Friends and family came to Le Coq d’Or to witness our first Toronto shows with the Hawks. Ronnie had become a master at “working the room,” and he made a big fuss over my friends and relatives, especially my mother. The Hawk was born to entertain—he made everybody feel a part of the evening, singing along, joking, having a rare time.
And he and Levon charming the ladies was a sight to behold—the humor, the timing, an art form unto itself. They started pointing out particular girls they had gone out with and thought I should meet, giving me a little backstory and setting my imagination afire. Night after night, an array of teachers, nurses, waitresses, students, hairdressers, salesgirls, elevator operators, and telephone operators passed before my eyes. The recommendations came with careful consideration as to who could teach me the most the quickest. I tried to follow their advice and thought I saw in the mirror a boy turning into a man before his time.
For the next few years I lied about my age to everyone but my mother. It was part of the routine, but real life to me was playing music, traveling, meeting girls, listening to and collecting lots of records, practicing day and night.
—
Occasionally, between sets at Le Coq d’Or, the Hawk would head next door to the Edison Hotel to catch Carl Perkins and his band. I’d run after him.
“Hey, Ron! Hold up. I’m coming too.”
He would give me that sideways grin. He knew I was tagging along with him so that the doorman at the Edison wouldn’t ask to see my ID, but I loved being there with him and Carl together. Watching Ron and Levon interacting with Carl and his boys was like observing a tribal community gathering. Magoo and I stood to the side and let the good old boys have at it, Carl and Ron trading humble remarks.
“Well, hell, I must’ve tripped over a rabbit’s foot and landed here,” Ron declared. “It sure ain’t for talent and looks, that’s for damn sure.”
“Tell you what, I’m just trying to get a bit better than I was yesterday,” Carl rejoined. “And God did bless me with a little luck.”
At Le Coq d’Or, Ron began featuring me as his young show dog more and more. It was the role Levon had once filled, but Levon didn’t have a problem passing the torch. He felt the same way about using me as Ron did: “Let that boy roll on,” he’d say. Whenever Ron’s fears of our getting busted for my age temporarily subsided, I was allowed out of the club’s back room, and he would call me over to certain people’s tables, introducing me as his new “find,” like a circus act. While I shuffled my feet, he’d brag about my talent, that one day I would be this and that. “And on top of everything,” he’d say, building to his punch line, “he’s hung like a mule!” Then he’d bust out laughing, slapping me on the back.
“Please don’t listen to him,” I’d beg.
“Too late, son. The word’s out!” the Hawk would cry.
He always wanted his boys looking sharp. That meant a trip up Yonge Street to visit tailor extraordinaire Lou Myles in his famous shop. The Hawks’ style was evolving—no more black vests and short-sleeved red Orlon shirts. Now we rocked black mohair suits, white shirts, black ties, fake white hankies, black shiny pointed shoes, and black socks. Nothing missing. The satin lining of the suit jackets was usually red, though I got mine in purple. Jackie Wilson or Roy Orbison couldn’t have done it any better. Lou Myles designed the suits to emphasize the positive; his was definitely a sensual cut. He had the flair of an international Italian designer, but it was his street savvy that made him Toronto’s hottest tailor. My first “Lou suit” made me stand a little taller, but there was a price: the uniform of an official Hawk had to be paid off, fifteen dollars a week. I could handle it, though. My starting pay was $125 a week, which covered wardrobe, food, hotel, and occasionally a new instrument. I felt rich and complete.
—
When I was around eight years of age my parents moved to Scarborough Bluffs, in the east end of Toronto, a considerable distance from downtown. It was a whole new scene for me. The Bluffs overlooked Lake Ontario with an edge of danger, a hundred-foot drop-off to the shoreline. Our house, white clapboard with a basement and an unfinished second story, had a real backyard with a hill, fruit trees, and rose bushes. No retail stores downstairs anymore; in fact, no stores for blocks. I’d landed square in the heart of suburbia.
Jim and Dolly started making new friends—the neighborhood teemed with characters, and that too felt like a departure from living at Jim’s parents’ apartment downtown. Family made sure we weren’t too lonely. All the Robertson relatives enjoyed coming out to visit. Uncle John, Aunt Mary, and the kids were always a welcome sight. My uncle John worked for Seagram’s, selling whiskey—he seemed to me trustworthy and impressive, and I thought he must be very good at his job. Uncle Bill and Aunt Vi were more the quiet type. Bill had continued to serve in the air force, and you couldn’t imagine a more gentle military man. I can still see him standing there in his blue uniform with ribbons on his chest, Aunt Vi beside him, her head turned to hide the scar that ran right across one side of her face. I never asked what had happened; I didn’t want to know.
My favorite of my father’s brothers, Uncle Al, an ex-boxer and magician, would cruise out to Scarborough in his yellow and white Chevy convertible. Sometimes he’d bring a blond honey; other times one of his cheering-squad buddies would tag along, funny characters with names like Sleepy or Knuckles. It was as if the circus had come to town when Al walked into the house, pulling money from behind my ears or long colorful scarves out of his mouth and making them disappear. Cool and funny, Al knew card tricks galore, and I wanted to be just like him when I grew up, pleading with him after one of his dazzling displays to teach me some magic tricks. He sometimes used the name “Robbie” when he performed, which was interesting because that’s what kids at school had started calling me, after my last name.
“A real magician never reveals his secret,” he’d growl. But every once in a while he would give in and show me a couple of sleight-of-hand techniques. He sent me books on magic in the mail and I ordered some on my own out of my allowance. Sitting in my bedroom, shuffling a deck of cards like the Great Robingo, I questioned my true calling: magician or musician? I was approaching an age where this kind of decision was considered on the scale of “how to impress the girls.”
On my mom’s side of the family tree, her uncle Waddy and cousins Herb and Fred Myke came by sometimes to play music. All three drove dump trucks, delivering stones, gravel, and asphalt to Toronto from Caledonia and the Six Nations area, and they would stop by on their trips. They carried their guitars with them, or sometimes borrowed the acoustic guitar my parents had given me for Christmas, a sturdy model with a cowboy painted on it, straight out of the Eaton’s department store catalog. After a couple of beers at the kitchen table, everybody was ready to sing. Because the Mykes lived in the country, a good portion of their repertoire turned out to be country music, and it was funny to see Indians singing cowboy songs, like Marvin Rainwater. Everybody had a little chuckle when they did “Kaw-Liga,” Hank Williams’s tune about a wooden Indian who fell in love with an Indian maiden. Then they might slip into the Kitty Wells classic “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Every time one of the Mykes visited, I tried to learn another little thing on the guitar from them.
My mother and I usually made trips to Six Nations four or five times a year. We mostly stayed with her uncle Waddy and aunt Alice Myke on Second Line between the towns of Hagersville and Ohsweken. Alice and Waddy had twelve kids ranging in age from mine to my mother’s. I still don’t know how we all fit into their little house, but it worked. Nobody ever thought to mention its being crowded.
In Scarborough my dad was spending the weekends remodeling the upstairs of our house into two bedrooms and a sitting area that we could rent out to make a little extra money, always needed. He came off as an easygoing, gentle guy, but he had a rough side, and whether this came from his time in the army I couldn’t say. He had a strict workout program with weights and a high bar
he built in the backyard, and between the kitchen and the hallway he installed a chin-up bar. He would lift me up to hang from it while offering cheers of encouragement. “Pull yourself up, that’s it,” he’d say. “Do it again, come on, one more. Don’t worry, I won’t let you fall.” Pretty soon my hands would get tired and slip. He would let me fall until my feet were just about to touch the ground and then catch me at the last moment. He would laugh, saying he was teaching his boy to be a “man’s man.” But trying to be like my father or be what he expected didn’t come naturally to me.
Still, over time we made some connections. During visits to Six Nations some of my relatives showed me tricks in knife throwing and bow-and-arrow skills, and my dad, who was a pretty good carpenter, built a large wooden target area in our basement and got me a new set of balanced knives. The sound of those knives plunging into the wood gave me a thrill—my dad too. He made me a powerful new bow and a whole batch of arrows. I could spend hours down in that basement fighting off imaginary enemies and bad guys. And one Christmas my parents got me a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun—with one simple warning, “No shooting birds with that thing.” I have to confess I did shoot one bird and felt terrible afterward, as I buried it.
Walking home from school one afternoon, I came upon a house that was just a basement with a tar-paper roof—the rest of it hadn’t been built yet—and the man who lived there was chasing a couple of young boys away from his yard, swinging a rake and yelling about their having done something to his property. They were already out of reach, but when I strolled by, he whacked me on the back. More angry than hurt, I quickly moved out of range and made my way home. When I walked in the door my dad asked me why I looked so sour. As I told him what happened, I could see his jaw clench and his eyes narrow.
“Show me where he lives,” he snapped as he took me by the arm.
I could hardly keep up with the pace of his walking; somehow I was following him even as I was leading. The rake guy was working in his backyard as we approached his fence.
“Hey there, YOU!” my dad called out. “Did you hit this kid with a rake?”
“There were some kids throwing garbage in my yard and I chased them away,” he answered. “He might’ve been one of them.”
Jim stared at me. “Did you throw garbage in his yard?”
“No! I did nothing. I don’t even know those kids.”
My father gritted his teeth and pointed his finger. “You ever come near my boy again, I’ll climb over this fence and wrap that rake around your neck. Do you understand me, you son of a bitch?”
“Yes, yes, I understand,” the guy said hurriedly. “I’m sorry. I understand.”
My father put his hand on the back of my neck as we walked away. I’d heard kids say, “My dad could beat up your dad,” but only as a bluff. This was real, and I couldn’t help but feel a jolt of pride.
That Christmas we got our first television, black-and-white, of course, with a rabbit-ears antenna on top. My dad and I would watch the telecast of Gillette’s Friday-night boxing matches together religiously. Sometimes his brother Al, who had been a boxer, came over and watched with us, giving insight and commentary on what we were seeing on the fuzzy TV screen. I remember tuning in to see Sugar Ray Robinson defeat Bobo Olson to win the middleweight championship, in a helluva fight. My dad and I probably made our tightest bond watching those fights together.
—
About a year or so after we moved to Scarborough, my parents and their friends began having weekend get-togethers. Though I was just ten years old, my parents frequently left me on my own: no babysitter, no brothers, sisters, or relatives. They went off to meet friends at the Scarborough House, a Canadian beer parlor divided into two rooms with separate entrances—one door with a sign above it instructed, “Ladies and Escorts”; the other, “Men Only.” Gradually my parents started to drink deeper into the night, and no matter what time they said they would be back, they never were.
One evening somebody came beating on our side door, yelling and threatening to kick the door in. When my parents got home and found me crouched in my bedroom, I told them what had happened, but they shrugged it off. “Oh, that’s just Frank from up the street. He probably had a few too many.” This did little to calm my growing paranoia. But in that moment what really stunned me was just how unaware they were of their unawareness.
Drunk people made me uncomfortable, including my parents, but I seemed to be spending more and more time around this kind of behavior. My parents’ get-togethers with drinking buddies and trips out to beer parlors grew more frequent. My father had an issue with his nerves, and his hands shook noticeably the morning after. Soon it began to register with me that my mother took on a different personality after she had a beer or two. She spoke with a strange Indian country accent, threw her head back in a different manner. She even walked with an unusual rhythm. Eventually I discovered this was an “Indian thing.” Native people and alcohol: a rough combination.
My dad, on the other hand, just got sloppy drunk, one eye half shut, ready to fight. Every once in a while somebody would do something or say something that would piss him off. In the middle of the night I’d be awakened by feet slamming against the floor and things breaking.
In my bedroom I would escape into a world that I knew must be out there somewhere. I had no problem spending hours playing guitar or practicing magic. My privacy and isolation felt good to me.
Soon my parents informed me that I was going to have a new baby brother. We were all excited about having an addition to the family, and they were particularly warm and comforting to each other; relatives came from around Toronto and the reserve to visit and celebrate the anticipated new arrival. I enjoyed my solitude, but there was no denying that at times it did feel a bit lonely. My mother was convinced she would be having a boy—she wanted to name him Michael. Some months into the pregnancy, when the baby was moving around inside her, she would smile and say, “Ah, there goes Michael, knocking on the door.” Then one night I was awakened by the sound of panic in the house and my mother crying. Jim was taking her to the hospital. The next day she explained she’d had a miscarriage, saying that she had a “blue baby.” I didn’t know what that meant and found the phrase disturbing, hard to imagine. I didn’t realize at the time what a toll such a thing can take on a family.
—
We were having a tough winter and, remembering the flyer I’d been given in the ice storm, I asked my mother if we could check out those guitar lessons. She seemed pleased to indulge my interest and took me on the bus and streetcar with my little cowboy guitar to check it out.
The instructor was a tropical-looking fellow in a Hawaiian shirt named Billy Blue. I took out my guitar and played a few chords for him, picking out a “Three Blind Mice”–type melody. Billy watched my hands the whole time. Then he went into another room and returned with a new Stella black-and-red sunburst guitar that looked much sharper than mine. I started to get excited, but then he laid it flat on my lap.
“Your hands aren’t big enough yet to fit around the neck of your Spanish-style guitar,” he said. “So I’m going to start you out on Hawaiian guitar.”
What? Gene Autry, Hank Williams, and Roy Rogers didn’t play Hawaiian guitar, but Mr. Blue sold his reasoning quite well, and for me just playing music was the key; looking sharp would have to come later. Before long I could play “Honolulu Sunset.”
Next I began working on a tough one called the “Hawaiian War Chant.” Waiting for my lesson one day, I could hear another student in the next room playing the same song on an electric lap steel guitar, with Billy Blue accompanying him on an acoustic. It sounded so good coming through the wall. When they finished, Mr. Blue introduced me to his student, Joey, who, as it turned out, lived one street over from us.
“My friends call me Scooter,” said Joey. “You could come over to my house and practice if you want.”
We played together a couple of times, and I found I learned faster the more we did. Scoote
r must’ve been about four years older than me and a couple of years ahead in lessons. He took his playing pretty seriously; he almost seemed pushy, in fact, with his steady requests for me to come over and practice up in his room.
One night after dinner, we were working on a pretty tricky tune.
“Let’s take a break and play a game,” he suggested, which came as a relief since we were struggling with the song.
“We both start with our fly open,” Scooter continued. “Or no, even better, we pull our pants down.” With that, I suddenly developed a toothache and had to go home.
My Hawaiian aspirations in general were winding down. I picked up my cowboy guitar, reached my left hand around the neck, and said, “I’m ready.” I quit my lessons the same day, and that was the end of my only formal music training.
—
During the three weeks at Le Coq d’Or, Levon kept offering me advice on music, life on the road, and bass playing. We listened to a lot of Jimmy Reed, who didn’t even have a bass on some of his records, but what a feel!
Levon continued to introduce me to funny downtown characters and women he thought would take me under their wing. Along the way I managed to steal a guitar lick here and there from Fred, who by now had stopped treating me like an underage foreigner. Meanwhile Ron started pushing me to “put on a show” while I played. He acted like I was a stray pet he’d rescued by the side of the road. Perhaps he wasn’t that far off. “You know, kid,” he loved to say, “if I hadn’t hired you, you’d be in reform school or jail.”
Ronnie seemed bent on never letting me forget the time a year or so back, before I’d joined the Hawks, when the Bear, Thumper, Magoo, and I had hooked up with a singer from England by the name of Billy Kent. He’d had some success back in his native country, where he was known as the Singing Milkman (I didn’t ask why). We played a couple of sock-hop dances together, and all of us were convinced we could make a go of it as a group.
“Come back to England with me,” Billy encouraged us. He thought having a band from North America would put him on top. As his pitch was our best and only offer, it grabbed our attention right away. I’d just turned sixteen, and I couldn’t see anything standing in our way. So Billy, Pete, Magoo, and I immediately checked into the Westover Hotel to make plans and work on music.
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