Now, I grant you that this can lead to some harrowing moments when you miss the mark and the listener interprets your work in an unexpected and, on occasion, cringe-inducing manner.

But a moment like that should generate wisdom, not mortification. You can learn a lot from the distance between your intent and the listener’s extrapolation. Plus, there are times when the message a listener takes from the song tells you something brand new, a perspective of your work and possibly, of yourself that you might never have experienced without an audience.

So, based on feedback received regarding songs, I came to the release of A MAN OF SUBSTANCES with some curiosity. I think that the book and its subject matter have the potential to reach a broader audience than the music I make. Being new to long-form writing, I had no experience with this broader “audience” in spite of years of turning out tunes. But I still suspected that music’s “ear of the beholder” principle would apply to book readers as well. I was prepared to learn something.

The first surprise came at how consistently reader’s referred to the book as “funny”. Now, Gerry – like his family, in fact– is not without a sense of humour. But some pretty harrowing stuff happens to Gerry in the course of his story. One reader even referred to the “sense of impending doom” she felt in the later chapters of the book. Being told of this comment, a member of Gerry’s family replied, “Tell her to talk to ME!” This, to my mind is the key to the brand of “funny” folks find in A MAN OF SUBSTANCES. While some of the humour is in the events, it’s more often the response to those events that seems “funny”. The sense of doom is there but the absurdity of the circumstance is never far behind. Thanks to a reader, first lesson learned.

Another reader wrote that the story carried her along “like a good novel always does.” The book is a memoir, of course, not a novel. But this is where my perspective (those opinions again!) shaped the way that Gerry’s story is told. I read a lot of memoirs, generally of musicians and artists that I admire. In almost every case, however, I find myself skimming paragraphs about stuff that was clearly important to the protagonist but is substantially less so to me. Even in books about artists I adore, I skim. I don’t do this when reading a good novel.

Memoir or not, I aspired to trim the skim. Full disclosure: this aspiration was at the core of several disagreements with Gerry. You can see his point; the book is about his life, for heaven’s sake. And I’ll admit that we left out some pretty good stories and side trips. But that’s what they were in my mind – roadside attractions. At one point I told Gerry to think of the book as a shared journey where he wanted to stop at every stand for fresh fruit, baked goods and even a bit of wine tasting. I, on the other hand, just wanted to get to Niagara Falls! To fortify my position, in my list of unworthy roadside diversions, I purposely omitted establishments selling ice cream.

To Gerry’s credit, he came to see the point. I think this “stay on the highway” storytelling strategy is why folks tell us that they read the book in “two sessions” or complain cheerfully about staying up too late reading it. I’m grateful that they seem to want to read on. Even so, the guy who wrote of reading the book on the toilet until his bath was too cold could rightfully be accused of over-sharing.

Some readers have noted the book’s intent to reflect the era in which its events unfold. This one really tickled me. As an, ahem, older fellow, I admit to developing a pique from movies set in a time in which I lived, but made by those who, clearly, did not. Don’t take this as reverse ageism – I’m thrilled when research supplants experience. But damn it, disco did not unfold in the Swingin’ Sixties and every attractive woman in attendance at a rock festival was not topless. Gerry’s desperate dash across a department store parking lot in Beatle boots is not in the book because it reflected the era, nor because it is funny. It’s there simply because it’s true. Take the incident out of its time– with Gerry’s footwear unspecified– and it’s not nearly as vibrant. So the details are important. I take great pleasure when readers notice.

>Unsurprisingly, A MAN OF SUBSTANCES’ subject matter comes up most often in reader comments. Those who were not part of the substance subculture express astonishment at the lengths to which a pot cultivator goes to get the weed into the baggie. From field to pocket or purse, it’s a business with a product that requires a manufacturing process like every other consumer product.

This much I understood. As for much of the rest, I was clueless. My partnership with Gerry was serendipitous in this regard. He was immersed in the substance culture; I wasn’t. When Gerry set aside guitar and amp for motorcycle and marijuana, I did not. Similarly, like a lot of readers, I went on to straight job and family without Gerry’s lifestyle schizophrenia. Sure, he had straight jobs and a family as well. But he also had a secret life, the resultant burden of which makes his path unique to a lot of us.

By “us”, I mean the readers and me. I share the reader’s outside perspective when it comes to the way that Gerry lived from rationalization to rationalization, from escalating problem to unexpected solution. Conversely, to those more knowledgeable souls who remark on the accuracy and detail with which the drug culture is revealed, I take no credit. I had a pretty good tutor in Professor Pot.

