The Can o' Biscuits and Why They Flopped

The Can o’ Biscuits were late getting out of Rotterdam because after the show at the De Doelen concert hall, Des disappeared, and the band coach wasn’t very well going to leave with one of the band missing. After nearly an hour’s frantic searching, the band’s road manager finally determined that he was on the crew bus, sulking about Jerome, the lead singer, having “forgotten” to introduce him during “Hammerlocks and Bagel”. After introducing Shlomo from Tel Aviv, the guitar player, and then Pedro, the drummer, Jerome had given the signal that the band should blast into the final chorus of their famous klezmer-flavored hit. Now, though, Jerome was claiming that it had been just an oversight, one engendered by his exhaustion — the band had played seven shows in six days, which won’t sound like much to the lay reader who doesn’t factor in the endless driving between cities, the inevitable breakdowns on desolate stretches of the motorway, and learning to sleep every night in a different bed, galaxies from hearth ‘n’ home.

Des wasn’t having a word of it, though, his belief being that Jerome had been trying to get back at him for taking back to his own Hôtel du Congrès room a chick they’d both had their eyes on at the Brussels show.

When the band formed years before in the basement of Pedro’s parents’ home in Angola, Wisconsin, one of the first things they’d all agreed on was that they wouldn’t refer to women as chicks. It was such a corny old word, chicks, one a lounge singer in white patent loafers and a matching belt might use in between trying to sound like Frank Sinatra. Shlomo from Tel Aviv had wondered if girls were OK, but they agreed it was demeaning to refer to a female over 45 as a girl, and they weren’t likely, at their age, to attract many fans much younger than that.

Pedro’s parents had died 18 and 21 years before, respectively, Papa of congestive heart disease, Mama of vertigo, but Pedro still thought of the house as theirs, and for that reason spent most of his upstairs time in his small bedroom, which was lined with Bob Marley and Lindsay Lohan posters even though Pedro shared Jerome’s belief that Marley had been inferior to Jimmy Cliff in all things except popularity.

There’d been a lot of resistance to the Biscuits from the record companies their first couple of decades, during which they did little but rehearse and play the occasional birthday party. The general consensus was that young audiences, who were America’s most avid music consumers, wouldn’t warm to a debut album by a group already in their mid-forties. The band’s manager countered that their ages were irrelevant. What was the big deal about their being wrinkled or balding when lots of very popular younger groups were downright ugly? Had the recalcitrant record company executives ever gotten a load of the Dave Mathews Band, for instance? Not exactly Calvin Klein underwear models, they!

If young consumers were going to be put off by the sight of their male pattern baldness, beer bellies, and, in Pedro’s case, premature liver spotting, they simply wouldn’t allow photographs, and for live shows would hire someone to light them dimly and really flatteringly. By the time they finally decided to release their own stuff on the Internet, they were all of them over 60, though only poor Shlomo from Tel Aviv looked it.

The Belgian chick Des and Jerome both had their eyes on had turned out to be 54, and a grandmother, and there’s nothing especially euphonious about the way a native Flemish speaker makes English sound, though it isn’t quite as hard on the ears as a native speaker of Swiss German. The thought of having a 54-year-old lover becomes very much less dispiriting as one grows older; while it might inspire an 18-year-old to pretend to stick his finger down his own throat, it might make a 70-year-old stand up straighter than he has in years, and to take greater pains with his personal hygiene.

Arriving in Munich, Des announced he was leaving the band to spend more time with his family. His wife had actually left him seven years before, and they hadn’t had any kids, but no one had to know that.