Burn Pinky burn

by RAF KATIGBAK

Last week, MTV Asia sent two camera people up from New York to shadow Montreal-born garage/soul singer King Khan. When I arrived at the Wheel Club last Monday, the three were standing in the doorway shooting an intro to the show. King Khan looked fidgety, his legs nervously tapping under beige, loose-fitting, almost bell-bottom pants. Draped over his shoulders was a tuxedo jacket with piano keys roughly painted in white on his lapels, and around his neck hung his trademark bone necklace. He was sweating and swaying with nervous energy as he mugged and joked around for the cameras with his pal Bloodshot Bill.

I had come to the bluegrass night because I heard that Khan was going to be performing a few songs. N., the friend who had tipped me off to the secret show, and I arrived just in time and already tipsy from a bottle of wine. We shimmied past the crew and into the hall.

If you’ve never been to the Wheel Club, it’s a wonderfully unpretentious surreal mix of octogenarian old-timie country fans and tattooed hipsters. Over at the bar, one such tattooed hipster friend of N.’s was sitting nursing a pint. His eyes were bugged out and he looked excited, more than he should be for an evening of vintage country songs. It was as if there was something else on his mind.

“We’re going to blow up Pinky tonight,” he whispered to N.

“No way! Where?”

“Kahnawake. After the set, we’re going to take her out there, set her on fire, then we’re gonna get a pro skater to do a trick off her then send her down a mine. MTV is going to film the whole thing. It’s going to be monumental.”

HOT TIMES IN KAHNAWAKE: Pinky’s fate

Pinky, I was to discover, was the 1989 Chevy van formerly belonging to New Orleans garage band the Black Lips. Since its arrival in Canada on their last tour, it had accrued so many parking infractions and traffic violations that it was barred from returning to the States. No one would be foolish enough to own it as it was also impossible to insure, not to mention notoriously unreliable. Obviously, the only sensible thing to do was to douse it with gasoline and send it barrelling down an abandoned mineshaft while some kid nollie 360’d off its flaming carcass.

“So are you guys in? We have beer.”

We weighed the pros and cons. Rock ’n’ rollers are probably the least organized people in the universe. That’s probably why we like them—they’re spontaneous, they live “in the moment” (as opposed to “the next moment,” when they realize that the previous moment has really stupid consequences). So while I was sceptical that this was even going to happen (is there even a mine in Kahnawake?!), I figured even the remote chance to witness something out of a James Cameron film would be worth my time, or, at worst, it’d be good for a laugh. So the reply was a resounding, “Fuck yeah!”

We piled into a caravan of cars led by Wax, a gentleman in a top hat and leopard print leggings driving a 1930s hearse. As we made our way south, past shotgun shacks advertising $7 smokes (my favourite sign was for “McSmoke’s” painted in the style of McDonald’s), my mind reeled with cutscenes from action movies of my youth, mostly stuff blowing up in slow mo. After picking up some supplies—fireworks, a bottle of Jägermeister, $10-worth of gasoline and a guy simply known as “Berserker,” we arrived at our final destination. Not an abandoned mineshaft as previously thought, but some dude J.’s house. Apparently no one knew where we could go to blow up the van, so we came to J.’s to party.

J. inherited his place from his grandmother, so the decor was a curious mix of ’70s wood panelling and rustic oak cupboards, and Motörhead flags and posters of Anna Kournikova. After a little convincing, J. graciously offered up his backyard as the new demolition site on one condition: “Just don’t blow up my fucking house.”

The stage was set. After a few parting words from Khan, they taped some fireworks to the windows, doused the roof of the van with gasoline and set it ablaze. The whole thing lasted less than two minutes. Even though the ceremony felt a little calculated and safe (things can’t get too crazy for MTV) and there was no Terminator-esque explosion, the sight of a huge vehicle on fire was rather glorious. As the flames lit the faces of the people gathered around and the fireworks crackled and screamed into the night sky, I sat back thinking, “Man, I love Montreal.”

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca