The 1969 spring carnival talent show was the talk of the town. I begged and pleaded, with my mom, for a dollar to go. She reminded me that I would skip next week’s allowance if I took the dollar now, plus, I had to fill the woodbox with firewood. I assured her that I was cool with it. After I filled the woodbox, she took the dollar bill from her slender purse and tucked it into my pocket. I locked myself into the bathroom and worked a dab of my brother’s Brylcreem hair tonic into my hair and worked it into a ducktail. I put on my coolest shirt, a dark-blue button-down, with stars splashed all over it, and dashed off to the talent show in my pullover parka and mukluks.

The school gym was packed and they shooed all us kids to the front of the gym floor. There was your usual assortment of country and western wannabe’s, onstage, and the odd folkie that didn’t excite us too much. But the big news was a rock and roll band that us kids hadn’t heard before. They’d been playing the forbidden teen dances and it was going to be a treat for us to hear them live.

The announcer called up the next entrants, The Chordells, and the crowd let out a loud cheer. A dapper-looking Larry Gordon walked out onstage and strapped on an electric guitar, the first I’d ever seen. Jerome Tocher adjusted the volume on his bass amplifier and tested a few notes. Willie Thrasher, in a buckskin vest and headband, sat behind the drums and twirled his drumsticks in his hands. Me and the kid beside me looked at one another in amazement. “Ho,” we chimed in unison, the Mackenzie Delta equivalent of “wow.” Lead singer Louie Goose loosened the tie around his neck, threw his head back and counted in the song. “One-two, one two three four.” Larry tore into the intro for the Rolling Stones classic, “Satisfaction.” “Dum duh, da da da da da, dum duh, da da da da da.” I looked over at my buddy. We smiled, nodded at one another and began to play air guitar. By the end of the song, all us kids were up on our feet dancing, playing air guitar or banging on a set of drums that only we could see and feel. It was like a revolution; the kids took over for one song.

They ended the song with the outro to end all outros. Willie stood up, kicked the drum set over and threw his drumsticks into the crowd. I had worked my way back from the stage, during my solo, and happened to catch one of his drumsticks. But a big school bully snatched it out of my hands and shoved me to the floor. He was too big for me to fight, so I kicked him in the nuts. He dropped like a sack of hammers and I grabbed my drumstick. I pulled on my parka, without letting go of the drumstick, and hauled ass out of there. He gave me a daily shit-kicking, until the end of the school year, but I never did give up that drumstick. I kept it for years and would play drums on my sister’s tin dollhouse. I didn’t have another drumstick, but I made one out of a willow and beat that tin dollhouse to a pulp.

Years later, as fate would have it, I ended up playing in a country and western band. I wasn’t much of a drummer, but I was a half-decent guitar player. We played every dive bar, with a dance floor, between the sixtieth and fiftieth parallels. We’d play anywhere they’d pay us—bars, music festivals, weddings, private house parties and even, one time, a divorce party in some guy’s garage. The booze was always free and there were always heartaches by the number. I ended up with a bad case of the blues, from not knowing how to handle all the booze, and got sent to a treatment centre by the band leader. We were playing a gig in Hay River and he fired me after I showed up drunk and fell off the stage. There was a treatment centre in Hay River, and the band leader promised to hire me back if I completed the treatment program.

The first morning at the treatment centre, I heard somebody playing “All Along the Watchtower” on a beat-up old acoustic guitar. I walked over to check him out. He looked like someone from back home, but I couldn’t place him. “Qunuqitbit,” I greeted, testing my theory.

“Nakurunga,” he replied, putting down the guitar. “Kina Una?” he asked me, wanting to know my name.

“Dennis Allen,” I replied. “From Inuvik.”

He stood up and put out his hand, “Willie Thrasher,” he said. “I heard about you.”

I was confused. “Good or bad?” I asked.

“Good. Somebody said you’re pretty handy on lead guitar. I want to record with an all-Inuit band.”

“I’m in,” I said. Then I told him the story about the drumstick and he laughed his ass off. He told me how they banned him from playing the teen dances, for a month, till he paid off the broken drum set.

I still had a bad case of the jitters, and he sat me down and got me a coffee. “Tell me some war stories,” I asked him, as I tried to hold the cup in my shaking hands. He told me about criss-crossing the country, forty times, on a Greyhound bus, making records, playing with Pete Seeger in upstate New York, jamming with Neil Young, and getting drunk with the Grateful Dead. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Willie’s stories. There was lots of knee slapping and laughing.

Though we spent a lot of evenings jamming and talking, there were times I wanted to run from the treatment centre. They were forcing us to look at ourselves, and I didn’t like it. But Willie would grab me and pull me aside and tell me what waited out there if I ran. We completed the treatment program and Willie drifted off toward BC, with the next south wind. I got a job dishwashing at a greasy spoon, outside of town, and quit the band. They were headed to the Gold Range Hotel, in Yellowknife, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to withstand the temptation of old friends and cold beer. We kept in touch over the years, running into one another here and there.

I was living in Whitehorse when I got a call from Willie. “I got nominated for a Grammy,” he told me. I thought he was bullshitting me and I laughed it off. But he kept on insisting that he’d been nominated and I had to check the Grammy website. And there it was, in all its pixelated glory. Kevin Howe, of Light in the Attic Records, dug through thrift-store record bins and compiled an album of long-forgotten Indigenous songwriters, called Native North America, Volume 1. It was nominated as best archival compilation, along with Bob Dylan. Willie wanted me to drive down to L.A. with him, to attend the ceremony, but neither of us had a pot to piss in. We thought maybe we could busk all the way to L.A., to pay for gas and grub, but I still had two kids to feed, and rent to pay.

Willie lives in Nanaimo, now, and is enjoying a resurgence of his musical career. We still haven’t recorded yet. But we got drunk one night, on near beer, and wrote a song called, “The Post Apocalyptic Talking Eskimo Blues.” Look for it in the record bins in your local thrift store.

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