Someone else who wrote to us called the writing “rhythmic”. Back to the music thing again, this one meant a lot to me. In music, the way you play or sing a melodic thread in the context of a tune’s tempo is termed phrasing. The word is used to describe the way different players string together the same notes over the same bars in a very unique way. It’s partially rhythm, partially volume, partially pitch and partially tone. So, as a muso, so much as nod in this direction from readers of the book is immensely gratifying.

There’s so much to be learned from reader feedback about what transpires when the sentences sink into a welcoming brain. In every case, we’ve gained from the perspective of those who’ve taken the time to comment. On behalf of Gerry and me, thank you for your perspective and the passion expended to express it. Even the over-sharing!

David Partridge
]]> http://www.postcardcomets.com/when-the-reader-writes-the-author/feed/ http://www.postcardcomets.com/comet-david-is-also-author-david-a-man-of-substances-out-now/ http://www.postcardcomets.com/comet-david-is-also-author-david-a-man-of-substances-out-now/#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2010 05:44:44 +0000 admin http://www.postcardcomets.com/?p=716

A MAN OF SUBSTANCES: Misdeeds and Growing Pains of a Pot Pioneer, a cautionary memoir co-authored by Gerald J. McCarthy and David Partridge, is now available from barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, amazon.ca and chapter.indigo.ca. Here’s the scoop:

When Gerry McCarthy hit the headlines in 1996, he was the man at the centre of a five million dollar dope bust, the largest grow-op takedown in Canadian history. But when he hit the big city as a small town teenager many years before, he was green as grass. The story between is a unique and winding journey through the most vibrant, revolutionary years of the Twentieth Century.

Told in the first-person, the book looks unblinkingly at the protagonist’s invention, reaction and folly over a life on the less sober side of the law. A MAN OF SUBSTANCES explores Gerry’s journey from a guitar across the shoulders to handcuffs around the wrists. In between are the exploits of one of Canada’s marijuana cultivation pioneers, at turns resourceful and rash, sincere and sardonic, hardworking and hammered. He is paperboy and pot dealer, secret-keeper and raconteur. He’s a devoted suburban family man with a pound of weed in the second car.

McCarthy’s story is honestly told because fact is so often more remarkable than fiction. It reflects the times and the culture of the world in which he grew and explores that world’s folly and its shadows with equal candor.

I’ve known Gerry McCarthy since his family moved to Toronto from Peterborough many years ago. We went to the same high school and started playing in bands in the same neighbourhood around the same time. But I knew his brother even better, and it was that relationship which gained me entry into the McCarthy household.

It was also my friendship with Gerry’s older brother Don that brought me to A Man of Substances. Don has been telling me for years that I should be writing more. He also told me that Gerry had a strong desire to document the remarkable elements of his own life but was having difficulty committing it to paper to his own satisfaction.

That’s not surprising. Putting your life down in words is a daunting prospect. I’d find it daunting, at any rate. The only one who did not appear to be daunted was Don. He invited me to accompany the two of them on a drive to Peterborough to visit their parents. The idea was that Gerry would tell me the story and his ideas for the book on the two hour-plus drive. To be honest, I was more compelled by the thought of a bowl of Ma McCarthy’s chicken and rice soup than I was by hearing Gerry’s story. But regardless of the motivation, I agreed.

The reason I was under whelmed by the prospect of Gerry’s story was that I thought I knew it. I did not. Over the course of that drive, I realized that his tale had more unexpected twists and turns than the car journey itself. To say that I had questions is flagrant understatement. I decided that I had to hear his story again now that my questions had taken shape.

I suggested that Gerry come to my studio; he could record his recollections and I could ask the questions that struck me as his narrative unfolded. I thought that the audio files would help Gerry find a writer that could tell his story in written form. Gerry knew at least one journalist, a crime reporter as it happened, that might be interested.

About three sessions in, something clicked. I realized that Gerry’s subject was not a crime; it was a life. I started to see a way that I could write the book, not as a series of exploits and arrests but as a broader, contextualized story. In all of this, I would have the benefit of having my real life protagonist as an ongoing guide, critic and corrector of facts.

