Jim finally returned from his tour of duty in Newfoundland—to his family’s relief he wouldn’t be sent to the front lines. They took pictures of him in uniform, six feet tall, thin but solid, with broad shoulders and a widow’s-peak hairline. Jim was a truly handsome man with a kind smile, and he and Dolly made a fine-looking couple. In 1942 they got married without too much fanfare and went down to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon.
Starting out with little money, they moved in with Jim’s parents on the north side of Bloor Street in downtown Toronto, about a block west of Bathurst Street. The Robertson clan lived an extremely modest lifestyle, basic working class, but they got by. The neighborhood felt very homey and worldly at the same time to the young couple, with family and extended family all around. Jim went back to work at Coro Jewelry with Dolly, and they began to build a future.
On July 5, 1943, at 10:25 p.m., Dolly gave birth to a healthy baby boy, nine pounds, eleven ounces, at Toronto General Hospital. She named me Jaime Royal Robertson, partially after her cousin Royal, Aunt Beatrice’s son. She chose to spell my name with the i before the m, because the reverse looked to her like it should be pronounced “jam-me.” Jim Robertson thought his son should be named after him and spelled the name “James” on the birth certificate. My mother called me Jaime and my dad called me Jame or Jim.
I grew up surrounded by busy, vibrant neighborhoods alive with immigrant sounds and smells. Some of my very earliest recollections are of rows of storefronts, each one memorable from all the various indelible scents of the neighborhood. The corner drugstore with its medicines, chemicals, and soda fountain mixture. Sweet aromas of pipe smoke from the smoke shop downstairs, proudly displaying Cuban cigars behind glass in the back. A Jewish deli poured out the scent of hot corned beef and dill. The bakery around the corner was my favorite—when you passed by you could almost taste the fresh-baked bread and cinnamon pastries. The candy shop, a close runner-up, made its own maple squares, marzipan, and Turkish delight. The shoe repair shop had a leathery, musky, shoe polish odor that impressed my young nostrils. The fish market had its ups and downs, of course, but in its freshest moments the smell of the ocean, lakes, and rivers carried in with the fish was wonderful. Alley cats would sit out front, waiting for a donation. Another gem was the Nuthouse, where they roasted and cooked so many kinds of nuts it was almost impossible to choose which to buy. The fruit and vegetable stand and butcher shop were next door to each other, so poultry and citrus intertwined. At the end of the block the smell of buttery fresh popcorn from the movie theater filled the air. At Honest Ed’s giant bargain store over by Bathurst Street they had one section where they kept the denim, and the jeans had this new scent to them. What was that particular smell? You never forgot it.
Police on horseback patrolled the back alleys, parks, such as nearby Christie Pits, and main streets too. Rag-and-bone men with horse-pulled wagons roamed the back streets singing out, “Rags, bones, old iron,” and the scent of manure played its own part in the mixture of downtown city life. And this was all in one block.
—
“Well, boys, we’re here,” Ron announced a couple hours later as we cruised up to the front of the Embassy Hotel in London, Ontario. London had been a music town since the nineteenth century and in the fifties home to many jazz venues. The Embassy didn’t look like much of a hotel, or even like a hotel at all. It wasn’t what you’d call sleazy, maybe two notches above. But at this stage any hotel looked like a palace to me, and I had a full-on grown-up feeling when we checked into the Embassy and I got my own room. Ron and Levon took a two-bedroom poor man’s suite with a little sitting room to one side. This gave them the opportunity to entertain lady friends with the option of close, convenient privacy. Their setup looked pretty suave and “road cool” to me.
