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MOTHER TUCKERS YELLOW DUCK
Part 1 - Continued excerpt from the end of
the book, 'Can't Loose, Can't Win, Can't Quit', by C. Livingstone.
(See here about the Book)
MTYD -- Part 1
My other reason for
stepping out of Fluorspar minerals was the fact that my hair was
starting to grow longer and longer. A sign of the times in the wake of
the Beatles. In the latter mid-fifties Elvis Presley flipped out
everyone’s parents with side burns. In the early mid sixties the Beatles
flipped out everyone’s parents with moppish long hair. By the late
mid-sixties if your hair wasn’t well below your ears you flipped out all
your buddies.
My enthusiastic growing of my hair actually had its start a half year
earlier at a big rock and roll concert in Vancouver. The concert
featured six totally unheard of rock bands from San Francisco.
As a teenager I used to go to most of the local ‘rock and roll’ and
‘rhythm and blues’ concerts like Jerry Lee Lewis and Bill Haley and the
Comets. But by the late fifties, because Greydie had become an aspiring
jazz drummer and was jamming every weekend at a local jazz club, some
friends and myself would spend our whole weekend holed up in the club
‘til the crack of dawn every evening catching the action. Then it was
the Black Spot. I therefore lost all contact with rock and roll for a
while. From about 1958 on I don’t think I went to even one concert.
When the folk singing craze hit in the early sixties, I started hitting
the folk clubs. I was in the cycle but still never went to the concerts.
To give you an idea of how far out of the loop I was, Beatle mania had
hit North America with a wallop. Since I never listened to rock stations
I assumed they were just another frapsey folk group.
I played rugby at UBC and we played a game at Berkeley California in the
winter of sixty-four. After the game, the Berkeley team invited us all
to a big Beatle party at one of the fraternity houses. So I found out
the party way that the Beatles weren’t just another barbershop quartet
with a banjo.
To give you an even better idea of how far out of the loop my years of
snotty jazz conditioning had left me, I clearly remember a young lady
friend inviting me over to her place one day to listen to some Bob Dylan
records. I’d been hearing a lot about this guy. But frankly, after years
of an exclusive diet of musically perfected jazz, his earlier stuff
sounded just a little bit like cats being strangled.
Worse. After a while, because so much of your attention in jazz is
always concentrated on the instruments, you tend to mask out even the
presence of a vocalist let alone tune in to the words. When I had last
bothered to listen to the words of music of the late fifties, the words
were, well, what can I say? I mean just go back and listen to some of
those oldie goldie doo wop doo ditties from the late fifties. Not your
average intellectual cup of gold.
After my friend had played a couple of her Dylan’s songs, she looked at
me expecting some kind of favourable reaction. I started to complain
about how raw in the rough the music was. She looked at me like I was
somewhat Neanderthal and said, “But listen to what he’s saying”.
It was like a blind man suddenly seeing the light, and I vowed then and
there never to work on Maggie’s farm no more. I have to tell you, it
wasn’t anything to do with his strumming that made the man so famous,
and his fame was every bit well deserved.
At any rate I was now starting to move in new directions until hitherto
uncharted. So in the summer of 1965, when a widely promoted rock show
billed as ‘Captain Consciousness Presents’ hit town, I decided to go.
Captain Consciousness turned out to be a euphemism for a whole pile of
matters which were all quite a bit lighter than air. It was for a new
type of substance and style imported directly from San Francisco.
Foremost in the substance were big buckets of a cool aid type drink,
euphemistically called ‘Electric Cool Aid’. I guess electric. The stuff
was at least twenty miles due north of any standard normal pH factor for
acid. In fact, that’s where Tom Wolf’s famous novel, ‘Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test’, got the kool-aid part.
The concert itself featured six totally unknown bands from San
Francisco. Bands like’ The Grateful Dead’, ‘Big Brother and the Holding
Company’, and ‘The Jefferson Airplane’ all thumped around in a trance on
stage while the audience all thumped around on the dance floor in an
even greater trance of their own. This was about a year before the San
Francisco bands broke into the main stream of popular rock music and the
bands suddenly became less well unknown all of a sudden.
Talk about the march of progress. In the old days, hucksters sold snake
oil from covered wagons and provided a medicine show to enthuse the
crowd into buying the product. Now it was a non-oxide elixir, and half
the rock bands in the genre brought along enough of the stuff to
guarantee a maximum turn out at the rocket launch.
Actually I didn’t know at the time that the concert was in fact a
bonafide rocket launch. In fact I didn’t know anything about such things
even existing. Some of us were a little slow in arriving. All I know is
that I was staring out of my eyes and seeing no problem, and everyone
else was staring out of their eyes and who knows what the heck they were
seeing.
For those of you who are still arriving, ‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’
meant that the drinks were about fifty fifty or so LSD. Even though I
didn’t have a clue to what was going on, luck or intuition had prevailed
and I didn’t buy a kool-aid.
I was therefore probably the only one or two out of the four or five
thousand people in attendance, including the musicians and road
managers, who wasn’t flying high in the sky with diamonds up there with
somebody named Lucy.
Some of the conglomerate EMF must have rubbed off though. Because not
too many weeks after the concert I suddenly started twigging onto what
had been going on around me unbeknownst in the Vancouver scene for some
considerable time already.
For example, pot had been going on in the jazz and folk clubs for a
couple of years. I had just been so far out of the loop that I didn’t
even know what the stuff was, let alone that everybody but me was
floating around the ceiling most of the time.
In looking back, the reason I’m sure the good ole smoking stuff had hit
town long before I woke up to it, was that whispery little conversations
would go on with whispery little groups all over the place at house
parties and congregational places. Then the groups would go outside and
come back a few minutes later with big giggly grins on their faces and
knowing little nods to everyone around the place except me.
In my first year of university, 1960 to ‘61, one of my classmates was
the son of a rich Vancouver family who had sent him to Berkeley. He had
started to experiment with pills which I learned from him was the big
rage among the campus cognascenti in the early sixties. He had a car
accident while bombed so his parents had brought him back up to
Vancouver and its supposedly not so cognascenti climate.
Graham told me about Perludins and other mood altering drugs which were
the pop of the charts down there. Also I was the first person in the
world Graham told about his engagement to his girlfriend. Actually I was
the second.
Greydie reported to me one evening that a guy had come screaming up to
him across a parking lot on campus shouting, “She said yes. She said
yes”. Greydie had never seen the guy before in his life and had no idea
who the, ‘she’ was. Nor of course what she might have said yes about.
Greydie told Graham I was probably in the student cafe where he had just
left me about ten minutes earlier. So I was the second to know shortly
after.
Graham was a very pleasant rather dashing chap, as I mentioned from a
very wealthy Vancouver family. So she did all right. She was a very
pleasant, very attractive girl from the interior of BC, studying music
to become an opera singer. So he did all right. Last I heard anything
about them was in the papers in the mid-nineties. They were still going
strong together, she still singing up a storm and he still managing her
career as ‘Dame Judith Forrest’ the internationally renowned Canadian
opera star.
By the fall of 1964, the mind altering stuff had made its way up to
Vancouver. A house party of Vancouver’s supposedly non-existent
cognascentis were waxing wild one night where I had been invited.
Someone was passing around Perludins and a couple of other poppers I
can’t even remember the name of.
It was kind of like an apothecary shop. If you took one of these with
one of those, you would get this kind of buzz. If you took that pill
with these, you would get another. One pill makes you larger and the
other one makes you small. I declined all recipes, thanks but no thanks.
I was always a little paranoid that I would alter my brain and then it
wouldn’t unalter.
The reason for the party though was that a local avante garde filmmaker
was filming part of Vancouver’s first ever bonafide feature length
movie, part of the reason why the party had been so loaded with
Vancouver’s ‘real people’ in the first place.