To be clear, Gerry’s brother Don had asked me to do this from the start. But I was reluctant to take the leap. My joke was that I’d never written anything longer than the text on the back of a DVD sleeve. I had, in fact, written thumbnail executive bios, a few magazine pieces, more than a few sales and marketing presentations and entirely too many songs. But the obstacle was the same. That obstacle was, “How in hell do I do something this big?”

Gerry’s original idea was to specifically document his grow-op experiences, even going so far as to conceptualize a work centred on a chapter per location. His provisional title for this was “Growing Pains”. I liked the pun but, given the massively successful TV show of the same name, thought the name misleading to a casual, stumble-upon audience.

But Gerry’s title had real value to me in developing the book’s structure. I felt that the grow-op material would benefit from some context– Gerry’s growing pains over his broader journey, not just through the life cycle of the cannabis. Who was this guy, what drove him through so many setbacks to the position he reached? And, crucially, how did it go so spectacularly wrong? I proposed to Gerry that we apply the idea of “growing” to him as well as to the pungent plants. I suggested starting in Peterborough and following the winding path that led to eventually to serial courtrooms and a long-term lawyer.

I also felt that, regardless of the fact that it was my digits on the keys, Gerry’s story was most compellingly told in the first person. I needed to develop a text version of the voice that he used to tell me the story without the repetitions and shortcuts of day-to-day communication. Helping to form this voice may have been the greatest contribution those tapes were to make. But beyond that factual recounting, I also believed that the story should grow an inner voice, reflecting on events and attitudes with the benefit of time passed.

Gerry agreed. We did our sessions almost weekly and soon Gerry was writing “talking point” summaries of each session after the fact. Talking points soon evolved into session outlines, sometimes almost stream of consciousness in style, sometimes highly conversational. Pretty soon, I stopped listening to the recorded sessions entirely. My notes and give-and-take participation in the sessions themselves were more than enough.

Even so, in the case of the technical elements of the cloning, cultivation and harvesting process, and in matters of the nightmare we came to call “the money-go-round”, I relied on Gerry’s outlines almost entirely. It’s hard to fault his expertise on those topics and it’s hardly surprising that the serpentine details of his monetary misery are still vividly with him, even to this day. Conversely, because we had lived in the same era, in the same city and attended some of the same events, my personal, impediment-free memories sometimes supplemented Gerry’s own. I recalled the colour of the roof of the family house, for instance, when he did not. Additionally, I knew a number of the people in Gerry’s story, most often in a radically different context, but I knew them all the same.

So we each brought pieces to the table. One of the pieces that Gerry brought was his willingness to document his personal flaws. He never once asked me to change a word that I wrote, as unflattering as the telling may have been. When the cards hit the table, they stayed there. I still wonder, were the roles reversed, if I’d be willing to do the same.

And so, in this way the story was told. A Man of Substances: Misdeeds and Growing Pains of a Pot Pioneer is now available in hard and soft cover on barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, amazon.ca and chapters.indigo.com. It appears that I am truly a ghostwriter. Now, when I see a pebble hit the pond, I feel an affinity not just for the stone but for the ripples that spread from it as well. It’s Gerry’s story, not mine, but I’m grateful for my part in the telling.

In essence, a song is comprised of a melody and a lyric. Nothing else. A great riff is a great riff but it’s not a song. It’s an arrangement. Even the chord pattern is not strictly a song. Plenty of cover artists, massive or modest, re- jig the chords to famous songs. But that’s not songwriting. That, too, is arrangement.

Postcard Comets songs exist elementally, as all songs do, as a melody and a lyric. The arrangement, I would argue, is a large part of what makes our tracks sound like us. Arrangements contribute atmosphere, groove and ultimately emotional response. But an arrangement can’t do its job if the melody and the lyric can’t establish the mood in the first place.

This is where we get back to Alibi Boy and the process of composition. I had completed the melody and lyric, or so I thought, and I began to work on a recording. All was going well until it came time to record the vocal. It was at that point that I realized that the melody, the sequence of notes the vocalist uses to sing the lyric, was not as evocative as the lyric itself. All of this is interconnected, of course; the arrangement complemented the lyric but the melody did not seem as resonant as either the words or the musical setting. I had a problem.

Of course, I blame Buck. No, he had nothing to do with the writing of the song nor did he criticize it. He did, however, play a guitar part that focused cruel, justifiable scrutiny on some mundane elements in the melody. If the guitar part could support the perspective of the lyric so well, why couldn’t the melody?

