Eagalic Music

We finally found a rooming house on 13th behind the Vancouver General Hospital that was to be home for the next year or so and would witness the arrival of our son Chad, born February 2, 1973.

We put lots of love and care into painting the two small adjoining rooms and in these rooms many songs and poems were carefully crafted on twilight evenings looking out over the mountains. A miniature hotplate stove and oven cooked many a savory meal and when Roger and Cleo arrived in Vancouver, hosted many a friendly gathering too. It was to be another period of magic in our lives.

I took a job as an accounts clerk at the Shaughnessy Hospital, complete with long hair and headband and this provided an income, while I strummed guitar at home evenings but did no performing. I recall also studying the writings of Madame Blavatsky, more cabala and reading The Green Child by Herbert Read which also provided me with a song of the same name. The song Ships of Sleep came out of this period too. This was a time when there was a simple and beautiful majesty about just being home and making love and creating music. There seemed to be excitement and adventure around every corner although we lived the simplest of lives. The sound of my guitar literally filled up those tiny rooms with good energy.

Chad was born with some difficulty at the Vancouver General Hospital’s Willow Pavilion but the day we brought him home and although it was still winter, spring seemed already in the air. The arrival of a baby was a big blessing in our lives that had seen such unstable times. About the same time, Roger and Cleo had a son too and we suddenly had a lot more in common than old times. Thank God for the friendship and love of those days.

My father died in the spring of that year of prolonged and painful throat cancer and I traveled alone back to Winnipeg for the funeral. It was a painful personal time for me as so much had been left unspoken between us but it was also a time where I laid to rest some old ghosts.

The train journey back to Winnipeg was a memorable one though because it was on the train I met a small group of gypsy travelers (they all seemed to be California hippies in their 20’s)who introduced me to the book The Holy Science, written by Swami Sri Yukteswar the guru of Paramahansa Yoganda. They served me green tea with cayenne pepper and told me they were vegetarians.

I asked one of them the purpose of their journey. “What are you hunting for,” I asked. “I’m not into hunting,” he replied. This same young man with long flowing blond hair who gave me the book astonished me at end of our journey by telling me he was 41 years old. It was only then that I noticed the grey hairs in his beard. These teachings and this meeting would have a deep influence on me in the years to come.

My job at the hospital didn’t last too long. I couldn’t seem to deal with a routine job but UIC insured us for a few months afterward, a small car came our way and we soon made the decision to abandon city life for the wilds of Vancouver Island, to a setting that was destined to become a kind of “spiritual home” for me, the Cowichan Valley. We stayed with Veronica’s sister and her family in Mill Bay until we found a little place on the water. It was there that I began to pick up the threads of my life as a performer.

Reading the local newspaper one day, I came across two poems written by a local photographer, Robert James, which inspired me to make an appointment to meet with him. I remember that Robert’s poetry had a powerful mystical quality about them and perhaps that’s what it was that led me to make the call.  Whatever the reason, the meeting was an important juncture in my life. Robert greeted me as a fellow artist-soul newly arrived on the island and immediately called the program director Chas Leckie at Shaw Cable to do a community television program on me and my music. He also asked if I’d be interested in accompanying some of his poetry readings on guitar and offered me the use of his studio to give guitar lessons. To top it off, he paid for my first series of ads, taking my photo for them and setting them up with the paper and if this wasn’t enough of a show of solidarity, he allowed me to teach evenings in his studio, rent-free. This set the course of my life for the next few years.

I’d tried to take a job at the Youbou saw mill but after one day on the job I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand the work. I also tried brush slashing with B.C. Hydro but I lasted less than one week because I was falling behind the rest of the crew, although I worked so hard my wrist swelled up to twice its normal size.

In desperation I took odd jobs cleaning up barns and stables at different farms in the area. This was work I hated but it provided just enough money to make ends meet in between guitar lessons.

I finally found a job through the winter at the Good Shepherd animal shelter which was run by a group of Catholic nuns, working first in the kennels and then with barn animals, a job that I found almost possible to keep doing. I used to milk the goats and bring a pail home for our baby to drink, feed the cows, sheep, goats and horses as well as groom the latter and of course clean out all the stalls. All the while I began to build up a clientele among my guitar students until at last I was able to do that full time, although without Robert’s continuing help, I would never have been able to make it.

During this time I met Michael Asti Rose who’d recently moved to the valley and was a film maker and photographer at the time and Kent Steele, who was then teaching literature at the Shawnigan Lake Girl’s School and who was also another artist-soul whose friendship was to remain a part of my life until the late ’80’s.

About this time Paul Horn who was also giving lectures on Transcendental Meditation, came to the Valley to give a talk and I cycled out to the Shawnigan Lake Inn to meet him and give him a tape. I walked up to him at the bar and he was very friendly, inviting me to sit down and talk.  I was able to give him a tape. He offered some initial encouraging words and took the tape with him. Later he sent it back with an apology for taking so long and gave me the name of a record producer in Vancouver who I traveled over to see. This person was not interested in my music but I will always remember Paul Horn’s gesture with thanks. Such a meeting and words of encouragement can be a very meaningful moment in a creative person’s life, no matter what happens as a result. I persevered with renewed determination after our meeting.

Things in the little beach-side cabin in Mill Bay were not so rosy, though. While on the surface we were managing to live a very “artistic” lifestyle there were inner problems that were not being addressed. Veronica wanted something very different in her life from what I was struggling toward and I was not ready to acknowledge this. In fact, I was getting deeper and deeper into meditation and was basically trying, it seems to me in retrospect,  to shut out the disharmony that was growing in our lives by closing my eyes to it.  At the same time it was a survival technique too, for there was pressure on me to become something I was not.

My son Chad was now becoming a toddler and this was a very beautiful stage in his growth. On one of my acid trips I had a vision of him as the Christ child, all perfect, all-knowing, all-whole and the thought of leaving him was a dagger in my heart but it was becoming more and more obvious that this was the only option available to me.

Veronica wanted me out of her life and though she was making it more and more plain, I could not bring myself to leave. I was working as hard as I could and yet she kept telling me that she wanted me out of her life for 2 reasons: money and sex. I felt powerless as I could not find a way to be a better lover or to make more money.

The oscillation of tenderness and friction defined our relationship from the very beginning in Greece and subtly undermined all of our growth together. It was the old story of a violent quarreling followed by reconciliation and promises never to repeat the offenses.

The worst part of these memories is that although I was trying to understand myself in the spiritual sense through meditation and hallucinogens,  I could not come to grips with the destructive part of my personality that was slowly but surely defeating everything I was trying to achieve in my life. This deep-seated fear sometimes masquerading as anger was the ground of the biggest battle of my life, my struggle with myself.

So one fateful day, having been evicted by Veronica, I found myself standing alone and penniless on the Trans Canada Highway just east of Vancouver, with my guitar in hand and no way home.

Post a comment

Name: (required)

Email Address: (will not be published) (required)

URL:

Comments: