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

After the show, in the band’s dressing room, down the hall from Lefebvre’s, there’s a meeting. They unanimously decide to recommend to their boss that he ditch “Wakes and Dreams” to streamline the set. Lefebvre pushes back: “In my mind, it’s the biggest rocker I have.” There is only one problem with this declaration: it doesn’t really rock, because the quick two-step chord change keeps the listener off balance. If we’re talking rock, Lefebvre’s most rocking song is the blaring “Wounded Knee.”

After the meeting, everyone hangs out. We listen to Eagles song after Eagles song being piped into the basement hallway via tiny speakers built into the ceiling. The lousy sound makes it somewhat easier to ignore them. The band tells bad jokes. On the radio one of them heard the temperature in Regina was minus two. He thought he heard “vagina” was minus two. “That’s one cold girl,” he says. “The cold clam on the Prairies.” Band humor.

Keyboardist Billy Payne talks about the gig. It wasn’t a disaster, he says, but the set needs fine-tuning. Other keyboardist Patrick Warren wants to slow down. In his opinion, Lefebvre has several excellent slow tunes. Payne confirms that the worst part was when Lefebvre wandered offstage — Payne was mortified.

Billy Payne was, and is, Little Feat’s keyboard player. Lowell George, who has been dead thirty-one years, is still the guy most closely associated with the name Little Feat. It may gnaw at Payne that he doesn’t get the recognition he deserves for creating and perpetuating the Little Feat sound. Lefebvre confirms this later, saying, “Yeah, it does bother him.”

Payne lives in Montana now. He bought a property for a good price and now it’s worth about double what he paid for it. He says he probably couldn’t afford to buy it now. Payne and bandmates reformed Little Feat in 1987 and the band started to tour again. They still do. A year ago, drummer Richie Hayward died, and Payne lost his best mate in the group. Payne wants to write a memoir about working with Hayward, who led such a colorful life. He wants it to be “honest and truthful, but respectful.” Meaning, if there was a Keith Richards, desperado kind of rock star in Little Feat, it was Richie, and some things might be left out. Hayward liked girls and motorcycles and did everything to extremes.

In the dressing room, Payne continues his quiet tirade about tonight’s performance. He’s exorcising demons, blowing off steam, letting it go. They start laughing and shaking their heads about that eternity when Lefebvre left the stage. No, it was not rehearsed. No, they did not know WTF was going on. Yeah, they wondered if he was coming back — fuck you think they were wondering about? Payne has a certain authority when he wants to assert it — call it paternalism with an edge. “Look,” he says to no one in particular but staring at me, “I’m not one to tell somebody what’s what, but …” Everyone understands Lefebvre is going to get told by employee Payne just exactly what’s what. “He’s the leader of the band. He can’t leave the stage like that.”

After Felder’s band finishes its encore, Lefebvre heads upstairs to the main-floor foyer for the meet and greet. Felder will be signing his memoir about being an Eagle. I’m sure it’s a great read. I meet Lefebvre’s sister, Anne. She is pleasant and happy and frenetic. She talks fast. I meet Anne’s long-lost daughter, the one she gave up for adoption around the time Lefebvre got busted for selling acid way back in his teens, and her children.

Anne’s guilt over abandoning her child lasted well over thirty years before suddenly, quickly, disappearing. In a happy, surprising turn, about ten years ago Anne discovered that her daughter might still be living in Alberta. After some hesitation, she initiated the delicate process of making contact. Her brother puts it this way:

Anne held her name out there. She’d heard from this adoption person that the girl she’d named Cassandra was now Suzanne, married, and living in southern Alberta somewhere. They wouldn’t say where, but we started to think it was Calgary. Turned out Suzanne was happily married and had two adolescent children and wanted to meet her birth mom. It was heavy. Anne spent her life concerned that if she ever met this young person there would be suffering — you know, “I’m an addict and it’s all your fault — you gave me up!” But it turned out her daughter was perfectly happy and wanted to meet her. In just one letter, a life’s anxiety obliterated.

The mother-and-child reunion looks well reconciled, and everything seems okay. It’s a beautiful story. I meet Lefebvre’s mom, Louise. She looks terrific in a formal black cocktail-style dress. Clutching a glass of red wine, she apologizes for her shaky hands. I meet some of the Cullen clan, from Lefebvre’s mother’s side of the family. The Cullens are a savvy, well-spoken bunch.

A female friend, who according to Lefebvre used to fly the Playboy jet, comes up to him and says, “Is this the ‘reinvented’ John? Because I want to speak to the old one.” She’s alluding to one of the local newspaper article headlines, “The reinvention of John Lefebvre.” Stepping closer, she leans in and French kisses him. Lefebvre’s eyes dart back and forth: Hoo boy, where’s Hilary? He has his one in two billion now, and he’d like to keep it that way.

We pile into the van on Monday, a short bus with the usual side-door entrance up front, at about nine in the morning. In the van is the driver along with John Lefebvre, the singer-guitarist; Barry Bookin, the manager; James “Hutch” Hutchinson, the bassist; Billy Payne, the keys guy; Patrick Warren, the other keys guy; Ricky Fataar, the drummer; Greg Leisz, the guitarist; Simon Sidi, the lights guy; and me, the writer guy. Tight fit.

It’s frigid. Ice crystals hang in the air. The sky is gray and so is everything else, as if all color had been sucked out of the city. The buildings are gray, the river is gray, even headlights, taillights, and traffic lights look gray. Desolation Calgary. The van is an icebox because its heater block can’t compete with the outside cold. The windows ice up. The American guys needn’t worry — there is nothing to see between Calgary and Edmonton on either side of the highway.

Regardless, everyone is in a good mood — everyone except Hutch, who will throw a hissy fit later about his cold feet. We just get rolling north on Highway 2, and Lefebvre decides he needs some fuel. I guess he didn’t grab a morning snack or tea at the hotel. Bookin asks the driver to find a Starbucks. The driver says he knows a place in Airdrie, not far off the highway.

Airdrie! We’ve been on the road for what, half an hour? And now we have to find a Starbucks and load up on coffee? The mega coffee and snack order consumes a lot of time. The Airdrie pit stop becomes a half hour. Bookin was smart enough to realize we were going to use up every minute of his slack timetable. He’s allotted five hours of travel time even though the trip takes three.

Back on the road, I’m sitting beside Lefebvre. We joke about the Calgary Herald story. “Bill, you always go on about fact-checking in journalism. Well, Mike got most of it right. He did make a couple of small mistakes, though.”

“John, it’s hard to get every fact 100 percent correct,” I suggest, after Lefebvre points out the minor errors. I add, “There was another statement I thought might require a little check, y’know. You see, right here,” I circle with my index finger, “this part, where Mike writes that the biggest inconvenience you’ve encountered in the four years you’ve been on bail is that it has, quote, put an end to his indulging in the herb, unquote.”