So, late in the game, with drums, bass, organ and guitar already tracked and stacked, I rewrote the melody. I won’t bore you with the particulars but the new tune emphasized the intimacy of the lyric and took the overall tone of the piece from accusatory shouting about a character’s flaws to a more imploring, close-to-the-ear advice. From hysterical to heartfelt, if you will, a deepening of the shadows.

Now, I’m not telling you this to hype the merits of the track. You decide that for yourself. But I hope to impart to those reading this the lesson I took from the process: it’s never too late to rewrite, to enhance, and to make your own contribution better in the service of the song.

Even if what you’re re-crafting is a key element of the song itself.

David Partridge

POSTCARD COMETS

“>

Not an actual monkey. I don’t get a lot of musical inspiration from the residents of the Metropolitan Toronto Zoo. The monkey to which I refer is the online avatar for a singer songwriter who goes by the name of Ayewrite. Ayewrite, or Monkey as he is often called, is an online friend of mine. He’s passionate about music but he’s not a man who bestows praise lightly. But some time ago he told me that I owed it to myself to check out a singer songwriter named Dolores Dagenais.

Monkey, who resides in Europe, also said that she was Canadian and lived in Pictou, Nova Scotia. He did not ask me whether, as a fellow Canadian, I knew Dolores. Monkey’s a smart guy. He knows that there’s some distance between western Nova Scotia and southern Ontario, maybe thirty, forty kilometers, by his reckoning.

But in fact, the music that had my friend excited was significantly closer than that. It seems that Dolores had a very generous album’s worth of songs, freely available for download on the web. And the web, as fortune would have it, connects directly to my house. Hmm, I thought, this Dolores Dagenais writes interesting songs. And she can sing. That monkey is on to something.

Not long thereafter, I was participating in an online “open mic” event -yes, there is such a thing- and who should make an appearance from Pictou, guitar in one hand and champagne glass in the other, but Dolores Dagenais.

She sang and, even in that informal and almost lo-fi circumstance, it was clear that she had something to say and an affecting way of saying it. Plus, she seemed to enjoy the posted recordings of my band Postcard Comets, so you know she had taste.

Dolores was in the process of assembling material for another album. She had produced and played her previous releases by herself. She was looking for a change. She approached me to see if I was interested in producing the album. Now, there is some speculation that she was at least as interested in securing the multi-instrumental talents of my co-Comet Robert “Buck” Wilburn. Buck doubts this. He maintains that she was only interested in him. This may well be true but you’ll never get me admitting it on the record and certainly not in print.

But it doesn’t take a joke from our friend Ayewrite to determine that Pictou, Nova Scotia is a long way from Thornhill, Ontario. Dolores was in the former and I in the latter. But Dolores is web savvy. A frequent poster to the social media sites, her many YouTube pieces were the foundation of our collaboration. Here’s how it worked: Dolores wrote the songs and recorded a performance for YouTube, or MySpace, or her own website, or all of the above. She also sent the clips to me. I stripped the audio from them and imported it into the recording program in my beloved Mac.

Using her playing and singing from these clips as our guide, Buck and I worked up accompaniment for each song and tracked our parts into the recording software. This way, Dol’s vision and performance dictated the architecture, the key, the tempo, the feel of the accompaniment. We sent our accompaniment sketches back to Dol at some point, got feedback and revised and polished the tracks from there.

Now, anyone who has ever captured any event with a camcorder or modest audio setup knows that the sound is not professional quality. Sonically, it’s fair to say, Dol’s recordings were not top notch. But the performances were and we tracked dobro, drums, bass and any other additional instruments to those original vibrant performances.

Then we threw Dol’s contributions away.

Now, now, don’t panic. It’s all part of the plan. You can’t make Big Girl Art without the grownup, female artiste now can you? Dolores and her husband Ross were coming to Ontario, making the thirty, forty kilometer trip from Nova Scotia to Ontario, ostensibly to see relatives but really to see Buck and me. Please don’t tell the relatives that they spent almost two full days of their two-week trip with us. No need to inflame unnecessary jealousy.

So I had two days to track Dolores’ vocals and guitar, replacing any sonically substandard elements of the original Pictou tracks Dolores did in what she calls her “gaffer tape studio”. Was the meager, two-day window scary? Only until I heard Dolores sing the first song. She’s a pro; all the work got done with time left over for Buck to eat multiple desserts at the local Mandarin buffet.

