of infection. Maybe, she suggested, we should deal with the fluid before starting the chemo. Dr. Li thought I should talk to Dr. Simone, the thoracic surgeon. “You could see if he’s in,” she said. “His office is just upstairs.” We—my health crew, Dorothy, Jill, and Marty, were there with me—went to the third floor, and, remarkably, Dr. Simone told us to come on in. He listened to what we had to tell him and scheduled me for a pleurodesis.
Listen, if I’m being dreadfully boring about all this, please just toss the book in a corner. I hate it when people go into detail about their surgical procedures, but I do think this one is reasonably interesting, and it’s not one I knew anything about. Indeed, I still knew very little about it long after it was done to me. But basically, after I was put under, Dr. Sim-one punched a hole through my side and stuck in a tube that would drain off the fluid. See, fluid collecting in the pleural cavity was my big problem, essentially crushing my left lung. That was the havoc my tumour was wreaking. The issue was not the fluid, because we all produce it, but the tumour not allowing me to reabsorb it. So, having drilled a hole in my side and stuck in a tube, Dr. Simone then blasted in talcum powder.
That’s my understanding of things, anyway. I have learned that doctors like to speak by analogy, and they especially like visual aids. For example, we had asked Dr. Simone why he couldn’t simply remove the tumour. He was sitting behind the desk in his office as he answered this, and he immediately scanned his desk top, seeking the means of illustration. He picked up the mouse for his computer. “Paul’s tumour isn’t like this, you know, where it can just be removed.” He then picked up the blotter pad. “It’s like this, you see. It’s thin, but spread out.” (I believe the technical term, which I first heard from Dr. Frazier, but didn’t inquire about, having had my concentration scuppered sometime around, “It’s cancer, lung cancer . . . ,” is “sessile.” Mosslike.) When explaining the pleurodesis, Dr. Frazier found nothing suitable on his desk top, so instead he rubbed the palms of his hands together. “Imagine that you have two plates of glass, and you put sand in between them. At a certain point, friction would cause them to”—Dr. Simone stopped his rubbing abruptly.—“stick together.”
This is what was done to me. The procedure was successful. I knew, we all knew, that it would not hold indefinitely. But it did give me a little time to consider how best to proceed. Margit Asselstine, a woman I’ve known for a very long time, did some work on me. I’m not sure exactly what sort of work; she used her hands a great deal but tended not to touch me. Anyway, I felt much better after seeing her. And one thing she told me was, “Paul, you have a lot of health still in your body. And there’s a lot of health in the world that you can draw on.”
Yeah, I thought. I am healthy. As funny as it might sound, it occurred to me the one thing I had going for me was that I was healthy. Big and burly. I began to wonder why, exactly, I was so eager to make myself sick. Especially since the chemo was palliative. Especially if it might only buy me a couple of months. Suppose those months were February and March. Here in Ontario, that might not seem such a great gift.
Okay, thought I, let’s have a re-think. I assembled the health team. We conferred. The decision was to forgo chemotherapy, at least until I found myself in trouble. In the meantime, there were shows to play, songs to write, people to see, and places to visit. I may only have a year, I thought, but it’s going to be one hell of a year.
And it revolved around music.
1 Part of the problem is that designation rock’n’roll, which I feel stupid even typing, seeing as I had to use two apostrophes. I suppose if we accept the term as referring to a very restricted sub-segment of popular music, the three-chord assertion makes sense. Actually, three chords might represent the upper limit. “Bo Diddley,” for example, is a one-chord song, or one and a partial, although I myself play two full chords. But when we were thirteen years old and figuring out chords, it wasn’t to play “pop” music—we applied the term “rock’n’roll” to everything. I guess we would have averred, without blinking, that Mrs. Miller singing “A Lover’s Concerto” was rock’n’roll.
2 Some people don’t bother to stop that low string with their thumb, either, the idea being that they will thence avoid smacking the open, dissonant low E string. They rarely do.
3 There are some songs that abound in “guitar logic.” The introduction to “Knock on Wood,” for example, is a power-chord ascension up the guitar fretboard. It was written by Steve Cropper, who then reversed things and came back down for the introduction to “Midnight Hour.”
4 Guitar chords in their most simplistic fingerings are often given the appellation “cowboy.” A Cowboy G, for example, created with three fingers (there’s also a better sounding formation that requires four), allows the B string to sound boldly. Because it’s impossible to tune a B string precisely—and I don’t mean difficult, I mean impossible— the chord sounds in a rowdy manner, the fanfare for a plaintive yodel.
5 B–B–B–C#–D, when playing in the key of E. And there’s no other key you can play it in. I mean, of course there are other keys, eleven if my sketchy music theory suffices. But this is another instance of guitar logic, something that makes illuminating sense given the mechanics of the instrument. The last note is usually played upon an open string, allowing even a struggling twelve-year-old guitarist the opportunity to finger the accompanying chord—which is impossible to do without executing the swaggering pelvic twitch that possesses Keith Richards when he plays this little riff, his most famous composition.
I’M GOING to continue detailing my musical education. Condensing it to a few pages, however, whilst useful in terms of pacing, fails to adequately convey the time given over to the process. I spent months, maybe even years, sitting in the basement. It might take, say, a week to learn a song, which involved much lifting and replacing of the phonograph needle on the platter. Even though I tried to do this gingerly, I purchased a new needle practically every other day. After the week spent learning a song, another week would be devoted to playing that song, executing it with pride and exultation.
It is during this early period in a musician’s life, I believe, that he or she acquires a unique cluster of predilections. Some tricky little licks, through a quirk of anatomy or some other manifestation of blind luck, come more easily to the fingers. A chord change affects some dim recess of the soul. Why? Who knows? Some combination of personal memory and cultural resonance, probably. And these become a songwriter’s personal memes, the basis upon which the compositions that lie far ahead in the future are built.
Are you familiar with memetics? I hope you are. Otherwise, what I’m about to say may confuse you. The “meme,” according to Richard Brodie, author of the book Virus of the Mind, is “the basic building block of culture in the same way the gene is the basic building block of life.” “Memes,” Brodie states, “are the building blocks of your mind, the programming of your mental ‘computer.’” The concept of the meme was invented by Richard Dawkins, so there is an easily discernible neo-Darwinian context. Let us say that caveman Og, beating a hollow log with a bone, hits upon a rhythm that has a curious appeal, not only to himself but to the others gathered nearby. This makes Og more sexually desirable than Nood, who insists on emphasizing the first and third beat and never approaches what we might call ur-funk. In these terms, rock stars are the epitome, using music to make themselves sexually attractive and then disseminating their genes far and wide. Indeed, this is how Charles Darwin accounted for the existence of music in the first place, likening it to the peacock’s lurid herl. I also like to imagine that musical memes contribute to the evolution of music itself, that they shape it to become increasingly beautiful and stirring. My thinking here has very little scientific credibility, so take it with a grain of salt. But, for example, I believe