Robertson Davies: A pat on the head, and a scowl

That time I met the Great Canadian Man of Letters, and that other time I met him

 

I met Robertson Davies twice: once when I was 10 years old, and again when I was about 25. I don’t remember the first time, but I understand my presence helped delight him; our second encounter was less pleasant, and I was complicit in a process that earned his scorn.

    In December, 1965, our Grade 5 teacher, Miss Ugolini, arranged to take our class on a filed trip to experience a performance of the opera “The Love for Three Oranges,” by Carlo Gozzi and Sergei Prokofiev. My mother volunteered as one of a handful of parents who would tag along to help herd the 30 or so children safely onto the bus, across streets and into our theatre seats, and generally keep us out of trouble. That meant I would spend the afternoon under the scrutiny of both my mother and my teacher. 

    On the appointed day, we boarded a chartered school bus that shuttled us from Cloverdale Public School, in the suburban utopia of Etobicoke, to the Edward Johnson Building, a recital hall set amid the exotic urban bustle of downtown Toronto.

    The real work for my Mum and her fellow parent volunteers came when we got downtown and, for some reason, had to walk a few blocks and cross busy intersections in order to reach our destination. The teacher and the mothers had to make sure we stayed together as a group and that we all got across the street while the light was green. When we crossed at the corner of Bay St. and Bloor St. W., as my mother recalled later, we created a bit of a log-jam on the other side, where we swarmed a bearded man in a flat-brim hat and a black overcoat. The man looked around at the sea of rosy-cheeked faces that surrounded him, raised his hands as if overwhelmed with delight, and then reached over and patted the nearest head, which happened to be mine.

    Fortunately, my mother, an avid reader, recognized the jovial stranger as Davies himself. She said later, with some irony, that the reason I became a writer was that Robertson Davies had patted me on the head.

    Fifteen years later, my nascent writing career had stalled after a few articles in a music magazine for which I was not paid. For a living I toiled as a cashier’s assistant in the Customs International Mail Unit, which collected taxes payable on commercial and personal goods entering the country by post. Part of my job was to stamp “Duty Paid” on the documents after the customer had settled with the cashier. 

    One day that giant of literature came into my place of work to pick up a parcel. By then I had read the Deptford and Salterton trilogies with relish, a literary journey that had begun when my parents gave me a copy of Leaven of Malice for Christmas when I was a teenager. I, of course, was the only one in the office who recognized Davies.

    He was accompanied by his wife, Brenda, and together they were, by then (1980), a slow-moving, distinguished-looking elderly couple. The cashier (a guy a couple of years older than me who once proudly declared that he hadn’t read as much as a newspaper article in his life) collected Davies’ money, rang the transaction through the cash register and passed the documents to me to stamp. I can’t remember what was in his parcel (it would have been noted on the document) but I recall it wasn’t anything literary or magical, such as rare books or vintage theatrical masks. It was something ordinary, like shoes or gloves, but expensive enough to trigger import duty and federal sales tax. Which probably explained Davies’ sour mood.

    As I stamped his papers my mind raced for something to say, to, at best, demonstrate a witty familiarity with his work, or, at least, show that I recognized him (“I hear Parlabane is back!” “A tax bill can be like a snowball to the back of the head!”). But all I could come up with was “Hello Mr. Davies!” 

    He didn’t answer. He looked down at the receipt I had handed him and shook his head, then looked up at me with penetrating distain. 

    I imagined he recognized me from our first encounter. I had such high hopes for you, he seemed to say. And now look at you! A customs clerk! A tax collector!

    The man who had patted my head at 10 and scowled at me at 25 stowed his receipt in his inside coat pocket, tucked his parcel under his arm and left.

 

That time I almost interviewed Bonnie Raitt 

(Part I)

 

 

In the early 1970s, when I was 19 or 20, I had a freelance gig writing for a magazine called Music Canada Quarterly — not a very lyrical title; it sounded more like a government database than a cultural journal. I interviewed some famous — and moderately famous — musicians, and wrote about them, for very modest, or no pay.

I had no journalistic training but I loved to write, and I was cheap. And I was a musician who had played in a pretty good band, so I could at least sound as if I knew what I was talking about. I had never really aspired to be a music journalist. As someone who had had shot at being the one on stage, I considered interviewing musicians a big step down. Still, it was better than working. 

One of the most famous people I interviewed was Bonnie Raitt. In 1974, she played at Massey Hall (Toronto’s main concert venue), opening for Jackson Browne. My assignment was to interview Raitt in her dressing room after her set, an arrangement made with the blessing of the publicist at Warner Bros., her record label. I was a huge fan of both Raitt and Browne, but was disappointed to learn that Browne was not doing press interviews on this tour. Still, an interview with Bonnie Raitt would be a great honour, even though the timing meant I might miss part of Browne’s set.

