The Girl With Stars In Her Eyes

I was hired by the brokerage firm Adanac Customs Brokers to run documents to the trucking terminals, the airport, the docks and to various businesses around town in a little VW Rabbit.

A part of the day which I spent in the office was devoted to menial office tasks such as filing, opening mail and a little basic paperwork which, although I worked at Adanac for 5 years, I can’t exactly remember the nature of.

This memory lapse on my part reminds me that the job served basically to provide me with an income and to take my mind off the concerns of my musical life which had confounded me for so long.  To this day I dream of being back at Adanac up to my ears in my assigned tasks, somehow preserved from my struggle as an artist and its demands. Adanac is Canada spelled backwards and it seemed to me, as it still does in my dreams, that I had returned to my native land, the land of my school days where progress was a straight line ahead, passing grades, following orders and ultimately, getting a good paying job.

Years ago, when I had started out to follow the path of my musical dreams and left the solid world of work and career that school had been preparing me for,  I left Canada too, metaphorically speaking and entered a much larger country, not surrounded by national boundaries, the country of the artist.  But in those days, I could not have defined it that way. 

In fact,  I may still have been headed for that pie-in-the-sky of respectability in my chosen career.  Not that it isn’t possible for some, as evidenced by Neil Young’s and other musicians’ acceptance into the Order of Canada.  But for the many struggling artists, there will be no such time of acceptance and praise.  To the many, the simple success of continuing to follow their own visions despite the pressure of society to conform is the only reward they ever get.

There is no doubt that finally receiving a paycheck on a regular basis gave me a confidence boost.  That is, I once again became a respectable Canadian citizen who paid taxes like everyone else.  It eased my mind from the constantly nagging worry about where the next rent cheque was going to come from.  But on a deeper level, my inner crisis as an artist was only postponed.

I continued to keep a journal, write songs and think of myself as an artist but I did not try to perform.  My heart wasn’t in it. Instead I marked time, did my duty, meditated all the while and prayed for some kind of divine intervention that would show me my path.

After a while I was evicted from my little artist’s pad on Trafalgar, as the house was being sold and the new owner wanted to occupy my suite.  Through one of the girls in the Adanac office,  I found a much more “upwardly mobile” apartment on the 16th floor of a tower at 1111 Beach Avenue in the West End of downtown Vancouver.

My friend Bruno helped me move.  I was given a bunch of free furniture and dishes by the caretaker, who had been stuck with the task of removing them from the apartment of someone who left without taking them.  Suddenly, I found myself paying double the rent and living the hectic life of an urban worker, hiking every morning across the Burrard Street bridge to my job and wondering how much more this would change my life.

The answer to this is that my life had already changed but I didn’t realize it yet.

Sue was still in and out of my life.  She would show up, unannounced, once every few months and my hopes of a relationship would briefly resurface only to be dashed by her departure.  But shortly before moving to my new apartment, in the summer of ‘79,  I had gone to the Ridge Theater to see “The Buddy Holly Story” for the second time and stopped for a bite at the Mediterranean Cafe next door.

A young woman serving me expressed an interest in the I Ching hexagrams scattered across the pages of my journal, which was open on the table.  We talked and exchanged addresses and a few weeks later met for breakfast.

One of the things she told me was that she was having difficulty holding her job as a waitress because while she was working,  sometimes all she could see around her were stars and when that happened she couldn’t think or concentrate.  Indeed, looking into her deep, brown, wide eyes I could well imagine that what she saw out of them was far different from what others saw.

We met several times after this at my place on Trafalgar and then I didn’t see her for awhile until just before I moved.  Since I didn’t give anyone at the house my forwarding address, had she not shown up at that moment, we might never have met again.  But she did reappear a day before my move and in the New Year she came to live with me.

Even then, I thought I was simply helping her with a temporary place to stay.  But in June of that year we married.

Karen tells me that even as a young girl she knew she would marry a singer.  But I wasn’t much of a singer in those days although I played regularly at home and my dream of success as a musician remained undiminished.

I was soon offered a chance to better my lot by taking the Customs Brokers training course and so I signed on for it.  This would mean that I could eventually move into the office as a career broker.  But I had only studied the course material for a week or so when that part of my mind that is needed to concentrate on work that doesn’t particularly interest me, began to close up.

I knew then that no matter how hard I tried I would never be able to persist or succeed in this course. It was exactly the same kind of labor I’d fled from years ago when I hit the road with a rock and roll band.

However, there was a bright hope on Karen’s horizon, for an uncle had left her a modestly large inheritance which she was now in court contesting against his son, who claimed the inheritance to be rightfully his.  By the time our daughter Shannon (who we now call by her second given name, Chaya) was born in the spring of ‘81,  Karen had won a large amount of the settlement, enough to buy us a house outright. From this new base, in the Marpole district of South Vancouver, we tried to conduct our lives as usual.

Something was changing, though.  We were not completely happy just existing in this way.  I was taking the bus to work every day but we both felt a growing unrest, a kind of aimlessness in living our lives in this way.