We set up our equipment Sunday afternoon at the Brass Rail Tavern so we could run through a few tunes and get used to the sound before the first show the next day. It was the nicest place in town to hear rock ’n’ roll music, with a long brass railing in front of the bar, a stage about a foot and a half high, and a ceiling only ten inches above my skinny six-foot frame. Every time we ran over the songs I gained a touch more confidence. Ron stood off the stage facing us while singing, to check out the playing and the look. We tried a song called “Odessa,” about a prostitute in Helena (of whom Levon and Ron spoke very highly: one time when they had visited her, Levon had gone into the bedroom with her first, and when they emerged, Odessa said, “Mr. Ron, I’d like to give you some, but I believe young Mr. Levon done took it all!”). Ron paced back and forth in front of the stage with a frown on his face as we rehearsed. He stopped, looked up at me, and said, “Boy, you look so damn young, I hope that liquor inspector don’t come in here and shut me down. I don’t know if I can even pay the son of a bitch off for this. Have you tried shaving?”
“Hell, Ron, it’ll be okay,” yelled Levon from behind the kit. “We’ll just draw a mustache on him with an eyebrow pencil.”
I went out that same afternoon and bought an electric razor, a Remington, and started shaving three times a day, based on the theory that the more you shave the faster your beard grows. I didn’t have much to shave, so all it did was irritate my chin and neck. Raw from razor burn, I didn’t look older; I just looked like an abused teenager.
On our opening night, my debut, my head was reeling but I was determined to remember all my parts and lock in with Levon’s beat. I didn’t have a chance to worry about it once we walked up on that stage. Ronnie had arranged that I stand under a blue light by the back wall for the lowest profile possible. I played looking at Levon’s hands the whole time. After a raging version of “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” Magoo spun around from his piano and gave me an encouraging nod.
When I called my mother the next day, she was thrilled—and relieved to hear my voice. I had never been gone this long, though I had checked in once while we were in Arkansas and sent some postcards and a little money. I told her we would be in Toronto in a couple of weeks. Mainly she was glad to hear I was okay and that I had not fallen into a world of debauchery and destruction. I couldn’t confess the jury was still out on that one.
Almost every night girls came back to the hotel after the gig. Scott and I watched Ronnie and Levon closely: we were trying to learn the tricks of the trade from the masters. These southerners could get away with mischievous behavior that Scott and I wouldn’t dream of trying: lines like “C’mere you pretty thing and give me some sugar” weren’t something you could pull off without a southern accent. Most of the women thought I was just a kid and that I should probably go and get an ice cream cone and stay out of the way.
—
The first time the power of music really struck me was on the Six Nations Indian Reserve. I was about eight years old, sitting in a kitchen at the house on Second Line road while a couple of relatives played guitar. It rang my bell—the sound, the rhythm, the fingers on the strings, the voices blending together in unison and then slipping into harmonies. My uncles and cousins were so lost in the music that it mesmerized me.
Sometimes there would be a mandolin or a violin joining in with Iroquois hand drums and water drums. On the rez there was no other entertainment—everything was homegrown. Nobody there had any “money honey” and it didn’t matter. Things balanced out in other ways, through the wilderness, the Grand River, the changing seasons, and always the dancing and singing. From my earliest impressions, I knew there was a deep beauty in this place. The water we drank straight from the well was cold and clear and I never knew water could taste so good. We picked wild berries from the fields and grew sweet corn so tall you could get lost in it. Every day was a celebration of nature with the three sisters, beans, squash, and corn, like nothing I experienced back in the city. My cousins didn’t climb trees; rather, they would run up them. I studied their hands, their feet, trying to find the secret of this supernatural skill. Over and over I tried to keep up with them, most of the time falling on my butt and once, when
I was seven, breaking a wrist, the white bone itself jutting right out of my small hand. In the summertime we would head over toward the railroad tracks like a ritual. Stop at the water pump, splash a little water on your face, have a drink out of a tin cup. There was a path that led through a field of wild strawberries, and we would grab a couple of handfuls on the way. Once my cousin Doug spotted a dried plant of some kind that was probably a type of wild tobacco, the Ontario tobacco belt being not far from Six Nations. Doug picked a few leaves, rolled them in his hands, retrieved a stray piece of newspaper, rolled the plant into a small square of it, lit and smoked it. He might have been eleven or twelve at the time.