I had a good seat, about four rows from the front on the right-hand side. I had probably bought the tickets myself — as this job offered few perks — and I had come with my then-girlfriend, Vicky, who must have been impressed when I got up from my seat after the opening set to find my way to my interview.

From the backstage area an usher directed me to go down some stairs and pass under the stage then go up two flights to the dressing room. While I was going through the corridor under the stage, I noticed a man coming toward me. It was Jackson Browne, who must have observed my briefcase and figured I was with "the press." I wanted to say something, but he averted his eyes as he passed me. 

I found the narrow staircase leading up to a second floor. There was a traffic jam near the top of the stairs: journalists trying, like me, to get an interview. A short, stocky guy in his 30s with an overwrought walrus moustache, wearing a vest over a sleeveless shirt was grilling each person. The critic from the Globe and Mail, a slight, pasty guy with a soft, English-accented voice asked the gatekeeper if he could have a “brief word with Miss Raitt.” The Globe writer left, as he had to file his review, with or without a quote, that night.

The gatekeeper talked to somebody else then turned to me and demanded, “And who are you, sir?” I’ll never forget the almost incriminating, condescending sir.

“Music Canada Quarterly,” I said, then gave my name. Damn! I should have said my name first. Worse, my voice had quavered. I gave him the name of the publicist who had arranged the interview, and the prick with the Moustache seemed satisfied.

“Don’t let him intimidate you. He’s an asshole,” said a voice from behind me. I turned around. It was Larry LeBlanc, a freelance music journalist I had seen at other events. “He thinks he’s King Shit but he’s just the stage manager.” 

LeBlanc told me about a time he was lining up a photograph of a famous singer from backstage, and the Moustache came up from behind him and slapped him hard on the shoulder. “I turned around and told him, ‘If you ever do that again I’ll knock your teeth out’.” 

LeBlanc’s assignment tonight was to interview Raitt for CBC Radio. He told me he had done a pre-interview with her in his apartment that afternoon, and she had asked him if she could take a nap at his place because she was exhausted from travelling from the previous show. I was in awe of this guy. Bonnie Raitt had slept on his couch!

When we were allowed into the dressing room, I saw that it was actually a suite: a large outer room with a couch, chairs and a coffee table, where band members and others milled about, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, and a smaller, inner room, which served as Raitt’s more private space. LeBlanc and I sat in the outer room waiting for our chance to do our interviews. The blue Fender fretless belonging to the bass player, Freebo, leaned against the wall beside me. I thought: “Wow! I could just reach out and touch Freebo’s bass!” Freebo looked over and flashed a friendly smile. Maybe I should interview him.

For some reason, (Toronto singer/songwriter) Murray McLaughlin was there, making his presence known, trying to be the life of the party.

A handler came over and told us Raitt was tired and didn’t think she could handle two more interviews. By now the roar of the crowd, followed by the music of Jackson Browne, came wafting in through the building’s 84-year-old walls and floorboards. I was going to miss his set. Vicky would be sitting alone in the fourth row, thinking her cool boyfriend was interviewing Bonnie Raitt.

(more ...) 

 

That time I almost interviewed Bonnie Raitt 

(Part II)

 

While the manager was talking to us, Bonnie Raitt came out of the inner room and approached us herself. “I just don’t think I can do it anymore. Answering the same questions, I’m starting to feel like a Chatty Cathy,” she said, referring to a toy doll, popular in the 1960s, that “talked” when you pulled the string on her back. She relented, agreeing to let us both interview her at the same time. Since Larry LeBlanc’s interview was for radio, he would take the lead, asking the first questions, but I could cut in later with a question or two of my own. We retreated to the inner room, LeBlanc and me on one side of a low coffee table, and Raitt on the other. 

 

LeBlanc had a professional, portable reel-to-reel tape recorder with a broadcast-style ball microphone. I had one of those boxy plastic cassette recorders of the time. Somebody offered Raitt a beer. She asked for a soda, and her manager brought her a can of Orange Crush and a plastic cup.

LeBlanc asked her about the tour, her latest album, “Streetlights,” and something about her relationship with her record label. On the topic of her background, she volunteered that as a child she was used to falling asleep amid a hep of fur coats piled on a bed at late-night show-business parties, as the daughter of Broadway star John Raitt. 

