9781553658276

An award-winning author, musician, and screenwriter, Paul Quarringtonwas diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer in summer 2009. Looking death in the face, he decided to go out singing, throwing everything he had into his work and demonstrating a creative energy that belied his illness. He was recognized with the Matt Cohen Award for his distinguished body of work, performed with his band, Porkbelly Futures, and recorded two new albums. He also finished Cigar Box Banjo, his bestselling and highly regarded memoiroreflections on his music, life, and death. The biographical documentary film Paul Quarrington: Life In Music, following the themes in Cigar Box Banjo, aired in spring 2010 on CTV Bravo.

Paul Quarrington an acclaimed author, screenwriter and musician, died in January 2010, just days after completing The Cigar Box Banjo manuscript. His most recent novel, The Ravine, was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and he received the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for his novel King Leary, which was also the victor in “Canada Reads 2008.” Roddy Doyle is an internationally bestselling writer. His first three novels—The Commitments, The Snapper, and the 1991 Booker Prize finalist The Van—are known as The Barrytown Trilogy.

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Introduction At the beginning of 2009, I completed a draft of a book that I was calling, "The Song." It was a slim volume that dovetailed my involvement in music (I am assiduously avoiding the word "career") with a look at some songs that I felt were noteworthy and influential: "This Land is Your Land," "Like a Rolling Stone," the enigmatic "Pancho and Lefty." The Publisher quite liked it-"Some fine writing here," he said, "some of your best,"-but there were problems. Apparently, when I attempted musicology, things flattened out some. My attempts to explain the intricacies of chord theory were confusing. "But," said the Publisher, "the personal stuff is all great. You learning to play the guitar, those groups with your brother, then all the song-writing stuff, the stuff about Martin, Joe Hall, Dan Hill, Dan Lanois[1] "All right. It's good that the Publisher liked the personal stuff, because In the early spring, as soon as the weather turned at all nice, I had my racing bike refitted and took to the streets. Actually, I took to the pathways that wend their way beside the ravines in our fair city of Toronto. I bicycled into Wilket Creek Park (past the pond that features both in my non-fiction book "The Boy on the Back of the Turtle" and my novel, "The Ravine") and ventured up a steep hill that the year before I had been able to do with, well, not ease, but I'd been able to do it. Halfway up, I abandoned the bike, gasping for breath. Moreover, I was panicking, part of me not believing that I would ever intake the air needed for resuscitation. "I," I told myself, "am in pretty bad shape." So I embarked on a program of brisk walking, largely in a nearby cemetery that contained a hill that historically winded me. I would walk up the hill and then gasp for breath as I continued down the roadway, checking my progress against whichever stone marker happened to find me breathing reasonably comfortably. I tended to end up beside my favorite gravestone. It was erected for a man named "John Ivan Johnson" and there was an etching of a racehorse beside his name. Underneath were the cryptic words, "Just By a Nose." Sometimes I found myself beside this marker with no lessening of the gasping. "Hmm," I told myself, "perhaps something is wrong." I googled and came up with a long list of possibilities, including the somewhat rare "vocal cord disorder," as I had had, over the previous months, some issues with my singing voice. (And I am a singer, you understand, I sing with the group "Porkbelly Futures," and play the rhythm guitar, although the actual rhythm section, the lads on the battery of drums and bass, might quibble with that designation.) So I went to my doctor, suggesting this iffy self-diagnosis, and he checked my throat and nose and diagnosed "post nasal drip" which had infected my vocal cords. I liked this diagnosis, although some inner part of me cautioned that he hadn't eliminated any of the really dire possibilities. But things were worsening. I found myself beside the "Just By a Nose" gravestone still sucking in huge quaffs of air. "I," I told myself, "am asthmatic. Or else allergic to something. Air, for example." The first weekend of May, I was scheduled to make a couple of appearances in Ottawa, Ontario. I was to speak at a symposium about film and literature on the Friday evening, and on Sunday I was giving a house concert. I drove up, checked into a rather nice hotel, but immediately noticed I was having much more trouble breathing. Even a little rise, hardly apparent in the landscape, would have me inhaling heavily. I did manage to put in some time on the stationary bike in the hotel workout room, and although I'd set the machine at a low level-two, I think, perhaps one-I managed to get through about fifty minutes without too much stress. Thus, when I walked outside only to be rendered windless once more, I came to the one conclusion an intelligent, right-thinking man could: I had an extreme allergic reaction to tulips. After all, Ottawa's famous "International Tulip Festival" was in full swing, those fucking bulbs were opening up everywhere....The next day-after an inexplicably exhausting journey to purchase some medications ("Buckley's Cough Mixture" and lozenges for my croaking throat, a big bottle of Tums for a certain sloshing heaviness I felt about my gut)-I drove out to Chelsea to visit my brother Joel. Also in attendance was Robert Wilson, who is the manager/booking agent for Porkbelly Futures. We barbecued many meats and drank many bottles of wine, so when I lay down to sleep and found comfort an impossibility, I had no reason for undue concern. Now, I know, you people out there are finding a certain irritating disregard for reality, an ability for self-deception that would rival a three-year-old's. For