Titles > Fiction > Excerpt > Acting the Giddy Goat
Acting the Giddy Goat
by Mike Tanner
Fiction
340 pages
Trade Paper
ISBN 1896951392
$22.95 CDN
Acting the Giddy Goat
by Mike Tanner
Excerpt from the first chapter:
Johnny cut across Yonge and coaxed the Roach along Carlton in front of sad, deserted Maple Leaf Gardens. He wasn't much into hockey, but he'd seen a thousand concerts in the old building. As he crossed Church Street, he realized it was several years since he'd been to an arena concert. He'd seen just about everyone he wanted to, he supposed, and become less interested in the hassle of lineups and fucking wristbands and more put off by the inadequacies of hockey rinks or fucking football stadiums as live-music venues. No more Doobie Brothers and Cheap Trick...he confined his outings these days to smaller places, halls and bars, where less well-known artists were booked as they came through town.
Jarvis Street. Johnny turned left and made a quick right into the parking lot behind the Horse & Groom. A tall, bald, broad-shouldered figure wearing jeans and a green plaid hunting vest was striding across the lot toward an open tailgate. It was Don McKenzie, unloading the PA and the amps into the bar. Even after years of working with him, Johnny couldn't shake the image of McKenzie as a guy who should be running a lodge outside Yellowknife, piloting float planes and bagging big game, instead of living down here, working in a print shop and playing bass. Johnny found a parking space, grabbed his guitar and his bag, and walked over to help.
"Raccoon!" said Don McKenzie in his rough northern voice, "Get the new lists done?"
"Yeah. I was a St. Andrew today, so I photocopied them in the mall."
Don nodded. "How was the busking?"
"Same as usual. Somewhere between ninety and ninety-five." Johnny took hold of one end of the bass amp. "Anyone you know coming down tonight?"
"I think the Murphys'll be here –"
"They the couple we met at Joker's?"
"Yeah. Joined at the hip, those two. She says things like, 'We've got a doctor's appointment tomorrow.' We, not I...Anyway, they should be bringing some friends, and I spoke to some people at York."
"Good," said Johnny. Although it wasn't a strict contractual stipulation insisted upon by Paul, one thing that kept The Johnny Raccoon Band at the Horse & Groom was the regular following they'd built up. There were maybe a few hundred interested people, out of which thirty or forty might show up on a good Thursday. Tonight, he was expecting to see Brewmaster Bill and his buddies; the annoying Andrea Smits and her family; the Noise Sisters; and several local musicians. Yes, it might be an OK night.
The Horse & Groom was another faux-English-style pub like a thousand others in Toronto. Paul's establishment, though, was a least a little older than many similar places: the wooden furniture creaked with more warmth, the beer stains in the once-red carpet had more depth, and the pub decorations had originated in Essex and been brought to the New World by Paul's uncle when he first visited "Canader" twenty-five years previously with hopes of buying and running a small hotel. The uncle had returned to the bookbindery in Essex, but the accumulated paraphernalia remained in Toronto with Paul and found a suitable resting place on the walls and ledges of the Horse & Groom – painted plates, Arsenal and West Ham United team pennants, reproductions of etchings from "Tom Brown's School Days."
Johnny Raccoon and Don McKenzie finished packing the gear into the bar and began to set up. They moved the bass cabinet, the amps, and other equipment onto the small stage near the bay windows. Positioning black metal stands to either side of the stage, Johnny hoisted one big PA speaker cabinet up onto each stand while checking out the crowd. Mostly the after-work suit and cellphone crowd; no familiar faces yet. Next, the mike stands were screwed together and set up at the front, clips and vocal mikes perched ready on top. Then Don patched everything together with speaker cables and quarter-inch cords, taping anything loose down to the floor. The two moved quickly and quietly, and within fifteen minutes of their arrival, most of the work was complete. Meanwhile, the other band members had arrived and were bringing in their own equipment: Rob Carter the drummer – short and stocky, powerful shoulders, brush-cut – was rolling cases and drum hardware into the bar on a hand-truck, while pale, airy Jenny Ross clamped together her keyboard stand in front of the windows next to Johnny.
It was time for the request lists to be set out on each table in the bar. Retrieving the lists from his bag, Johnny Raccoon looked again at the prices attached to certain songs. Would these people get the joke? And would anyone ask for the songs he felt like playing? People wanted to hear “Peaceful Easy Feeling” by the Eagles and Eric Burden’s “House of the Rising Sun” and “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor and, naturally, “Cat’s in the Fucking Cradle” by Harry Chapin. Mundane fuckers. Last week a woman had kept asking to hear Cat Stevens, even though Cat Stevens wasn’t on the list, she under the mistaken but oh-so-common impression that Cat Stevens had written “Cat’s in the Cradle.” Idiot.
While they had been tearing down at the end of last week’s gig, the band again discussed taking the most obvious stuff off the list; but they knew it was Elvis Presley and not Elvis Costello, Rod Stewart and not Rodney Crowell, Paul McCartney and not Paul Westerberg who got them the paying bar gigs. The over-requested songs bought them the luxury of the obscure ones. So, as always, they left the list largely unchanged, resolving once again that between requests for “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Free Falling,” they would try even harder to squeeze in more interesting tunes, maybe educating the bar audiences a little in the process.
