Matthew Perry

 

I met Matthew Perry in the summer of 1995, when Friends had suddenly blown up making its mid-season debut. He was 25; I was 40. I was freelancing for the (Toronto) Globe and Mail’s TV supplement, Broadcast Week. I was at a low point in my career, barely eking out a living as a freelance writer and selling running shoes part-time. Perry was a sudden major Hollywood star. 

I knew about the show but hadn’t been watching it, so, a couple of days before the interview, the editor, Trevor Cole, couriered a box of VHS tapes of Friends episodes to my house for me to watch. Cole made it clear to me that he was not a fan of the show and my assignment was not to interview Perry for a flattering “puff” profile. In true Globe and Mail fashion, the story would go something like “Sure, it’s the Number One show on television, but here’s why we find it irritating.” The interview was to form only a part of the larger, snarky article.

I was not happy about that angle, especially after watching a few episodes and finding myself laughing at the witty, if somewhat convoluted dialogue — particularly the lines delivered by Perry as “Chandler Bing.” (“Have you heard the news?” “The fifth dentist caved and now they’re all recommending Trident?”)

But I was glad for the assignment and the eventual $300 payment.  

The interview was to take place in a room in the hotel built into the stadium where the American League Blue Jays play. I got downtown early and sat in my car in the underground parking garage reading the cover story about Friends in the latest Rolling Stone magazine. I had crammed the names of all the cast members and their characters and hoped I would not appear unprepared. I was nervous. This guy was rich and famous, and yet I knew little about him, except that his mother was once Pierre Trudeau’s press secretary, his step father was NBC News anchor and former CTV news anchor Keith Morrison, and his biological father used to play the bearded seafarer in the Old Spice commercials.

Perry’s hotel room had a main floor sitting room and an upstairs loft as the bedroom and, like all the rooms at the SkyDome Hotel, a floor-to-ceiling window looking onto the baseball field. I was introduced to Perry by a publicist with a clipboard. Perry stood tall and dignified and I remember he was wearing a preppy-style blue blazer. His face bore a half-smile that seemed to be carved into him in the form of a permanent smirk. He shook my hand warmly and smiled as if he was genuinely happy to meet me. After the publicist left he turned toward the baseball field and told me he had watched last night’s Jays game. Now, the field was a dormant, bland, industrial space. Sections of artificial turf were rolled up like carpet and maintenance people strolled around carrying tools. A Zamboni-like riding tractor groomed the outfield. Through the window you could hear the empty, cavernous echo of utility fans. 

Perry told me he had met the team the night before. He reached into his pocket and showed me the game ball manager Cito Gaston had given him after the game, autographed by all the players. He was really proud of it and anxious to show me. He was a fan, delighted to have met these big-league heroes in the flesh, not yet fully grasping the reality of his own fame. The Jays had won their second World Series less than two years ago, and Perry told me that the vanity plates on the Porsche 911 he drove around L.A. read “JAYS 93.” 

There was a small couch against the side wall, a couple of chairs facing it and a coffee table in between. He sat on the couch and I took one of the chairs.

“Hey, instead of always facing each other, why don’t we try sitting side by side,” he said.

Why not? I thought. Why be a stickler? I’ll go along. So, I sat beside him. A mistake, as it put me in the awkward position of having to turn my head to the right 90 degrees in order to address him. I arranged my tape recorder and my note pad on the coffee table and held my list of questions in my hand. Perry asked if those were my interview questions. Then he grabbed the sheet out of my hand and began reading them. “How about if I just pick the questions I want to answer, and —"

“Um, I don’t think so,” I said, taking back the page.” 

It would have been a funny twist, and Perry might have respected my willingness to flaut formality, but I couldn’t risk losing control of this interview. This wasn’t a game. 

At one point during the interview, he said, with ironic emphasis: “You might as well go ahead and ask THE QUESTION.” 

“What question?”

“You know,” he said. “The one they always ask me.”

I looked at him for a few seconds.

He said, “‘Are the cast members all really friends?’”

What a dumb question, I thought. 

“We don’t ask that question,” I said, with mock seriousness. “We’re the Globe and Mail.”

He laughed. What a relief, and a thrill for me. Only a Canadian would have got that joke. I had made Matthew Perry laugh. 

When the interview was over, I packed up my briefcase, shook Perry’s hand, thanked him and went for the door. He stood there in the doorway, alone, in the two-story luxury room, clutching his autographed baseball, awaiting his next interview; about to face the wild ride that lay ahead of him, of which Friends was only the beginning. And when the door closed behind me and I walked down the hall, I had the illusion that, under different circumstances, we might have been ... friends.

"That's not Robbie Robertson!"

