Play Wipe Out!
CONFESSIONS OF A COVER BAND.
It smarted when Mother Fabian wrapped me over the knuckles with her cane for playing a wrong note. The Convent of Sion, where I went for piano lessons, thankfully had practice rooms where you could escape. Alone, I’d spend the hour learning pop songs by ear, though what I really wanted was to play guitar. My first gig was at King George Public School, an embarrassing performance of Elvis Presley’s “Don’t be Cruel,” on air-guitar. I finally bought an old acoustic in high school, and practiced guitar chords while bedridden for a month with mononucleosis (the necking disease.) But it gave me a chance to start learning cover songs.
Ever been threatened for ignoring someone’s favourite song? It’s always a possibility, playing in a cover band — unless the crowd prefers your own compositions. When I was hired as a ‘folksinger’ years later for university initiation week, I tried playing some of my own songs. It wasn’t long before people started yelling “Play something we ALL know!” A few of them struck up an a cappella “We Shall Overcome” (it was the sixties), in some unplayable key. Drowned out by the the glum glee club, I got paid while they entertained. “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” was the next dirge.
For those of you for whom the 1900’s may as well have been another century, one of the biggest hits of 1963 was “Wipe Out,” by The Surfaris, a rocking instrumental where every second verse is a continuous, rolling drum solo. The obligatory cover band song wasn’t complicated if you played guitar, but a chore for drummers, who tired of it. We had to play “Wipe Out” routinely in The Loids, the band I was in at university. Back when I was fifteen, my first band pre-dated “Wipe Out,” but there were other guitar tunes we attempted. To us Viscounts, our gods were The Ventures, and “Walk Don’t Run” was an anthem. We had one gig — the high school variety show. We may have performed some cover songs, but our facsimiles were so godawful, nobody recognized them.
In those days it was hard to get the words for a song, let alone figure it out on a guitar. You had to buy the 45 rpm record, and play it over and over – which still didn’t guarantee the words were understandable. Sometimes we could only learn them by listening to the radio. That’s what we did in The Tempos, my band throughout high school. Garth Proude, our bass player, went on to be a regular on CBC Television’s “Singalong Jubilee,” backing up Anne Murray, who got her start there. Garth said in a recent interview, “We learned from each other,” and it was true. All The Tempos’ songs were stolen from the top 40 — or top 100. Writing original material never occurred to us; it was challenging enough to try and play songs people knew and could dance to.
The Loids were a cover band that kept me busy playing at university dances. Along with other diversions, like skipping classes, it no doubt contributed to my flunking out of Pre-Med. Sadly, you can’t be a doctor if you disdain chemistry. I figured instead I could carve out a business career moving to the big city. Ironically I wound up bringing ‘education’ to people’s homes — selling encyclopedias door-to-door. The city of Montreal was a place in the sixties which was a mecca for musicians, and I absorbed all I could, especially from visiting blues bands. When I became disenchanted with selling education, I found a university which gave me a second chance, and enrolled in their BA program. At that institution four of us started a blues band, named for the year 1969, when we were supposed to graduate. We called ourselves the 69th Parallel; it sounded better than the Sixty-Niners. I played blues harp, and Tom Gallant — who went on to full-time music — played lead guitar.
We only did blues covers at university events, mostly by artists the students never heard of, but if they could dance to them, fine. Not so at a gig we got at a regional high school out in the country. It was some kind of ball, and the gym was decorated in anticipation of the big event. We kicked off the first set with Paul Butterfield’s “Born in Chicago.” Throughout the night, as we played songs nobody knew — from Muddy Waters’ “I Got my Mojo Working,” to John Hammond’s “Big Boss Man” — it became obvious our mojo wasn’t working. A small but menacing crowd of delinquents gathered at the foot of the stage, giving us looks that could kill. “Play Wipe Out!” they demanded. As musical snobs, we weren’t going to stoop to that. “Sorry, we’re a blues band,” I snottily informed them. “PLAY WIPE OUT!” The refrain continued, growing in volume till the dance mercifully ended. We started to pack the van, but when we returned for the rest of our gear, the gang in front of the stage had grown. I turned and whispered, “When I give the signal, grab your stuff and make a run for it.” We dashed out the stage door, squeezed in the van and floored it. The hoodlums raced around to the parking lot, but they were too late.
Decades later during my mid-life crisis, I started playing again in cover bands. The most memorable was a band called The Armadillos. We played regularly at Spurs, a honky-tonk in a badass area of Montreal. Sometimes two guys straight out of Goodfellas would appear and collect a stuffed envelope at the bar. At first I was pleased with the cheers and whistles we got, until I noticed they kept the hockey game on behind us on the big screen TV. It was the 1990’s, and the line dancing craze was at its height. We played new country and some old classics, but inevitably we’d get requests for songs we didn’t know. One night a drunken cowgirl asked for something by Shania Twain. I told her we didn’t do Shania Twain — but did she like Steve Earle? “Play Shania Twain!” she demanded. I explained that since we didn’t have a Shania twin, we couldn’t play Shania Twain. “Aww…” she boozily pleaded –“just one?” It was times like these we had a special tune up up our sleeves, one we sometimes played out of spite. It woke everyone from their stupor before 3 AM closing, and its tortured drum solo expressed how we felt. The name of the song, of course, was “Wipe Out.”
© June 2022 by Richard Hancox
