.

What happened between then and now?

Uncle Donny.

“I’m digging those crazy tunes, man!” says Uncle Donny, dancing around the rec-room to the shifting time signatures of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. He sets the glass of viscous green liqueur down on a TV table and parks his cigarette in an ashtray, moving ritualistically, like an Olympian preparing to run the hundred-yard dash. Then he struggles out of his double-breasted blazer and hops onto the Twister mat with the girls. “Let the Games begin!” he says.

I twirl the spinner once and the girls immediately drop to the floor, feigning defeat. Uncle Donny is harmless, but they wouldn’t be caught dead getting tangled up with an old guy. They tumble off the mat and stand up.

“Go Uncle Donny!” says one, rolling her eyes. “Show us how it’s done!”

“Yeah, show us, Uncle Donny!”

“Spin that thing!” he says, and I obey, dialing up a series of commands for Donny to execute. Within minutes, he’s doing a sloppy version of The Bridge, a yoga pose in which hands and feet support an arced torso facing skyward. Uncle Donny’s long comb-over hangs down like a skirt, revealing his mutton-chop sideburns in their full glory. He turns red, huffing and puffing, and finally drops to the floor when commanded to cross his feet.

“You’re a champ, Uncle Donny,” I say, halfheartedly.

“I’m a little out of shape—but it’s a boss game!” he says. There’s an awkward silence as he struggles to his feet and teeters across the room to retrieve his Creme de Menthe and cigarette.

“Time to get up and party down with the parental units!” he says. “Peace, dudes.” He shuffles up the stairs and out of sight. We’re free again, but we’re embarrassed for him, and maybe a little cheesed off at him. Why does an old relic need our approval?

Dear Uncle Donny and CBC radio: Act your age—dare to be square.

Institutions.

What’s with CBC radio?

Canada’s public broadcaster is loved by some, hated by others, and ignored by many. I liked the venerable old institution when it was given the money and freedom to do what it wanted, with little regard for what was cool. In these leaner, meaner times, though, it seems like it’s bending over backwards to provide pop-culture programming—dumb contests, hyperactive promotional spots, and “new” music that too often sounds derivative and amateurish. Rather than following its own nose, the CBC now wants to be hip with the kids, just like your Uncle Donny did back in the 60′s.

Uncle Donny was that familiar but distant relative, the 40 year-old bachelor “baby” of the family who showed up at the house for special occasions. Picture this: It’s Thanksgiving, and you’ve just inhaled the traditional turkey dinner, the one your mom spent hours labouring over, in less than ten minutes. The teenagers—you, your siblings, cousins, assorted girl- and boyfriends—pile down to the rec-room, mainly to get away from the adults, who are lingering over dessert, chain-smoking, and getting loaded on Baby Duck and after-dinner liqueurs. This is before the days of child-centred households, and the ageist caste system suits everyone just fine. The adults can “unwind” upstairs while the kids head to the basement to “make their own fun”.

Downstairs, you put Sergeant Pepper on the hi-fi and spread the plastic Twister sheet out on the shag carpet. Someone cracks open a few beers from your dad’s 2-4 of Canadian hidden under the table saw in his workshop. Another lights up a Player’s smuggled from her mom’s purse. Let the real party begin! Except for the faint sounds of laughter and coughing from upstairs, you’re on your own, kids!

A couple of your cousins—girls in their mid-teens, a few years older than you—jump onto the Twister mat, contorting themselves into pretzels at the command of the spinner, which is under your control. You notice that the girls have “developed” considerably since last Thanksgiving. Your 13 year-old male antennae for all things sexual is entangled with Old Testament Guilt, the certain knowledge that there is a special place in hell reserved for pre-verts like you who even look at their female cousins in “that way”. You can’t stop looking, though, in the spirit of scientific observation.

The door at the top of the stairs opens. It’s Uncle Donny, with a smoke dangling from his mouth and a tumbler of Creme de Menthe in hand. He takes in the game. “Groovy!” he says, weaving his way down the steps. “Can I play?” We all avert our eyes until someone finally mumbles, “Sure, Uncle Donny.”

Not Aware.

Anne of Plutonia was running tickety-boo until the college kids showed up. They were a group of U of T psychology graduate students out for a night of slumming, on academic safari to observe abnormal (i.e. non-middle class) behaviour in its natural environment. The Broadview Tavern was their first stop.

At first, they seemed to dig the show, clapping politely between sips from their Frescas, until Kickin’ Bob sang his goodbye song to Anne:

Farewell, queen of the bright red mud,

Fair orphan from a fair, fair land.

Too fair, too delicate, my little spud,

For Godzilla, monster from Japan.

Again, Dan’s sensitive lyricism completely captured the drama of the moment. (Students of poetry: note the way tension is built through repetition of the homonyms “fare-” and “fair”—it becomes almost too much for the listener to bear, hearing the bear of a monster bare his disappointed soul so eloquently.)

