I’m looking to be by a window
That looks out on the sea
Anybody here know
Where such a place is?
Surf of golden sunlight
Breaking over me
Man of a thousand faces
In the Garden paths take form
But the hailstorm guards its own
Things forbidden, things unknown
You must travel on alone
In memoriam friends come round
But the hard ground holds its own
Time for pulling, time to ride
It’s my turn but where’s the guide?
On the jetty shadows lie
And the gulls cry once or twice
Swelling thunder, truth is hid
Behind the glass eye of the idol. . . .
Anybody here know
Where such a place is?
You know, these city towers
Jewels on the serpent’s crown
Twist the space between them
Till every eye is blinded
Lord will you trade your sunlit ocean
With its writhing filigree
For any one of my thousand faces?
“MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES,” 1969
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/3.
The people I spent time with outside school, when I wasn’t spending time alone, were my musical friends. Dave Milliken, who had been my best friend through what would now be called junior high, was still in the picture, though adolescent tensions were pushing us apart. Early on we played war games. Those evolved into fantasies about the girls we knew, about women in magazines. Girls were pretty much out of reach, but when we both began guitar lessons around the same time and played a lot together, rock and roll presented the distinct advantage of being accessible. As time went on and the world expanded, Dave got a girlfriend and we gradually stopped hanging out.
My musical tastes evolved quickly, and I found myself increasingly in the company of Bob Lamble, whose house I walked past every day on the short hike to school. Bob was studying bass, and we had a common interest in jazz and poetry. He was bright and thoughtful, and eventually pursued a career as a scientist.
At first we studied the safe stuff. In those days it was possible to pick up budget records at the corner store, like videos at truck stops today. These albums consisted primarily of outtakes and deleted overstock by known artists, discarded onto cheap vinyl sets. They were probably bootlegs . . . bad recordings of second-rate Charlie Parker performances and such. I found an album of jazz TV themes arranged by guitarist Mundell Lowe, in a big band with horns and a four-piece rhythm section. I thought it was a beautiful sound, and he played TV themes that I was familiar with, so I could appreciate the imagination brought to bear in his arrangements. I bought Belafonte Sings the Blues, which featured the artist singing a collection of great songs, some of them actually blues.
The first piece I learned by ear off the radio was “Walk Don’t Run,” which was a huge hit in 1960 by the Seattle instrumental rock band the Ventures. I was so proud to have “nailed” that song! While the Ventures played it as a delightful little surf tune, it had first emerged in 1954 as a jazz number written and recorded by Johnny Smith. Within a year of hearing “Walk Don’t Run,” I began trying to learn jazz tunes. I laboured through the drudgery of schoolwork until I could retreat to my real studies: DownBeat magazine and jazz on records and the radio.
My musical tastes morphed from mainstream to edgy, the latter in large part because it was just that, out of the mainstream. At that stage, with a broadening but still narrow view of the overall landscape, “edgy” meant the intellectualism of the Modern Jazz Quartet, the raw energy of Wes Montgomery (before he toppled into proto–smooth jazz), the spacious, exotic harmonies of Gil Evans with Miles Davis. Much of this music shows up in supermarkets and airport lounges now, but in the early sixties it was cutting edge.
The album The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery got a positive review in DownBeat, so I bought it and listened with my friends. When we learned that Montgomery played with his thumb, it was like finding a secret compartment to an old music box you’ve had for years. He didn’t use a pick. We had never heard of such a thing. It was new and different for our times, for our community of adolescent explorers, and not everyone around me liked the sound. I was drawn to new and different, and the bottom line was that it was great, a fat sound that felt like you could eat it. He was deeply soulful and, in his tone and his use of parallel octaves, masterfully inventive.
