Day 35
I have been working on a piece for 2-3 days now, and it holds special ties to my Vancouver life. During those years I had to hustle for work as a musician. It was for survival. Slowly, cover acts replaced original bands, pop and country music paid the bills and it was eroding something in me. I needed a balance. Enter Ground Truthing. G T for short. It was entirely serendipitous, an accidental submersion. They heard my silent plea and I theirs. We still share molecules. Nothing was spoken, everything wide open and no stone was left un-turned.
Ground Truthing - To lie on your back on outside ground and take in the universe and our place in it.
Three souls collide and gather together for Sunday sabbaths in an industrial cave to be immersed in seclusion with no windows or outside energy to corrupt the flow of emotion released through music. Heavy metal bands were always rumbling through walls down hallways from other jam spaces reminding us we were never alone.
To get to Railway and Jackson near the old docks of Vancouver's Downtown East Side you have to pass through the full depths of rawness of humanity, no matter what time of day, people's darkest hours are exposed here. A few blocks north of East Hastings this area always felt like the fringe of the fringes. Less of the expose of Main and Hastings where the larger congregations happen. The few blocks away from here reveals even darker depths. Overdoses morph to deceases. Survivors of abuses but whats left are sufferers with no choices. These hearts found a place in me, even if I had to quicken the pace as a police confrontation goes down or a paramedic gives way to the coroner. It was never a threatening place. Desperate, sick, and often hopeless but also genuine, real, unfiltered and room for smiles and 'hellos'. All of this found a natural way into the music, unintentional.
I met Faye first. We played in the same group for a few shows backing up a wonderful soul and singer / songwriter, Lisa O'Neil. These tender broken songs, revealing so much fragility but brought to life with utter conviction. She made an awesome record and we were doing a run of CD releases in Vancouver, Faye was an hour or two late and joined in on bass mid rehearsal. We didn't really connect much until after the first gig at the well known Little Mountain Studios space. It was a true renegade vibe, well worn wood with many layers of paint, like a High School art room that's survived decades of disrepair but continues to ooze with creativity in abundance.
After our set I grabbed a complimentary a beer from a plastic cup, so did Faye and we struck up conversation. I was 23 or 24, we just played all this music together through a few weeks of rehearsals, then a show, an obvious entry point was to ask what was the music that inspires her. Right away Daniel Lanois and A Silver Mt. Zion were mentioned and I was sold. Turns out she isn't only a bass player, and her main thing is this crickety and temperamental vibraphone from the 1930s that has ghosts and rust and spooks and so much fucked up beauty. Beyond that, she plays the drums and was on a level I could understand and communicate in. Curiosity was peaked right away. Cool, vibraphone and steel guitar, let's try it out some afternoon. So we did and it was unlike anything I ever played or heard before. We were both mesmerized by the sound mixture of the pedal steel and vibe combination, little did I know I would enter into a union that still exists today.
Faye had a cohort, Braden. I could tell right away they were more serious and intense than the crowds I was used to circling. We became deep, entrusted blood friends. We shared an instant connection that crossed levels beyond music. We found a tribe and it is still belonging. Musically we all entered the space with no ego. It dissolved upon entry with a deep understanding without ever having to be discussed with words. I found out 6 or 8 months later that Faye and Braden had just ended a lengthy relationship (that’s how much we talked) I can't even imagine. There was pure power, fragility, uncertainty and conviction in the music we made. It contained the heaviness I craved, a beauty I'd never heard before and with an urgency that needed to escape. I still think of these souls often. We even kept making music when I moved to Nova Scotia in 2013 via email. So much unreleased music. I might change that in the near future.
Before moving mountains to get to Nova Scotia, I needed to book some studio time for us to capture the set of songs we had been immersed in, to document this project in a serious way. We had played some captivating shows, we're just beginning to spread out and take our sound to audiences when I moved. That was the hardest situation to leave in body.
A storied Vancouver studio called The Hive was shutting its doors around this time and I booked their Bee Room for 3 days. We were one of the last bands to work in there on my last weekend in the city. One particular song that Faye had conjured needed some moving parts but had to retain a calmness, almost lullaby effect. It was either late one night or early the next morning when I had some moments alone to do a rare overdub - an acoustic guitar that filled this role. A finger picking pattern I had never done before. This band has been essential to my development as a guitar player. The songs seemed to always require something I had never done before on the instrument. Total expansion of rhythm, harmony, sound structure, ambiance etc... All of this with no discussion of any such details. We never spoke of chord voicings or tempos. It was plug in and take off. We did this for 3 or 4 years with several gaps that would stretch a few months here or there.
Here is a new creation I am working on and at the bottom is the unreleased GT song from 2013. You can easily hear the thread.