A woman entered the room (the door to the outer room was open) carrying a bouquet of flowers. “From Mary Martin,” the woman announced. “I’ll put them in water.” (Mary Martin was a Broadway star of the 1950s and ’60s who had co-starred with Raitt’s father in "Annie get Your Gun.") 

By now, Raitt had relaxed a bit and the exchange felt more like a conversation than an interview. McLaughlin came in hoisting a bottle of Champagne, possibly part of Mary Martin’s gift. The cork popped like a gunshot, interrupting the conversation. Without hesitation, LeBlanc said into the microphone, with an official, “announcer” voice: “And that, ladies and gentlemen, was Murray McLaughlin opening a bottle of Champagne.”

McLaughlin took a big swig of the bubbly, straight from the bottle, then handed it to me. I held the bottle up to Raitt, silently offering it to her, as she was talking. She tapped the rim of her soda cup and I poured some Dom Perignon into her Orange Crush before taking a pull from the bottle myself. Not entirely sanitary, but McLaughlin had started it. Music from the Jackson Browne concert still hummed through the walls. Rock Me On the Water.

I intervened with a few questions of my own, about Raitt’s band, about song selection and blues guitar styles. She answered thoughtfully. I was flattered. After LeBlanc wrapped up, I reached for my tape recorder to switch it off and realized to my horror that I hadn’t turned it on. I hadn’t made any notes. All the words spoken were gone (unless I tried to record the interview from the radio when the CBC aired LeBlanc’s interview). I didn’t dare ask Larry to let me borrow his tape. (In the end, I wrote a rave review of her set, with a few quotes from the interview.)

After we’d packed up, as I followed the route of stairways and hallways on the way toward the public theatre seating, the music of Jackson Browne’s band got louder, closer. My Redneck Friend. I realized I was passing the backstage area, and from where I was standing, I could look onstage: I had a side view of the concert. The promoter Richard Flohill was there, holding hands with his girlfriend, bouncing up and down like teenagers. LeBlanc and the stage manager were there, all of us forming a small, sparse group, taking a privileged, insider’s peek at the show. "This is the best spot to watch a show from," the Moustache said to me. "It's like the band's-eye view. And you're hearing the music through the monitors rather than the concert sound system." Just like that, we were allies.

Browne stepped quickly toward us from centre stage, grabbed a lit king-size cigarette from an ash tray sitting on an amp, took a drag, and returned to his position as the audience cheered from the shadows. The opening chords of “Take it Easy” swelled to life. This was the last of the encore medley. The tail end of the show I’d missed in order to almost interview Bonnie Raitt. 

 

The poet on the bus

 

While browsing in a big-chain bookstore recently, I happened upon the book Milton Acorn: The People’s Poet (2015), which includes essays about Acorn as well as the text of his book I’ve Tasted My Blood, first published in 1969. This edition also includes notes Acorn added when editing a subsequent edition in 1978. The book reminded me of an encounter I had with Acorn when I was a high-school student and aspiring writer in 1973.

One of the benefits of attending the School of Experiential Education (or S.E.E.) in the early 1970s was the opportunity to meet some of Canada’s most respected poets. Many of the English literature students, like me, were interested in poetry, and the English teacher, Barry Duncan, was very good at getting writers to come to the school to lead tutorials and read their work. Some people called an alternative school such as S.E.E a “free” school. It was run like a university: attendance was not mandatory but most courses had one class a week and you were expected to complete your assignments through independent study.  

In those days, there was a vibrant Canadian poetry scene. Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton and Al Purdy were the big-name poets, who got the more elite reading gigs at art colleges and were featured on CBC. But there were several recognized poets who were happy to drop in to our old school building in southeast Etobicoke and regale a bunch of long-haired teenagers in denim overalls with their wit and their published work. The names Earl Birney, Bill Bissett, Gerald Lampert and Joe Rosenblatt spring to mind as writers who visited our school.

One day Barry (we called our teachers by their first names, of course) told us he had lined up a visit by Milton Acorn, a popular local poet who had recently had the honour “The People’s Poet” bestowed upon him by a group of his peers — Atwood and Mordecai Richler among them — who were dismayed that he'd been passed over for the Governor General's Award that year.

Even though I didn’t have any classes that day, I made a special trip to school to see the visiting writer. The session was to take place in the early afternoon and the bus I boarded at Old Mill station to get to school was almost empty. I took a seat near the back and opened my book (probably a Kurt Vonnegut or a Richard Brautigan; I was a sucker for an easy read). After the bus left the station I became aware of some peculiar animal noises come from the back. Snorting, growling, moaning. I turned my head far enough to see that a shabbily dressed middle-aged man was huddled in a seat across from me and few rows back. He wore a coarse brown shirt and a pair of old black dress pants that looked like he’d bought them at a charity shop. The waist was secured by a belt that was way too big for him; the long slack end of the belt flapped down at his knees. His brown hair was greasy and disheveled and he resembled a huddled wretch from a Dickensian slum. This man might have been homeless, but we didn’t say “homeless” in those days; we used more clumsy words like “winos” and “bums.”