That’s when things changed. The college kids, all WASPs, got it in their noggins that we were depicting all Japanese people as monsters. Maybe we were just simple country boys, but this was a leap of logic that escaped us. When it came to such nuances, we were just not aware, I guess. The academics were suddenly scandalized on behalf of all Japanese people, past, present, and future. You’d have thought they’d stumbled upon a KKK midnight bar-b-que in Bumcheek, Alabama, for all their horrified sanctimonious righteousness. The next day, they ran to the media with the news that racism was alive and kicking at the Broadview Tavern, and the dirty diaper hit the fan. There was no time to talk sense into them or the press, and h certainly did not need another scandal—there was still gerbil blood on his hands from the Trudeau fiasco. Anne of Plutonia, now deemed offensive, closed, and cast and crew made a quick getaway to Jak’s ranch on Baffin Island.

Postscript: In 2007, Kickin’ Bob toured Japan to great acclaim with a revival of Anne of Plutonia. He is affectionately known these days as “Hoser Godzilla-san” by Japanese audiences. Political correctness, of course, grew from its humble beginnings in academia to become a major filter for communication around the free world, a brave new mode of public discourse ruled by fear of litigation, especially within our government institutions.

Deemed Offensive.

The Broadview Tavern proudly presents:

ANNE OF PLUTONIA: A SCIENCE-FICTION ROCK OPERA

Written and directed by h

Starring:

Tiffany Delmonico as Anne of Green Gables (and later, Plutonia)

Bronislav Chugunov as Xebo, Anne’s Plutonian husband

…and featuring

Rudolph Schnitzler as Godzilla

Music composed and performed by Rubbaboo

(text from Anne of Plutonia playbill, circa 1972)

We couldn’t believe our luck, man. After shoe-horning the Godzilla character into the story at the last minute, h called in a favour from a very special dude: Kickin’ Bob Rogers, PEI’s iconic singer-songwriter and Canadian uber-patriot, had just finished a month-long run at the Horseshoe Tavern, and h convinced him to join us in an incognito appearance as Godzilla in our production. Kickin’ Bob (billed as “Rudolph Schnitzler”) was as good a thespian as he was a singer. What a coup!

As a teenager growing up in Winnipeg, h had stumbled upon Kickin’ Bob performing on one of his many cross-country tours, and the two struck up an immediate friendship. They came from different planets, but these two minds orbited around the same creative sun. h went on to design several of K.B.’s album covers* for Bootlick Records, setting a new standard for the industry in those early days of Cancon. There wasn’t much bread around then, so the work for Bob was mostly pro bono. By the seventies, Kickin’ Bob was a big-name act, so it was time to return the favour, and he was glad to oblige.

By our second week of performances, locals were lined up around the block to see Anne of Plutonia. This wasn’t the fashionable, arty, black irony-clad Queen Street West crowd, man. We were on the other side of the Yonge Street tracks. Our audiences were the great unwashed, the urban orphans deemed offensive by polite society, and they came out in droves to cheer on local heroes Tiffany Delmonico, Broadview Tavern exotic dancer extraordinaire, and Bronislav Chugunov, the fiery Russian bouncer. Nobody twigged to the fact that “Rudolph Schnitzler”, in his scaly, towering Godzilla costume, was really Kickin’ Bob on stilts, and that was cool with us. h, still in exile after the Trudeau gerbil-suit photo scandal, was basking in the private glory of having created and staged an underground rock opera right beneath the schnozzes of the Toronto media. In other words man, the squares were not aware.

*My personal favourite: the”potato” cover from the Terry the Tater and Other Kickin’ Bob Favourites album. Who knew that a photo of raw potatoes could be sexy? When it came to vegetable album art, h had broken new soil, surpassing the previous standard set by Booker T. and the M.G.’s Green Onions LP cover in 1962.

Stay tuned.

You may recall, dear reader, that the story of Anne of Plutonia begins on Green Gables farm in PEI. Late one evening, the adopted orphan finds herself roaming the potato fields, singing a song to the stars, a wistful ditty called So Sad I Almost Forgot to Smile, in which she ponders her family roots.

In h’s last-minute rewrite, Godzilla enters at this moment, staggering out of the ocean, roaring and swatting trees to the ground with his gargantuan claws. Anne screams and dives for cover under a potato wagon, but to no avail. The sea creature bar-b-ques the wagon with his fiery breath and advances upon Anne, who summons the courage to stand up to the monster, shouting, “That’s no way to introduce yourself to a defenseless orphan!”

At the sound of the word “orphan”, Godzilla stops in his tracks and begins to weep copiously. In a flurry of Jeopardy-like charades, Anne discerns that the speechless monster too was abandoned by his parents as a baby. She climbs up into the big guy’s lap to comfort him, and of course he falls for her immediately, leading Anne to burst into song again:

Your halitosis and your jagged teeth

don’t hide the heart that hangs from your sleeve. 

I’d rock you in my arms if I could—

Oh baby, baby, baby, you’re misunderstood.

                            —Song to Godzilla

Once again, Dan had nailed the lyrics with just the right sentiment. On opening night, our audience—Broadview House regulars, the orphans of society—were crying into their glasses of Labatt’s 50 by the end of the song, and hey man, this was only the first act.

To continue: The crazy kids soon realize that though their two hearts beat as one, they can never be a couple. She’s a farmgirl and he’s an ocean-dwelling monster. She’s 5’4″ and he’s four stories tall. She’s a minor and he’s pushing sixty, for heaven’s sake. You get the picture. The Green Acres scenario of opposites in love simply will not work, and they both realize it. Anne, unaware that a Plutonian spaceship is at that moment hovering above them, waves goodbye to Godzilla as he lurches back into the sea. The spaceship lands and Anne’s life changes forever. You’ve heard the rest.

We didn’t know it that first night, but we had a hit on our hands. We had stayed tuned to the muse, man, and it worked. The community of Queen St. down-and-outers loved us, and they turned out in droves over the next month of performances, but it was a group of smarty-pants college kids, a cabal of educated fools out for a night of slumming, who later brought Anne of Plutonia to its knees. Who knew that our masterpiece could be deemed offensive?

Political Correctness.

In the final preparations for Anne of Plutonia, h outdid himself. When he gets involved with a project, h goes way deep. He’ll dive in the ocean and wrestle a sea monster if it means he can take things to a weirder place.

“Check this out, man,” he said one morning at the Tower restaurant on Dundas Street. He lifted his Ray-Bans and read from the Globe & Mail.

“Anne of Green Gables, Japan’s latest superstar, is attracting thousands of tourists from the land of the rising sun to Prince Edward Island, home of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved fictional character.” 

He snapped his fingers and bobbed his head beatnik-style. The Ray-Bans fell back down onto his nose. “Crazy, man, crazy!‘ he said. “We gotta do something with this.”

I looked up from my filmy eggs. “Do something? The show opens next week. We’ve got lots to do already.”

“It’s never too late for a little re-write,” said h. “A small modification.” He upended a salt shaker over his open-face turkey sandwich. “A little tweaking in the service of art and good taste.”

h was a huge fan of Japanese sci-fi movies, and he had decided on the spot to include a nod to the Japanese in our production. You see, h doesn’t always feel the need to separate ideas like socks in a drawer. For him, just about anything is one degree of separation from anything else, and if it isn’t, he’ll knock down any barriers between the two. h loved Godzilla (Japan’s cinematic metaphor for nuclear weapons and the United States) as much as he adored Montgomery’s Anne, and in his brain it made perfect sense to bring the two icons together. By the end of the day, Godzilla was a major character—a major love interest, no less—in Anne of Plutonia.

None of this explains how the cloud of political correctness came to hover over our production. For that, my friends, you’ll have to stay tuned.

Anne of Plutonia.

The first three weeks of casting and rehearsals for Anne of Plutonia were a flurry of activity, and fortunately, there was no shortage of on-site talent to choose from. Tiffany Delmonico, an exotic dancer beloved by Broadview House audiences, auditioned for and won the lead part of Anne. Bronislav Chugunov, the house bouncer, was engaged to play Anne’s Plutonian husband Xebo. Bronislav, a strapping young Russian immigrant with a skunk-like streak of premature gray bisecting his oily pompadour, could be tempermental and unpredictable, but we figured his thick accent would lend a mysterious, alien air to the role. Other, smaller parts—potato and mingo farmers, mainly—were snapped up by elderly rubes and rubettes, who brought an authentic vaudeville sensibility to the production—I’m talkin’ about their generation, man.

Dan and I barricaded ourselves in a room above the bar and wrote songs for the show—everything from the sultry “Peel Me a Potato” to the touching “So Sad I Almost Forgot to Smile” (a moment in the story when Anne laments the plight of being an orphan). When it came to writing wholesome lyrics, Dan was the man. He could pull off sentimental ditties like tissues from a toilet paper roll. His anthemic “Let’s Be Happy We’re So Happy”, which left even the most hardened audiences with tears rolling down their legs, is still in major Walmart muzak rotation.

h and Jak collaborated on all things visual. Jak, the begrudging owner of over a thousand pelts from a failed gerbil ranching operation, outfitted the Plutonians in fur from head to toe. It was tasteful, it was exotic, and it had that neanderthalogical-extraterrestrial thing we were going for in the outer space scenes. h focused on set design, which was an opportunity for him to pay homage to Ed Wood, his favourite film director. Wood was a master in creating economical but convincing sci-fi scenery and props (I still shudder when I see those eerie pie-plate flying saucers suspended on strings in Plan Nine from Outer Space). For our production, h used industrial-sized rolls of tinfoil to giftwrap the stage and walls of the Broadview House, and employed more than a few family-sized lasagna pans as space ships dangling from the tin ceiling. It was a voyage to deep dish space, dudes.

Bob was our maestro, our Herbert Von Karajan, our Herr Direktor, the man responsible for guiding instruments (Rubbaboo) and voices together along one glorious musical trajectory. He had the mind, the monkey suit, and the Teutonic severity to do the job.

We all had what we needed, man, but there was one thing we were not prepared for, something that in the 1970′s was in its infancy: political correctness.