Bob and I attempted to play jazz out of books. We didn’t really understand what it meant to improvise, but we were moved by what we heard on records. We liked guitar players, but also appreciated the delicate counterpoint of piano and vibes from the Modern Jazz Quartet, the velvet trumpet of Miles Davis on the brilliantly cast Kind of Blue, and the roughneck sophistication of Charles Mingus. Thanks to a DownBeat review I discovered the Chico Hamilton Band, featuring the playing and composing of Charles Lloyd and Gabor Szabo. These guys profoundly shaped my sense of what music could be. Szabo played a Martin D-18 or D-28 acoustic with a DeArmond pickup mounted on it, giving him a sound unlike any other jazz player. He was a refugee from Hungary, and his playing evoked strange and mysterious elements of Eastern Europe. I found the sound fresh and enticing, no matter the jazz establishment’s disapproving grumbles. Both Szabo and Lloyd effectively employed elements of pop, at times tongue in cheek, but the tunes were imaginative and original. (Carlos Santana cited Szabo as a major influence, along with Bola Sete and Wes Montgomery. Santana’s 1970 album, Abraxas, features the hit “Black Magic Woman.” The famous guitar solo at the end of this song is a dynamic cover of Szabo’s song “Gypsy Queen,” from his 1966 album Spellbinder.)
Decades later we tried to get Charles Lloyd to play reeds on my album The Charity of Night, but he wanted such a fat fee, more or less the entire recording budget, that we had to abandon the idea. (This turned out to be a blessing, for we were ultimately led to the great vibist Gary Burton.) Lloyd continues to create powerful music. Gabor Szabo died in 1982. In 1965 Szabo and Hamilton collaborated on the score for Roman Polanski’s psychotic film Repulsion, which, coincidentally, became an important and disturbing contributor to my youthful self-analysis.
Folk music began to infiltrate my musical world vision. I first heard the term in connection with Harry Belafonte’s album of calypso songs, which every household in North America must have possessed. My dad used the term to justify buying the record after I accused him of secretly liking modern music. It was the one place where my parents’ tastes and mine overlapped.
I didn’t connect folk music to the guitar until I was fifteen, during my last summer at Camp Ahmek, a venerable institution on the shores of Canoe Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park, about a hundred miles from Ottawa. That year I worked in the kitchen, where I met a kid my age who practiced rudimentary fingerpicking. I had not seen anyone play that way. He played a song called “Black Fly,” about the vicious little creatures that tormented us on two-week canoe trips through the bush of northern Ontario. When I asked him what he was playing, he said it was folk music. (Wade Hemsworth, part of the original wave of Canadian folksingers, wrote “The Black Fly Song” in northern Ontario while working with a survey crew before the damming of the Little Abitibi River.) Soon enough, like a lot of people during the 1960s, I was playing folk music as well. The era and the possibilities continued to expand.
The expansion included vocals. I was very shy about singing, but my mother said, “If you’re going to play guitar, you should sing. People who play guitar sing too.” I knew my dad would be skeptical, as he had very high standards when it came to most things, including what constitutes a good singing voice. I had absorbed his way of judging things, but with my own set of understandings. Mom could see better than I could how much I wanted to be more than just a guitar player.
To overcome my fear of singing, I joined the high schoo
l choir. I was nervous trying out, but I got in. I was sixteen years old. I spent the school year going to rehearsals where I sang tenor parts in Gilbert and Sullivan songs, while keeping a keen eye on my future in rock and roll.
The first band I saw live was a group from Montreal called the Beau-Marks, a play on the name of a long-range anti-aircraft missile. (Bomarc missiles could carry conventional and nuclear warheads, and they caused a political storm in Canada because the United States deployed them there without the approval of Parliament.) In 1960 the Beau-Marks released “Clap Your Hands,” which became an international hit. It was thrilling to hear them the next year at an Ottawa dance hall, but most exciting was a revelation by the band’s guitarist. It appeared that he played rhythm and lead at the same time! One of my companions called it “rhythmo-lead,” and we all aspired to know how it worked.
During my second year in grade eleven (that math!), I met Peter Hodgson, who was a fingerpicking guitar player. Peter played an eclectic repertoire of blues, Woody Guthrie, and old-time country music, as well as a range of songs from across the folk world. When we played together I’d inject little bits of jazziness while drawing out of the experience an understanding of song as a representation of the human spirit. I also worked on making my thumb play rhythm while my fingers played lead, which would become central to my later playing style.