The movie turned out to be a pot boiler of the first order called
‘Bitter Ash’. The only action in the whole film part was when a scene
changed. The silver lining of course, is that Vancouver is now one of
the world’s top centers for churning them out.
I got into a five minute yak with the lead actor about something. The
camera whirled constantly. When the movie rushes came out, about a half
a minute of our conversation was in the movie. Only the conversation.
The camera had focused on the head of the lead for the whole bloody
shot.
Great. Everybody else gets fifteen minutes in the limelight. All I get
is a half a minute as a disembodied voice. Actually it was even more
short lived than that. When the final cut came out for distribution,
even the disembodied voice was gone. Sob, my whole movie carreer,
started and stopped in the same twenty five seconds.
Greydie’s short lived acting career was a lot more illustrious. He was
co-lead with academy award nominee Chief Dan George in a mid-sixties CBC
hour long drama called ‘How to Break a Quarter Horse’. Likewise he was
on center stage in the auction scene of Rita Tushingham and Oliver
Reid’s movie, ‘The Trap’, which had been filmed in Vancouver.
Greydie was also the publicity director of the Vancouver Playhouse
Theater for nearly a year and a half during the time. Ray Orbach of the
popular TV series ‘Law and Order’ fame was a six-foot three, hundred and
sixty pound string bean from New York who was starring in one of his
first major roles in one of the Playhouse’s productions.
The Playhouse Theater borrowed Greydie’s tiny little 80cc Suzuki
motorcycle for some publicity photos of bean pole Ray riding around.
Picture Icabod Crane on a tiny motorcycle waving high fives to the crowd
as he tooled slowly around. Ok, you had to be there to see it. At any
rate, talk about the difference between form and function.
In late 1964, one of Vancouver’s supposedly non-existent cognascentis
started putting on light shows in a small converted warehouse. Everybody
sat transfixed, ooing and awing. I just sat there bored. I know now it
was because I was probably the only one coming to the shows who wasn’t
already transfixed into ooing and awing well before they got there. It’s
a bloody good thing PC computer screen savers weren’t existent back
then. Nobody would ever have gotten any work done.
I remember going over to a friend’s house one day in 1965 and asking him
what the funny smell was. His jaw dropped, then he giggled. But he never
told me what was going on. Like I said, I was way out of the loop.
I got my first pot to hiss in so to speak in the summer of 1965.
Athletes who don’t think smoking a little pot now and then will affect
their performance are kidding themselves. Don’t forget now, in 1964 I
was a rugby hooker playing top at the first division level in Vancouver.
One of my competitors wasn’t bad. But frankly, compared to myself, he
was well, er, ahem, coff coff, pat pat, you know. Similarly, a new
fellow showed up the winter of 1965 from Toronto, who, while likewise
not too bad a player, wasn’t up to my well, er, coff coff, pat pat, you
know what I mean.
By the summer of 1965, I had finally started taking to floating around
the ceiling on occasion with some of my new found acquaintances. When I
turned out for rugby that fall, to my dismayed amazement my two
competitors had improved so enormously over the summer that it was
almost all I could do just to keep up. Whereas before, well you know,
coff coff, pat pat.
Shortly into the season, I separated my shoulder. Another telling sign.
In fact, that officially ended my athletic era. By the time I healed, I
had lost all interest in the whole sport environment world completely.
Another telling sign.
It wasn’t until years later, long after I had gone through four full
years of more than just token smoking and toking and had cut it off cold
turkey for at least five more years, that the light bulb finally dawned.
Those two guys hadn’t improved over the summer one jot. I had simply
lost my razor’s edge because of the pot.
If you think about it, that’s exactly what the stuff does, it lays you
back. Small loss for some people. But for athletes who train hours a
day, week after week, month after month, they’re taking away from
themselves in the blink of an eye the very thing for which they’ve
worked so hard in the first to put in. Kind of like cutting off your
toes to spite your pace.
A snowboarding champion from Whistler Mountain BC, in the late nineties,
who won a gold medal and then was disqualified for having pot in his
system, should have been given two gold medals for what it implied about
his actual ability.
Smoking today and playing tomorrow doesn’t help either. That’s just
another part of the illusion. It takes at least six months for the
deeper seated toxins to even begin starting to wearing off.
If you think about it, the same situation applies for anyone whose
success depends on a razor’s edge. Kids and students all take note.
Remnant hippies also take note, the houses and clubs which you think
feel so warm and groovy when stoned, feel cold and clammy once you are
always straight again. It’s not because your vibration level is so low
as the pot heads would have you believe. It’s because the vibration
level of the pot envorment is so low, which none of them will ever
believe.
It’s also not because straight people aren’t with it and it’s not
because the vibrational energy of the stuff is bad in its own right.
Under the proper circumstances of medicinal aid or spiritual advancement
it is very good.
It’s because when pot is corrupted by use as recreation, and or for
profit, the vibrational energy levels associated with it fall well below
the mid line, not above as has always been believed. This resulting drop
in frequency is the hidden sucker punch behind the promised lotus land
of pot and most psychedelics.
If you find this hard cheese, tough luck and all the more of it because
you know in your heart of hearts that it’s true. Like the man says, lies
revealed are self destroyed.
The long and the short of it is, that by the time I had walked into the
Fluorspar Minerals board meeting to walk out in early 1966, I was
already sitting well along the sidelines of the whole new Vancouver
hippie scene coming along, and already had a whole new circle of friends
who were way more often than not a whole lot airier then air and higher
than a kite could fly.
When I walked out the door of Fluorspar Minerals, I also in effect
walked out into a world with no future and no money in my pocket. You
could do it a lot easier in those days than today. Besides I did have
some assets, like an impressive hi fi set, which I downsized in
increments and lived off the difference.
Also the hippie community to which I was becoming more and more attuned
had an impressive unwritten rule of looking after their own. If you were
a hippie and on the outs, you were never really alone and desperate. In
fact the hippie community might well have become a good model for all in
many respects if it hadn’t been for the hair.
Like Animal Farm, where all the real animals were equal, hippies tended
to live communally and quite equitably. They would live a number to a
house where a few would be the core occupants and the rest changed from
day to day on the move. If you hit town a total stranger, you could
quickly find a place to stay and didn’t need American Express to make it
happen.
It didn’t matter who you were, you always had somewhere to stay and
something to eat. Total strangers, not a stranger, didn’t matter. No
questions asked. If they knew your first name, they knew all they ever
wanted to know.
As good as it got there was always a bad seed or two around. Hippies had
a kindly, true justice way of dealing with problem members within the
household. I knew a house with a girl that loved to bake chocolate
cakes. She would bake a cake and simply leave it out on the table for
everyone else to help themselves.
One of the guys evidently thought he was a little more equal than others
because if he got there first he would polish off the whole bloody
thing. The others griped but who would stop him?
So she did what any self respecting baker would do in a situation like
that and baked in a whole package of Ex-Lax on the sly. Everybody else
was queued up to stay away from the cake that particular day just to
make sure he got there first. Worked perfectly. After the air was
cleared he never took more than his fair share.
There was another aspect of the hippie world which the straight world
never caught onto. It was a two-way street. A simple example says it
all.
Haight Ashbury in San Francisco was the undisputed core central of the
hippie world. Fourth avenue in Vancouver was the suburb. Yorkville in
Toronto, and Greenwich Village in New York were also well touted suburbs
but not the same. Both of these were more from commercial motivation.
The difference was between wearing love beads because ‘that’s what you
were’ on Fourth Avenue and in the Haight, and wearing love beads because
‘that’s where the money was’ in Toronto and New York.
Right in the middle of Fourth avenue was a nice grassy slope about two
houses wide sitting right in the middle of the block. About seven every
night the hill would quickly fill up with hippies sitting watching the
traffic go by. Which comprised a non-stop line of straights in cars,
bumper to bumper, cruising by at about five miles an hour from all over
the lower mainland for the specific and singular purpose of gawking at
the hippies sitting on the hill.