what it's worth, over breakfast I did instruct my brother Joel to Google many ailments: the afore-mentioned "vocal cord disorder," "pneumonia," "pleurisy," and, yeah, "lung cancer." But we ruled out lung cancer because 1) I had not been coughing up blood and b) I had not experienced a "sudden and unexplained weight loss." I was scheduled to perform at a house concert. In case you are unfamiliar with this concept, I was, essentially, going to sing in someone's livingroom. People were invited, they paid a small entrance fee, which was all turned over to me....had a bottle of whisky with me, I had my Buckley's, and I hoped that the combo would loosen up the vocal cords and give me the requisite energy. And it worked out pretty well, I sang some songs, I read some poetry.You know, I think I may append one of those poems into these very pages. After all, it does have some thematic connections. Here's one that's a little bit of foreshadowing:Crossroad BluesWhen I was 15My mother died and IStarted playing the blues onA Zenon guitar andDrinking Four Aces wine,Which was not really wine.Just like Robert Johnson.Who made a deal with the Devilat the Crossroads.Robert Johnson sold his SoulTo the Devil,Which was like selling his shoesWhen he knew he had to walk downA road of horseshoe nails.I would listen to the recordsAnd learn the licks withTongue-biting concentration.I was pale and chubby and little-dicked.I would drink Four Aces,Which was not really wine,But it was alcohol.I would play the guitar,Drunk in my bedroom,Hiding from my father,Who was drunk in the denOf our house in Don Mills, Ontario,Canada's first planned community.One night the DevilAppeared in my bedroom.The Devil has some personal hygiene issuesWhich we need not get into.The Devil offered me the same dealHe offered Robert Johnsonat the Crossroads. He said, "I will make youThe best guitar player ever.You will make strong men cryAnd you will make women wiltWith their desire for you.The songs you write will hauntMankind forever.It will cost you your Soul."I thought about it."Well what would it costif you just showed me how to playa F7?"And that was the attitude with which I, accompanied by Martin Worthy, my dear friend and a founding member of Porkbelly Futures, went to attend my consult with Dr. Frazier on May 11, 2009. "How are you feeling?" he asked. "I feel terrific," I said. "Great, just great." Dr. Frazier picked up a file. "Well, we've got some answers for you. It's cancer. It's lung cancer-" ("Hold on, hold on!" I wanted to shout. "Didn't you just hear me tell you I felt terrific?!") "It's the non-small cell type of cancer. You have what we call a 'sessile' tumor. It's not what we'd call an operable cancer it's a you're a and think in terms of months andjkghghjgkkljhjkghjkghghjghjlshgjhkasjhkjashdjkn " Chapter OneSo where do we go from here? Well, like I said, I had just finished a little memoir about my life in music. That word "memoir" suddenly had holy heft, the phrase "months to live" fires up all sorts of engines, most of them a little selfish (I got to get laid a lot, I have to eat a forty dollar Kobe beef hamburger), some of them a little more lofty. Namely, I should write some of this down. So, I had this memoir and my Publisher wanted a re-write, and he really liked the personal stuff, hmmm "It'll take a couple of months with that second draft," I told the Publisher. "I'm just going to add a new thematic concern." "Umm sure." If I do my job well, this won't be quite the motley pastiche you might imagine. Indeed, at this point in my life-way closer to the end than I'd imagined I'd be at the age of 56-music has acquired more importance than it ever had. I've become more interested than ever in the process of songwriting. Songwriting is an interesting way to interact with the world; to take it in as experience (other songs, books and movies, employment, job dismissals, hopeful first dates, clumsy hand-jobs, bad whisky, rejected and accepted marriage proposals, bad love, true love, long road trips and pronouncements of fatal disease) and spit it out in little three-to four minute units of airborne beauty and grace.As a small child my favorite recording was something called "The Cigar Box Banjo." I often think of this LP in connection with not only my musical output, but with work I do in novels, television, film, etcetera. I summarized the recording in my novel "The Ravine," but, assuming you didn't read that-a reasonable assumption-I'm going to do so here. A boy makes a banjo out of a cigar box. (How, exactly, I don't know. If you're looking for a blueprint or a schematic, go elsewhere. It is a long-standing source of frustration that much of what excites me in the realm of fiction is impossible to duplicate in real life. I even managed to get my hands on an actual cigar box, away back when, but that only made it worse, as I couldn't see any way to attach a neck, strings, etcetera.) Anyway, this boy hears of a contest, a banjo-playing contest, taking place in the next town, some ten miles away. Despite the fact that the kid has nothing like a show piece, he decides he will go compete. So-without informing his parents, I remember, simply heading off-he begins to walk the dusty road. As he goes along, the lad hears things-a bluebird's song, for example, the whine of truck tires, the lowing of a cow-and he imitates these things on his cigar box banjo, adding one upon another, and by the time he reaches the contest site he has an entire song. He plays this and wins! I loved that story, and I think it stands as a reasonable template for the creative process as I experience it[2]. Songwriters travel through their lives-we are descended from troubadours, after all-and we collect little themes and motifs and whistles and airs, and we string them altogether to fashion our wares. So it seems reasonable that this book should follow my travels down the musical road, and I intend to commence that forthwith.

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Cigar Box Banjo Notes on Music and Life

Cigar Box Banjo Notes on Music and Life

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