As the bus rolled on, the man lolled from side and groaned audibly, never uttering a discernible word. Was he a mental patient or a drunk? I wasn’t sure. I considered getting up and moving farther away from him, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that his brown eyes burned with a kind of fiery torment, a dark blaze of passion. He moaned and growled some more and whined like a dog and swayed in his seat until we reached my stop. I stepped quickly toward the centre doors and leapt off the bus, glad to escape the remote chance that this frightful specimen might speak to me. 

I didn’t look back until I was inside the school (an old two-storey brick building constructed as a primary school in the first years of the 20th century). I was a little early, so I had time for a quick visit to the washroom and to look in the students’ common room to see if any of my friends were around. Then I went up to the second-floor classroom where the poetry reading was to take place. There were a few students in the hallway outside the classroom door and about 25 were hanging around inside, smoking cigarettes (because it was allowed) while Barry chatted with someone, probably the guest speaker, at the front of the room. When I got a better look at the person Barry was talking to, I realized it was the scary guy from the bus. That growling, moaning, tortured soul was the People’s Poet, Milton Acorn.

At first, and to my surprise, Acorn’s behaviour in the classroom was pretty normal. He was lucid and well-spoken and fulfilled his role as a mentor to young aspiring writers. But when he began reading from a paperback copy of one of his books, he seemed gripped by a kind of spiritual possession. He shouted some lines so loud and abruptly that some of the kids flinched in startlement. After one particularly dramatic line, I noticed a tear had flown from his eye and landed on his cheek. At another point, he shrieked a phrase with dramatic volume, then stared at the page for a few seconds, silent, his eyes fixed on the book with an expression of utter horror, as if the words he himself had written were the source of his torment.

And then he snapped out of it. He took some questions from the class (sorry, I don’t remember any) and I sensed an air of condescension toward us. He turned to illustrate a point on the blackboard and, searching the ledge for something to write with, quipped, “Is this school free of chalk?”

His sarcastic wit now intact, that furious emotion he had displayed during the reading seemed to have been switched off. But I knew it wasn’t an act. I had seen that fire in his eyes, heard his troubled voice on the bus, when he thought he was alone.

 

---

 

Milton Acorn (1923-1986) was born in Charlottetown, P.E.I. He lived in Charlottetown, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Notable books: I’ve Tasted My Blood; I Shout Love and Other Poems.

  

 

Matthew Perry

 

I met Matthew Perry in the summer of 1995, when Friends had suddenly blown up making its mid-season debut. He was 25; I was 40. I was freelancing for the (Toronto) Globe and Mail’s TV supplement, Broadcast Week. I was at a low point in my career, barely eking out a living as a freelance writer and selling running shoes part-time. Perry was a sudden major Hollywood star. 

I knew about the show but hadn’t been watching it, so, a couple of days before the interview, the editor, Trevor Cole, couriered a box of VHS tapes of Friends episodes to my house for me to watch. Cole made it clear to me that he was not a fan of the show and my assignment was not to interview Perry for a flattering “puff” profile. In true Globe and Mail fashion, the story would go something like “Sure, it’s the Number One show on television, but here’s why we find it irritating.” The interview was to form only a part of the larger, snarky article.

I was not happy about that angle, especially after watching a few episodes and finding myself laughing at the witty, if somewhat convoluted dialogue — particularly the lines delivered by Perry as “Chandler Bing.” (“Have you heard the news?” “The fifth dentist caved and now they’re all recommending Trident?”)

But I was glad for the assignment and the eventual $300 payment.  

The interview was to take place in a room in the hotel built into the domed stadium where the American League Blue Jays play. I got downtown early and sat in my car in the underground parking garage reading the cover story about Friends in the latest Rolling Stone magazine. I had crammed the names of all the cast members and their characters and hoped I would not appear unprepared. I was nervous. This guy was rich and famous, and yet I knew little about him, except that his mother was once Pierre Trudeau’s press secretary, his step father was NBC News anchor and former CTV news anchor Keith Morrison, and his biological father used to play the bearded seafarer in the Old Spice commercials.

