May 1999
Barely two weeks after the first day out with the accordion, my friend Krazy Karl Mohr phoned me.
“Joey! Baby! How would you like to be on the radio?”
“I’d love to, Karl baby. What do I have to do?”
“You have to help me back up John Southworth on accordion, for his new song Veto Valvoline.”
“Rock!”
John’s one of Canada’s indie rock darlings and a British-accented and -mannered sort of guy who writes pop tunes that could be described as “Burt Bacharach songs filtered through Ween”. Veto Valvoline (here’s an MP3 excerpt) is a cute “laundry list” ditty, in which John attempts to string together as many words beginning with the letter “V” as he can.
On the album version of the song, Karl played his beaten-up Rosetti accordion, a raspy, punk-ish sounding little squeezebox with a broken reed or two. He’s accompanied by a drum, bass and guitar and the vocals of another Canadian indie rock darling who is also a friend of mine, Hawksley Workman. For the live version, John decided to make it just him, and Karl and me on accordion. Karl would play the bassline and I would “comp“, and both of us would sing backing vocals.
I’d only been playing the accordion (and singing in public) for a couple of weeks, but I was game.
We had a great afternoon rehearsing. John, Karl and I met at the condo where I was living at the time, whose entire second floor was a gym that the tenants rarely used. We went through the song — a scary thing for me, becuase until then, I’d been sticking to three-chord rockers on accordion, and John’s terribly fond of having a bazillion chord changes per song. By the end of the afternoon, we had it down cold and were performing the number as we marched around the indoor track, watched quizzically by the few tenants in the gym.
Gig day was an amazing one. We performed live on CBC Radio Two’s show RadioSonic, along with some great musicians, including Martin Tielli of the Rheostatics, Sarah MacElcheran (see the last paragraph of this article) on trumpet, and Hawksley Workman. Despite the fact that radio is not a visual medium, Karl and I decided to dress up as dapper 1920’s gentlemen. There was an audience of about 50 in the studio, so the effort wasn’t completely wasted.
We performed the number quite well, and after the gig, John’s record company got us very drunk and gave us money, with which I took a cute girl out for dancing and more drinking.
A couple of days later, Karl and I were playing accordion of the roof of my building when I made an observation. “Ten years of playing synths, and it never took me any farther than the Queen’s/Kingston bar circuit. One month with the accordion, and I get a CBC radio live gig. I think I’m going to enjoy being an accordion player.”
