Once we sneaked out and went bike-riding at two o’clock in the morning, and the cops picked us up and took us home. My mom came unglued about that, and I was grounded for a few weeks, but that gave me time to work on my barré chords and a couple good guitar riffs and learn some new songs.
We call Ryan “Butsy” which probably isn’t Ryan’s favorite thing, but sorry, dude, if you got “butt” in your name, how are people not going to jump on that? Butts are funny to nine-year-olds. In fact, butts are funny to everybody. There’s some stuff that’s beyond your control, like your name. Other stuff – such as volunteering the information that you sometimes stand in front of the bathroom mirror pretending to be Michael Jackson and singing “Rockin’ Robin” into a blow-dryer – that’s something you can and probably should keep to yourself.
Not that I ever did that... much.
Okay, I did, but, in my own defense, “Rockin’ Robin” is a classic, and I was just messing around. I wasn’t rehearsing or anything. At least I didn’t think about it that way. I didn’t dream of becoming a rock star back then. I dreamed of becoming a hockey star...
CHAPTER 3
THE STRATFORD STAR
Jamaica Craft, our amazing choreographer, got her start out on the street. Never took formal dance lessons. She just danced the way she felt like dancing, and people were into it. Some pretty big people. She started dancing professionally about ten years ago, and, a few years later, stars started coming to her, asking, “Can you make up this breakdown for me?” Genius. Everything Jamaica does looks like dancing. Even when she’s just standing around talking, her crazy lime-green fingernails look like they’re dancing. If you ask her how she does it, she shrugs and says, “Just listen to the record. It’ll tell you what to do.”
The day I met Jamaica, she fractured her foot. She wasn’t even sure how it happened. She was literally just standing there having a conversation with Scooter and, wham, she was out for twelve weeks. Standing on the set of the touring show, she preps me to rehearse the flying trick (sorry to spoil the surprise) along with Nick and Mike, two of the backup dancers.
“Dancers are athletes,” Jamaica reminds us. “We don’t get pampered like athletes. You ain’t got no masseuse down in here. You won’t be getting any spa treatment after the show. But we can get hurt like athletes get hurt. You’ve got to take care of yourselves. Take care of each other.”
Fully aware of that, we’ve been rehearsing this show twelve hours a day. There are a lot of safety precautions we have to take. The choreography involves my flipping upside down in a harness about thirty feet in the air. I’ve been trying to get comfortable with both the dance choreography and the staging – where to be on the stage, and what I’m doing when I get to that part of the stage. A lot of hard work goes with performing. My set is seventy-five minutes long, and it’s not easy. I work hard on endurance training, but I’m still hella tired by the end of the show. I go everywhere in a matter of seventy-five minutes. Never a dull moment. We rehearse every transition so the audience is never bored for one second. There are more than five-hundred people working to make sure the show goes perfect.
“A lot of hard work goes with performing”
Nick, Mike and I get into our flying harnesses. Jamaica smacks each one of us on the butt and says, “Kill it.” The music comes up on the sound board. I’m on my way up, up, up until I’m only about ten feet below the follow-spot rigs. High enough that I don’t want to look down. Something doesn’t feel right. When I go to do the flip, the harness isn’t where it’s supposed to be.
“Hey, you guys? Hey! Somebody?”
The music’s too loud. No one can hear me.
“Guys! Something’s messed up here!”
Nick and Mike are doing their thing, feet in the air, not even looking at me. I make a broad gesture, hoping somebody will get the idea that it means Down! Now! The music stops.
“Everything okay up there?” says Jamaica.
“No. I am about to die. Get me down.”
My heart’s still pounding after my feet are on the floor. Holy crap! That sucked a little. That could have ended badly. Mom is hustling across the arena with a very Mom-mode look on her face.
“What’s wrong? Was there a malfunction with the safety harness?”
“He’s okay,” Jamaica calls. She puts her hand on the back of my neck. “You’re okay. It was hooked up solid. You weren’t going to fall. Just part of it got tangled on the mike pack, so it was sitting kind of not quite right.”
“Okay.” I want to be cool, but I tell her I need to step off and take five.
“We can be fine with that,” she says calmly, unhooking the harness. “Dance is supposed to get your pulse racing, but-”
“Not like that.”
“No. Not like that. But you’re okay.”
“Geez,” I mumble as I walk off stage. “I used to think hockey was dangerous.”
MY FAVORITE GIRL
Nothing ever got my pulse racing (in a good way) like hockey. Well, nothing except Beyoncé, but that wasn’t until I was twelve or so. Then, all of a sudden, it was like I opened my eyes one day and noticed that the world is full of beautiful girls, and I’ve had a hard time thinking about anything else ever since.
“One day I noticed the world was full of beautiful girls”
When I was twelve, I left French immersion school and went over to Northwestern, a public middle school in Stratford. Chaz and Ryan and I had all moved up from the house hockey league to the travel league, and Grandpa used to go with me on the bus to the away games. We’d get to the game and play our hearts out, and on the way home we’d either be wired from winning and create more havoc than ever, or we’d be weary and discouraged from getting our butts kicked and end up getting into fights.