Perry’s hotel room had a main floor sitting room and an upstairs loft as the bedroom and, like all the rooms at the SkyDome Hotel, a floor-to-ceiling window looking onto the baseball field. I was introduced to Perry by a publicist with a clipboard. Perry stood tall and dignified and I remember he was wearing a preppy-style blue blazer. His face bore a half-smile that seemed to be carved into him in the form of a permanent smirk. He shook my hand warmly and smiled as if he was genuinely happy to meet me. After the publicist left he turned toward the baseball field and told me he had watched last night’s Jays game. 

Now, the field was a dormant, bland, industrial space. Sections of artificial turf were rolled up like carpet and maintenance people strolled around carrying tools. A Zamboni-like riding tractor groomed the outfield. Through the window you could hear the empty, cavernous echo of utility fans. 

Perry told me he had met the team the night before. He reached into his pocket and showed me the game ball manager Cito Gaston had given him after the game, autographed by all the players. He was really proud of it and anxious to show me. He was a fan, delighted to have met these big-league heroes in the flesh, not yet fully grasping the reality of his own fame. The Jays had won their second World Series less than two years ago, and Perry told me that the vanity plates on the Porsche 911 he drove around L.A. read “JAYS 93.” 

There was a small couch against the side wall, a couple of chairs facing it and a coffee table in between. He sat on the couch and I took one of the chairs.

“Hey, instead of always facing each other, why don’t we try sitting side by side,” he said.

Why not? I thought. Why be a stickler? I’ll go along. So, I sat beside him. A mistake, as it put me in the awkward position of having to turn my head to the right 90 degrees in order to address him. I arranged my tape recorder and my note pad on the coffee table and held my list of questions in my hand. Perry asked if those were my interview questions. Then he grabbed the sheet out of my hand and began reading them. “How about if I just pick the questions I want to answer, and —"

“Um, I don’t think so,” I said, taking back the page.” 

It would have been a funny twist, and Perry might have respected my willingness to flaut formality, but I couldn’t risk losing control of this interview. This wasn’t a game. 

At one point during the interview, he said, with ironic emphasis: “You might as well go ahead and ask THE QUESTION.” 

“What question?”

“You know,” he said. “The one they always ask me.”

I looked at him for a few seconds.

He said, “‘Are the cast members all really friends?’”

What a dumb question, I thought. 

“We don’t ask that question,” I said, with mock seriousness. “We’re the Globe and Mail.”

He laughed. What a relief, and a thrill for me. Only a Canadian would have got that joke. I had made Matthew Perry laugh. 

When the interview was over, I packed up my briefcase, shook Perry’s hand, thanked him and went for the door. He stood there in the doorway, alone, in the two-story luxury room, clutching his autographed baseball, awaiting his next interview; about to face the wild ride that lay ahead of him, of which Friends was only the beginning. And when the door closed behind me and I walked down the hall, I had the illusion that, under different circumstances, we might have been ... friends.

"That's not Robbie Robertson!"

  

When I was 14, in 1969, my 16-year-old brother, John, was in a band with a few friends from high school — including future Grammy nominee Tom Cochrane and future record company executive Deane Cameron. The band practised in our basement and I would often fool around with the equipment — guitars, amps, a full drum kit — when they weren’t around. I had been schooled on what’s cool in music by John, who introduced me to artists like Jimi Hendrix, Cream and Johnny Winter. But this band John was in was into a different kind of music. They played songs by Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash and the Band, as well as some originals written by Tom. They were most influenced by the Band, even naming themselves “King’s Harvest,” after the song from the album “Music From Big Pink.” 

 

There was a copy of “Big Pink” in the house, and, I confess, the first time I heard it I really couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. At 14, I had just been drawn in by distorted guitar solos, fuzzy power chords, bluesy harmonica and screaming vocals as the new vocabulary of contemporary music. These Band tracks were just songs — well written, well played and well sung — but songs, with lyrics and melodies and without the sensationalism of driving hard rock. 

Meanwhile, I spent that summer teaching myself how to play an acoustic guitar by learning the chords to every song on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” I forced myself to finger-pick every chord, knowing that picking was more difficult than strumming, and the technique would make me sound like a better guitar player, sooner. It worked. I was invited to join John’s band two years later.

On that night in 1969, John, Deane and Tom went to Massey Hall to see the Band in concert. I was home alone, with a copy of the Band’s second, eponymous album and our living-room General Electric console stereo. I played that album for maybe the eighth time but suddenly heard it for the first time. I was hooked. I played it again and again that night. While John and is friends were witnessing a live Band performance, I was learning to love their music at home. 