  

When I was 14, in 1969, my 16-year-old brother, John, was in a band with a few friends from high school — including future Grammy nominee Tom Cochrane and future record company executive Deane Cameron. The band practised in our basement and I would often fool around with the equipment — guitars, amps, a full drum kit — when they weren’t around. I had been schooled on what’s cool in music by John, who introduced me to artists like Jimi Hendrix, Cream and Johnny Winter. But this band John was in was into a different kind of music. They played songs by Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash and the Band, as well as some originals written by Tom. They were most influenced by the Band, even naming themselves “King’s Harvest,” after the song from the album “Music From Big Pink.” 

 

There was a copy of “Big Pink” in the house, and, I confess, the first time I heard it I really couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. At 14, I had just been drawn in by distorted guitar solos, fuzzy power chords, bluesy harmonica and screaming vocals as the new vocabulary of contemporary music. These Band tracks were just songs — well written, well played and well sung — but songs, with lyrics and melodies and without the sensationalism of driving hard rock. 

Meanwhile, I spent that summer teaching myself how to play an acoustic guitar by learning the chords to every song on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” I forced myself to finger-pick every chord, knowing that picking was more difficult than strumming, and the technique would make me sound like a better guitar player, sooner. It worked. I was invited to join John’s band two years later.

On that night in 1969, John, Deane and Tom went to Massey Hall to see the Band in concert. I was home alone, with a copy of the Band’s second, eponymous album and our living-room General Electric console stereo. I played that album for maybe the eighth time but suddenly heard it for the first time. I was hooked. I played it again and again that night. While John and is friends were witnessing a live Band performance, I was learning to love their music at home. 

Without knowing it I developed an ear for the stylized nuances: the rootsy touches of accordion and fiddle, boogie-woogie piano combined with the funky drum beats, the heart-tugging vocals and the witty, colourful lyrics, the beautiful pain of “The Unfaithful Servant” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” The photos on the album cover completed the impression. These guys were reaching back to 19th-century America (even though they were mostly Canadian) and all its rustic, romantic appeal. They all managed to look the part, of rural homesteaders, with their beards, cowboy boots, work shirts and beat-up felt hats, displayed in grainy black-and-white photos. One member, whom I deduced was Jaime Robbie Robertson (as credited on the album), had distinctive eyebrows, wire-rimmed glasses and a dark moustache, making him look like some sort of university intellectual.

Liking the Band (and Dylan and the Byrds) set me apart from my friends at school (although I still liked Hendrix). Most guys my age had albums by Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath and Deep Purple in their record collections. I hardly knew any Band fans, which made being a fan feel like a personal distinction, as if I was a fan of this artist nobody else had heard of.

The first time I saw the Band perform was at a weekend-long festival in suburban Toronto (on this day, Aug. 21) in 1971. They shared the bill with Edgar Winter and White Trash, Sha-Na-Na and others. By that time, I was a member of my brother’s band, whose name had been reduced to "Harvest," and who played mostly original songs written by Tom. We didn't do any Band covers, but we were still influenced by them in style and outlook.

Deane was a bit of a dictator about our aesthetic style. He was adamant that we not only eschew psychedelic and hard-rock music. We also had to dress accordingly. No mod clothes. No bellbottoms. No flowered shirts. We were to dress like farmers, as the Band did. Leather vests, jeans, cowboy shirts. 

We all attended the Band show as if it was a school field trip. We were sitting on the grass, fairly close to the stage. When the Band came on, Robbie Robertson appeared wearing a bright purple velvet suit. The round spectacles were there, the thin dark beard and the cream-coloured Fender Stratocaster. But the outfit, complete with velvet cap, was a bit of a surprise. 

Deane called out: “Hey, Tom, that’s not Robertson, you know! That’s not Robertson!” Other people in the crowd must have heard, many of them wondering who "Robertson" was. 

Deane was in denial. He refused to accept that the mainstay of the band that served as his aesthetic template would violate every sartorial rule he had enacted.

A minute later, the Band opened with “The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show,” from their “Stage Fright” album. I remember because the first notes of that song — both on the record and in this performance — were the searing, choppy guitar riff that Robertson played as the song’s intro. On stage, Robertson’s face expressed a sense of self-conscious delight as he connected with the audience and with his bandmates, these two bars of unaccompanied guitar riffs serving as the count-in for the song. 

Despite the crappy, open-air venue, it was a great show, and Robertson’s, grinding rockabilly riffs and ringing harmonics pierced the air through every song, confirming his identity as surely as a fingerprint. 
 

 

The day I almost destroyed half a roomful of Gordon Lightfoot albums

  

 

When I was a teenager, I learned that a second cousin — my mother’s first cousin, whom the family had all but lost touch with — was Gordon Lightfoot’s manager. In that role, I later understood, cousin Al Mair managed Lightfoot’s business affairs and co-owned, with the singer, his publishing company, Early Morning Productions.

 

That was around 1970, when Lightfoot had already become a household name in Canada and was well known abroad. Although I wasn’t a huge Lightfoot fan, it was exciting to learn that I had a cousin in the music business, as I had designs on a music career of my own. 

 

My brother and I were in a band and we were hopeful that we could benefit from our family connection. So, we contacted Al, under pressure from the other band members, to see if he could offer any advice that would help us achieve our ambition to make a record. Al came out to hear us practice a couple of times and gave us some advice, but he didn’t commit to signing us or anything. Whatever he did for us regarding our music — helping us apply for a grant or recommending a demo studio — seemed to be done begrudgingly, out of obligation. 

 

As a band, we were actually pretty good. A couple of major record labels were interested in us. Our lead singer went on to have a successful career as a Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter/rocker, and our drummer became president of a major record label. But back in the ’70s, our fledgling band broke up and my pursuit of a career in music ended. Al and his wife remained friends with my parents, and Al, who was 15 years older than me, would still chat with me about music at family gatherings.

 

Being related to Al did net us some freebies. Lightfoot would play a week at Massey Hall (Toronto’s top concert venue) every year, and for several years in a row, Al gave our family four tickets for the show (orchestra, row H, centre, on the aisle). We’d also get free Lightfoot albums as they came out (this was the era of “Sundown,” “Old Dan’s Records” and “Don Quixote”). 

 

In 1975, Al invited me to come with him to see Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue at Maple Leaf Gardens. Our seats were not great (they were greens, near centre ice), but while we were sitting there, I deduced that we were part of a sort of Lightfoot entourage: sitting to my right was a nephew of Lightfoot’s, a guy around my age, named Steve, and next to him was John Stockfish, Lightfoot’s long-time bass player, and his wife, along with another colleague of Al’s. Lightfoot was to appear as a surprise guest at the Toronto show, and Al had a backstage pass. 

 

While we were at our seats before the show started, Al excused himself and was gone for about 20 minutes. When he returned, he casually mentioned that he had been in the dressing room drinking beer with “Gord,” Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Ronnie Hawkins. “It’s like a party down there,” he said. Later, during the intermission, Al got up again, saying to me, “I’m going backstage for another beer.” He was showing off to me. I was impressed, but crushed that I wasn’t able to go with him.

 

After my dreams of making it as a musician faded I was somewhat adrift — 19 or years old, unemployed, out of school, writing the occasional article for Music Canada Quarterly magazine. Al would find various odd jobs for me to do. I baby-sat his son a couple of times; he paid me in cash and albums, including his industry copy of “On the Border” by the Eagles. Al rented a pickup truck and hired me to dig some soil out of his Etobicoke garden and drive it to the dump. Two days’ work, at minimum wage. Around then, he was severing his business ties with Lightfoot and Early Morning Productions to focus on the indie label he was starting up, Attic Records. Another of the odd jobs he gave me was to spend a couple of excruciatingly boring days stuffing copies of Attic’s promotional newsletter, “Under the Eaves,” into envelopes.

 

A few months later, Al hired me to do what struck me as a very odd job: go to his old office, now occupied by the purchasers of his interest in Early Morning Productions, and destroy the large quantity of surplus vinyl records — singles — in the basement. I had heard of record companies destroying records that were no longer for sale for one reason or another, but I didn’t understand the legality of it. I didn’t need to. “Just make sure you destroy them all,” Al said. 

 

The office was on a trendy stretch of Davenport Rd. where boutiques, galleries and professional offices occupy renovated turn-of-the-century row houses. When I arrived that summer morning, three women were sitting at desks in the main floor office. The one who was in charge, an older woman (to me, then, so she might have been 40) in a beige skirt suit — who turned out to be Lightfoot’s sister, Beverley —  had been expecting me. She showed me to the basement stairs.

 

The cellar was a damp, unfinished concrete room that smelled like wet sand. It was bare except for stacks of 45-rpm records in paper sleeves, some in loose stacks, some in neat piles lined up against the walls and reaching halfway to the ceiling, some on the floor in domino-like rows formed by stacks that had toppled over, and most strewn in disorderly heaps on the floor. There must have been thousands of records. In a far corner, diagonally opposite the steps, sat an old wooden table on which sat several open cardboard boxes full of albums, while some stacks of albums sat on the floor. I decided that I would deal with the singles first and the albums later. 

There was an axe leaning against the wall at the foot of the stairs and beside it an electric drill plugged into an extension cord. I remembered Al telling me: “Some guys prefer the axe, others think the drill is faster. The last guy said he used the axe until he got tired, then switched to the drill, but then he quit after two hours, so I don’t know.”

 

A few destroyed records and many record fragments littered the floor, and there was a green garbage bag containing a fragments of a few dozen records that had met a violent demise. Oddly, I don’t remember the artists or the songs on these records. The Irish Rovers? Patsy Gallant? Ken Tobias? Maybe. I didn’t understand where this function fit into the machinery of the music industry of the 1970s. I just had to turn these discs into unplayable plastic shards, and place the scraps in garbage bags and haul the bags up the stairs, out the back door and into the alley. 

 

This looked like it might be fun. I was on my own — no boss looking over my shoulder — wrecking things, for minimum wage. And I was working in the record industry.

 

I decided to go with the axe first. I placed a 10-inches-thick stack of records, maybe “Horses” by Ron Nigrini, on the square of plywood that served as the chopping block, and took an overhead swing with the axe, careful not to hit the open-joist ceiling in my upward arc. The blade penetrated the plastic platters, but didn’t go all the way through, leaving the six or so discs at the bottom of the pile still intact. The axe blade didn’t shatter the records; rather, it made an incision that was duplicated on each disc through the stack as far downward as the blade reached. The challenge lay in getting the incision to reach the disc at bottom of the pile without going through the plywood base. I turned the pile over and swung at the bottom records. They slid onto the plywood square, so I attacked them individually until they were all wrecked. This was going to take a long time.

 

After half an hour I had smashed less than half a bagfull of records, but I had not made a perceptible dent in the assigned load. And I was getting tired. So I decided to give the drill a shot. It was a corded drill with a quarter-inch-diameter bit. With the drill, you had to  hold the stack of records steady, or the first few discs penetrated by the drill would spin violently like out-of-sync hula hoops, on the rotating bit, sending the remainder of the pile skittering across the floor. I tried holding the stack with my foot while I drilled, which worked well, but was hard on my back. As I drilled, the two or three records on top of the stack would splinter under the pressure from the drill, but the bit would bore a clean hole through the lower layers. I figured as long as the record had a hole and a deep crack in the grooved surface, it was unplayable and therefore officially destroyed. 

 

After a ruining a couple of stacks of records with the drill, I tossed them into the garbage bag and went back to the axe. The axe was more primitive, relying on brute force, cleaving many of the records, but strewing fragments and intact discs across the floor. The drill was more precise, surgical, but required more concentration and technique (restraining the records so they didn’t spin with the drill; getting the variable speed right, as a too-slow rate of revolutions sent the drill skating across the surface of the first record; and applying the right amount of downward pressure).

I had packed a lunch and there was a bathroom down there, so I didn’t need to come up until I was finished. At about five o’clock the basement door opened and a woman’s voice called my name. Al was on the phone. 

“How’s it going,” he asked. I was using Beverley’s phone.

“OK, but I’m only about halfway through.”

Al told me to go home, as the women were closing up the office, and come back the next morning. 

I was much more productive the next day. I devised a system, using the drill, that ploughed through 40 or 50 records per minute. I’d line up a row of six or seven piles and bore through them one after another, then toss the remains in the bag. I placed any survivors aside, restacked them and drilled them. By three o’clock, I had destroyed all the 45s, bagged them and placed the bags out the back door to be picked up on garbage day. The alleyway was now partially blocked by garbage bags filled with the fragments of music that would never be played. 

That left only the albums. Al had said “Make sure you destroy them all.” Should I just follow his orders and “destroy them all,” including the albums, or should I stop and ask about it? There was something different about the albums. Unlike the Attic singles, they seemed to be stored with care: some in open cardboard boxes, some sitting on edge and leaning against the wall, and others piled in orderly rows on the table. “Sit Down Young Stranger.” “Summer Side of Life.” “Don Quixote.” “Did She Mention My Name?”

Each unit was sealed in clear plastic, untouched, like a brand-new piece of merchandise. There must have been 600 or 700 albums here. Despite their larger dimensions, the shape and rigidity of the cardboard covers would have made them easier to destroy than the 45s. Maybe even fun. I could have them all shredded in half an hour.  

But unlike the 45s, these albums seemed to be telling me that it would be a shame to destroy them — even if it was legally necessary. 

When I reached top of the stairs, the office was alive with activity. In sharp contrast to the dank basement, the room was bright and airy, with spider plants and Boston ferns hanging from macramé hangers. A middle-of-the-road radio station played easy-listening music at low volume. The front bay window looked onto sunny Davenport Rd., where shoppers and office workers hustled by on the sidewalk and vehicular traffic rushed past. Beverley, who was on the phone, looked up at me and raised a finger to indicate she’d be off in a minute. A younger woman at a small desk was typing at impressive speed on an IBM Selectric typewriter. The other woman was flipping through folders in a filing cabinet drawer. Everyone was busy, running Gordon Lightfoot’s affairs.

The typing women stopped typing. “Did you want something?” 

“I just need to use a phone,”  I said.

She indicated the phone on her desk. “Nine out,” she said.

I went over and dialled Al’s office number while standing at the side of her desk. Luckily, Al was available.