The reality was that word had gotten out. So at the appointed time
around seven every night, the hippies would gather for the specific
purpose of watching the straights driving by gawking at the hippies
sitting on the hill watching the straights drive by.
The intensity of a given car load of gawks of course, produced the
intensity of the collective yaks amongst the hippies. And the straights
never caught on. The Beatles had it right all along. The fool on the
hill was no fool.
By about three quarters of a year after I had left the mining business,
most of my sellable material effects were gone and I was living on the
loose. I had started to gain interest in the new hippie styled Rock and
Roll coming out of the West Coast, including Vancouver. I had started
going to the local concerts plus a local hippie club which featured
local hippie bands and a local hippy-styled light show for strictly
local hippy-type audiences.
I stayed strictly away from the fruit drinks though. Actually I have to
admit that I never did drink one of the electric kool-aids which were so
popular at the time. Had I missed out on an important piece of history?
I think not.
Greydie had a folk singing friend who was planning to start up a rock
band. So I said I would manage. We played a couple of gigs using the
remnants of my once landmark hi fi speaker system as the PA. Then he
decided to go back to folk and I decided to go back into hanging loose.
Then in August 1966 came another one of those memorable turns in life we
spend the rest of our lives reflecting. I had become friends with the
operator of the local hippie club called ‘The Afterthought’. He had
decided to go to university for Business Administration and wanted to
know if I wanted to take over the club. “Well sure”, I said, “Why not”.
The Afterthought was no mean potatoes. Jefferson Airplane hung around
Vancouver for four months in the early days before their big singles
started. Playing at least every couple of weeks at the Afterthought.
The Steve Miller blues band likewise hung around Vancouver for a while
and played the Afterthought on the optimum rotation. He went back to San
Francisco, slickered out his moustache, called himself Morrice, said
“Abracadabra”, and launched a couple of sleazy big hits.
After I took over, the Afterthought became a mysterious affair. Every
weekend the place was way fuller than the number of people buying
tickets at the door. I even hired two guys to watch the back door and
fire exit. It made no difference. I never made more than enough to pay
for club rent, the bands, the staff, and sometimes a few groceries. I
even got to suspecting that maybe the two door guards were in on it.
I never did figure out how all those extra patrons were slipping in past
the door. Not being hard-nosed whenever hard action was needed was never
one of my strong suites.
The only money I ever made, chicken feed at best, was on Saturday
afternoons when I would rent a whole pile of roadrunner cartoons and run
a Roadrunner festival for the day. Believe it or not, after a couple of
weeks, we all started cheering for Wiley Coyote.
It seems as though I was never destined to make money from rock and roll
promotions. I made nothing from the club, and put on three concerts with
the Yardbirds that never earned me a penny. The first was in Seattle in
the summer of 1966. The second, a day later in Vancouver.
The third was in early November on their swing back through the West
Coast. Another little piece of history, the last swing though was also
their farewell tour, last concert.
I did the Seattle concert in cahoots with a local Seattle promoter.
Someone had introduced me to him for the purpose of the concert. I think
he did the whole thing on speed which was a subject about which I didn’t
know much about at the time.
Later, I came to recognize the ersatzing behaviour of someone revving
along at twice the speed of sound. So in hindsight, I definitely
recognized that the fellow had definitely been buzzing along at five
times the metabolic rate of a normal human being during the whole
ill-fated episode.
Seems he had blown the money I had given him to get started with on
amphetamines. Then he didn’t start promotion until about three days
before the gig. Consequently, even though it was the Yardbirds, the show
barely drew an audience.
After the show the band got their money. Then the City of Seattle took
the partner and I into an office in the concert hall to get theirs.
Seattle had an automatic tax on such soirées.
A lot of these affairs were put on by tour promoters from some other
city. So the city had long since gotten tired of getting stiffed for
their show tax and had developed the habit of sending a knee capping
taxman to collect their tithe at the moment of truth the second after
the concert had ended. The rules were simple, pay the levy or go to
jail.
