Jenny was the first cool stranger I met in a dark punk club.
When my friends and I made pilgrimages to see punk and garage bands in our teens, these dank and mysterious haunts were places of wonder and excitement.
Weird bands we knew nothing about would appear on these dangerous, smokey stages and instantly blow our ears and minds.
We dreamt of playing these dives and carefully studied our accidental mentors, up there with amps cranked, screaming with stances struck.
Jenny was there to document.
She was tiny, so she looked up at me under her heavy eyelids with a playful smirk. Her leather jacket lapel was sprinkled with band pins. I remember trying to sneak peeks in the dark to see who was cool enough to be on Jenny’s jacket.
When I got to know her, we barely spoke a word because the music was too loud. But when we did, her voice had the drawl of an accent I could never place.
It was the accent of urban cool.
Her dark hair was part Ramones, part Cruella. Her sunglasses always stuck in there, a perfect accessory for those Montréal clubs.
She had a pen and pad and scribbled notes throughout the show. When she spoke to you, her pen moved in tandem.
She tried to act aloof, but she was too kind to pull off that cliched punk nonchalance.
One time while making small talk I joked how much louder I thought the band was since I got my hair cut. She smiled, said nothing and wrote in her notepad. I wasn’t even sure if she heard me.
Next week in her Notes From Underground column in an alternative weekly, she quoted me.
It was an early lesson for me to be careful speaking to nice people with notepads.
I’ll never forget Jenny because she was the first stranger to give me positive feedback about my obsessive, out of tune, garage-band, power pop ramblings.
She gave our young, noisy band props.
Whether she truly meant the praise or not, her little positive reviews gave us the push we needed to keep going. To keep finding our way.
Eventually I realized she wasn’t just there to document.
With the little strokes of her pen, she was there to prop up a community she loved.
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Here’s a mellow acoustic song I released a couple of years ago with the help of my friend Susan Odle singing and playing piano and organ parts:
Those who follow me on Bandcamp will know I usually like to compliment these acoustic “Sunday morning” takes with a revved up “Saturday Night” version.
I can still see Jenny scribbling in her notepad. This is the version of the song she would have approved of: