The other events worked out better. Cream’s audience in Ottawa’s ornately gilt Capital Theatre at least tolerated us, though nobody seemed to get very excited.
The Hendrix show, in April, was the second occasion in which I found myself on an arena stage. This time it was the cavernous Paul Sauvé Arena in Montreal’s east end. We actually had a proper sound check. I was surprised and confused by the sight of the stage techs placing microphones around the drums. “What are you doing that for?” I asked. “The friggin’ guy’s already too loud!” The tech looked at me like I was an animal he’d never encountered and said, “Well, that’s what we do.” I had never seen that done before. I had no idea it had become standard practice to put the drums through the PA in large halls like this.
We went onstage on time, made it through our set without mishap, and got out of the way for the performance by the Soft Machine, a pioneering electronic band that was touring with the Hendrix trio. They were interesting, hypnotic, accompanied by a classically West Coast psychedelic light show, cellular shapes slithering and swelling, projected into air thick with incense and hashish.
Then came the Jimi Hendrix trio. The sound that exploded from Hendrix’s stack of overdriven Marshall amps was fluid, shattering, seductive, threatening, and uplifting. The notes seemed to rise high above the thundering rhythm section into the dense air and spontaneously combust. I stood in the darkness of the balcony and marveled. And longed to be a conduit for that kind of power.
One reviewer said that if the main act had been anyone but Hendrix, we would have stolen the show. That may be a measure of how much pot smoke was in the atmosphere. But to me these gigs were monsters under the bed: big shows in big halls stacked with thousands of fans, most of them stoned out of their minds and howling for the headliner. Opening acts were really just meat. “Sure, I’d love to go on first.” Freaked me right out. I would be transported to a state of awareness that was glassy, opaque, like an out-of-body experience or the memory of a trauma. I was onstage with my gang, thrashing the strings of my Esquire, cranking out rock and roll like I’d always wanted, and inside I was in survival mode, insulated from the scene.
There was a party for the bands after the show, at a warehouse recording studio in downtown Montreal. Soon after we got there I fell into a conversation with Hendrix’s drummer Mitch Mitchell, who told me that the Montreal gig was their thirtieth one-nighter in a row, and they were doing the tour by air. They had no chance to do laundry or sleep. Everything was about arriving in a city, playing a set, getting to the airport, flying to the next city, then playing again. They all smelled bad. Their clothes, fine-looking from an audience perspective, up close were split-seamed and ragged.
When the Hendrix crew had arrived earlier that afternoon, the major downtown hotel they had booked refused to accommodate them. Management was afraid they would throw the televisions out the window or something. But because Hendrix happened to be African American, his management was able to play the race card, and they called the press. The hotel was shamed and eventually gave the band rooms. This kind of thing was common in the sixties. Nonetheless, that night the Jimi Hendrix Experience played what must have been one of the finest sets of rock and roll ever heard in Montreal, which speaks to the professionalism of those guys.
At the party, clusters of wannabes, posers, and industry hucksters clotted dark as platelets in the shadowy corners of the large-ish room. I didn’t know any of them, and I didn’t want to. They were passing joints and conspicuously assessing to what degree each new arrival warranted their attention. They wasted no time on me. Then Hendrix came in, causing a palpable shift of energy. Ragged and sapped as the trio was, Hendrix was beautiful in half-unbuttoned ruffled shirt, flowing scarf, and blue velvet jacket. He happened to walk up and stand next to me. In front of us was a little stage set up with instruments, but nobody was playing. Jimi lingered awhile and seemed peeved that everyone was gawking at him. He turned to me and said, “I don’t know what all these people are staring at, man. I just want to play some music.” Then he stepped onstage and stroked some beautiful blues out of an old Stratocaster. It was supposed to be a jam—any guest could get onstage and join in—but I didn’t have the nerve to get involved. I left while Hendrix was playing.
Yes: I was at a party with the closest thing I had to a rock-and-roll hero, one of the greatest electric guitar players in rock history. He was playing on an open stage ten feet from me, and I was free to join him, but I didn’t. It wasn’t just the phony mutterings and poses of sycophants surrounding Hendrix, although I had a definite aversion to being taken for one of those. I wasn’t just tired (though I was that). I was held back by the deep inner conviction that I had nothing of value to contribute, and that by getting up and playing, I would demonstrate that to all present.
After a nine-month career that included no more than maybe a dozen gigs, Olivus disbanded. I was done with psychedelia. All the thrashing and pounding had become boring. My ears were tired. It was time to move on. There was beauty to be coaxed from the guitar that is unique to the instrument. I was only twenty-three years old, but I felt ready to become me, whatever that was. Through this period I had the occasional solo gig, often at Le Hibou, which was the world I wanted to enter full-time. Since early 1966 I had written dozens of songs. Most were easily discarded, but a core body of material stood out, workable songs that sounded better to me when played solo on the Martin 00-18 acoustic I had acquired. I decided to go it alone, as myself.