I had been standing by a desk with the taxman. The taxman was spreading
his forms out on the desk getting ready for business. The partner was
standing behind me holding what was left of the gate receipts in a large
paper bag. Wrong guy to have been left holding the bag.
The taxman and I felt a sudden blast of cold air. We turned, the door
was wide open. Our bird had flown the coop with the dough. I never saw
or heard of him again. I only hope the tax guy didn’t get fired. I mean
try and imagine a likely story to tell your superiors. I went back to
Vancouver cold sober broke for all my effort.
My silent partner back in Vancouver wasn’t all that happy either. In yet
another minor brush with history he was the owner of the very first ever
Midas Muffler franchise in Canada. He had been making a piss pot full of
money and a friend had suggested he front me enough to do the concert in
Seattle.
The first Yardbird concert in Vancouver was an all day rock affair
featuring six additional local backup bands. The place was packed. My
Mom was the cashier. As her cash tray filled up she would simply stuff
it in big wads into a shopping bag and set it on the floor beside her.
I pulled the first bag which counted out around just enough to pay the
Yardbirds and the bands. When the second bag was nearly full she turned
around to put in another wad and it was gone. What came in after that
was just enough to cover off the remaining assorted nicky nork expenses.
The funny part about all this was that nobody actually ended up getting
burned. The only bad thing was that I ended up not making a penny again
but I was getting used to that.
I had borrowed enough for the promotion down payments and arena rent
from a local electronics parts dealer. He had been saving the money to
bid on a sixty-foot coastal utility boat. The BC Government was retiring
the boat after many years of service and it was going up for auction a
few weeks after the concert.
After the concert the money was gone. What else could he do but bid what
little he had left? He got the boat anyway. Life is good.
I shouldn’t grouse too much about missing the third pitch every time at
bat though. A Vancouver acquaintance had put on a fairly successful
concert with a then completely unknown British Rock band called the
Rolling Stones on their first time through.
A number of British rock bands were been offered up on a platter in the
wake of the initial success of ‘Eric Burton and the Animals’ and ‘The
Dave Clark Five’.
He had also been offered, for two thousand bucks, the chance at yet
another completely unknown British band called the Beatles. He turned it
down flat. Between the time he said no and the day they would have gone
onstage in Vancouver, the Beatles had done their first Ed Sullivan show.
As they say, timing is everything. He muttered about that one for years.
For the third Yardbirds concert I partnered with a local building
contractor. The contractor had agreed to back the concert because he
wanted to showcase his son’s band who were up and coming at the time. A
lot more up than coming actually. They were, um, somewhat unpracticed.
So his son’s band on the bill was strictly as a condition for the money.
Everyone has their price.
I was also permanently managing my own band by then which I had put in
as the other back up. So it was a mutually beneficial concert anyway.
Nepotism runs rampant. The guy’s wife ran the till. The place was
packed. When the show was over, the bands and everyone else got paid
off.
When my turn came, the story was, “gee son, sorry son, no money left for
you or me son”. Whenever it’s my turn at the trough there’s nothing left
but turnips. I’m sure he and his wife had a fine time in Hawaii or
wherever it was they spent that winter. However, my real objective had
been achieved. Our band received a super reception and we were on our
way.
In some people’s eyes I did miss another golden opportunity though
during this whole concert cycle, new band aside. The concert cycle
itself could have been a very lucrative career.
The original Yardbirds concert in Seattle had come to me courtesy of a
successful local Seattle promoter. Floyd, Lloyd, or Boyd Grafmeyer, I
can never remember which, was already tied up doing another show at the
time of the Yardbirds concert which is why he had passed it on to me.
He asked me to become his permanent Vancouver liaison. He was one of the
West Coast’s most successful promoters and Vancouver was one of his
bedrock locations. Maybe he’s still in business today. Since I haven’t
been back to Vancouver since 1974 I have no way of knowing.
At any rate, he did real well for quite a while there while I was still
there. And so did the other guy who eventually took over the Vancouver
slot which I had turned down. And thus I wound up as the manager of a
local rock and roll band. We called the band ‘Mother Tucker’s Yellow
Duck’ for short, MTYD if you didn’t mind spelling it all out.
The band wasn’t planned. Like a lot of the things that happened in my
life, it just sort of happened. During the time I had been running the
hippie club every Friday and Saturday night, I would assemble a group of
local musicians as backup band to whatever main name local band I was
featuring.
One of the more popular local rock bands I booked a fair amount was
called ‘The United Empire Loyalists’. Then eventually ‘The Seeds of
Time’. The group comprised five kids barely out of high school. In
another really miniscule touché with history, the core members
eventually became the highly successful International rock band Prism of
the seventies.
The Afterthought Club itself was an old neighbourhood motion picture
theatre which had long since been closed down after TV had come into
full bloom and had taken away the audience. The seats had long since
been torn out and the floor flattened out. It was now used mainly as the
meeting hall for the landlords, namely the Vancouver branch of the
Canadian Russian Society. I would meet the manager once a week to givew
him the rent. I’m sure that’s the second time CISIS had me down in their
little black book for talking with the Russians.
As a dance hall at any rate, the meeting hall was pretty simple stuff.
No tables, no chairs. Just a well polished wooden floor on which
everyone sat, danced, or did whatever else their current predispositions
fancied.
Hippies, who were always way more for substance than form, loved the
loose format. My only problem as earlier mentioned, was that there were
always way more patrons in the place than had paid to get in. I never
did figure the leak through that little levy. Not that it was ever the
foremost thing on my list of things to do. I liked the energy of the big
crowds, money would have been a bonus.
I found out one day that both of the door guards I had hired to watch
the back were musicians. I found out because they asked me over to their
place one day to listen to a new tune they had just written. Quite a
nice song actually.
So one weekend I used Donnie and Pat in my ad hoc back up band, plus a
base player named Charlie I had been using who I figured was a franchise
player.
That Friday night after finishing, we just knew it was a band. I came on
board as the manager and by the next week had turned the club over to
someone else. Now I was officially the manager of a hippie rock and roll
band.
After a six year hiatus of sitting in jazz clubs listening to my brother
on drums, I was back in hippie clubs listening to a band member play
drums. Fate always has a way of recapitulating itself.
Our original drummer was from the USA and decided to go back. So the
bass player brought in Hughie, his favorite drummer, and the music
improved on the spot. Similarly the group hadn’t yet settled on a lead
guitar player. The two original guys knew of a player named Roger who
they felt was something else, a common hippie expression implying great
praise in a somewhat convoluted kind of way.
Roger had just arrived in Vancouver from the interior of BC and was
still trying to decide what to do. After about two more weeks he
officially came over to the band. And that was that, the band was set.
When Roger had first moved to Vancouver he came alone. He didn’t know a
soul and lived the first three days on the beach without a meal.
Actually all he had to have done was gone the few blocks over to Fourth
Avenue where the hippies hung out, and he would have been set up with
both in about an hour.
As it was, on the third day at the beach he had met some people
strolling by who discovered he was quite the guitar player. So suddenly
about five bands were after him which is why he took so long to make up
his mind.
Roger was talented par excellent because he had been raised on a cattle
ranch in the remote Chilcotin River ranch area of West Central BC.
Except for high quality munching grass and a bit of natural gas that no
one was supposed to know about, not much else was up there. The family
lived forty miles from their nearest neighbour.
They were in an area so remote that if you looked at a map you would
wonder how on earth they got out in the winter. The answer was simple.
They didn’t. Instead, dad would pull out the ivories, the kids would all
play something, Mom would keep the cookies coming, and it would be one
happy jam session after the next for the whole entire winter. Roger
played guitar.
During every summer up at the ranch, Roger would sit behind the woodshed
practicing guitar while his father wondered why the chores weren’t
getting done. By the time Roger came out of the wilderness as a young
teen, he was a very accomplished country western singer and player. He
played with a rock band while living in the Okanogan Valley for two
years. So by the time Roger hit Vancouver he was a master of both
worlds.
