Going For A Song: Early Days 2

It seems to me that early on nature equips singers and musicians, with what I would call. "a functional double standard". This
allows you to listen to a professional of long experience, as say, Elton John, and know what he's doing is delivered on a high
level. then listen to yourself on tape singing "This is your song", and imagine there's really no difference between Elton's
efforts and yours. Perhaps one day scientists will find, that beginning singers and musicians, actually secrete a hormone, that
is responsible for this blindness that helps them to survive, eventually to a point where they can hear the way their work
really sonds, so they can work to make it better. And so it was, that the three of us, brightly shirted, and gaily straw hatted,
were after two or three rehearsals, engaged to play at our first bar. It was a heady experience, no doubt aided and abetted by
that stale cloud of vapourous alochol, that hangs in the air forever in those places. The low lighting and the glances of women accompanied by men who worked nine-to-five, convinced us that there would be more than meets the eye to this
kind of work as time went by. Looking back, I'll never know what it was that caused the cocktail bar owner to hire us. It
certainly had nothing to do with a high level of musicianship. It may have had to do with the fact that we were bursting with
the rythms of our tropical origins, as the stereotype goes, and that may have brought a flash of the exotic to the land of
Victorian liquor laws, and rythmn freezing blizzards. Perhaps, it could have been our dazzling coloured sometimes flowered
shirts, with our little straw hats perched on our dark crowns, at a rakish angle. Perhaps, we had a youthful charm or grace or
magnetism on stage, that even we, our tender egoes to the fore, were not aware of at the time. Whatever it was, we found ourselves asked back again and again, to bounce our way through, four sets a night, six nights a week, at the tavern with
the Caribbean name, replete with phoney coconut tree out front, on Yonge street...Toronto...Canada................Quester.