Without knowing it I developed an ear for the stylized nuances: the rootsy touches of accordion and fiddle, boogie-woogie piano combined with the funky drum beats, the heart-tugging vocals and the witty, colourful lyrics, the beautiful pain of “The Unfaithful Servant” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” The photos on the album cover completed the impression. These guys were reaching back to 19th-century America (even though they were mostly Canadian) and all its rustic, romantic appeal. They all managed to look the part, of rural homesteaders, with their beards, cowboy boots, work shirts and beat-up felt hats, displayed in grainy black-and-white photos. One member, whom I deduced was Jaime Robbie Robertson (as credited on the album), had distinctive eyebrows, wire-rimmed glasses and a dark moustache, making him look like some sort of university intellectual.

Liking the Band (and Dylan and the Byrds) set me apart from my friends at school (although I still liked Hendrix). Most guys my age had albums by Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath and Deep Purple in their record collections. I hardly knew any Band fans, which made being a fan feel like a personal distinction, as if I was a fan of this artist nobody else had heard of.

The first time I saw the Band perform was at a weekend-long festival in suburban Toronto (on this day, Aug. 21) in 1971. They shared the bill with Edgar Winter and White Trash, Sha-Na-Na and others. By that time, I was a member of my brother’s band, whose name had been reduced to "Harvest," and who played mostly original songs written by Tom. We didn't do any Band covers, but we were still influenced by them in style and outlook.

Deane was a bit of a dictator about our aesthetic style. He was adamant that we not only eschew psychedelic and hard-rock music. We also had to dress accordingly. No mod clothes. No bellbottoms. No flowered shirts. We were to dress like farmers, as the Band did. Leather vests, jeans, cowboy shirts. 

We all attended the Band show as if it was a school field trip. We were sitting on the grass, fairly close to the stage. When the Band came on, Robbie Robertson appeared wearing a bright purple velvet suit. The round spectacles were there, the thin dark beard and the cream-coloured Fender Stratocaster. But the outfit, complete with velvet cap, blew Deane's aesthetic sensibility all to hell. 

Deane called out: “Hey, Tom, that’s not Robertson, you know! That’s not Robertson!” Other people in the crowd must have heard, many of them wondering who "Robertson" was. 

Deane was in denial. He refused to accept that the mainstay of the band that served as his aesthetic template would violate every sartorial rule he had enacted.

A minute later, the Band opened with “The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show,” from their “Stage Fright” album. I remember because the first notes of that song — both on the record and in this performance — were the searing, choppy guitar riff that Robertson played as the song’s intro. On stage, Robertson’s face expressed a sense of self-conscious delight as he connected with the audience and with his bandmates, these two bars of unaccompanied guitar riffs serving as the count-in for the song. 

Despite the crappy, open-air venue, it was a great show, and Robertson’s, grinding rockabilly riffs and ringing harmonics pierced the air through every song, confirming his identity as surely as a fingerprint. 
 

 

The day I almost destroyed half a roomful of Gordon Lightfoot albums

  

 

When I was a teenager, I learned that a second cousin — my mother’s first cousin, whom the family had all but lost touch with — was Gordon Lightfoot’s manager. In that role, I later understood, cousin Al Mair managed Lightfoot’s business affairs and co-owned, with the singer, his publishing company, Early Morning Productions.

 

That was around 1970, when Lightfoot had already become a household name in Canada and was well known abroad. Although I wasn’t a huge Lightfoot fan, it was exciting to learn that I had a cousin in the music business, as I had designs on a music career of my own. 

 

My brother and I were in a band and we were hopeful that we could benefit from our family connection. So, we contacted Al, under pressure from the other band members, to see if he could offer any advice that would help us achieve our ambition to make a record. Al came out to hear us practice a couple of times and gave us some advice, but he didn’t commit to signing us or anything. Whatever he did for us regarding our music — helping us apply for a grant or recommending a demo studio — seemed to be done begrudgingly, out of obligation. 

 

As a band, we were actually pretty good. A couple of major record labels were interested in us. Our lead singer went on to have a successful career as a Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter/rocker, and our drummer became president of a major record label. But back in the ’70s, our fledgling band broke up and my pursuit of a career in music ended. Al and his wife remained friends with my parents, and Al, who was 15 years older than me, would still chat with me about music at family gatherings.

 

Being related to Al did net us some freebies. Lightfoot would play a week at Massey Hall (Toronto’s top concert venue) every year, and for several years in a row, Al gave our family four tickets for the show (orchestra, row H, centre, on the aisle). We’d also get free Lightfoot albums as they came out (this was the era of “Sundown,” “Old Dan’s Records” and “Don Quixote”). 

 

In 1975, Al invited me to come with him to see Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue at Maple Leaf Gardens. Our seats were not great (they were greens, near centre ice), but while we were sitting there, I deduced that we were part of a sort of Lightfoot entourage: sitting to my right was a nephew of Lightfoot’s, a guy around my age, named Steve, and next to him was John Stockfish, Lightfoot’s long-time bass player, and his wife, along with another colleague of Al’s. Lightfoot was to appear as a surprise guest at the Toronto show, and Al had a backstage pass. 

 

While we were at our seats before the show started, Al excused himself and was gone for about 20 minutes. When he returned, he casually mentioned that he had been in the dressing room drinking beer with “Gord,” Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Ronnie Hawkins. “It’s like a party down there,” he said. Later, during the intermission, Al got up again, saying to me, “I’m going backstage for another beer.” He was showing off to me. I was impressed, but crushed that I wasn’t able to go with him.

 

After my dreams of making it as a musician faded I was somewhat adrift — 19 or years old, unemployed, out of school, writing the occasional article for Music Canada Quarterly magazine. Al would find various odd jobs for me to do. I baby-sat his son a couple of times; he paid me in cash and albums, including his industry copy of “On the Border” by the Eagles. Al rented a pickup truck and hired me to dig some soil out of his Etobicoke garden and drive it to the dump. Two days’ work, at minimum wage. Around then, he was severing his business ties with Lightfoot and Early Morning Productions to focus on the indie label he was starting up, Attic Records. Another of the odd jobs he gave me was to spend a couple of excruciatingly boring days stuffing copies of Attic’s promotional newsletter, “Under the Eaves,” into envelopes.

 

A few months later, Al hired me to do what struck me as a very odd job: go to his old office, now occupied by the purchasers of his interest in Early Morning Productions, and destroy the large quantity of surplus vinyl records — singles — in the basement. I had heard of record companies destroying records that were no longer for sale for one reason or another, but I didn’t understand the legality of it. I didn’t need to. “Just make sure you destroy them all,” Al said. 

 

The office was on a trendy stretch of Davenport Rd. where boutiques, galleries and professional offices occupy renovated turn-of-the-century row houses. When I arrived that summer morning, three women were sitting at desks in the main floor office. The one who was in charge, an older woman (to me, then, so she might have been 40) in a beige skirt suit — who turned out to be Lightfoot’s sister, Beverley —  had been expecting me. She showed me to the basement stairs.

 

The cellar was a damp, unfinished concrete room that smelled like wet sand. It was bare except for stacks of 45-rpm records in paper sleeves, some in loose stacks, some in neat piles lined up against the walls and reaching halfway to the ceiling, some on the floor in domino-like rows formed by stacks that had toppled over, and most strewn in disorderly heaps on the floor. There must have been thousands of records. In a far corner, diagonally opposite the steps, sat an old wooden table on which sat several open cardboard boxes full of albums, while some stacks of albums sat on the floor. I decided that I would deal with the singles first and the albums later. 

There was an axe leaning against the wall at the foot of the stairs and beside it an electric drill plugged into an extension cord. I remembered Al telling me: “Some guys prefer the axe, others think the drill is faster. The last guy said he used the axe until he got tired, then switched to the drill, but then he quit after two hours, so I don’t know.”

 

A few destroyed records and many record fragments littered the floor, and there was a green garbage bag containing a fragments of a few dozen records that had met a violent demise. Oddly, I don’t remember the artists or the songs on these records. The Irish Rovers? Patsy Gallant? Ken Tobias? Maybe. I didn’t understand where this function fit into the machinery of the music industry of the 1970s. I just had to turn these discs into unplayable plastic shards, and place the scraps in garbage bags and haul the bags up the stairs, out the back door and into the alley. 

 

This looked like it might be fun. I was on my own — no boss looking over my shoulder — wrecking things, for minimum wage. And I was working in the record industry.

 

I decided to go with the axe first. I placed a 10-inches-thick stack of records, maybe “Horses” by Ron Nigrini, on the square of plywood that served as the chopping block, and took an overhead swing with the axe, careful not to hit the open-joist ceiling in my upward arc. The blade penetrated the plastic platters, but didn’t go all the way through, leaving the six or so discs at the bottom of the pile still intact. The axe blade didn’t shatter the records; rather, it made an incision that was duplicated on each disc through the stack as far downward as the blade reached. The challenge lay in getting the incision to reach the disc at bottom of the pile without going through the plywood base. I turned the pile over and swung at the bottom records. They slid onto the plywood square, so I attacked them individually until they were all wrecked. This was going to take a long time.