All the players would sit at the back of the bus, and all the parents would sit up front, not wanting to know what was going on back there. Of course, what was going on was a lot of guy talk. We were all completely fascinated with girls, freaked out about the way we were changing, and, more importantly, freaked out about the way the girls were changing, and of course, we were all clueless idiots who didn’t know what to do with any of that.
I had a great advantage in that I had lived in girl world all my life. My mom and I had talked about stuff pretty openly, so maybe I understood a little bit more than the average guy about how girls work. I wasn’t afraid to talk to girls, hang out with girls, look at girls and well, you know, flirt with girls – but I also had an idea of when not to talk to girls, hang out with girls, look at girls and flirt with girls.
Some guys ended up hurting a girl’s feelings or making her mad, because they were working too hard to look cool. Not me. My mom had drummed into my head the difference between confident and cocky. I tried hard to stay on the confident side, and I wasn’t always successful. Sometimes, I probably came off as cocky, but I tried to balance that by actually being a nice guy. A certain amount of success with the opposite sex comes down to the simple concept: don’t be a jerk. You don’t have to work hard at pretending you care about a girl’s feelings if you actually do care – not just about girls, but about people in general.
“A certain amount of success with the opposite sex comes down to the simple concept: don’t be a jerk”
In the video for “One Less Lonely Girl” – which was a lot of fun to make, because they cast this gorgeous sixteen-year-old girl opposite me – the storyline is that this girl drops something at the Laundromat (don’t get excited, it’s just a scarf), and I send her on a treasure hunt to get it back. Somebody called it “the musical equivalent of a chick flick” and I didn’t immediately get that they meant it as an insult. They dissed this part where there are some puppies at a pet shop, and I was, like, “What? Who doesn’t like puppies? And, more important, who thinks pretending to not like puppies will make them more attractive to girls?” They also thought the lyrics were corny.
* * *
I’m gonna put you first.
&
nbsp; I’ll show you what you’re worth...
* * *
I’m definitely open to suggestions. Maybe something like:
* * *
I’ll put Xbox first.
I’ll make you feel like dirt...
* * *
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense: I’m the lame one, and what really turns a girl on is a puppy hater who doesn’t care about her feelings. Maybe if I get with that program I could someday achieve that critic’s level of success with the ladies. Oh wait, I’m not a bitter old man.
Let’s continue...
“I could move faster and play smarter”
WANNA BE STARTIN’ SOMETHING
Back in middle school, most girls in my class were taller than I was. The last thing I wanted to do was give them another reason not to go out with me, so it seemed like a good idea to just be a nice guy. I also figured I’d keep the music thing on the down-low and stick with something I knew I could look cool doing – playing sports.
Guys don’t engage in nearly as much drama as girls do at that age, but, when we do, look out. Heads get punched. Some people need to feel big, and the only way they can is to pick on somebody who’s smaller. Unfortunately for the bullies, my dad was a former professional fighter who used to take me to his training sessions. I quickly got a reputation as someone not to be bullied even though some kids still tried. I think I learned from an early age that although I was smaller, I shouldn’t pay attention to my size or let it stop me from going for something I knew I could achieve. I had nothing to prove to those guys, just as I have nothing to prove to the haters who try to tear me down now. I’m not a fighter by nature, but, if I believe in something, I stand up for it. If somebody talked trash about my friends or my mom, I’d let them know that was not cool. If somebody shoved me, I shoved back harder.
One time, an epic fight got organized off the school grounds. I don’t remember what it was about or how I got sucked into it, but a bunch of people were involved and a bunch more were taking pictures and videos of it with their cellphones. Somebody posted their video on YouTube, for whatever reason. I guess it never occurred to them that teachers would see it. That’s the thing about YouTube. You never know who’s out there. That can be a good thing or a not good thing, depending on the situation.
Anyway, nobody got seriously hurt, but there were a lot of scrapes and bruises, and the video made it look like something out of Mortal Kombat, which we all thought was pretty awesome until school officials got POed about it and started busting people who couldn’t sit there and deny that they were part of it, because, well, there they were on camera. (Apply that lesson to your own circumstances in any way you find helpful.)
Canadians are a scrappy bunch in general, but I was never a big fighter. My dad always said he did enough fighting in his day for both of us. I preferred to compete on the basketball court or slice and dice them with my hockey skills. I was a lot smaller than most of the guys in the hockey league, and I definitely wasn’t playing Forward on the basketball team, but none of them could keep up with me. I knew I’d never be as tall as they were, but I could move faster and play smarter. I would try to skate circles around them or steal the basketball right out from under them. That’s another thing Grandpa always told me that you can probably apply to your own life: “Make the most of what you’ve got.”
