“The real animals are in the streets and in the bars,” said Dylan as we drove farther away from the mayhem of downtown Calgary. A church was visible in the distance, as promised in the directions we inherited.
“This must be the place,” I said, quoting the Talking Heads and simultaneously announcing our arrival.
Dylan cautiously steered his faded green Jetta into the parking lot, frantically scanning our new surroundings for signs of life. We’d been in contact with a woman named Pearl, who instructed us to meet at a disclosed time and place.
Our business was country music, and our job required us to convince people like Pearl we were the prodigal sons of the genre, capable of elevating any event via our musical gifts. We catfished unsuspecting victims, using a fabricated Kijij classified ad to oversell ourselves as a band of the purest pedigree. Rather, we were simply aging hipsters with a knack for internet marketing. Our friend Keith staged a photo shoot, making us look like demigods of 70s era AM country, straight off a record cover. We appeared enthusiastic and bright eyed in the hokey press photo, taken a few years prior. Today, we looked significantly older, like first term presidents. It was the last day of the Calgary Stampede, a metaphorical forty-day cattle drive in the badlands
We called ourselves The Wildrose Ramblers and we’d recently fallen in rank on Google search results to a senior’s walking club of the same name in Edmonton, Alberta. We billed ourselves as the Unrivaled Calgary Stampede Cover Band.
We were not.
We waited in the car, coddling overpriced fermented teas between our legs, as 90s indie rock poured from the only working speaker in the car stereo. “Oh shit,” said Dylan, as an elderly woman pulling an oxygen tank waved her arms manically, as she laboured across the field towards us at a comically slow pace. She hauled a steel cart behind her, dragging her precious lifeline as it bumped up and down with every divot in the grass like car wheels on a gravel road.
“What in the hell kind of gig is this?” I asked Dylan through parched lips and a voice with the timbre of an aging Rod Stewart.
“A local charity’s Stampede breakfast,” said Dylan, hesitant to say the words aloud.
We took turns fulfilling the role of corporate booking agent for our country cover band, only active ten days per year during the alleged, Greatest Show on Earth. It was Dylan’s year to play agent. I chipped away at his remaining patience by asking the same questions repeatedly: “what’s the gig?” and “what’s the pay?”
Dylan looked a fool, a filthy western shirt clinging to his chubby torso like saran wrap from the morning heat. His face was sunburnt from playing hatless and blotched from too many corndogs and late nights – occupational hazards in our line of work. I looked no better, donning a pearl button-up cowboy shirt covered in stains of overpriced draft beer, Wranglers and the Australian equivalent of a Stetson hat. True grit, indeed.
“How much does it pay?” I asked, hoping the amount would somehow justify my displeasure.
“$1,500,” Dylan replied.
“$1,500! That’s pretty good for a charity gig.”
Dylan had no reason to respond to my optimism, this wasn’t news to him, he was simply going through the motions to get the job done.
Pearl finally conquered the soccer field between us and hobbled onto the even ground of the church parking lot. Her oxygen tank clanked against the cement as it tipped back and forth before coming to a halt next to our guitar cases. “Where’s the rest of the band?” It was a question we fielded often. Dylan and I played nearly exclusively as a duo, but implied we were a four-piece based on the photo in the Kijij ad. We charged the rate of a full band, showed up with half the members and morally justified our actions by telling ourselves: “The White Stripes only had two members.”
“You’re looking at it,” I quipped with enthusiasm.
“Double trouble,” Dylan said, echoing my sentiment.
“Two’s a couple, three’s a crowd.”
We could go on like this forever.
We amassed enough stock responses of dad jokes and bad puns to excuse ourselves for the intentional miscommunication. Besides, we had Pearl over a barrel. It was too late to hire another band and she’d already paid a 30 per cent deposit
She went with it, like they all did. This wasn’t our first rodeo.
After Pearl covered the basic logistics, she escorted us to a small stage with a three-walled tent set up to block the sun. Coincidentally, it also blocked the breeze becoming an unbearable heat box for hungover peddlers nearing the end of a marathon of shows.
Our contract stipulated we play from 10 AM to 2 PM — an absolute beast of a performance we’d overlooked until now.
We uncoiled cables and hoisted speakers upon stands in preparation for our start time. I pulled a flask from my pocket containing piss-warm Jameson whisky, which couldn’t be consumed as-is, but was palatable when mixed with the complementary orange beverage that so often existed alongside the traditional pancake breakfast we found ourselves at. A four-hour gig like this could wreak havoc on vocal cords. I knew firsthand that staying hydrated, avoiding late nights in loud bars, and passing on alcohol were the most effective ways to preserve a singing voice.
Unfortunately, I was not willing to participate in any of these tactics and found the easiest way to save my voice was to sing as little as possible. We accomplished this by adding nearly endless guitar solos into every song. I carried a variety of harmonicas, filling a minute or two of space after every third guitar solo. It was a brilliant musical formula that stretched the typical three to four-minute country tune into an unsuspecting eight-minute anthem. The typical pre-disposed crowd of chatty-Cathy’s were none the wiser.
At 10:07a.m. we rang the first notes from our guitars while we checked our microphones for volume and tone. The opening song was always the worst, as it drew a large degree of unwanted attention. The brief line check caused a momentary lapse in conversation, and the hundred-or-so people standing in the soccer field looked at us with a sense of hope.
“I’d like to thank you all for showing up bright and early and keeping us company. How bout’ a round of applause for our new friend Pearl. We wouldn’t be here without that hip, young gunslinger.”
A sea of white teeth exposed as genuine smiles splayed across the faceless crowd. They clapped and cheered. I knew it was already over, we had won. I knew what kind of crowd I was dealing with based on the response to my first joke. First impressions were king, and I just made a good one. This would buy us room for error later. It’s hard to dislike someone who makes you laugh.
Shortly after we began playing, we witnessed a woman suiting up behind the tent. Unbeknownst to me, this local branch of a global charity had a mascot, a Raggedy Ann-looking-redhead type character. The woman in costume proceeded to skip around the park in the blazing heat, joyfully committing to the task at hand. A middle-aged woman approached the mascot and the two held hands and skipped together for the remainder of the afternoon. They looked blissfully content as we suspected a closet homosexual relationship being publicly displayed for the first time under the guise of a costume. The charity was a notoriously brutal Christian organization, and this may have been one of the few times to get away with such a stunt. Their love for one another was on display under the thin veil that so delicately protected them. We cheered silently, admiring their rebellious courage in our state of dehydration.
Pearl, the oxygen tank lady, made it undeniably clear that every hour, on the hour, she would be leading a group through instructional line dance lessons. It was a bizarre request coming from a woman with severe mobility issues. This was a blessing in disguise as it would give us a break at the top of every hour, while she fumbled through instructions like a geriatric Alan Jackson.
At 11o'clock, as promised, Pearl shuffled into the tent, removing a microphone she squirrelled away in a hidden compartment of the oxygen cart and belted out a prompt command.
“ANYONE WHO WOULD LIKE TO LEARN TO LINE-DANCE SHOULD COME TO THE STAGE NOW!”
An intense squealing came from the P.A. system. Pearl’s mic was running off a separate sound system and it was interfering with ours, causing ear-piercing feedback and distortion — it was the sound musician nightmares are made of. She ignored it with an unrivaled sense of confidence I’ve rarely seen.
Not being particularly mobile herself, most of the instruction seemed to come from vintage muscle memory, and her recollection of the dance wasn’t serving her well. Twenty minutes went by, and no one was closer to learning how to line-dance.
Finally, we were instructed to continue playing.
By 1:30 p.m. we ran out of songs to play. We sat in the between-song silence that seemed to last an eternity. Between-song silence is something a good band never shows you — it’s an amateur move brought on by poor planning. By this point I couldn’t stomach any more Johnny or Hank or Merle or Dolly. We were in too low of a place for “Friends in Low Places”.
The combination of sun-warmed Jameson and orange drink soothed my anxious mind as I stood spaced-out, possibly dealing with mild heatstroke. Bruce Springsteen’s pop masterpiece, “I’m on Fire” appropriately played in my head. It was pure and accessible, the antithesis to bad country music.
We’d never played it before, but nothing mattered anymore.
I fumbled through, guessing at the chords and connecting verses in the wrong order. We committed to the sonic bliss that is Bruce Springsteen, losing ourselves in the song. The unexplainable, mystic beauty possessed us for 17 minutes, bringing us 12 minutes away from the end of our contract. It was an impossible song to follow, so…we didn’t.
As we stood in the post-show wonder, I gazed out at the Raggedy Anne mascot and her middle-aged lover, skipping through the field. I saw children with painted faces, laughing and dancing. Genuinely happy people smiled back at us, under impeccably clean Stetson hats. In that photographic moment, it was evident that Pearl had orchestrated a near-perfect event.
We rolled up our cables, placed guitars into cases and took speakers down from stands. We loaded our gear back into the faded green Jetta as we heard an oxygen tank clanking against the cement. There stood Pearl, holding out an extended arm, clutching an envelope full of cash.
“Great job guys. Can I book you right now for next year? I want to get you before someone else snags you up!”
We pulled the car out of the parking lot to set up for our final gig of the year. Pearl waved goodbye as we drove away.
Little did we know this would be one of the final gigs as a duo. Dylan would soon decide to move to Montreal to change careers and pursue a PhD in physics.
“Literal rocket science”, he liked to say.
Dylan and I went on to play many great shows, for wonderful crowds across the country. Despite it all, we often find ourselves defaulting to stories about the infamous Wildrose Ramblers and our annual 10-day country cover band. To this day, I still feel a pang of dread through my entire body when I hear the song Wagon Wheel, the most requested tune in Rambler history. Sometimes I even find myself wondering if Pearl ever taught anyone to line dance.