Karen became pregnant again and in the early spring of ‘83 we took a trip to Seattle, for the Northwest Folklife Festival.  I had reconnected with my friend Chris Lunn from my Palo Alto days via my old friend Jim Luft (now Jim Page) who we’d run into at the ‘82 Vancouver Folk Music Festival and he’d invited me to come down and perform at the Victory Music Review’s open stage there.

While there, we also looked up Paul Reps who owned a house in Seattle and found him staying at the University Towers hotel.  Karen was very impressed by Reps (who wouldn’t be) and we wound up organizing a series of “play shops” (as opposed to workshops…a bit of Reps wordplay) for him at UBC in the fall of that year.

That summer I also started to play in public again, doing my first solo concert in years at the locally prestigious Soft Rock Cafe.  I was hired by Patti Fiedler who used to run the Mousehole in Yorkville where I had studied other singers in the late ’60’s while learning to play guitar. She and her husband Bernie also owned the famous Riverboat coffee house in Toronto. Attendance wise, my Soft Rock gig was a disaster, but it opened up the door to my musical career again.

Karen funded a cassette tape which was recorded in a small studio in West Vancouver, with the help of Marty Hasselbach a recording engineer we’d met at St. Paul’s Hospital during Karen’s pregnancy.  And so I produced “Border Crossings,” my first album of original songs.

Thanks to Herb Gilbert a professor of Fine Arts at UBC and long time Reps admirer, who was to become a close friend over the years, we found a space at UBC for Reps and during the time of his playshops in September of that year, our second daughter Nika was born.

I also contracted my second bout of pneumonia. This time it was in both lungs and I chose a natural fast rather than a medical cure. My employers advised me that I would probably kill myself doing this and since they couldn’t afford to risk waiting, they fired me.

This was an eleven-day fast, the longest by far I had ever tried, although I had tried a few short fasts over the years.  A natural hygienist by the name of Helen Ritchie helped me through it and I needed her help too, when mid-way through the fast my whole body broke out into hives.  It turned out this was a natural occurrence when the body is so full of long suppressed toxins. By the time the fast was ended I looked like a skeleton but the pneumonia had broken.

For the first time in 5 years I found myself with my own time on my hands and so I ran an ad and began teaching guitar lessons in the front room of the house, which Karen had converted into a study.

In the meantime Marty delivered my completed album to our front door and I began the learning process of trying to market it myself.  Actually, “market” is a pretty sophisticated word.  What I tried to do, on no budget at all, was simply to knock on doors and interest people in it.

I did mail quite a few copies away to recognized musicians and people in the business.  However, without the formality of first sending query letters and mailing tapes to addresses that may or may not have been current, I received virtually no feedback.  The major record companies’ business offices in town took copies of my tape and forwarded them and I received my first complete set of rejection letters, none of which had much of anything good to say about my record, except for one executive somewhere in the eastern U.S. who praised “Master Five Willows” and suggested I “write more like that one“!

Chris Cairo of Co-op Radio played my tape and even got a bit of good listener feedback but the feeling was one of throwing a pebble far out into the ocean and barely being able to hear the splash!  Karen was as disappointed as I was if not more so because I think that we both felt that my album would go further and make a big difference for us.

My unemployment insurance was paying the bills but the house began showing signs of wear and tear, most noticeably a major leak in the kitchen roof.  All of our money was tied up in the house and we made a decision, one Karen says she still regrets at times, to sell the house and move to Vancouver Island.

Jeevan, my friend and erstwhile employer with Karmsar from Vancouver Island, who helped us move, offered to reinvest the money for us and for a while Karen was tempted by his offer but this would once again mean losing control of the money.

We found a little one bedroom cottage in a trailer park, overlooking Shawnigan Lake and there we spent the next year.  I began doing benefit concerts in hospitals and rest homes in Victoria and the occasional restaurant gig.  I also connected with the Cowichan Folk Guild, still in it’s primary stages and played the very first Islands Folk Festival at Providence farm.

My studio was a tiny loft above the house accessible by climbing a step ladder through a trap door in the ceiling and there I wrote songs, strategized my future and looked out over the beautiful ambiance of the lake.

The summer was a chaos of tourists and vacationers but the winter was solitary and healing for us.  A local island musician named Gordon Curtis, a clarinet player, showed up one day to introduce himself and I did a few gigs with him playing a mixture of folk, blues and ragtime. We became collaborators and good friends.

Early that winter my friend Kent had a breakdown of his mental and physical health that resulted in his being committed to the local psychiatric ward.  This event scared Karen and me badly and we felt we had to re-evaluate what we were doing with our lives.

Karen had never traveled and desperately wanted to do so and we decided against the advice of all our friends, to put our stuff in storage and to travel to India.  This, we felt, would give us some badly needed perspective in our lives.

I was against the trip at first and my response to all the packing and arrangement was to get sick.  The children were only two and four years old and I suppose I was worried and affected too by all the negative feedback from friends.

But Karen persevered and one snowy morning in early January of ‘86 we flew east out of the Victoria airport, India-bound.