Chris Frye hoisted a guitar older than himself over his head before telling a story about the instrument.
Mr. Frye was performing the final show of a brief West Coast tour to promote his first solo project, a compact disc titled R aised on Rhythm and Rhyme.
At the Belfry Theatre, with the set of the musical Urinetown as an unintended but hilarious backdrop, he delivered a performance so intimate as to seem like it was taking place in his living room.
Perhaps that's because the musician knew so many audience members. He invited about a half-dozen friends to leave their seats and join him onstage for a raucous finale. (His encore was a soulful cover of the reggae classic Pressure Drop.) Mr. Frye is as tall as a standup bass and as lean as a bow. He wears a soul patch on his chin and sometimes hides his thinning hair beneath a snap brim fedora.
He is a busy fellow these days. He plays rhythm guitar for the gypsy jazzy Marc Atkinson Trio and, as Bill Guitar, he is lead singer and front man for the Bills. The group formerly known as the Bill Hilly Band is to Vancouver Island what Great Big Sea is to Newfoundland, bracketing this vast land with unpredictable but always entertaining songs from their rocky outposts.
The Bills begin a California tour this week. On Sunday, they're scheduled to play in Berkeley, which is where Mr. Frye's parents met.
It is also where his favourite guitar was purchased.
At the Belfry show, he told the audience about arriving at the studio to record his CD. He brought with him all his guitars, old and new.
He had a spanking-new Collings D-1 and an expensive Collings D-2H, a loud guitar favoured by bluegrass pickers. He also had a Fender Musicmaster, his first electric guitar.
And he hauled in the old acoustic guitar that he was now wearing on stage. The producer, Joby Baker, surveyed the collection briefly before pronouncing: "That Gibson's got character, man. That's what we've got to use."
It was his first guitar. His father gave it to him.
Mr. Frye was born in Creston in 1969 to an American father and a Canadian mother who had met while studying at Berkeley. They had come north before being drafted, their back-to-the-land intentions delivering them to the Peace Country, a geographic name more inviting than the land itself. Soon after, they retreated south.
Young Chris was raised in Nelson, enjoying a childhood filled with the delights of "the groovy and fertile artistic environment in the Kootenays." He would fall asleep as his father and friends played old-time Appalachian fiddle tunes. "Timeless stuff," he said. His first gig came at age 5 when he joined his father's band on stage at the historic Civic Centre in Nelson.
Not long after, his father handed him the Gibson, teaching him some chords. His first song was All Shook Up by Elvis Presley, sung "about three octaves higher than you're used to hearing."
From then on, the guitar belonged to the boy. He took it to school, where the ability to pluck out songs for the girls meant, "You're pretty slick, pretty popular."
Mr. Frye's father, a school band teacher, brought home instruments for Chris to try. The boy made violins squeak, drums rattle and saxophones honk.
After the family moved to Vancouver, Chris became a star basketball player for Lord Byng Secondary. A 6-foot-4 point guard, he later played for the Thunderbirds while completing a commerce degree at the University of British Columbia.
He attended university in Denmark for a semester, backpacking around Europe, the Gibson accompanying him everywhere.
Back home, he became an instructor of English as a second language, while also indulging his passion for music in such bands as Lotus Eaters and Gracious Four, "teaching by day, rocking out by night."
In 1994, he had what he calls a jazz epiphany, discovering a music with which he was not familiar. The following year, after moving to Victoria, he sought out an instructor. Everyone he knew told him to contact Marc Atkinson, who lived on Dunsmuir Road in Esquimalt. "I studied with him for a couple of years and really got my head inside of jazz," he said. They hit it off and the guitarist now plays in the trio that sports his teacher's name.
Mr. Frye wound up renting a house on the street where his teacher lived. Six months later, he bought the one across the street, which had a mirror-image layout. The homes were built in 1943 to house workers building warships at the nearby shipyard. The street is a block from West Bay, where a seawall leads to the Blue Bridge and downtown Victoria. Over the years, he has come to know his neighbours exceptionally well, finding in them a community that is "friendly and positive. Eden is too strong a word, but I can't imagine a better place."
The new recording includes a song called, The Ascension of Dunsmuir Road, which Mr. Frye calls "a rumination, a meditation" on the street on which he lives.
"There's a peddler in the front yard," he sings, "and a paddler out the back, the carpenter and the potter next to the lawyer dressed in black. . . ."
Other songs offer a lyrical description of natural beauty ( Under the Garry Oak Meadow) and of nature's force and our own mortality ( Balanced Out on the Breakwater). The mournful Takata's Walls is about a forgotten tea garden, the family that once owned it lost to the deportation and internment of Canadians with Japanese ancestry during the war.
Mr. Frye's themes are universal, his locations local. "A lot of it is a homage to things I've found beautiful and moving in some way, either people or places," he said. The CD's accompanying lyric sheet -- with references to the Gorge, Fleming Beach, the E&N Railway -- was handwritten by his mother and father.
He performs several of the songs on his dad's old Gibson LG-1.
"It's seen a lot. It's been around the world. I do believe it carries something special in its sound."
His father was a student when he bought it. In those days, the guitar listed for about $105 (U.S.), which was a lot of bread in 1964.
It has a mahogany back and a spruce top, coloured a beautiful sunburst red.
"It was his treasure," Mr. Frye said. "He learned all the Dylan songs on it, the heady stuff of the sixties. It was the thing he wooed my mom with."
Mr. Frye would not be here were it not for the guitar he now plays, an inexpensive acoustic that has been in the family's hands for two generations.