With the heat bug singing in the late afternoon, we stopped by a longhouse to hear an elder share a story. That turned out to be a particular highlight for me. When everyone had gathered round, an old man appeared out of the trees like a vision. With his walking stick he pushed himself past everybody and into the longhouse, where he settled into a chair made of birch branches covered with deerskins. We gathered in front of him as he banged his walking stick twice on the wooden floor and began speaking, first in native tongue, like a short prayer of gratitude. Then, switching to English, he told the story of Hiawatha and the Peacemaker who brought the nations of Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Mohawk together after years of war and introduced the Great Law of Peace. When he told that story, it sent a charge right through me—the cadence of his voice, the power, the violence, the righteousness. I only hoped someday I could tell stories like that.
—
One night about a week into our gig at the Brass Rail, we were in the middle of a song when Ronnie motioned me to step forward on the stage. “Come out into the light. Let’s see what you got.” He motioned for me to take a bass solo. This was confusing primarily because so far as I knew there were no bass solos in the middle of songs. “Go ahead,” he nodded, “go on.” Fred stopped playing and looked at me wide-eyed, like I’d just stepped on a land mine.
Well, I was on the spot, so I walked that dog. I locked in with Levon’s kick drum, leaned back, and wailed. The crowd started clapping along. Ronnie started hollering, “Go on, son, walk that baby!” Soon the crowd started yelling and whistling. It went over so well that the Hawk made my bass solo a staple in our set. Ron said I looked older when I played a solo because it made me appear more experienced. I hoped the young ladies coming to the clubs would think that too. At least being featured helped me overcome my nervousness about getting busted by the liquor inspector.
Levon was a locomotion every night, machine-gun eighth-note bass drum if need be. He kept a Kotex pad under the top skin of his snare to keep it tight, popping like a whip, an idea he got from Jerry Lee’s drummer Jimmy Van Eaton. I found myself playing directly toward Levon to get that rhythm-section connection. It made the vocal phrasing feel better and gave the music a solid foundation. I kept an ear out for when “the pocket”—the groove—was alive and breathing. We came to the conclusion that the thick, four-stringed Fender Precision bass had more low authority to it than the six-string. Levon said, “Let’s go for the low down.”
Those first weeks flew by for me: the pure excitement of being in this band, making a living playing music and learning the code of the road. But London was just the warm-up; the real live-wire shows in Toronto would be the true barometer for whether the Hawks’ personnel changes would stick. After our last night at the Brass Rail we headed out on the highway for Toronto, the center of the Canadian rockabilly circuit. This had been a band of southern Arkansas cats, but it now had two Canadians; and our lineup was edging toward a questionable reading on the rockabilly authenticity meter.
Toronto had become a major music town, with hot jazz clubs like the Colonial and the Town Tavern and new after-hours spots blooming as well. There weren’t many places up north where a rockabilly band like ours could play for three weeks at a time, but Toronto had Le Coq d’Or, which also featured Conway Twitty and Narvel Felts. Then there was the Edison Hotel next door, where Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Big Jay McNeely and his band would play. There was the Brown Derby, a Vegas-type joint where Louis Prima and Keely Smith with Sam Butera and the Witnesses could play. Just up the street was the Zanzibar, half strip joint, half local talent. A couple blocks down you’d find the venerable, legendary Massey Hall, where you could hear Sinatra, Segovia, or Ray Charles. All these venues were on one side of Yonge Street, forming a remarkable row of music temples.
Cruising along the highway, I could see the glow of the Toronto skyline in the distance. It felt good coming home with a little experience under my belt. Heading into the center of the city, we passed the Alhambra movie theater on Bloor Street, where my mother took me when I was little. The Alhambra showed coming attractions, a cartoon, a newsreel, a serial, and a feature film, sometimes a double feature. It tilted my imagination like nothing else; some of those first movies made an impression that I would only come to realize years later—films like It Came from Outer Space in black-and-white 3-D, or Streets of Laredo, where a guy throws a knife at William Holden and it sticks into his guitar with a vibrating thud.
