Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

Ahern has developed his own methodology for the studio. He tells me he’s even given it a name, “strateragy.” This could be another one of his jokes on a journalist, for all I know. He says it’s his way of dealing with musicians who have become too damned good at playing their instruments. He says,

They don’t want to play more than one take because they know it’ll be more proficient but won’t sound any better. That’s because on the first take they really listen to each other. After they know the part they don’t bother listening to each other anymore.

So I’ll ask them to play the intro. Then I might ask them to rehearse the chorus, then maybe the ending. They get really frustrated: “Let’s play the song!” they yell. But this way I get them to rehearse the song without actually playing the song.

Ahern’s “strateragy” includes keeping Warren’s instrument, the Chamberlin, out of the mix so the others cannot hear him — at least until Warren has figured out his part. The machine Henry Chamberlin introduced in 1956—magnetic tape loops, which contain notes from the clarinet and various other instruments, are wound around reels — emits strange, wonderful sounds that can distract the other musicians. It begat the Mellotron, which became popular with English rock royalty in the sixties: “Strawberry Fields Forever” by the Beatles, “2000 Light Years from Home” by the Rolling Stones, “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues, among others. “Patrick is the sorcerer,” says Ahern. “We didn’t want to throw anyone off, or have them play off him too much.”

Since Ahern is being expansive about his methodology, I tell him I was at Lefebvre’s first-ever recording session. Nothing’s happening in the studio, so he lets me babble. In the spring of 1980, I was part of a joke slate of candidates for student senior government positions during the annual U of C Student Union elections. We called ourselves Parti des Pataphysiques, after French proto-surrealist playwright Alfred Jarry’s so-called science of imaginary solutions. During the presidential forum, instead of our candidate delivering a speech, the collective performed a song, a proto-rap actually, written by the fiery New York ghetto trio the Last Poets. In a move that would be in bad taste now and probably was then (but seemed kind of funny to us and most everyone else), we changed the Harlem group’s original lament of “Wake Up, Niggers” to “Wake Up, Students.”

The forum went well and convinced campus politicians that, as a club, Pataphysics might be good for campus spirit. We went back to CJSW’s studio to record the faux call to arms, along with a theme song to make Jarry proud, “The Pataphysics Blues” (as in, “I’ve got the pataphysics blues / And I just can’t stop my drinking”). Strangely — and a little suspiciously, I thought at the time — ex-student union president Lefebvre — still at U of C but now working toward his law degree — arrived unannounced at the radio station studio with his pal Bruce Ramsay, the current student union president. Relations between student politicians and radio station personnel had never been too healthy, despite Lefebvre’s move to address student media autonomy the previous year, and the groups maintained a tribal mutual wariness. Yet here we were with the two most senior members of the last two administrations, drinking, smoking dope, and bellowing in unison, “I got the Pata-Pata-Pata-Pata-Pata-Pataphysics bloo-ooooze!!!!”

“Oh yeah,” Lefebvre pipes in, the story flooding back, “now I remember!”

Lefebvre had a stockpile of songs he’d reserved for the sessions, a baker’s dozen written over the past ten to twenty years. Some were co-written or co-performed with his former music partner Karen Fowlie and dated from the late nineties, when they worked together under the moniker French Kiss the Fortune Teller. Danny Patton, the Calgary musician, engineer, and studio owner, had helped the duo record one self-titled CD in 1998, before they broke up.

To this pile of songs, Lefebvre added another dozen tunes — written for the occasion and many, understandably enough, about American justice and society — prior to his June “residency” at the Village. He recorded twenty-nine songs in all, enough material for two CDs. Some people might pick the ten or twelve that flow together best, releasing what they consider a strong introduction to their music that also happens to be digestible to the public. Not Lefebvre. Coming from the Department of Go Big or Go Home, he’s looking to release every tune.

Lefebvre’s songs range from straight country ballads to full-on rock ’n’ rollers, but overall his sound falls in the roots-and-country quadrant of rock and pop. His voice is not robust and can be sharp and thin, but it takes on a likeable, rusty tinge when he’s relaxed.

During my second afternoon in Studio D, Lefebvre starts working on “Independence Day,” his rocking, bittersweet ode to the USA. He barks out his words John Mellencamp — style. The strangulated delivery sounds like braying, which makes the lyrics — Lefebvre playing his love of L.A. off his rage at the current Washington administration — sound dumber than they should. The words require a subtle delivery, one that nudges and winks at the listener rather than preaches. I start to wonder whether he shouldn’t let that great guitar hook he’s fashioned, basically a reworked “Shakin’ All Over,” do its business and channel some of his inner Bob Dylan — maybe, say, that purring, sly delivery the old coot conjures on “Things Have Changed.” I say this out loud to no one in particular, hoping to catch Lefebvre’s ear. I don’t.

Eventually Ahern recognizes Lefebvre is trying too hard and constricting his voice. For the next take he attempts to convince the singer to be more conversational. Once the spirit of “Dylan” is invoked, though, Lefebvre starts trying to mimic the Voice of His Generation. Literally. After three or four takes, it sounds like the young Bobby Dylan is right there in the room. Lefebvre listens back to his mimesis. Ahern loves it and cracks, “We had a special guest singer for this song.”

“Aw,” Lefebvre then drawls, “he’s a washed-up old star.”

Later, Lefebvre tells me, when I started to squawk about the vocal, making suggestions, Ahern told him in the lounge, “I need a water gun.” Apparently, without much effort and on my second afternoon in the studio, I’d become the hanger-on Ahern detests, the guy who sits on the couch and tells him how to produce his records. “Fortunately Brian respects you,” Lefebvre says, “because he used your idea.” Later on, Lefebvre sang over the Dylan imitation with his own interpretation — but the phrasing and the volume never returned to their original, hectoring form. I felt vindicated.

Lefebvre admits his hired guns were a little doubtful about what Ahern had gotten them into: “More than a little skeptical, truth be told.” But he insists Jim Keltner and company didn’t come because he was some rich guy who could afford to rock out with the best; they came and played the songs because Ahern asked them. After a while, though, Keltner started to say things to him like, “Hey John, that was a good tune.” And later: “Jeez, that was a good one, too. How many you got, John?”

Lefebvre says, “All the guys told me they were willing to come back and add parts or whatever I need. They might not have said that at the beginning, but they did by the end.”

Hilary Watson — the woman Lefebvre calls, in habitual hippie vernacular, his “lady friend”—and I sit in the studio lounge while everyone takes a break. It’s now around six o’clock on Thursday. A never-ending stream of Fox News propaganda blares from an oversized television set. It is impossible to deny. The demure Watson shrugs off her irritation.