 

After half an hour I had smashed less than half a bagfull of records, but I had not made a perceptible dent in the assigned load. And I was getting tired. So I decided to give the drill a shot. It was a corded drill with a quarter-inch-diameter bit. With the drill, you had to  hold the stack of records steady, or the first few discs penetrated by the drill would spin violently like out-of-sync hula hoops, on the rotating bit, sending the remainder of the pile skittering across the floor. I tried holding the stack with my foot while I drilled, which worked well, but was hard on my back. As I drilled, the two or three records on top of the stack would splinter under the pressure from the drill, but the bit would bore a clean hole through the lower layers. I figured as long as the record had a hole and a deep crack in the grooved surface, it was unplayable and therefore officially destroyed. 

 

After a ruining a couple of stacks of records with the drill, I tossed them into the garbage bag and went back to the axe. The axe was more primitive, relying on brute force, cleaving many of the records, but strewing fragments and intact discs across the floor. The drill was more precise, surgical, but required more concentration and technique (restraining the records so they didn’t spin with the drill; getting the variable speed right, as a too-slow rate of revolutions sent the drill skating across the surface of the first record; and applying the right amount of downward pressure).

I had packed a lunch and there was a bathroom down there, so I didn’t need to come up until I was finished. At about five o’clock the basement door opened and a woman’s voice called my name. Al was on the phone. 

“How’s it going,” he asked. I was using Beverley’s phone.

“OK, but I’m only about halfway through.”

Al told me to go home, as the women were closing up the office, and come back the next morning. 

I was much more productive the next day. I devised a system, using the drill, that ploughed through 40 or 50 records per minute. I’d line up a row of six or seven piles and bore through them one after another, then toss the remains in the bag. I placed any survivors aside, restacked them and drilled them. By three o’clock, I had destroyed all the 45s, bagged them and placed the bags out the back door to be picked up on garbage day. The alleyway was now partially blocked by garbage bags filled with the fragments of music that would never be played. 

That left only the albums. Al had said “Make sure you destroy them all.” Should I just follow his orders and “destroy them all,” including the albums, or should I stop and ask about it? There was something different about the albums. Unlike the Attic singles, they seemed to be stored with care: some in open cardboard boxes, some sitting on edge and leaning against the wall, and others piled in orderly rows on the table. “Sit Down Young Stranger.” “Summer Side of Life.” “Don Quixote.” “Did She Mention My Name?”

Each unit was sealed in clear plastic, untouched, like a brand-new piece of merchandise. There must have been 600 or 700 albums here. Despite their larger dimensions, the shape and rigidity of the cardboard covers would have made them easier to destroy than the 45s. Maybe even fun. I could have them all shredded in half an hour.  

But unlike the 45s, these albums seemed to be telling me that it would be a shame to destroy them — even if it was legally necessary. 

When I reached top of the stairs, the office was alive with activity. In sharp contrast to the dank basement, the room was bright and airy, with spider plants and Boston ferns hanging from macramé hangers. A middle-of-the-road radio station played easy-listening music at low volume. The front bay window looked onto sunny Davenport Rd., where shoppers and office workers hustled by on the sidewalk and vehicular traffic rushed past. Beverley, who was on the phone, looked up at me and raised a finger to indicate she’d be off in a minute. A younger woman at a small desk was typing at impressive speed on an IBM Selectric typewriter. The other woman was flipping through folders in a filing cabinet drawer. Everyone was busy, running Gordon Lightfoot’s affairs.

The typing women stopped typing. “Did you want something?” 

“I just need to use a phone,”  I said.

She indicated the phone on her desk. “Nine out,” she said.

I went over and dialled Al’s office number while standing at the side of her desk. Luckily, Al was available.

“I did all the 45s in the basement but I’m not sure about the other records.”

“What other records?”

“There’s a bunch of albums there. Did you want me to destroy those too? You said to destroy them all, so —”

“What albums are they?” Al asked.

By this time, Beverley was off the phone and I got the impression that all three women were following my end of the conversation.

“They’re Gordon Lightfoot albums,” I said.

I heard the room gasp as all three women inhaled simultaneously. Then, one called out “NO!”

“Judging by the reaction here, I think I know the answer,” I told Al.

"Those aren't our records! You can't touch those!" Al said. 

Beverley stood up. “You- you didn’t-”

“No.” I smiled, embarrassed.  Embarrassed for having had to ask such a stupid question. Because now it seemed obvious: you don’t destroy Gordon Lightfoot albums when you’ve been hired to destroy Attic singles that happen to be in the basement of Gordon Lightfoot’s business office.

“You could have asked us!” Beverley said. 

But it was a good thing I asked someone.