We checked into the Warwick Hotel, with its air of muted prestige, a haven for streetwalkers, hustlers, and tin men (slang for aluminum-siding salesmen). Most musicians staying in Toronto checked into either the Warwick or the Westover; they stood right across from each other at Dundas and Jarvis, the city’s vibrant crossroads of vice. I had told my mother I couldn’t stay at her house because of our rehearsal schedule, but I really wanted to be with the band, to be part of the ritual.
As we set up our gear at Le Coq d’Or Tavern, I noticed that Carl Perkins and his band were playing next door at the dark and dingy Edison Hotel. He and Ronnie were friends and had both worked this circuit before. Carl was one of the fathers of rock ’n’ roll. He wrote his own songs, played lead electric guitar on his baby blue Gibson Les Paul, and moved and sang perfectly in the Sun Records rockabilly style. He had been a tremendous inspiration for a lot of young musicians, including me, and his song “Blue Suede Shoes” had become a rock ’n’ roll anthem, even more so after Elvis cut it.
The club manager at Le Coq d’Or took a look at me and asked Ron, “How old is that new guy?”
If they busted me for being underage at Le Coq d’Or, they’d be busting Ron too, and since he didn’t have a backup bass player that meant all our eggs were in one basket. But he didn’t hesitate.
“He just looks young, hoss,” said Ron. “He’s got so much talent it don’t matter. Get me some of that Canadian Crown Royal rye whiskey in those purple satchels for gifts. If the authorities show up that always goes over pretty smooth with those ol’ boys. Had to do it a couple times with Levon. Hell, he looked fifteen forever with his bleached-blond hair and schoolboy smile—part of the reason they came to see our act.”
Unfortunately, the way the stage was situated, there was no place for me to stay “out of the way.” For our whole run I never smiled, never looked directly at anyone. My mother came with a friend the first night and I didn’t look at them once.
As vulnerable as I felt, I had no control over my future. All I could do was play like a demon. But I was that much closer to where I wanted to be. I had crossed the border. I had gone to the Mississippi Delta. I’d gotten hired by an official southern rockabilly band, one of the hottest around. Now I was onstage at a big-time club in my hometown, and I stepped forward into the spotlight to take my solo.
I was at my mother’s house at 193 First Avenue, in a part of Toronto called Cabbagetown, enjoying a wondrous home-cooked meal. It was the best food I’d had since going down south. There was fine food in Arkansas, but I tell you my mother had the magic touch.
“Ma,” I said, “you wouldn’t believe the South. You wouldn’t believe all that I’ve seen down there.”
“Try me,” she said, smiling.
“It’s magical,” I said. “There’s music everywhere. Age doesn’t matter. Background doesn’t matter. B
ig or small, rich or poor, everyone shows up for the music.”
My mother nodded, enjoying my excitement.
“I mean,” I continued, my voice rising with enthusiasm, “I always kind of sensed there would be magic down there when I listened to my records. But actually going and smelling the air, seeing the way people walk and talk, all in the rhythm of the South…it’s so beautiful.”
My mother said, lowering her voice slightly, as if confessing a secret to me, “I just knew that’s what you would feel. I don’t know how, but I just felt all along that you’d discover something special down there.”
We grinned at each other.
“You had a feeling, huh?”
My mother wiped her hands on her apron and nodded modestly. She did believe in her own powers of precognition. I made my way back to the hotel with a full belly and a warm heart.
Every night at Le Coq d’Or, I was growing by leaps and bounds musically and coming out of my shell in other ways too. Magoo and I, both still pretty green when it came to playing with an act of this caliber, were slowly gaining acceptance from the crowds, though we drew some smirks when the audiences caught on that we were Canadians. None of the famous rock ’n’ roll or rhythm-and-blues bands had Canucks; it was unheard of. Some people even began accusing Ron, Levon, and Fred of not actually being from the South, either, saying that the whole act was a put on, right down to phony accents.
“Canadians in disguise!” they yelled.
“What the hell is this about?” Levon asked Ron.
“Hey,” said the Hawk, calm as ever, “as long as they’re talking, it’s okay. It’s when they stop talking that you have to worry.”
Testimony Page 4