Through Peter—who later morphed into the Ottawa folksinger Sneezy Waters—I began meeting people in the local folk scene, which was still fairly nascent but would evolve into a strong community of performers and promoters. Peter introduced me to Sandy Crawley, who became as much of a friend as I was able to permit myself back then. Sandy was another good picker with a varied repertoire. He and I played together as a duo at parties, and once or twice onstage. Through them, and the various connections they had, I encountered sounds and performers that would become major influences on my music: Fred Neil, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Big Bill Broonzy, the Folkways record label, the Reverend Gary Davis, Brownie McGhee, and Sonny Terry. I have Peter to thank most of all for introducing me to a girl he was going out with at the time, Barb Luther, who in turn introduced me to the consumption of wine and the music of Mississippi John Hurt, two things that have had a profound and positive effect on my life.
Bob Dylan came on the radar at about the same time that Peter Hodgson brought me to a coffeehouse, now legendary, called Le Hibou, which is French for “The Owl.” Le Hibou (pronounced luh eeboo; non-francophones who hadn’t paid attention in French class pronounced it lay hee-boo) grew out of the creative drive of an artsy set of students from the University of Ottawa. By the time I came along, the club had acquired the role of galactic hub around which most of the Ottawa folk scene revolved. Bill Hawkins, a “real” poet dedicated to the craft, was Le Hibou’s manager, and he would change my life. Bill was five years older than I, but there was something about my playing, even in those early days, that he seemed to like. By the end of high school I was washing dishes on weekends at Le Hibou, running the espresso machine, and playing at the weekly open mikes, which for some reason were called hootenannies.
I was quickly drawn into the musical and interpersonal scenes of Le Hibou. The coffeehouse opened in 1960, which was good timing because in 1961 I was in my first year of grade eleven and utterly bored with school. All I wanted to do was read and play music, and have it take over my life, and I thank God I was able to make that happen.
One of the first performances I saw at Le Hibou was by Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, blues greats who exuded a style and verve that I had never before experienced. They gave me goose bumps: Brownie, dark and intellectual, and Sonny, joyful and deceptively simple, both of them solidly musical and generous of spirit.
Another Peter who had an even bigger influence on my life in general, as well as musically, was Peter Hall, the organist at Westboro United Church, where we attended Sunday school as kids. A tall and physically soft gay man with a pronounced widow’s peak, he taught piano and theory under the standardized courses offered by the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. I took lessons from Peter with an eye toward proficiency in musical composition. Somehow he managed to get me through the conservatory’s Grade III theory course and the Grade VI piano exam. The examiner took pity on my nervously quaking hands and passed me even though I turned in a truly wretched performance.
Peter also encouraged my continued exploration of jazz. While he was necessarily steeped in the music of the church—Bach and other composers whose works soar on the pipe organ—he loved jazz, and encouraged me to love it too and master it if possible. Bob Lamble and I spent a lot of time with him, listening to jazz, discussing theory, playing music—experiences that were the polar opposite of high school. If one was a prison sentence, the other was a breakout.
On Saturdays Bob and I went to Peter Hall’s house to soak in the sound: Mahalia Jackson; musique concrète; Mose Allison; the Third Stream music of Gunther Schuller and the Modern Jazz Quartet; and electronic music, which was very new. Peter also led me to an appreciation of film. Early in high school my friend Al Greenberg and I spent nearly every Friday night in a movie theatre, bug-eyed over sci-fi and horror films or noir crime pictures. In contrast, Peter thought I should see Fellini’s visually and conceptually innovative 8½. We also took in Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, with its questions about God and a gorgeously sparse score of Bach cello pieces. We saw Freud: The Secret Passion, with Montgomery Clift. (Jean-Paul Sartre, a leader of the French Underground during World War II and a subsequent existentialist muse, was the original Freud scriptwriter, but his story came in at over five hours long. When director John Huston asked Sartre to shorten it, Sartre made it three hours longer. After a brief but fiery argument, Sartre left the project and told the American director to drop his name from the credits.)