At the same time I was witnessing a devolution of the Toronto rock scene. There was no question that the “Toronto Sound,” a unique conglomeration of R&B styles mostly played by white guys, was becoming an international draw, and the city was alive almost every night with unique and wonderful riffs and rhythms pulsing from dozens of venues. Yorkville, and downtown in general, were packed with an array of clubs large and tiny, funky and fashionable, and the masses swarmed them all: the Riverboat, Club Bluenote, Kiki Rouge, Jacques’ Place, Charlie Brown’s, the Purple Onion, the Pornographic Onion, the Penny Farthing, the Gas Light, the Mousehole, and the Mynah Bird (whose chef often cooked in the nude). Lucky tavern rats took in the talents of emerging Canadian stars like Ian and Sylvia Tyson, Steppenwolf, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, the Guess Who, The Band, Gordon Lightfoot, Murray McLauchlan, and Kensington Market. So the devolution might not have been apparent if you’d just arrived and went club-hopping, or if you were a favourite local performer and the stars were aligning in your favour.
But city officials were tiring of accommodating the Beats and hippies, bikers, and drug dealers swarming in the flood of humanity that arrived each night to partake and to gawk. They wanted developers. They wanted Tiffany and Louis Vuitton, Ferrari and Gucci, and they would get them and more. Shortly after protests swept through Yorkville in 1967 (the protesters wanted cars out of the crowded district), Toronto controller and former mayor Allan Lamport said he wanted Yorkville to “become a shopping centre.” He got much more than that. Yorkville is now Toronto’s wealthiest district. In 2008 Fortune magazine reported that Bloor Street, the main thoroughfare running past Yorkville, was the seventh most expensive shopping street in the world.
Rain rings trash can bells
And what do you know
My alley becomes a cathedral
Eyes can be archways
To enter or leave by
Vacuum’s replaced by a crystal
Jesus don’t let Toronto take my song away
It’s easy to love if
You let yourself love it
But like a moth’s wing it’s easily crushed
Jesus don’t let tomorrow take my love away
“THOUGHTS ON A RAINY AFTERNOON,” 1969
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/7.
Through it all, Toronto remained cold and unwelcoming, musicians ever more aggressively hustling for gigs and desperate. There was some authenticity, some exceptional music, and some promising artists, but as these t
hings often go, the shysters and wannabes, phonies, and petty criminals seemed to take over the scene and make it oppressive. I had a few friends, but mostly I felt detached from humanity in the crazy city. I hovered in my own thoughts and songwriting, and isolation, and stepped further toward a solo career.
My flight from the band scene was delayed by another offer to join an ensemble, one that was difficult to refuse. The invitation was from 3’s a Crowd, a Toronto folk-rock band that had relocated from out west. They blazed bright for a few minutes and then collapsed. The original outfit was an entertaining folk trio consisting of Donna Warner, Trevor Veitch, and Brent Titcomb. Those three had performed together for a few years before getting a record deal and expanding into a six-piece that included my former bandmates Richard Patterson and David Wiffen. I knew them from their regular visits to Le Hibou’s stage. Brent’s house in Yorkville provided a kind of refuge during my lonely sojourn in Toronto. He and his then wife Maureen had a mysterious tolerance for my silent presence. Sometimes I’d be handed a guitar and invited to play something.
The band had recorded a couple of my songs (as well as some by Bill Hawkins) on an album called Christopher’s Movie Matinee, produced by Cass Elliot of the Mamas and Papas, whose music I did not care for. My 3’s a Crowd friends weren’t happy when I told them how little I liked their rendition of my stuff, which I thought sounded mechanistic and passionless. I felt bad about making them feel bad, but I didn’t know how to fake enthusiasm for what they had done.
Just before the founding members decided to disband, they’d landed a good-paying contract to be the “house” band for a mainly musical variety show that would run nationwide on Canadian TV. As the summer of 1968 approached, Richard and David, as the two most recent members, asked me to join them in a resurrected version of the group (which would also include Colleen Peterson, Sandy Crawley, and Dennis Pendrith). They had been left in the lurch by the sudden parting of the original three singers. They hoped to capitalize on the deal for the show. It was to be called One More Time. It would be taped over the summer at the CTV studios in Montreal.
I was skeptical of the offer for a few reasons, not least of which was that I had experienced the unhinged side of the show’s producer, Sid Banks, during The Flying Circus’s misadventure at the Wilson Pickett concert. Mostly, though, my hesitation hinged on a desire, a need, to get out of bands and go it alone. But Patterson and Wiffen dangled before me the promised $13,000 for a summer of work, which sounded like decent pay in those days and would provide a stake for my future solo flight. So I told them, “Okay, I’ll do the show, but that’s it, then I’m done.” We spent the summer taping twenty-six half-hour episodes, which ranged in quality from laughable to embarrassing to execrable. My $2,166 share, which dribbled in over an eight- or ten-week period, did not constitute much of a grubstake. I agreed to go with them to New York for a meat-market audition to try to score a U.S. college tour, which we got. We spent much of that fall playing through the Carolinas. It actually went well.
