Daron's Guitar Chronicles Vol 5

328 WATERFRONT

WATERFRONT

I finally got to see some Canadian money that day when a bunch of us went wandering to find some lunch. Canadian money was colorful. Montreal felt much more like we were in a different country than Toronto had. Maybe it was all the French. I think some people had been there before and led us through the Montreal Metro to a historic section of town.

The venue itself was historic in other ways. This was, to hear the security guards who were shooting the breeze with Antonio, the equivalent of Yankee Stadium for Canada. Their winningest hockey team had won lots of their championships here. Also, a bunch of live albums were recorded here. That perked my ears up because it probably meant good acoustics, which you don't always get in a hockey rink. Rush did a live album there, and so did Queen. And Bowie broadcast a concert from there a few years before on worldwide radio.

Huh.

We spent the rest of the afternoon doing press, some of it with translators, which was weird, but necessary, I guess. Most of that happened at the venue, where we were setting up, though the show wasn't until the next night. No hotel this time, we stayed overnight in the buses at a park by a lake.

That meant a bunch of us hung around up there instead of going into the city that night. We had a kind of tailgate party between the two band buses, where we set up a little hibachi grill and sat around playing guitars and mandolins and singing songs with the other bands and the crew, and that was probably the best party we had the entire tour. The stars came out, and it was great weather. It had hit maybe just eighty that afternoon and was maybe seventy that night. In Canadian terms that was like 27 and 22 degrees, I think?

I sang a song with Ziggy, where I just played a riff I had been working on, and he sang something out of his inventory of stuff he was working on, and pretty much a whole song came out of the jam. But most of what we did was just folk songs and Beatles songs and stuff that people could jam on together. Everybody seemed as relaxed as I was. We went through a couple of bottles of wine but no one was really motivated to go get more.

At one point I took a break to rest my hand, but other people kept singing, and I went to the edge of the water and threw rocks in. Marty had the headlights of the bus on, pointed across the flat lake. Don't ask me why throwing rocks was so satisfying. I skipped some of them, but I wasn't really trying hard to. Just winging them into the water was enough.

Bart came over after a while and then we took turns throwing rocks. It sounds stupid, but at the time it felt really good.

Some time after that I was sitting on a log with Louis.

"You're such good kids," he said.

"What brought that on?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"That didn't sound like nothing."

"Well, okay, I was thinking you're so young but you handle yourselves so professionally. That's not true of every touring musician, you know."

I wondered if maybe he hadn't heard about how Ziggy and I had literally run away from a promo party. "I just want to do it right," I said.

"Well, you're doing something right. Maybe more bands will be like you, too. I see it all around. I mean, look at pro athletes."

"Athletes?"

"Yeah, come on, in the fifties and sixties, guys were always getting tossed in jail for shenanigans and they had curfews on the teams and you know, taking a baseball team on the road was worse than taking a group of delinquent teenagers. But now that they're making millions of dollars, they take better care of themselves. They don't have as many alcoholics."