“I did all the 45s in the basement but I’m not sure about the other records.”

“What other records?”

“There’s a bunch of albums there. Did you want me to destroy those too? You said to destroy them all, so —”

“What albums are they?” Al asked.

By this time, Beverley was off the phone and I got the impression that all three women were following my end of the conversation.

“They’re Gordon Lightfoot albums,” I said.

I heard the room gasp as all three women inhaled simultaneously. Then, one called out “NO!”

“Judging by the reaction here, I think I know the answer,” I told Al.

"Those aren't our records! You can't touch those!" Al said. 

Beverley stood up. “You- you didn’t-”

“No.” I smiled, embarrassed.  Embarrassed for having had to ask such a stupid question. Because now it seemed obvious: you don’t destroy Gordon Lightfoot albums when you’ve been hired to destroy Attic singles that happen to be in the basement of Gordon Lightfoot’s business office.

“You could have asked us!” Beverley said. 

But it was a good thing I asked someone.

 

Against the night sky

Anne had let me pick the hotel in London (a sleek, glossy little place that occupied part of a larger building just off Trafalgar Square), so it was only fair that she pick the hotel in Paris. She wanted to be close to the Eiffel Tower.

    “But you don’t need to be close to the Eiffel Tower,” I had said when we were booking the trip online. “It’s a tower. You can see it from anywhere in the city.”

    “You picked the London hotel, so I’m picking Paris” was her only counter-argument. She wants to be near the cliché, I thought. I would have preferred the Latin Quarter or Montmartre. I wanted the Paris of Picasso and Renoir, to be near Shakespeare and Company, where Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas tippled and scribbled and held forth. She wanted the Paris of Kevin Kline and Meg Ryan. But I let it go. 

    The hotel she picked wasn’t bad. A typically Parisian exterior, four storeys with flower boxes on the windowsills. Our room was nothing special, somewhat motel-like, with a beige, suburban décor. It had no window-box because it was on the main floor, with a view, if you parted the curtains, of a small parking lot: a couple of Renaults, a motor scooter, a potted ficus tree, a garbage can. “But it’s still a French parking lot!” I said.

And the hotel was on a Parisian street, with rows of 18th- and 19th-century buildings with wrought-iron rails on the windows, and motorcycles by the dozen, lined up tightly at a 45-degree angle to the sidewalk. 

    The main street was well shaded by trees and there were restaurants and café shaded by awnings and umbrellas and we loved to just walk the streets. It was late June and the weather was warm and sunny and the streets were alive with humanity — tourists who were there for the same reason we were: just to be there. 

    Following the directions on my phone, we walked the short distance to the Place du Trocadéro, a terrace that straddled two identical 19th-century stone museum buildings and overlooked the Seine, with the tower just beyond the far riverbank. We ate in a nearby café — at an outside table facing the pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk — and watched big tour buses empty their human loads in front of the terrace. After dinner, when the sun had set and the sky had begun to dim, we walked over to the terrace. People were already gathering to do what we were doing: stand there and look at the Eiffel Tower as night darkened the sky and stars began to appear. A dozen or so souvenir vendors worked their way through the crowd — young Black men, presumably immigrants from francophone African countries or the French Caribbean— selling miniature Eiffel Towers of various sizes. The sellers were a bit of a pain, but they were not too persistent. Once you shook your head or waved them off with a “Non, merci,” they would leave you alone. But then the next one would approach and you had to wave him off, too.

    The crowd thickened as the night intensified and the tower came alive with light. Spotlights placed strategically at various points on the structure gave depth to its metallic, skeletal form and its bronze hue. I wondered if this wasn’t a cliché of a vacation activity, to be standing there just looking at a famous urban landmark. But the crowd seemed to emanate an oddly warm feeling of community, all these people, from various points in Europe, the Americas and Asia, united in this single, trivial purpose: to observe a beautiful manmade thing — Hollywood’s icon of Paris for those not worldly enough to recognize the Arc de Triomphe or the Louvre, I was the symbol we had all seen in movies all our lives. At one point the tower exploded with light, flickering and flashing as if by fireworks, and the crowd responded with oohs and ahs. Anne and I held each other close and took pictures of the tower and of each other.

    The next morning, we went into a tiny bakery across Av. Kléber for a coffee and a pastry. A tall, dark Haitian man sold us coffee and pastries at the counter, and we took a seat at one of the four tables set up in the small space to eat our breakfast. After a few minutes a well-dressed white man came in, marched through the room and stepped behind the counter and through the saloon-style door that led into the kitchen, as if he owned the place. He came out a few seconds later and started yelling in French at the Haitian man, then stormed back into the kitchen. The white man came out again and shouted some more. The Haitian slammed some cupboard doors and a drawer in anger, then took a 50-euro note and a small note pad out of the till and walked quickly out through the front of the shop, apparently on his way to a market to buy some ingredients for the lunch business. 

    I pitied the immigrant employee, stuck in a shitty job with a prick of a boss, but too dependent on the lousy pay to quit. The Frenchman came out and took over behind the counter. I was annoyed that he would abuse his employee in that way, especially in front us, the customers. He had a cool, fashionable look: 50-ish, short salt-and-pepper hair, trim grey beard, crisp white shirt and high-end jeans. He was good-looking and fit. You wanted him to be a good person, but he had stained his image to us. He tried to be pleasant, asked in English if we wanted anything else. We said, “Non, merci,” and left.

    After a day of wandering the streets of the Latin Quarter and, later, the Avenue des Champs Élysées, we were drawn back to the Trocadéro as the sun set. It was a cheap, low-energy evening’s entertainment after a long day of walking, and it was a short, pleasant walk from our hotel. A Korean tour bus pulled up and a new flock of visitors piled onto the terrace. The African mini-tower vendors were out in force. As night stained the sky, we edged closer to the rail overlooking the garden that sloped down toward the river and the tower on the other side. 

    One vendor approached me and proffered a miniature tower. The vendors would dangle a tower from a chain in one hand, with a backpack full of them slung over the other shoulder. The replicas were actually quite nicely made: solid metal, of an accurate colour, and well detailed. They came in various sizes, ranging from about four inches to 12 inches tall. 

    I refused the vendor’s offer while looking down at the model in his hand. I looked up, and saw that he hadn’t understood my rebuff. As our eyes locked for that second, I saw in his face a sensitivity, his eyes revealing a wavering confidence, an apprehension in his position as the subservient, intruding salesperson. He had been intent only on getting the communication right: did I want one or not? “Non, merci!” And then he turned away and I lost him in the crowd. This was not just about whether I wanted a souvenir; I had seen into the deep morosity of this man’s life. I suddenly felt a stinging remorse. Not only had I rejected his offer, dashed his hopes for a sale, but I had done so in a gruff, dismissive way. I had been the object of his shyness, his doubt. If I saw him again, I thought, I would recognize him. His face was youthful but manly, taut-skinned, his eyes clear and expressive, and tinged with a sadness I would never forget.

I held Anne close. The lights on the tower burst and sparkled against the night sky. Suddenly I believed all the clichés about Paris and falling in love. For a moment I didn’t have to feel guilty or stupid for thinking that the two of us and all these others around us were touched by the magic of the city of lights, a city that was here a thousand years ago and would be here a thousand years from now. 

When the tower glittered and strobed again, Anne and I snuggled and took more pictures. The African men circulated with their replicas. Some made sales. I hugged Anne again and felt an urge to cry. Because Paris had made me love her more and because my remorse over the souvenir vendor confirmed my humanity.

 

Back at the room. Anne said, “We’ll have to buy one of those miniature Eiffel Towers before we leave.”

    “I was thinking the same thing.”

    “We can give it to my mother. I can see it on her nick-nack shelf already. And it would be nice to give one of those poor Africans some business.”

    “Let me pick the guy to buy it from, OK?” I said.

    “Why?”

    “I think I offended the one trying to sell me tonight. I feel badly. Really.”

    I tried to explain the hurt in his eyes and how it made me feel.

    “Come on, they get rejected every five minutes.”

    “I know, but I think he thought I was rude to him. I just want to put it right. And I’m pretty sure                I’d be able to pick him out if I saw him again.”

    She laughed. “But even if you find him, he’s not going to remember you.”

    “That’s not the point.”

 

The next night we had dinner in a restaurant off the roundabout near the Trocadéro — Anne didn’t believe in the five-block rule: avoid restaurants within five blocks of a tourist attraction. We had this pink salmon casserole baked in individual hand-thrown bowls, and a half-bottle of Chablis. We sat facing outward, in the Paris tradition, watching the pedestrians and the cars flow past. A police car approached, its siren blaring that two-note interval, “bee-bah bee-bah bee-bah,” which then dropped a semitone in pitch as it passed us, just like in the movies. I laughed, but Anne didn’t understand what I was laughing at. I didn’t bother to explain. As the sun set, the tour buses pulled up and the terrace began to fill up with tourists and vendors. It was Friday and a little busier than usual. “Maybe people who live in other parts of France come here for the weekend,” Anne said.

    When we got to the terrace I looked around. I would have to be quick and decisive, otherwise I would be rejecting and offending vendors right and left until I found the one I was looking for. Then I recognized the muscular arms sticking out of the blue cotton shirt, the loose jeans, the hair in knotted short twists and, most of all, the clear, sad eyes. He was about 20 feet away. I looked at him until our eyes met. I nodded and raised a hand and he adjusted his backpack and came toward us. 

    “Un,” I said, holding up an index finger. Then, reciting the phrase I had learned from Google Translate, I asked, “Combien coûtent les moyens?” 

    “Huit — “ he began, then corrected himself, having recognized my accent. “Eight euros.”

Anne took her wallet from her purse and fished for the right change. The vendor rummaged through his bag for a medium-sized replica. I was happy. I was actually fixing a mistake, in the middle, brokering the deal. Things were falling into place. 

    “Just give him a ten,” I said to Anne, enjoying this small victory. We would have Kronenbourg later, or a bottle of wine. 

    The vendor handed me the model. It felt surprisingly solid and heavy in my hand. Anne gave him the money, and signalled with a wave to keep the change. 

    “Merci!” I said. The vendor turned away, indifferent to his success. As he left, another vendor, who also looked a lot like the sad-eyed one I had offended the night before, passed.

    “So, was that him?” Anne asked.

Another vendor, dressed the same, with the same short dreads and clear, sad eyes, passed. And then another. 

    “I’m not sure.”

    The sky darkened and the Eiffel Tower sparkled and shimmered.

    Maybe I hadn’t made good with the right vendor. But we had our souvenir, and one vendor had our money. And I knew that if I’d had enough 10-euro notes I would have bought towers from all the vendors in Paris, and begged their pardon, in French.

Burt Bacharach: Parking cars, pumping gas and sanding boats

 

Whenever I think of Burt Bacharach, I remember a spring day in 1968 when I was part of a small group of kids who were sanding and varnishing the boats we would sail that summer in sailing school. The day was cool and windy, the kind of intrusive wind that you felt you had to shout over in order to be heard. So we didn't talk much, the instructors and the kids, and the wind was like a hiss of static or rushing water, a white noise that dominated the afternoon as we rubbed our woodblocks wrapped in sandpaper back and forth upon the hulls of the overturned Albacores in the yacht club parking lot. This auditory buffer seemed to give the song going through my head more room to grow and stretch to fill every corner of my brain until long after we headed for the streetcar stop and home. The song that had been going through my head all day was a pop song I must have heard on the radio: "Do You Know the Way to San José."

The words suggested images of "cool" through the narrow lens of my 13-year-old's world view; can you direct me to this cool place in California? This other cool place, L.A., is a great big freeway. Maybe they'll make you a star. The melody soared and the rhythm bounced with energy. It wasn't hip, like Jefferson Airplane, but it was trendy: TV trendy. "Parking cars and pumping gas." 

It was, of course, one of the first major hits for the massively successful trio of Burt Bacharach, Hal David and Dionne Warwick.

In the years to come, Bacharach's music propelled the mainstreamiest of mainstreams into a late-modern era. While my peers and I wallowed in Dylan, Hendrix, CSNY and the Band in our teens, Bacharach's music, his then-unconventional yet accessible chord structures and melodies, became the musical language of the grey-sideburn set. This was music for people who owned sprawling ranch-style bungalows with kidney-shaped backyard pools, learned transcendental meditation and watched Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. 

For a time, I rather disliked Bacharach, mainly out of ignorance, the way teenage boys develop tribal allegiances and hostilities toward various musical genres. Only much later, maybe 20 years ago, I listened to Bacharach's songs with unprejudiced ears. The music that once evoked shallow fashionableness to me now sounded full, complex and masterful. The simple yet evocative chording of "Close to You"; the hip optimism of "Say a Little Prayer"; the mild irony of "I'll Never Fall in Love Again." And then there was the theme from Arthur (on which Bacharach was a collaborator), which seemed to bring the same late-'60s, comfy-couch ambiance into the 1980s. And the puzzling complexity of "Promises, Promises," a mind-boggling experiment in rhythms, time signatures and structure.

When Hal David died in 2012, I read the lyrics to "Do you Know the Way to San José" closely for the first time, with that boat-sanding afternoon still in mind. The song is actually about unrealized dreams, about failing to make it in L.A. and returning to San José. That bright, hopeful tone came from Warwick's sweet voice combined with the rhythmic and melodic flair that could only be conjured by the man who stretched the era of the Great American Songbook into the 1960s and beyond.  

 

Life and The Love Boat

The Love Boat, Season 4, Episode 18, "Aquaphobic/Humpty Dumpty/the Starmaker," Feb. 7, 1981.

I never watched a full episode of The Love Boat during its decade-long run starting in the mid-1970s. It seemed a stodgy, shallow show at a time when television comedy was becoming more progressive and experimental, with shows like Mork & Mindy and Saturday Night Live. Today, a Love Boat episode is like a peek back at television's most conservative faction moving reluctantly into a new era. 

In the episode I watched yesterday, Isaac, the moustachioed bartender, learned that a music executive was among the newly boarded passengers, and hoped to be discovered as a singer. He arranged to perform a guest set in the cocktail lounge, and recruited three of the ship’s maids to be his back-up singers. Isaac, it turned out, was not a good singer, but the maids, played by the Pointer Sisters, were very good, so the music executive passed on Isaac and signed the three maids.

