Paul Quarrington’s life as a performer began in the late 1960s with a Christmas song for a high-school assembly, which the teenager composed in collaboration with classmate Danny Hill – an alliance made as per a teacher’s request, but much against Quarrington’s will. “I was projecting mere months into the future … to my performance at the Mariposa Folk Festival,” Quarrington writes in Cigar Box Banjo, his just-published, posthumous memoir, “where the entire audience was composed of women who had removed their blouses in deference to the sun and its heat. Now this Danny guy had to come along and scupper the deal.”
Quarrington’s life as a performer ended in a no-easier collaboration with the same partner in a hotel room in Nashville, a city where Dan Hill now makes his living crafting hits for other singers. Using a chord progression Quarrington first played for his old friend in the basement of the Quarrington family home in suburban Toronto 40 years earlier, the two of them crafted a genuinely religious ballad under a spell of mutual inspiration.
No one can tell me where I’m gonna be/ When I sail into the mystery …The song Are You Ready was the final grace note in the elegant rounding-off process by which Quarrington, an irrepressible artist, said good-bye to his life.
In the year that has passed since his diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer, the multitalented author and musician suffered tributes enough to bury 10 of his kind. The miracle is that he managed to live up to them all before he died on Jan. 21. As his strange and remarkable memoir shows – along with a new one-hour documentary, Paul Quarrington: Life in Music, to be aired on Bravo! tonightSat at 7 – the artist’s last year of life was his greatest work.
“I’ve seen people die, but I’ve never seen anybody die as well as he did,” Winnipeg writer Jake MacDonald, a long-time friend, said in an interview. In ordinary life, MacDonald added, Quarrington could be “a really discouraged, grumpy guy.” In the face of death, he became almost angelic. “He just seemed to be glowing a lot of the time.”
And fiendishly productive. Cigar Box Banjo captures the transformation as it happened. It began, before his diagnosis, as a book about songwriting that combined notes on the author’s lifelong “involvement” in music – “I am assiduously avoiding the word ‘career,’ ” he writes in the introduction – with large doses of musicological theory.
But the mixture failed to excite “The Publisher,” he confesses. And with the sudden emergence in his life of “new thematic material” – Quarrington’s typically sardonic description of his diagnosis – the rejected manuscript evolved into something quite different: a portrait of the artist facing death square in the face, singing for the ages.
That might come as a shock to readers who think of Quarrington as the amiable populist of Canadian literature. His memoir is an elegant eulogy for deep culture. Without ever losing the same light tone, he sketches a vivid picture not only of his own eventful life but of an entire generation of 20th-century rebels whose accomplishments, like his own, are becoming clear only as they disappear.
For anybody who grew up in Toronto or its suburbs in the sixties and seventies, idolizing the same bands and patronizing the same bars as the author, Quarrington’s descriptions of those heady days are bound to thrill. And amaze. A lumpy tapestry of bizarrely mixed strands – a drinking pilgrimage to the birthplace of Dylan Thomas, life on the road with Joe Hall and the Continental Drift (“Still not dead!” according to his website), an amusing disquisition on pop-song chord theory, a near-fatal heart attack in Calgary – Cigar Box Banjo somehow makes it all of a piece. Out of the jumble, a genuine monument, poignantly unfinished.
The author writes with passion about what he calls the “Toronto sound,” an early, distinctive form of white soul music exemplified by such hard-rocking outfits as Mandala. And in tonight’s documentary, Hill half-jokingly describes something he calls “Don Mills soul,” a reaction to the prevailing cultural aridity, led by such outcasts as Hill and his brother, Larry, (a.k.a. Lawrence, author of The Book of Negroes) and the multitalented Quarrington brothers, Tony and Joel, both now professional musicians.