The best thing I got out of that tour was meeting Fox Watson. Fox was an accomplished guitar player, a lovely fingerpicker who introduced me to the magic of open tunings. We hung out for a while on tour, and then he came up to Toronto for a couple of months. I was sort of disdainful of open tunings back then because I didn’t like most of what people did with them—playing the same four chord formations in different tunings, trying for a specious variety in their sound without going to the trouble of actually learning their instrument—but when Fox played in any of several tunings he used, what came out was fluid as a mountain creek and agile as a gull. My first attempts at instrumental pieces, “Sunwheel Dance” (b.hc.com/s/8) and “Foxglove” (b.hc.com/s/9), which is named after him, reflect his important and timely influence on my playing. At his suggestion, I replaced the relatively small-bodied 00-18 with a fuller-sounding, dreadnought-shaped Martin D-18.
After the Carolina tour and one or two other gigs with 3’s a Crowd, I was done with bands and remained so until the mid-seventies. In early 1969, an excitingly original singer-songwriter named Murray McLauchlan, who had befriended me over the course of several visits to Le Hibou, took me around the Toronto folk music scene that had somehow escaped me, for the most part, while I was a band member there. Most favourably, Murray introduced me to Estelle Klein, who ran the Mariposa Folk Festival. Mariposa was the biggest music festival in Canada, and that year would be the most successful in the event’s history, featuring performances by Joni Mitchell, Pete Seeger, Vera Johnson, Bessie Jones, Joan Baez, and others. Estelle booked me for a side stage at the festival, but when Neil Young bowed out of his main stage slot to join Crosby, Stills & Nash at Woodstock three weeks later (I guess they needed to rehearse), I was moved onto the main stage. I wasn’t looking for a “big break,” but this was one for sure. Thirty thousand people attended the festival that year, and finally, fitfully, in front of them all, I got to be me, and I sang my songs.
Look out the window
Cows hangin’ out under spreading trees
Zoom, they’re gone behind the sign
White letters pointing to the long white line
And I’m going to the country
O, la la la la la
I’m going to the country
Sunshine smile on me
I can smell the grass growing in the field
Wind in my hair tells me how it feels
Farmhouse, silver roof flashing by
Tractor-trailer truck says good-bye with a sigh
And I’m going to the country
O, la la la la la
I’m going to the country
Sunshine smile on me
Birds singing, I’m singing in my bones
Doesn’t much matter now where I’m goin’
Get it when I get there is what I’ll do
If I get enough I’ll give some to you
And I’m going to the country
O, la la la la la
I’m going to the country
Sunshine smile on me
“GOING TO THE COUNTRY,” 1969
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/10.
6
In late 1966 I was introduced to two people, in very different circumstances, who would have a profound effect on the shape of my life. Both relationships were codified in 1969, when I married Kitty Macaulay, and when, with somewhat less ceremony, Bernie Finkelstein became my manager.
The nature of these relationships, like all relationships, helps to illuminate an aspect of the human condition—or maybe just my condition, though I think I can take a shot at some universal truths. My professional connection with Bernie has lasted nearly four times longer than any of my relationships with women. Business brings the benefit of distance: you don’t have to live with or love or even like your business partner to make it work. Relationships of the heart, though, require exposure of the soul. There is risk and, potentially, reward in every utterance, every look, every assumption. You are more vulnerable slipping into bed beside your lover than you are setting up a freelance meth lab in Sinaloa.
It took me decades to become open enough to allow another human beyond the courtyard of my heart. I know it’s not just me: most of us, to one degree or another, have difficulty maintaining human bonds. Becoming, and especially remaining, intimately associated with another human being—spouse, child, parent, friend—is challenging. For many of us, the prospect of revealing our inner selves (if we even know we have inner selves) and giving up the autonomy of a solitary life (an autonomy that many people cling to even when living with others, as I can personally attest) can be harrowing. And everyone knows that relationships require work, patience, and trust, and the renunciation of individual freedom in favour of the richness of coalescence.
At the same time, the “freedom” of the individual is an illusion. We need each other. Alone we are not free, but bound by an unnatural state of disconnection. Which is not an argument against alone time, someth
ing I greatly value, but I recall too well the loneliness of those moments and days with only my own thoughts and spirit. The value of human relationships is inherent; studies of prisoners show that people go mad without human touch. Outside penal walls we, the lucky “free,” endure the scrutiny and habits of others in exchange for the benefits of a loving relationship. In the end, successful long-term coevolution allows us to enjoy deeply rooted connections of the heart until our final breath, one of the greatest blessings humans can offer each other.
The caveat in all this is that no matter how much you care and work and try, there’s a good chance, in our busy and transient era, that our human connections will be severed—if they are established at all—and that relationships will be short-lived. That’s okay. Make it work if you can. The important thing is to pursue these connections no matter the risks. In fact, the risks speak to the importance of mindfulness, and the mindfulness speaks to connection with the Divine. So go there, but don’t beat yourself up if it isn’t quite happening. You’re in good company. We’re a tough species.
Rumours of Glory Page 10