Meanwhile, a middle-aged man hoped to overcome his fear of water with the help of his fiancé. Enter Louis Nye, who had played the Drysdale's coddled, Ivy League son on the Beverley Hillbillies and would later play Susie Green's irascible father on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Here, he was an aquaphobe who couldn't venture out of his cruise ship cabin without wearing an oversized, prop lifejacket that looked like it was made from sofa cushions. Shedding the flotation device, according to the story's logic, would signify victory over his phobia. I won't spoil the ending, but the captain and the ship's doctor appear to devote an inordinate amount of time and attention to this single passenger's problem. 

And then there's the former college football star, played by David Hasselhoff — before Knight Rider and Baywatch, and long before that depressing viral video of him dining off the floor — who could not accept that his glory years on the gridiron were behind him. He also is the ex-boyfriend of Julie, the cruise director, and they dabble in rekindling their romance, which is apparently permitted on the Pacific Princess.  

The song Isaac and the sisters performed was "He's So Shy." The first time I heard that song I was sitting in women's strip club in the late '70s with a couple of friends of both sexes. We were there out of ironic curiosity — people did things like that in those days. During a break in the male stripping (short bodybuilders with moustaches and long, dark hair) someone from the crowd selected a song on the jukebox and joined a small group of friends on stage where they sang along with the record. They danced an understated Motown-type choreography and snapped their fingers as they sang; a friendly-looking guy in a preppy cardigan led the group into a dip at the knees at the beginning of each chorus. It looked as if these friends — five or six men and women — had planned this temporary takeover of the stage and had rehearsed these moves beforehand. Moves I would remember some 40 years later. 

The Grammys: An unknown blues singer, and a broken record

 This is a test post, as I haven't been on here in years. 

As I posted on Twitter this morning, the Grammys telecast (which aired last night on CBS) used to stand out from the other awards shows by showcasing the many sometimes unprofitable genres the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences represents, by including  jazz, classical and folk performances among the commercial stuff. And it always expressed a clear stand in favour of music education in public schools. While last night's show included acknowledgement of a "music educator of the year" and some advocacy for education, the show has become in recent years indistinguishable from other celebrity glitz-fests, such as the American Music Awards, the People's Choice Awards and the MTV Video Music Awards.

Some highlights: The in memoriam segment, featuring Kacey Musgraves, Mick Fleetwood, Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow and Migos' Quavo; Harry Styles receiving his award from bis biggest fan, a grandmother from Sudbury, Ont.; and a nod to the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, put together by Questlove (the Roots) and including a long list of notables, including L.L. Cool J., Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Busta Rymes, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Missy Elliot, Big Boi and De La Soul, to name but a few. Inevitably, the omnipresent D.J. Kaled, who always manages to stake out a prominent position in these events, was everywhere.

Unknown Bonnie Raitt

Song of the Year honours went to Bonnie Raitt, who beat out Adele, Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. Raitt's expression of utter shock upon hearing her song title ("Just Like That") called was reminiscent of Meryl Streep's feigned astonishment at the Golden Globes a few years ago. But Raitt's incredulity was real. She was likely resigned to an honorary mention alongside the reigning stars.

No one, however, was more surprised at Raitt's win than the reporter at U.K. trash tabloid The Daily Mail, which reported: "Shock as unknown blues singer beats Beyonce, Adele and Taylor Swift to win Song of the Year."

Whose record did Beyonce break?

Beyonce set the record for total Grammys won by an artist, taking home her 31st gold gramophone. But I heard no mention made during the telecast, or since, of the incumbent record-holder: Georg Solti, the Hungarian/British symphony and operatic conductor and long-standing musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. 

Born in Budapest in 1912, Solti studied with Bela Bartok and later, in the 1930s, worked under Arturo Toscanini at the Salzburg Festival. Before the Second World War, Solti fled Hungary's increasing antisemitism for London, where he conducted a season of ballet at the Royal Opera House. During the war, he found refuge in Switzerland, where, forbidden to work as a conductor, he earned a living as a pianist. After the war, he made a name for himself as a fastidious, demanding conductor with such notable companies as the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Covent Garden Opera Company in London. 

Solti joined the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1967. He made numerous recordings with the CSO, including the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler. He made several operatic recordings with the CSO and other orchestras. Solti's recording of Wagner's "Der Ring Des Nibelungen," recorded in Vienna in 1958, has twice been voted the greatest recording ever made — by readers of Gramophone magazine in 1999, and by professional music critics polled by BBC's Music Magazine, in 2011; this is the music heard during the helicopter attack scene in the movie Apocalypse Now. Solti died in 1997.

Here's to you, Georg. It was a good run. One might say you put your own Ring on it.