There was a lot of psychology in these films, and as Peter and I became closer he began to reveal his own struggle to deal with his sexuality. I was utterly ignorant in this area, but in typical teen male fashion was convinced I had a handle on the concept of having sex with girls. Not that I hadn’t had some experiences that one might call physical, but the girls I went out with either sensed the limits of my capacity for intimacy and were wary, or were too forward and scared me off. I had the ability to empathize with females, though. The callous attitudes expressed by many of my male peers disgusted and embarrassed me. The world-in-my-head where I mostly lived was held together by a belief in how things ought to be, and I could not yet recognize the degree to which deep down I was just one of the boys.
In the early sixties it was possible to discuss homosexuality, at least in circles that fancied themselves hip. Not with my family, certainly, where anything to do with sex was forbidden territory, but among “arty” people and intellectuals. Peter, as I understood it then, was undergoing counseling in order to “convert,” or cure himself of homosexuality. The prevailing view at the time was that queer behaviour was a moral choice, and that those who engaged in it were perverts, or “sex deviates,” as they were referred to in news reports. The idea that one could be Christian and gay, or a whole person and gay, was to many an oxymoron. The notion that love could be involved was more or less heretical. I didn’t get it at the time, but I’m pretty sure Peter loved me. Though he behaved toward me with perfect decorum, there was an emotional depth to our relationship that I recognized only dimly but that I think was pretty intense for him. I wonder what strength it must have taken to maintain the correctness with which he treated me.
With Peter’s mentoring and support I began writing jazz-based instrumental music, producing many pieces that have since, mercifully, faded into the fog of time. I can’t remember whose idea it was, mine or Peter’s or Dan Matheson’s, but I composed a jazz liturgy on the understanding that it would be performed as one of the regular Sunday evening youth services. The Reverend Matheson, the minister at Westboro United Church, was a lively man, well groomed to the point of shininess the way clergymen can be, yo
uthful-looking in spite of his wavy white hair. He also happened to be our backyard neighbour. I think he felt that an enterprise like this would inject some energy into the youth aspect of his ministry.
Mom and Dad attended the service, along with Peter Hodgson, Sandy Crawley, and some other folkie friends. There was a reasonably good turnout from among my high school peers. A surprisingly large number of mature adults from the community also showed up. I put together a four-piece band: Rick Locatelli on alto saxophone, Bob Lamble on bass, Paul Barette on drums, and me on guitar. I had composed an offertory and sundry other instrumental music, following the standard order of service. The choir sang anthems I had written, and some modern-sounding hymns carefully chosen by Peter Hall. The performance went reasonably well, though some of my choral harmonies had the older folks poking at their hearing aids, wondering if they’d broken.
The music earned praise from the grown-ups and from my musician friends. Overall, though, the young people from my own demographic were less enthusiastic. They seemed to find it inappropriate. One girl accused me of sacrilege, providing an interesting, and at the time surprising, lesson in human nature.
My only religious studies during high school were self-directed. I liked to read the Bible for the juicy bits. People rape, they pillage, they impale each other, they dash infants’ brains against walls. One memorable episode was in Judges 3, in which a dude named Ehud fashions an eighteen-inch dagger and assassinates the apparently very obese Eglon, the king of Moab. Ehud manages to bury the knife in his belly until “the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out.” (“Dirt”? We read the King James Bible, but the English Standard Version is clearer on this point: “. . . the dung came out.”) Ehud then leads a mob of Israelites into Moab, where they “slew . . . about ten thousand men, all lusty, and all men of valour; and there escaped not a man.” Such carnage fit well into the vast aquifer of my suppressed adolescent rage. Ehud reminds me of a young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part 2. In Sicily, Corleone visits Don Ciccio, the fat old guy who killed his dad. Corleone makes nice with the killer, playing a friendly olive oil importer until he plunges a dagger into the old man’s gut and slices nearly to the nipple. (One suspects that Mario Puzo, who wrote the book The Godfather and co-wrote the screenplay, was also familiar with the Bible’s juicy bits.)
Rumours of Glory Page 4