slingshot
eyes
and how's-the-air-in-the-tire
politeness.
I know this feeling, this
comfortable bucket seat of longing
'cause I've been harnessed
here before, heading home,
pistons lighting up underneath
the hood like nova stars
burning tips off spark plugs
down
inside the throat of my
ambition.
So we had one song in our
canon and no where to go but up. But we were not out of the
basement yet. In my own head, I was formulating a “SurfPoet
philosophy” in hopes that we might eventually become bigger than
the Beach Boys or their arch-rival the Beatles and I'd actually
have some profound ideas to share with the world. I was formulating
surfing, poetry, music ideology and had configured love into it as
well. Unlike the Beatles who proffered, “All you need is love,” I
was offering a more complex recipe, something like, “All you need
is love, poetry, music, and surfing.”
It was around that time that
local radio was getting rid of DJs who were not at all cost
effective and replacing them with walls of CD machines programmed
to play music punctuated at plentiful intervals with commercials.
DJs were being fired left, right and centre and that included a
friend of Doug's named Stan Carew, a.k.a. A.J. Stanley. Stan became
a local legend on his last shift of live radio at rock station
Q104. Just as he was about to be replaced by twenty-five CD
players, Stan gave a distinguished sermon on air about how
pissed-off he was that automation was taking over and then he left
the building, leaving the radio audience to sample ten minutes of
dead air.
With loads of free time on his
hands, Stan was lured into the SurfPoet conspiracy still hatching
in the recording studio basement of the same building where a young
alternative group called Sloan had cut their first recordings.
Sloan was already huge in a Canadian alternative sort of way and we
knew that soon we'd go upstairs and cut similar
hits.
Now, Doug surfed a longboard
he had brought down from Toronto, which is only a semi-surfing
town, if you count surfing on Lake Ontario. Surfer kids who come to
Nova Scotia from Ontario say they like to surf near the nuclear
power plant back home “because it's warmer there.” Nova Scotia
surfing, as you know, is very cold. And it's the cold surfing
experience that is primal to SurfPoet music. Stan Carew, however,
has never surfed. But he was a lead singer in a country band. He
also played acoustic guitar and ushered in two new innovative
concepts to the SurfPoets. The first was the idea of adding a
second chord to our songs.
I was opposed to using a
second chord at first. I thought A minor was fine. But not Stan. I
wanted to kick him out of the band but Doug, usually a sombre,
quiet keyboardist, was militant that Stan was “in.” I was afraid
that shifting chords on my guitar while trying to recite my poetry
would throw me and the audience off. The compromise was that one of
the chords be A minor and the second one also a minor chord - an
easy one: E minor.
I had
decided that it would be a cliché if all the SurfPoet songs were
about surfing - not that we'd done any songs yet about surfing,
just the one about cars - so I decided to use a poem I had written
called “Beautiful Sadness.” It was a bittersweet, melancholy love
poem about the concept of beauty and
sadness. Sad things can be beautiful, it seemed to say. It was, I
argued, a very Celtic idea inspired by sad Cape Breton fiddle airs.
So Doug found a sampled slow hip-hop loop, I found my two chords,
Stan would strum acoustic and sing backup. Doug also had sampled
recordings of women in a church singing the Lord's Prayer, which
Doug added - only those recorded elements were played backwards,
just like on the old Black Sabbath records.
And so emerged a kind of
spoken word hip-hop love song that made you feel really sad - but
good. During coffee break, Stan introduced one more concept that
would revolutionize the SurfPoets forever. He took me aside and
told me a song should
eyes
and how's-the-air-in-the-tire
politeness.
I know this feeling, this
comfortable bucket seat of longing
'cause I've been harnessed
here before, heading home,
pistons lighting up underneath
the hood like nova stars
burning tips off spark plugs
down
inside the throat of my
ambition.
So we had one song in our
canon and no where to go but up. But we were not out of the
basement yet. In my own head, I was formulating a “SurfPoet
philosophy” in hopes that we might eventually become bigger than
the Beach Boys or their arch-rival the Beatles and I'd actually
have some profound ideas to share with the world. I was formulating
surfing, poetry, music ideology and had configured love into it as
well. Unlike the Beatles who proffered, “All you need is love,” I
was offering a more complex recipe, something like, “All you need
is love, poetry, music, and surfing.”
It was around that time that
local radio was getting rid of DJs who were not at all cost
effective and replacing them with walls of CD machines programmed
to play music punctuated at plentiful intervals with commercials.
DJs were being fired left, right and centre and that included a
friend of Doug's named Stan Carew, a.k.a. A.J. Stanley. Stan became
a local legend on his last shift of live radio at rock station
Q104. Just as he was about to be replaced by twenty-five CD
players, Stan gave a distinguished sermon on air about how
pissed-off he was that automation was taking over and then he left
the building, leaving the radio audience to sample ten minutes of
dead air.
With loads of free time on his
hands, Stan was lured into the SurfPoet conspiracy still hatching
in the recording studio basement of the same building where a young
alternative group called Sloan had cut their first recordings.
Sloan was already huge in a Canadian alternative sort of way and we
knew that soon we'd go upstairs and cut similar
hits.
Now, Doug surfed a longboard
he had brought down from Toronto, which is only a semi-surfing
town, if you count surfing on Lake Ontario. Surfer kids who come to
Nova Scotia from Ontario say they like to surf near the nuclear
power plant back home “because it's warmer there.” Nova Scotia
surfing, as you know, is very cold. And it's the cold surfing
experience that is primal to SurfPoet music. Stan Carew, however,
has never surfed. But he was a lead singer in a country band. He
also played acoustic guitar and ushered in two new innovative
concepts to the SurfPoets. The first was the idea of adding a
second chord to our songs.
I was opposed to using a
second chord at first. I thought A minor was fine. But not Stan. I
wanted to kick him out of the band but Doug, usually a sombre,
quiet keyboardist, was militant that Stan was “in.” I was afraid
that shifting chords on my guitar while trying to recite my poetry
would throw me and the audience off. The compromise was that one of
the chords be A minor and the second one also a minor chord - an
easy one: E minor.
I had
decided that it would be a cliché if all the SurfPoet songs were
about surfing - not that we'd done any songs yet about surfing,
just the one about cars - so I decided to use a poem I had written
called “Beautiful Sadness.” It was a bittersweet, melancholy love
poem about the concept of beauty and
sadness. Sad things can be beautiful, it seemed to say. It was, I
argued, a very Celtic idea inspired by sad Cape Breton fiddle airs.
So Doug found a sampled slow hip-hop loop, I found my two chords,
Stan would strum acoustic and sing backup. Doug also had sampled
recordings of women in a church singing the Lord's Prayer, which
Doug added - only those recorded elements were played backwards,
just like on the old Black Sabbath records.
And so emerged a kind of
spoken word hip-hop love song that made you feel really sad - but
good. During coffee break, Stan introduced one more concept that
would revolutionize the SurfPoets forever. He took me aside and
told me a song should
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