“Grandpa always told me... make the most of what you’ve got”
Anyway, I tried to steer clear when anything uncool went down at school. I was getting into enough trouble on my own. Nothing major. Class clown stuff mostly. Outside, I’d be showing off on my skateboard, kicking a soccer ball around, or just stirring things up with Chaz and Ryan, and it was hard to turn that off inside the building. I’m one of those people who have a lot of energy. If I got in trouble at school, it was never for being mean. It was for laughing. Or making someone else laugh. Or dancing in the hallway or drumming on my desk or humming in the library. Basically, I got in trouble for being myself, and that didn’t seem fair to me.
One time I was sent to the Principal for clowning around. I walked down the hall toward the office, but then I just kept on walking. So long, suckers. I went out the door, up the street, and across town, all the way to my grandparents’ house, thinking I’d find some sympathy there. Not a chance. Grandpa was very surprised and not very happy when he found me with my feet up in the living room, watching TV. He put me in the car and took me back to school, where I had to go in and face the Principal, who wanted to know where I’d been for the last hour and a half when I was supposed to be at school. By the time Mom got home from work that afternoon, they’d called her and told her all about it, which gave her plenty of time to work up a good wrath and think of a bunch of harsh things to say. Grounded again. I sat in my room, busting on those barré chords for a couple more weeks.
“I’m not a fighter by nature, but, if I believe in something, I stand up for it”
“DUDE, YOU’RE PRETTY GOOD”
Nobody in my family lets me off the hook if I’m in the wrong, but they’re always on my side when I do the right thing. I don’t remember playing a basketball game when there wasn’t somebody who loved me in the stands. My memories of hockey games, as a player and a fan, will always be about how my grandpa shared that with me. My family and best buds were always there for me, so I knew I’d have at least a few friendly faces in the audience when I decided to enter a local talent competition hosted by the Stratford Youth Centre in January 2007.
The few people who’d heard me do music kept telling me, “Dude, you’re pretty good. You should try out for American Idol.” But you had to be sixteen for that – as old as you had to be for a driver’s license. To a twelve-year-old kid, that seemed like a million years away, so I never thought that much about it. The Stratford Star competition was basically the same idea on a smaller scale: all kids, aged twelve to eighteen, in a series of elimination rounds. The cost was two dollars at the door. Instead of Randy, Simon and Paula, we had some local folks who were involved in the community music scene, directing the church choir or teaching at the high school or whatever, and, instead of Ryan Seacrest, we had this really nice girl who organized the summer music programs. The grand prize was a microphone you could use to record on your computer, plus a couple of hours at a local recording studio.
“I wasn’t nervous about performing... my mom was more nervous than I was”
I thought that would be a fun prize, but I was more into the idea of getting up in front of people and doing music just to see how it felt. I wasn’t nervous about performing, because I was used to playing basketball and hockey in front of crowds much bigger than this. But this was going to be the first time I’d ever sang publicly. Anyway, what’s to be afraid of? The few people who knew me were people who loved me, and the rest were strangers, so if I didn’t do well it wasn’t like I’d ever have to see them again. My mom was more nervous that I was, I think, even though the understanding was that this was just for fun. She helped me figure out what to wear and made sure I had the background track and all that.
For the first round I wore a huge brown sweater and jeans, and I did Matchbox 20’s “3 AM.” The girl introduced me, and there was a little bit of polite applause when I went up on stage. I said, “Hey, everybody” and tried to get them clapping on the intro. Mom and Grandma were out there with smiles a mile wide, clapping away, but most of the crowd just sat there looking bored.
Okay... so I started singing.
Then they perked up a little. I saw some heads nod, like people were thinking, “Hey, this little dude’s not bad.” By the end, they were surprised that this kid in the too-big sweater could actually sing pretty well, and the applause was a little more enthusiastic. This was the first time I heard an audience actually cheer for me on stage, and it felt pretty good. I made it through to the next round.
I thought I’d dress up a little for the next performance. Mom ironed a blue dress shirt for me and helped me do the knot on a sharp blue neckt
ie, which was made for a grown man, so it was longer than I was tall. I decided to sing Alicia Keys’ “Fallin” – which was my jam in the shower. When I came out, people remembered me from the week before. They were even more surprised and cheered even louder. That didn’t just feel good. That felt kind of... thrilling.
By the time I got to the next round, I’d settled into the idea that I should just be myself, so I wore my regular school clothes and a baseball cap. I decided to do the Aretha Franklin arrangement on “Respect.” By now people knew who I was. The girl doing the emcee duties said, “Let’s show Justin Bieber some respect.” And there was a burst of loud, shrill screaming from the back of the room.
A group of girls. Beautiful girls. Screaming. For me.
Holy crap!
I got up there and sang my little eighth-grade butt off, thinking this was possibly the greatest moment of my entire life – of anyone’s life – better than hockey, better than Star Wars, better than Grandma’s turkey and gravy. A few people up front looked like they were sitting on something pointy, but those girls in the back were into the number, swaying and clapping. I was feeding off the energy and it felt great, and, when I got to the instrumental break, I hammed it up, playing air sax. I got so big with it, I dropped the mike, which made a loud thunk on the stage – but no problem – I grabbed it up just in time to plow into the next verse.
“I just got up there and sang my eighth-grade butt off”