just say, “What do I think? I think I’ll have another Kokanee.”
She always lived on some island or other, and in my experience there were always at least two women she had … she had, she was having — one for home and one on the road. Sometimes the one from the road would replace the one at home, thinking that now she was going to be the only one, but then not that long after that, there might be another one on the road. And of course this sometimes led to … problems. One show we did, a girl I’d never seen before paid full cover just to come into the community center gymnasium and stand perfectly still through the whole set, staring at DD with her middle finger high in the air. But then she probably went home with someone else again that night. She could pick up like I’ve never seen.
One time we were in Nuremberg and I was wearing a hat that I didn’t like. It had started to bother me, like a canker sore, you know, in the lower back left of your mouth. It was making me kind of tense and hard to be around. I only forgot about it when I was playing the shows, because I never wear a hat when I’m playing, unless I’m sick. I was looking for a new hat. I had a black hat and a brown thrift-store suit that fit me. I hadn’t known that you weren’t supposed to wear a black hat and a brown suit until some girl told me that, in a way that informed me that I had descended in her estimation because of the colour of my hat. I was feeling very sensitive on that tour, so my hat was really bothering me at this point. I couldn’t shake it. We went into the bar next to the little theatre where we had played. I saw a hat that looked like mine, but it was brown like my suit and I thought maybe it might fit me. It was hanging on a hook behind the bar, quite high.
A pretty girl was bartending. She had mostly short hair but what do you call those? Tufts. Long side tufts. And a little tail at the back. She had more than one piercing on her face. I had been thinking about going over there and trying to start a conversation with her, but I was only on my second beer. I didn’t know yet if I would be able to work up the courage and the disregard for the fact that generally girls don’t like to get hit on while they’re working. Sometimes I disregard it and then, of course, I feel disgusted with myself the next day, or even as soon as later that night.
I said, “gee, that looks like a better hat than what I’ve got,” and DD said, “gimme that” and walked over to the bartender girl with my hat.
I couldn’t hear what they said but the girl took the hat down, and tried on my hat. It fit her quite well. DD said something to her and the girl said something to DD. DD brought the brown hat to me. I asked her what the girl had said about the hat, and DD told me she’d said that she got off work in an hour and asked if DD had a place to stay.
In previous conversations, we had both agreed that generally when people ask touring musicians if they have a place to stay, they are at least thinking about fucking them, even if they haven’t discovered in their own minds yet that that is what they are thinking. Not that someone will necessarily fuck every musician they ask “So, where do they have you staying?” but they are often rolling the thought around in their mind. So I said, “Oh. I see.”
I tried on the hat but it didn’t fit very well.
The next day we met up with DD at the train station. I asked her if she’d had a good time when she went home with the pretty bartender, and DD said yes but that it had been a little weird because she had a boyfriend.
“She told you she had a boyfriend?”
“No, I met him,” she said.
“He was there when you got there? How did he feel about you being there?”
“He was pretty sad because when we arrived, we all chatted for a while and had a beer and then she took him into the other room and broke up with him.”
“She took you home and broke up with her boyfriend?”
“When we were in bed later she said that she’d been meaning to do it for a while, and I was just the … what’s the word for something that makes something change, like with rust?”
“The catalyst,” I said.
“Right. She said I was the catalyst. Her English was very good. And she speaks French, too. We mostly spoke French together.”
I told her I hated her. That made her laugh.
The rest of the tour, we had a running gag where we would call her “the Catalyst,” as in “the Catalyst really needs to dig out her passport because we’re approaching the Swiss border,” or she might rub her belly and say, “the Catalyst is ready for a big plate of kartoffels.” Or someone would ask, “has anyone seen the Catalyst?” and the answer would be, “the Catalyst is in the men’s can because some big Austrian woman in the ladies’ room mistook her for a boy and screamed at her,” or something.
Pete Podey
His Home Studio, Basement Suite, Gravely Street, off Commercial Drive, Vancouver, 2014
I’m recording now. Check. Check one two. Levels look good. Okay, this is Peter Podey, July 27, 2014. I’m recording this because Geoff has asked me to try to come up with some thoughts about DD. Ah, for the record I don’t know where she might be. I wish I did.
What can I say about DD? Okay, well, I love her. Not in a sexy kind of way, although of course she is sexy, that’s just not the nature of our thing. I love her. Like a sister? Yeah. Like a sister, or maybe like the way guys in a platoon in a war love each other, because they’ve been through so much together, they’ve saved each others’ lives, they’ve seen each other at their worst and their best, and they have a deep respect. I don’t know if this is helpful. Okay, I’m just gonna roll on into this microphone, and you can, you know, do whatever you want with it.
Yeah. A deep respect. And that really begins because of the way we play music together, which is hard to explain. We really communicate. Okay, well, that doesn’t even come close to what I’m trying to describe, which is a really amazing thing, you know? “We really communicate” sounds weak compared to the feeling. DD understands what I do, and I understand what she does. A lot of people kind of get how special DD is. But it says something special about her, that she also gets what I do, because that’s not as common, for whatever reason. Actually no, okay, because there’s a good reason for that.
I’m not sure where to start about it, but I guess I’ll start with how I met her, and that leads me to Geoff’s book, I guess.
So … I really enjoyed Geoff’s book, or I guess Cam’s book, or whichever. Ha ha. It was a lot of fun, and I understand that when someone is writing a whole book, things get edited out and everything, for space.
And I don’t want to make a big deal out of this or anything, because it’s not a big deal, and I guess it’s a matter of ego, or something, and that’s not really how I like to live my life. The thing is, in that book, there’re a lot of things that happen in it where, you know, I was actually there.
I don’t mean there in Calgary, or there at the festival. I mean in the room. Participating in the discussion. And in the book it’s like I wasn’t there. Actually like there was either no drummer at all, or else he has Jenny drumming, when, if you get right down to it, she was playing bass. Jenny is a great drummer, but, you know.
Like I say, I don’t mean to say that somebody has done some kind of terrible thing to me by leaving me out of the history of what was happening, but I just need to say for the purposes of telling you about DD that, for the record, I was there.
I was the drummer for the Athena Amarok project that summer. Cam specifically asked me to do it because he’d admired my old band and he liked what I was doing there. I guess he liked the portability of my set-up, too, which took a lot of work, a lot of trial and error, to fit right into a suitcase, unlike a lot of drummers that have to have this huge kit and everything. I mean you couldn’t have put Neil Peart into a situation like that and fit his stuff into a rental minivan.
For instance, right there at the start of the story I was in the minivan with Mykola and Cam and Jenny when we were zooming over the Rocky Mountains toward