It was a busy week. Youngest’s grad. Visitors with various ways. Kids setting out on adventures. Serious stuff at work. So Friday evening became a quite quiet and I found myself looking for some thing for something to do, dusting a little as I went along. I found a few things but not the thing I was looking for. Grandfather-in-law’s cufflink sets. An original 1977 Luke Skywalker Speeder toy. And I found a letter.
The letter was mailed by me in March 1986 from The Netherlands to a pal back home. Thirty-nine years ago. He gave it back to me at some point, we can’t remember when. And in the envelope, among other things, was a page written by a gang of us, starting out our backpacking trip together in the year after graduating undergrad. Before we split up and heading to our next stops, we passed the paper and pen around one Paris hotel room a few weeks before the letter was mailed. We wrote as we drank and told the friend back in Canada how he was missing out and how he was missed. Rude. Half-wasted. Stupid. Funny. Not funny. Juvenile. Here in my hand at 62, a window opened back to us all being in our early twenties. To be honest, I don’t miss being that young guy at loose ends even with all that freedom. But being with that gang of pals? It was great. Which brings me to my point.
We were a group of pub people in those years. Actually tavern people. A distinction. And we were a we. Seventeen years ago for the 15th edition of The Session I wrote a bit about it in response to the topic “How Did It All Start For You?“:
I was trying to think of auspicious moments on my early years with good beer. I am a lucky guy who, at 45, started in my university years interest in beer in early 80’s Halifax, a seaport town, that was interested in beer and drink and donairs and whether Keith’s or Moosehead was better house draught. A place where one could say “it’s a drinker” on a lovely day and know by midnight you’d be amongst 50 pals in the taverns, pubs and beverage rooms of our fair city’s waterfront.
And in those taverns… well, some of those taverns… there was singing. It’s one of the things I miss most about getting older and moving away. I have never encountered the same sort of tavern singing culture. I wrote about that in response to The Session #9. On a Saturday afternoon you could go to the Lower Deck or that other place nearby, Peddlers, where Kenny MacKay – whose Dad was a music teacher in my high school – led his band The All Stars. He led the crowd, too. A couple hundred people in a sing-a-long of folk songs and current pop hits. All while drinking pitchers.
And once in a while a sort of quiz broke out. Not the advertised organized thing that Laura may have had in mind when she posed the question for this month’s edition. But it was a quiz and it was a reasonably regular thing if you were at the right place at the right time: singing challenges. One challenge was to out sing Kenny. I was actually pretty good at this one, being a Minister’s kid who was in church and school choirs for, at that point, much of my life. It went like this. Kenny would be singing along and then he would stop and hold the note. And so would the whole room. Folk would drop away as they sputtered out their last breath. Once at the back of the Lower Deck I beat Kenny by a fair bit. I won. Hoorays and whoops before we sat and continued the serious business of draining our pitchers of draught.
So, yes, a challenge but not really a quiz. But there were quizzes even if those were rarer. Don’t get me wrong. We would regularly sit around and debate facts like “did that song come out before this song?” or “what exacly was the cubic centimeter size of that 1974 car your Dad owned?” The quiz master was always our brainy pal Jon as he sat (and still sits) somewhere affably on a spectrum or two. He could (and can) pull data out of the air better than anyone I have ever met. Pre-internet this was a vitally important presence in one’s life. Because it was always backed up with a “I remember how that particular song came out in June 1972 because we were in the station wagon going to Kitchener when I first heard it and Dad bought a new car in August.” He was our first computer.
Once on a rare night, the two tavern entertainments – singing and puzzling – came together. An example was the night the tavern became obsessed with TV show music and for half an hour or so it was a ping pong game of tables taking turns to sing and then counter-sing their best recollections of songs from The Flintstones. “There’s a place I know where the cool cats go call Bedrock.. twich twich.” Or The Wayouts song. We were getting near the end of the night when we realized the staff were all at the back watching us. We apologized for keeping them from closing but as it turned out they were having fun just listening. We tumbled out of the place, singing as we climbed the hill home.
So – singing trivia. That’s my perfect pub quiz. Could it be recreated? In the internet era? Maybe. If you put the phones away. And as long as you have your own Big Jonny in the room to pass judgement and point out the winners.
