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.