One of the original back door musicians, Donnie, was both a lead singer
and rhythm guitar player. This was back in the days when it was presumed
a singer could at least sing a bit in order to be the lead singer of a
rock band. Nowadays of course, it’s considered tony to sing off-key and
sound like your adenoids are being pulled out though your eyeballs.
Donnie was from Winnipeg, still nearly a kid. He had spent most of his
formative musical years following the Guess Who around community centers
in Winnipeg in their formative years. Consequently he had developed a
decidedly Burton Cumming type singing style.
He had followed him so consequently in fact that he was way more Burton
Cumming than Burton himself. At least twice the pipes, not that Burton
is in any way a slouch. Burton as you may well know is considered one of
the five greatest Rock and Roll singers of all time. No small praise as
at least some of the earlier ones could really sing.
In Donnie’s case, the second one along always has the first one along to
build on so usually winds up the better. When our band had initially set
out, we at least therefore had going for us not only a first rate bass
player and lead guitarist, but an exceptionally good powerful lead
singer. If you’ve ever heard a new band up there for the first time at a
sock hop, you’ll know that says plenty.
Actually Donnie ended up second lead singer and Roger third. The other
door guard. Patrick became the front man and main singer. Patrick had an
amazingly beautiful musical voice but didn’t always have the training
for pitch and timing to the annoyance of some. When all was said and
done though and the three sang together in harmony, it was great.
The original two musicians were living in a hippie house in downtown
Vancouver. So we all squeezed in and became a family as a lot of bands
did at the time. We stayed together as family for three more years
before they finally booted me out the door as their manager in Toronto
in late 1969 for totally blowing their prospects for big band success
out the window.
Before I was fired, I saw us onstage with The Birds, the Yardbirds, Jimi
Hendrix twice, James Brown, Paul Butterfield Blues Band about three
times, Fleetwood Mac, Deep Purple, The Moody Blues, and so it went. We
of course headlined numerous local all day rock shows featuring a
quantity of local bands rather than big name groups. We were the
perennial headliner at the, ‘never to be missed’, world-famous Vancouver
Easter Be-Ins every Spring.
The start was rough. But after the first six months we at least always
had a place to stay and food to eat. In the early days however things
were not always the most favorite way in the world you would like to
live.
The two original back door guards/musicians provided most of the money
for rent and expenses by indulging in a little side enterprise. The same
kind of enterprise just about every hippie on the planet was getting by
on at the time, namely spinning grass into hay.
Business didn’t always deal fairly though. One day they gave a buddy the
week’s take to secure the next weeks inventory. By the end of the day
still no score. That meant either the guy had been busted or had flown
the coop. Sadly, he hadn’t been busted.
We found out afterwards that he had gone straight from the house to the
airport, straight back to Scotland where he had had the whole thing
lined up for weeks. This proves yet again that you can’t tell a crook by
the cover.
He had gone back to Scotland because some of the lads from his home town
had invited him back to join a new rock band they were forming. Before
too long he was back in North America touring around big time as the Bay
city rollers or Boomtown Rats, something like that. Nothing like getting
a well-financed start with other people’s money.
The low point for us came near the end of October just before the
concert with the Yardbirds. Roger and I sat down for dinner one night.
The only thing in the entire house even remotely edible was a single raw
onion.
We did it up in style. We set the table with all the fittings. Cut the
onion in half. Then each ate our half with knife and fork, tastefully
seasoning it with salt and pepper, eating each bite with raised pinky
and great flourish and acted relish. If you can’t laugh at adversity, or
yourself, you don’t deserve to laugh at anything at all.
Overall, life was pretty good for the three years I managed MYTD. We
never made big money to speak of however. My fault entirely. If anybody
should have made it big, this band should have. Same old story, while
flocks of big opportunities flew by the coop in unending number, I stood
around stupidly studying their flapping wings for aerodynamics.
Actually, we already had it made courtesy of the Yardbirds show. Only I
didn’t recognize it.
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