Like any disreputable news gathering service and opinionated content magnifier, Next Play is part of a Signal chat group.
Because of a swimming pool.
And, as usual, itās all about a band.
ā¦
At the turn of the century, there was Oxen.
My long music adventure as part of Babelfish had expired like a dusty mixing board in a pawn shop window. As we gained attention and developed an identity, weird considerations creeped into band conversations. And two of us moved away, settling the arguments.
I wandered the Earth, or at least, the part of Earth that is two neighbourhoods in MontrƩal.
A lot of the old gang (think West Side Story without the dancing but very much with the bad attitude, or baditude) had quit Canadaās funnest city, but an elite squad was left behind to witness the unbelievable day when the bars of MontrĆ©al banned smoking. The elite four of us were gathered at Devinās apartment, maybe on rue Guy (as in Lafleur), watching hockey, because we are the original identity being resurrected by Mike Myers.
Dev was noodling on the guitar, and I had a great idea because I was using alcohol. Stu had worked at a music store where he learned to hit a snare drum with regularity and Frank, well Frank was the singer of Babelfish who survived multiple blows from the headstock of my swinging bass on stages from the Plateau to Guadalajara.
Using my powerful faculties of reasoning, which would one day inspire generative AI, I realized, āholy shit, this is a bandā. Wait, did I say that out loud? I look around. The others are still watching the game.
I try again. āHoly shit, this is a band.ā The Penguins score and no one hears me again. I get not heard a lot. Welcome to bass land, population: me.
I was using my bass guitar in a showband playing martini bars, crushing nouveau R&B for impossibly good looking people (I was only allowed in because I knew how to work the mixing board) but I had no outlet for the irrepressible creative urges which drove my life into the haphazard. If I was going to be haphazard, it should be on purpose.
ā¦
Years later, Frank left MontrƩal for good and the band that started in front of the hockey game merged with the infinite. Still no biopic.
This happened as Google (not a fun number for kids but a company that crawled the information superhighway to indulge and amplify predilections) was getting into the email game with Gmail, as in Gee, your mail smells terrific. And a new, crappy word was going around: monetize (ex. Jesus monetized the water into wine). Googleās initial promise: You will never have to worry about email storage again. Now my Gmail account tells me I am nearly out of space and would I like to BUY SOME? Complaining to Google is throwing a tennis ball against an aircraft carrier.
To stay connected, the four of us signed up to this fantastic new Faustian bargain, and so began an adolescent, unregulated, haphazard conversation that is still going ā but not on fucking Gmail. Our predilections are too nefarious.
ā¦
Once I finally pulled my friendsā attention back from the fucking hockey game, we agreed to jam.
At the bottom of MontrĆ©alās St-Henri neighbourhood is a remarkably useful business called Studio Ćconomik. The name is spectacularly effective, describing at once what it is and how much you are going to pay. For $15 an hour, you get a room furnished with a drum set, amplifiers and a PA system. And it is not a shit room - it has carpeting and everything.
We assembled there without a clue what we were going to do. Frank had a couple of tunes, he always has a couple of tunes, he is bursting with irrepressible creative urges. So, you know, we just started playing.
Studio Ćconomik usefully placed in each soundproofed room a four-track cassette recorder. I canāt let a piece of electronic junk go to waste, and I snapped in a 90-minute TDK. We played and wrote music and took breaks across the street in the disused parking lot overgrown with weeds to smoke and pop a couple of Molson Ex.
We went to Stuās to pop more Ex and pop the TDK in to listen back. To my genuine surprise (not the kind I feign in work meetings to appear interested) it didnāt sound bad, and I realized that making rock music was not as hard as I thought.
Because sometimes, in Babelfish, we made it really fucking hard.
ā¦
In Toronto, city on the verge of the nervous breakdown that it really wants to have (I mean, weāre so closeā¦ just hang on honeyā¦ Iām almost there), in the impossibly fashionable neighbourhood where I am allowed to live with my attorney because I know how to work the mixing board, there is a small public swimming pool. Itās really small. It takes three strokes of a standard human front crawl to traverse its length. A pool like this reminds you that contrary to reassuring mythologies, size matters, and this pool has almost no size at all, so itās interesting in that negative way, from a lack, like some people lack empathy or like a band missing a bass guitar (cāmon, man). In summertimes, I grab a too-small towel, don a colourful bathing suit and amble ridiculously in flip-flops to Stanley (Cup) Park to join the hungover hipsters and yummy mummies and their one perfect toddler with their pre-acceptance to Wilfred Laurierās business program, and the soft old timers stunned that the ramshackle pile of house they inherited from their parents in 1986 is worth eleventy million dollars, and gather around the diminutive puddle of water to bask in the glory of this priceless, pathetic urban amenity. I bring a magazine to read because the pool is always full - if eleven people are in then it is full - and also the pee canāt really dissolve, there isnāt a sufficient volume of water.
The magazine I am reading this one fine day in 2010 on the hot poolside asphalt has a long discussion among three demented experts about the burgeoning business of data. The data collection is vast, the surveillance pervasive, and, as any respectable paranoiac will tell you, just because you didnāt do anything doesnāt mean they (them) canāt use it against you. Gmail is harvesting your whole fucking life. It is discomfiting, even though I am not 100% sure what that word means. The moderator of the discussion (I want to be a discussion moderator when I grow up) asks for final thoughts from each of these auspicious suspicious:
Him: āUse Signal.ā
Her: āUse Signal.ā
Them: āUse Signal.ā
ā¦
The reason people make a band is to give it a name. We spend hours, days and weekends contemplating what this magnificent new ensemble should be monikered. Bursting with creative urges, we use two. One is Saferacker, which isā¦ safe. The one that glows with meaning and irony and a healthy dose of cud-chewing stupid, is Oxen. We are Oxen and we are ready for our first gig.
At rue Mont-Royal and rue St-Laurent is a big fucking barn of a bar called Jailhouse Rock which is also the name of a song performed by Elvis, and QuƩbec at its most quƩtaine fucking loves Elvis. The band loads in. As the new girls at school, we are on first.
In the dressing room, which is a closet adorned with a photo of a biologically mature woman in a colourful bathing suit on a motorcycle, maybe she is going later to a small public pool, I scribble together a set list, which is easy because we have like, eight songs and we are gonna play em all. Two of us are seasoned semi-professionals at this sort of thing, habituated to blowing away audiences of nine to thirteen drinkers. And two of us are about to be rock stars, with the attendant groupies, coke dealers and hangers on and drug addictions that lead to their epic Scorsese downfalls, drowned in the massive pools of their mansions.
At Jailhouse Rock, for thirty electric, unrecorded and badly misremembered minutes, Oxen owns the room. People stop drinking to clap. We are famous and rich.
ā¦
The Oxen perpetual conversation migrated to Signal, where we have been ever since. We added a couple more excellent fellows, but unlike another, impossibly stupid band of users, we invited them on purpose.
Still no biopic.
ENCRYPTIONS
Ā· Typical headline: Groupie accidentally sleeps with bass player. Ha.
Ā· On rock biopics.
Ā· Were you TDK or Maxell? Or bi?
Ā· Thatās Kate and Patrick, poolside in Little Children by the most excellent Todd Field.
OUT OF OFFICE
Ā· Next Play will not publish next Saturday. Use the reclaimed five minutes to enjoy a nervous breakdown.