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MOTHER TUCKERS YELLOW DUCK
Part 8 - Continued excerpt from the beginning
of the book, 'Listen Carefully to Everything he Says, Then Ignore it
Completely', by C. Livingstone.
(See here about the Book)
MTYD -- Part 8
By the end of October things for the band were definitely going from bad to
worse. Even the bookings had started to become mediocre. So like firing the
CEO when the stocks are down I got the boot. Capitol Records finally
released the album but just let it float out there to see if it would go
into critical mass on its own. Which it didn’t.
The band eventually recorded another record for Capitol that winter. It
was only a fraction of what they could do onstage, a really lacklustre
production. It likewise languished on the store shelves unprompted. The
band likewise languished around Toronto undistinguished. By the
following year they had disbanded.
The summer of that fall however, had been a ripsnorter in Toronto for
rock and roll generally despite the steady down turning cycle for the
band. In particular, 1969 was the summer of the world famous Toronto
Rock and Roll Revival starring John Lennon in Varsity stadium. I had
tried and tried to book our band into the show but the promoter wouldn’t
even talk to me. He had never seen us play.
A couple of months later we were playing at a club, and he approached me
apologizing profusely after hearing the set. Thanks a lot. It was small
consolation for the missed opportunity since the whole world press had
been at the rock show because John Lennon was going to be there.
We also missed another big one that summer, called Woodstock. I had
never even heard of it until a couple of days after it was over. Such
was the jingoism of the USA.
I eventually heard the inside scoop on the Woodstock story. Woodstock
was the brainchild of two guys who were undertaking to produce an album
of select rock and roll oldie goldies to be called Woodstock. A fellow
in his early twenties came into their office one day. He had just
inherited a million dollars and wanted to put his money where his mouth
was into somewhere important.
So he wanted to put it into the, sic, big rock concert they were
preparing. He had gotten his wires crossed somehow and thought they were
putting together a gigantic rock show of oldie goldie performers.
The first partner started to say, “Um, it’s not a concert...”, but the
other partner, being somewhat nimbler on his feet, cut him off in mid
sentence saying, “Just sign here please”. Nothing like agile
entrepreneurial ability when you need it.
About five minutes after the new benefactor left, the hip partner was
already on the phone to Joni Mitchell starting to line up every top
named talent in North America he could find. Among other things of
course, Woodstock was Crosby Stills and Nash’s step out debut.
Actually Woodstock was only a follow up to a precursor which had
occurred the summer before in Seattle, Washington. Like Woodstock, it
rained in spits and the whole affair had been spent wallowing in the
mud. Like Woodstock, the site was on a private farm, in this case about
thirty miles up a fast flowing little river out of Seattle called Sky
River.
Bearing my all-time favourite name for a rock festival, it was modestly
called, ‘The Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter than Air Fair’. I guess
‘lighter than air’. For most of the party goers, the on and off rain for
most of the two days made the day.
The whole affair was lauded afterwards as the farthest out, grooviest
thing anyone had ever experienced. Hippies were always able the make the
best of the worst. No doubt an adaptive characteristic for living on the
fringes of society all the time.
Plus of course, hippies were completely without airs. Imagine a theatre
full of opera goers praising that the air conditioner had just gone on
the blink and they were all feeling a lot closer together.
The fair was also to feature a momentous occasion in history. The
‘signs’ amongst the Navajo and Hopi Indians in Arizona and New Mexico
for the last hundred years, had been predicting the coming of the
long-awaited long-haired white brothers. We had arrived. So the Elders
had sent some of the Elders up to the fair to officially welcome their
new long haired brothers into the tribe.
A highlight of the show was therefore the official dance ceremonies of
the Elders on stage. This was to officially function as the official
welcome. The ceremony screeched to a halt when a live chicken was
brought onstage to be sacrificed and everybody freaked out.
In a blink of an eye out had come the crooked stick. The ruffled
feathers back stage were finally smoothed over and the Elders eventually
came back onstage to officially welcome us all anyway. Agreeing to do
the all important part of the ceremony by implied innuendo and
representative dancing, instead of full fledged neck-wringing and last
squawk chancing.
MTYD was there because one of the festival producers was a big fan. He
had planned to showcase us as much as he could. He proposed it would be
really neat for us to provide the early morning revelry for all the
overnight campers first thing the second day morning. I agreed on the
basis that we would also have a top spot at showcase time later in the
day.
No problemo he said. So we did our first show at the crack of dawn when
the mists were still rising over the dell. I’m sure maybe only ten
people out of the hundred and fifty thousand or so who were laid out
flat around the grounds actually heard us.
Early in the afternoon, a big eighteen wheeler full of recording
equipment swooped in backstage unannounced and the backstage was
suddenly all abuzz with new found excitement. The Grateful Dead had
heard about the show down in Frisco and had pulled an all nighter,
hoping to get in on the action in time to record a show in front of all
those groovy vibes.
That was the end of our next appearance. We had come and gone and almost
nobody knew we’d been there. The experience wasn’t a total loss however.
In the late nineties a friend in Ottawa introduced Greydie and I to a
lady friend of his who had been one of the woken few who had heard the
band at six o’clock in the morning all those years before. At the tender
age of six. It’s a small world indeed.
Oh yeah, the star of the show besides the Grateful Dead and, um,
ourselves, was a completely unknown new band out of Frisco called,
Santana.
The Rock and Roll Revival in Toronto was no small potatoes either in its
own right. It featured a cross platform of such musicians as Count Basie
and his orchestra, The Doors, plus a slew of middle level bands and
musicians to justify the exorbitant ticket price. Greydie, who was also
living in Toronto at the time, was on the card reading his poetry
between band setups as the crowd settler.
The idea of Greydie waxing poetic on stage at a major weekend rock
review was not all that far fetched. Greydie as mentioned in the first
Book, had had some not insignificant earlier success as a creative
writer in Vancouver during the mid and late sixties.
Greydie had given a poetry reading of his stuff at the Vancouver library
one night. The next day the Vancouver Sun gave it a glowing review.
About a week later the Vancouver Province came out with a scathing
report for the exact same event which didn’t make a lot of sense.
Two years later Greydie ran into the guy who had given the bum review.
Turns out the two newspapers had been going through a severe turf war at
the time. The Province newspaper was therefore purposely nay saying
everything the Sun newspaper was yay saying. Greydie had simply been
caught in the crosshairs.
The Province reviewer had been specifically told to dump on the reading
even though he had been thoroughly impressed. Yellow press is alive and
well. The guy had eventually quit the paper because he had reached a
point where he could no longer handle the job description.
Such goes the fragile makings and breakings of artistic careers in the
peripatetic world of fame and torture.
Greydie had also written and published one hundred copies of a sixty
page novella titled, ‘Billy Barker’ which eventually became sufficiently
hand circulated to wind up catalogued in the US Library of Congress
courtesy of parties unknown. Likewise fifty copies of an LP of a saga
poem of his had been produced in 1968 with him reading against a guitar
accompaniment performed by a friend. Selections from the LP were played
late at night on a couple of Vancouver FM stations for years.
It also seems that what goes around also comes around. Nearly thirty
years later after ‘Billy Barker’ was first published, Greydie was
fiddling around on the Internet one day in the Spring of 1997, and
discovered a well thumbed second hand copy of Billy Barker being offered
for sale by ‘The City Lights’ bookstore in Berkley California for forty
seven dollars and fifty cents. I should get around so well.
Greydie has now published a new edition of “Billy Barker” that he’ll let
you have for less than twenty-five bucks. See details at the end of this
book.
Greydie aside, the feature presentation of the rock show was John Lennon
and his rag tag band of no name backup musicians such as Bob Dylan,
George Harrison, and Eric Clapton. A film crew was in to do the
documentary.
I stayed behind stage for most of the two day affair. Because I was an
accepted member of the backstage community for being backstage all the
time with MTYD, I spent most of the time backstage at these affairs
because that’s where most of the managers usually hung out supervising
things for their band. The General Manager of Capitol Records Canada was
also backstage.
This was back when we were still on talking terms with each other. He
was higher than a kite on enthusiasm, proudly showing everybody the
hundred and fifty thousand dollar mobile recording studio they had
whomped up just for the occasion in an eighteen wheeler to catch the
John Lennon performance for fun and profit.
Because this was Lennon’s first live performance since the Beatles had
broken up, Capitol Records had already invested millions and millions in
a world wide promotion for the album that was going to be cut from this
concert. The Canadian arm of Capitol, my guys, owned the rights. The
Canadian Company stood to make a huge fortune. The stadium was packed.
The Capitol Record guy was rubbing and rubbing his hands in gleeful
anticipation.
Once the group was on stage and ready to play, an ignominious small pile
of something under a brown blanket sat in the middle of the stage. The
band played a couple of songs to get in tune and find each other’s
rhythm. Then everybody waited breathlessly for the official ‘on with the
show’. Into the next tune the band sailed, fully revved and ready to let
fly.
There seemed to be a sudden problem with the public address system
though. The stadium was suddenly filled with a gut wrenching squealing
wail, exactly like feedback caused by an improperly facing microphone.
The blanket at center stage slowly started to rise like an illusionist’s
act.
The caterwauling intensified, and the blanket rose faster and faster.
Suddenly the blanket was flung aside and it was Yoko Ono gripping
fiercely onto a microphone and doing a Japanese Zen rendition of
something like tiptoe through the tulips. The show was over.
The manager of Canada Capitol Records Canada was going berserk. The
recording was going to be worthless. Millions and millions of dollars
had just gone down the drain in a blink of an eye to be gone forever.
Hair was sticking out from between the fingers of his tightly clutched
fists.
He was literally pulling his hair out by the roots, the one and only
time in my life I actually ever saw someone doing that. He kept staring
at me out of balloon size eyes yelling, “Would you buy that, would you
buy that”. Good point, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.
The wailing persisted without letup. Lennon kept leaning over to say
something in Yoko’s ear but it didn’t help. After about twenty minutes
people had already started filtering out of the stadium. After forty
minutes the stadium was already half empty. The lady had literally
brought the house down but not in the manner she’d no doubt been
expecting.
I got to thinking about the whole thing afterwards and it seemed the
thing was pursuantly strange. Clearly something had gone not quite right
about the whole deal. There was absolutely no way that what had actually
transpired was anything close to what Lennon had probably intended going
in. So what had gone wrong?
Eventually, only a couple of years ago, I finally found out. I happened
to be watching TV one night, Spring 1995 to be exact. On came the
documentary film of the Rock and Roll Revival which I had never seen
before in all these years. ‘Aahh’, I said to my analytically speaking
self in anticipation, ‘Let’s see if the camera caught something about
this Ono affair that everything else had missed’.
Sure enough, it had turned out to be an ill wind of fate destined to
happen. The instant it had became obvious that the wailing sound was
from Yoko, the crowd had sent her an instant blockbuster negative
vibrational feedback loop to get her the heck out of there. Which had
blown all her circuits and left her frozen in its grip. After all,
everyone had been there to see Lennon and his rock and roll and not Yoko
and her Japanese Zen.
The poor lady was now locked frozen in a vibrational twilight zone of
her own making and couldn’t break out of it.
It was all there in the eyes. Hers were completely glazed over like in
the twilight zone. John’s had the half wild look of someone on the edge
of panic as he continually leaned over and tried to snap her out of her
frozen trance. For some reason, no one had thought simply of shutting
down her mike for awhile and helping her quietly offstage.
They were probably all too afraid of interfering with poor old John’s
plans, who would probably have been eternally grateful if they had. At
any rate, the show was over and so was John for a long time to follow. I
have to figure this might have been included amongst the reasons why
Lennon was so reluctant to venture into the musical limelight again for
nearly ten years afterwards. After all, some experiences can last a
lifetime.
One day near the end of 1969 in Toronto, out of the clear blue sky, the
band fired me for hopelessly mismanaging their recording aspirations.
Couldn’t really blame them. By now you have probably guessed that I
wasn’t the savviest kid on the block for things circumstantial to
business.
I moved into Rochdale College near downtown Toronto. Rochdale College
was a fourteen story hippie enclave on Toronto’s Bloor Street West.
I had been there less than two days when I heard a knock on my door. It
was the band plus the equipment manager. Somebody had broken into their
practice room the night before and cleaned the whole place out. Even the
drumsticks were gone. You had to like the timing.
The band wanted to know if I’d heard anything about it. Actually it
sounded a lot more like they were asking me what I’d done with it. Again
I couldn’t really blame them, I had to be like the one hundred percent
most perfect likely suspect.
Of course I hadn’t, I didn’t, and I wasn’t. This was the first I’d heard
of it. So they left and it was the last time I saw the band for nearly
half a year.
Rochdale College though, along with a half dozen other enclaves like it
around the world, had been an experiment gone awry in experimental
education. Rochdale was a fourteen story apartment building with
dormitory type accommodations which they called ashrams instead of
individualized little apartments called condos.
It was also supposed to act as a college complex inside itself. A number
of supposed intellectuals would be allowed to live together rent-free
and operate as a high octane think tank.
The mutual coagulation of their thought and ideas as they yakked and
even mounted mutual projects on the fly, was supposed to provide new and
useful insights into the prevailing problems of world affairs and the
philosophic questions of life in general. Millions of dollars went down
the drain in trying to set up these supposings, because what
unfortunately ended up was complete mental anarchy.
The octane was way too high and the only thing that got coagulated out
of all that supposing was everybody’s ability to function. The high
output of their collective alpha brain waves in such close proximity was
too much to handle, and everyone just shut down ending up like you or me
and in some cases even dumber.
The similar projects around the world suffered the same demeaning fate
and all fell on hard times. Maybe they just reached the level of their
incompetence. Rochdale College in particular was left to drift with the
tides. A boat left drifting with the tide quickly attracts lots of
finders.
A full contingent of hippies quickly attracted in as its main occupants
because of the laissez-faire attitude at the rental office. Hippies
always know a good thing when they see it.
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