This is where technology dances tenderly with the good old ways. Yes, we traded tracks through online servers and built the tracks in software. But legend has it that the Beatles cut their first album in a single extended session. When you’re prepared, you can do that. Homework had been done in Pictou and Thornhill alike. Buck’s and my tracks were adapted to Dolores. And Dolores was prepared. She showed up, sang, played and left. And when she did, I had everything I needed. After all, she wrote these songs. But songwriters everywhere know it’s not that easy. Dolores is not just a songwriter but an accomplished performer as well. And for 2 days, she performed admirably. The result is Big Girl Art.

Not to overstate the theme of this site but Dolores is truly a multi-hyphenate. Buck’s a multi-hyphenate and as the producer/accompanist, I reason that I am too. But allow me to push the definition and suggest that the methodology used to create Big Girl Art qualifies for multi-hyphenate status of its own. Acoustic, electric, solo, band-based, online, face-to-face analogue, digital– at some point in the process it was all of the above. Big Girl Art is the sound of digital files posted to online servers, downloaded into software and mixed with the sound of a human voice and a wooden instrument, captured through an analogue tube mic that further warmed the room on those two stiflingly hot summer days.

I’m glad I had the opportunity to be there. From Pictou to Thornhill, it was a very human process. Even if it did start with a monkey.

David Partridge

This piece was originally posted on the site Multi-Hyphenate.blogspot.com.

David Partridge has written a blog about the making of Dolores Dagenais’ CD Big Girl Art for the blogspot Multi-Hyphenate.

You can find it at http://multihyphenate.blogspot.com/2010/04/breath-wood-and-optical-fire.html

Be sure to leave a comment, either there or here. You know we love it when you come back!

POSTCARD COMETS

Ms. Dagenais credits this in some part to her collaborators. “There are some strange influences on there that I might not have been brave enough to explore if I hadn’t had this group of people being my team, saying yes you can.”

Although David and Buck are mildly embarrassed at having stolen their inspirational message from a recent presidential campaign, they’re pleased to have contributed to the new territory Dolores explores on Big Girl Art.

Dolores is gigging in support of the CD release but acknowledges that her gigs will be complementary, but not slavish, reproductions of the sound of the album. “The sound of the album is not the sound of the live show. The sound of the live show is its own art form.” Her pals, the Comets, wouldn’t have it any other way.

Big Girl Art is comprised of 13 tracks composed by Dolores and a final bonus track written by David Partridge. The final track is Never Seen The Mountains, a duet between Dolores and David and can be found on the player here on the site.

Enjoy! And feel free to repost the widget. Just press the word “Share” on the widget for all kinds of reposting options.

The problem was that with each successive version, the arrangement of the song just got bigger and more dramatic and, we admit it, longer. But the song itself is a relationship song and was originally written to have an intimacy; that intimacy had been lost.

So we decided to revisit Never Fall In Love with the intent of bringing a bit more whisper to a song that, frankly, was beginning to shout.

That wasn’t easy. Some cool electric guitar work from Buck fell by the wayside. Fortunately, some cool acoustic guitar work from Buck replaced it, supplemented by some clean electric work. His nicely crunchy solo in the middle remained. Hey, no need to go crazy!

The drums and percussion were next. A massive drum kit (there were even timbales in there) was replaced by a mélange of hand percussion. The groove is a blend of cajon, high hat, djembe and frame drum for those interested in the details. For those with less interest, a bunch of quieter stuff will suffice.

The vocals were next step in the renovation. This version of the song has a brand new vocal by David in keeping with the more personal feel of the new tracks. To bring a little warmth, we asked our friend Virginia (Vee) Evans to sing on the chorus. Vee has a rich, warm voice that brings a special timbre to the harmonies on the refrain. Some of the texture comes from the fact that Buck’s part is actually higher than the one being sung by Vee. She also contributed some countermelody parts that inspired the woven vocals in the coda.

One of the Comets’ very good friends told us that he vaguely recalls a previous version of the tune and asked that the old version be posted for forensic comparison. But, the thing is, we didn’t like the previous version. That’s why we went to the trouble of reimagining it!

One element that was not reimagined is Howard Rabkin’s fine bass line, a big solid reggae-inspired wonder that manages to be even more effective without the relative bombast of the drums and big guitars of the original.

Reading back, it seems that this entire note is a musical version of “Flip This House”. Who knows, Postcard Comets may yet be cable-worthy. As long as it’s not a spot on “Nancy Grace”!

We hope you enjoy Never Fall In Love. Be sure to take a moment to leave a comment.