The first days after I moved to Toronto, my brother Ronnie and Ray made me feel welcome by marching me up and down Beverly street and the Art Gallery of Ontario and John’s Italian Cafe. Never ending dad jokes was the burden of their company, “should we take Spadina? Dundas me about Spadina”. They weren’t funny to anyone but themselves but I felt secure and welcome in this big new home called Toronto. My older brother Ronnie and his best friend Ray Baillargeon played in a blues band called The Fabulous Overtones and the execution of their blues, the positioning of their hearing, the shapes of what they musically reached for, the quality of their solos on harmonica or piano plus their different kinds of sexual energy, Ray with Elvis legs and Ronnie reacting to keys as though they were electrical current (imagine a keyboardist behaving like that), resonated with how we grew up with Little Walter, Pinetop Perkins, Memphis Slim, Big Bill Bronzy, Sonny Terry and Lightnin’ Hopkins – and praise be the Gods, I saw the last two up close in concert at the Playhouse in Winnipeg.

I can attest that the aesthetic of the Fabulous Overtones was as good and as authentic as the staggering talent of Chicago’s Siegel Schwall Blues Band and not as embarrassing as Colin James or take your pick of any number of imposter syndrome blues artists marketed by imposter syndrome publicists, each feeling like the way Keith Jarrett spoke about Wynton Marsalis in the New York Times, “I’ve never heard Wynton play anything that sounds like it meant anything at all”.

Ray was also a painter and he studied at OCAD. In my parents house we had one of his first paintings, of Ronnie, and the spooky resemblance fascinated me over many years, often inspecting what I found realistic and what other worldly. He did odd jobs, dropped much of the 90s in Memphis. I don’t know the whole extent of where he went what he did but in the end rode a bus back to Windsor, where he was born, where his father was a mechanic and where his mother abandoned them as kids, that’s the matter-of-fact way he put it.

During the last years he was active on Facebook, posting his new paintings from his bachelor apartment and showing just as much care over the different dishes he concocted for supper. One day Ronnie told me he had pancreatic cancer but after they performed surgery it went into remission. Around the same time, as a board member of the Tranzac, I started curating art shows and he was to be our first show, it was this time a year ago. I drove the four hours to pick up his paintings but he was mostly interested in cooking me a meal. Being a vegetarian I’m a disappointing guest for epicurean ambitions of someone like Ray, which probably is why he then asked me to sit for a portrait despite the fact that I had to get going to do the 4 hours drive back. When he traveled to Toronto in January for the opening of his show he stayed with us one night and with Soozie Schlanger the next night. They were roommates forty years ago. He had four or five friends from the old days who he asked me to invite and double checked twice, the days before the opening that indeed I had called them. Each of them thanked me for letting them know and expressed their assurance about the event. None of them showed up. I felt sorry for him, I guessed he might not be alive this time next year and this would be his only show in Toronto in forever, but he wasn’t a guy who dealt in people feeling sorry for him.

Soozie Schlanger came, she even offered to view it a week earlier when I first hung it and promptly gave me total shit for not understanding anything about how to put paintings together. I didn’t know there were rules. She acted like it’s obvious you should understand their relationship to each other, to the light in the room, to their content next to other paintings, to which wall and what background of the room containing them; she was completely right. Made me wish I did this for a living and that it would include being tested by her. It was another show altogether after she hung it. It stayed up until Covid started and then everyone’s future was canceled. Nobody bought any of Ray’s paintings but he asked me to gift one to Soozie, it was the same one she confidentially told me was the best in the lot. It was a road to a farm and called the Black Donnellys. Before Ray left my house he left the portrait for me that he started after our meal.

His brother contacted me in July to tell me Ray died and I asked him what I should do about the paintings that remained. He came to the Tranzac to look them over and said he wasn’t interested in any of them and neither was anyone else from his family. I found one friend of Ray’s in Windsor who asked me if a certain painting of a musician in a hotel room was among them, and it was and I made arrangements to get it to her. His brother elaborated that they weren’t close though he confided he too was a painter but a different aesthetic. He also told me he secretly attended Fabulous Overtones gigs in the 70s which left me wondering what all this meant about their relationship as brothers, I’ll never know.

Lindsey, who works at the Tranzac as a bartender and the overseer of the front landscape and who also teaches Yoga, was impressed when I showed her the piece titled Siddhartha. It moved her and so I gave it to her. I’m left with the paintings of a musician/ artist and wondering how to gift them meaningfully.