I loved the Hound’s jargon. His rap had the authority of a preacher laying down an R&B gospel. I was such a fan, in fact, that once I convinced my friend Don to drive me to Buffalo so we could actually see the Hound in person at his radio station, WKBW 1520. We walked into the station, acting like we knew where we were going, and there, through the glass, we spied the Hound, live on the radio, spinning “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” by Lloyd Price. Finally we could put a body to the voice. The Hound was actually a white guy, a bit chunky, with a salt-and-pepper goatee. You could tell by the joy on his face that he lived for this music. During a commercial break for “What’s the word? Thunderbird” wine, he came out of his studio and called over to a young boy I assumed was his son. The kid was bouncing a rubber ball.
“Hey, look out,” warned the Hound. “You’re gonna fall. I told you before—no ball in the hall.”
With that, he walked back into the studio and sat down behind the mic just as the commercial ended, hit the ON THE AIR switch, and purred, “Hey, baby, can you dig? ‘Young Blood’ by the Coasters.” As far as I was concerned, Moses couldn’t have said it better.
Levon laughed and lit a Winston. “So, I took you out to Marvell to see my humble beginnings,” he said. “Now tell me your story. When did you start getting serious about playing guitar?”
“Well,” I said, grinning, “after I finally managed to score a little amp to go with my Harmony electric, there was no stopping me.”
—
At our house in Scarborough Bluffs I received a welcome surprise. Our new boarder, Doug Willis, happened to be a guitar player. He had a pretty black F-hole acoustic with a DeArmond pickup on it, so he could plug it into my amp or play it acoustically. We often practiced and sang songs together. I had turned thirteen and was playing with a band, the Rhythm Chords, which had come together when we all answered a newspaper ad placed by a drummer named Johnny Diamond and included Pete Traynor, his brother Steve, and a sax player named Bob, who were all in their late teens or early twenties. We played school dances, parties, anywhere we could get booked. Little Richard’s “Rip It Up” and “Miss Anne,” Jimmy Reed’s “You Got Me Dizzy,” and Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel” were mainstays in our repertoire. Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” too. I love that first line: “As I was motorvatin’ over the hill, I saw Maybellene in a coupe de Ville.”
On the weekends, Doug Willis would play guitar and sing for my parents’ friends. A couple named Len and Betty, who were a few years younger than my parents, would often come by with their friends Willie and Helen. Doug would do a couple of standards, like “Ain’t She Sweet.” But then, when I’d pick up my guitar and play a few rock ’n’ roll tunes, like Big Joe Turner’s “Flip, Flop and Fly” or Little Richard’s “Send Me Some Lovin’,” the mood in the room would change. The neighbors would get all fired up and cheer me on. I could see in their eyes the effect my playing had on them, the power of rock ’n’ roll.
One night Doug pulled me aside. He told me he’d been hooking up recently with Betty, Len’s wife, and this time Helen, Willie’s wife, was coming too. She said she wanted Doug to bring me along. “Helen’s really pretty,” Doug said encouragingly. I wasn’t sure, but Doug kept pushing. “Come on, no big deal. We’ll go get a Coke or something.”
We didn’t get a Coke. Doug piled the four of us in his car, Helen and me in the backseat, and set a course for a remote country road. As we drove, Helen moved closer to me. “Your music gave me chills, and I thought you were so cute singing.” Her attention was intoxicating. When we were sufficiently far from anywhere, Doug pulled over and hustled Helen and me out of the car, tossing us a blanket. “Here, go have fun. I’ll be back in an hour.” We went into the field, laid the blanket on the ground, and went at it with a teenage sweetness. She was sensitive to my youth and inexperience.
The next weekend, when my parents’ friends came over again and the guitars came out, I reached a little higher, stealing glances over at Helen to see if I was getting through. Doug arranged to take us out again, same country road, same blanket, and this time Helen and I rock ’n’ rolled—my first real grown-up romantic encounter. The power of this music was changing my life.
Our rendezvous went on until one evening Betty and Helen said they needed to cool it; their husbands were starting to ask questions. I tried to look disappointed, but inside I breathed a sigh of relief. As surreal and wonderful as this experience had been, I wanted out of this craziness before things got out of hand.
I often felt like a kid moving through an adults’ world. I had worked at a ragtag carnival the year before in Scarborough, so that summer I got a job on the midway sideshow at the Canadian National Exhibition, beside the lakeshore in Toronto. This show featured contortionists, barkers, dwarfs, an armless man, a hermaphrodite, Siamese-twin brothers, and an alligator man, all gathered for display in the name of family entertainment. My duties seemed incredibly simple. Make sure everybody had what they needed, make sure they showed up on time. How hard could it be? But I hadn’t understood just who I’d be dealing with. These were true sideshow freaks, hardened by long lives on the circuit and God knows what else. Some had done time, and some had done too much time. They looked at me like a lamb ready for slaughter.
Looking for something less dangerous, I got a job at the Midland Bargain Center, run by Max and June Applebaum. I worked after school and on weekends for one dollar an hour, decent money for a kid my age. The Applebaums were kind people, happy to teach me what they knew about sales and retail. They had an employee named John who seemed like the coolest guy around and I really looked up to him. But every once in a while when we worked together, I noticed him pulling out a big wad of cash.
“Did you get all that money from working here at the store?” I asked him.
“No, I get it from rolling queers downtown on the weekend. It’s easy. You pretend you’re going to let them blow you, then you ask for some money, ten bucks, whatever. When you see how much money they pull out, you just take it, push them over, and run off. Usually they just start crying. When you’re a little older, I’ll take you with me.”
I acted unfazed but inside I felt nauseated. It seemed like I was walking from one nightmare alley to another.
—
In that fall of 1957, I heard that Alan Freed, the legendary radio DJ, was bringing his Rock and Roll Show to Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens arena, featuring an amazing lineup: Fats Domino, LaVern Baker, the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, Frankie Lymon, and Buddy Holly and the Crickets would all be performing. For the next few weeks I saved every penny I could to buy a ticket. This was the holy grail of rock shows, and there was no way I was missing it.
By the night of the show, I was so out of my mind with excitement that I arrived hours early to watch the road crew prepare the stage, the lights still dimmed. As the Gardens filled up, the smell of strong cologne, body odor, and cigarettes wafted through the air. Then, at the appointed hour, a crowd of men slipped through the darkness and took the stage. The lights went up and Alan Freed charged the microphone at center stage as the Paul Williams Orchestra kicked into gear.
“Ladies and gentlemen, teen queens, rockers and boppers, I’m Alan Freed and welcome to the Cavalcade of Stars. Without further ado, let’s get started with Mr. Rock and Roll himself….Let’s hear it for Chuck Berry!”
The sound of Chuck’s Gibson 350 sent lightning bolts through my body. His voice echoed through the arena like that of a prophet spreading the gospel of a “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” It was a whole show of headliners; one after another they came on, looking fantastic and sounding amazing. They all rocked the house, and by the end I could hardly breathe. But fasten your seatbelt, there was one more: Buddy Holly and the Crickets appeared, romping into “Peggy Sue” and “That’ll Be the Day,” with Buddy down on his knees pounding out a guitar solo that ran up my spine.
After the show, as the musicians packed up their equipment, I slipped up to the security railing by the stage and caught a glimp
se of Buddy Holly putting away his guitar.
“Excuse me, sir,” I called out. “I gotta know, how do you get that huge sound out of your amp?”
He looked over at me and smiled, then closed the latches on his guitar case and walked toward the railing. His black horn-rimmed glasses looked much bigger offstage and he dressed more like a university student than a rock ’n’ roll star.
“You a guitar player?” Buddy asked.
“Yes sir, I’m trying.”
“What’s your name?”
“Robbie,” I quickly replied. “Robbie Robertson.”
“Robbie Robertson, all right!” Buddy laughed. “Here’s the thing. I got this Fender amp with two twelve-inch speakers. I blew one of the speakers, and thought it sounded better, so I left it. Some guys I know even cut holes in the speakers or put paper in them to get this tone.”
I couldn’t believe it: not only was Buddy Holly a genuinely nice guy, he was willing to reveal the kind of inside information I was hungry for. As he walked back to pick up his guitar case, Holly raised his arm over his head, calling back, “Good luck to ya!”
When I left the arena I didn’t know what to do with my nervous energy—if I got any higher I worried I’d just combust into smoke. I’d just been through something transformative, a wondrous experience that had given me a glimpse into a different life, and it was both thrilling and terrifying. I couldn’t go home, so I went to a restaurant and didn’t make it back until two thirty in the morning. My parents were pissed, and I had no way of communicating to them that this had been the most important night of my life.
All of my focus now went into sharpening my chops, and soon various local bands started inviting me to join them for gigs at dances. Pete “Thumper” Traynor joined me on occasion. Our band, the Rhythm Chords, had by then evolved into Thumper and the Trambones, or sometimes Robbie and the Robots.
Nothing could compare to a lesson in rock stardom like Alan Freed’s Rock and Roll Show, but we learned a lot from local bands too. Toronto had an incredible scene in the late fifties, and we got to see plenty of great acts, night in, night out. Pete and I both liked a hot group called the Gems, featuring Bobby Blackburn on vocals, one of the only young black R&B singers in Toronto. The Gems had a full horn section, so they were definitely official. And of course there was Little Caesar and the Consuls, whom I played with and from whom I learned a wicked version of Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns’ “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.” I soaked up everything I could from all these bands. I wasn’t sure if I could ever play better than these guys, but I thought I could dream bigger than any of them.
At home, I felt a distance growing between my dad and me. When I talked about my musical ambitions, he said, “Look at your relatives on the reserve. Look at the people in our neighborhood. That doesn’t happen to folks like us. So don’t set yourself up for disappointments.” When he pushed back against my dreams, my resentment grew. And I saw something too that was getting worse with him. It had started to become apparent one night a couple of years earlier. We had a black and white mutt named Buster, a beautiful dog, half collie, half something else. He went on all kinds of adventures with me, trailing behind as I tromped through the willows or ran errands. Buster went anywhere I could take him, and when I’d get back from school, he would be waiting for me faithfully. One summer night my father came home late from drinking with friends. When he came in, Buster barked and growled, protecting the house. My father kicked and beat the dog down into the basement in a drunken rage. I never forgave him for that.
Another time I came downstairs after practicing my guitar and accidentally left a fan running. When my dad got home and found the fan still on, he stormed down into the kitchen and smacked me across the head, knocking me into the stone chimney. It might have cost a half a penny’s worth of electricity to leave it on, but that was his reasoning. Shaken and angry, I ran out of the house and down to Kingston Road, where my mother had taken a job in a restaurant to help make ends meet. When I walked in the door, she could see the welt on my face and the sadness in my eyes. She knew instantly what had happened, and with a red fury in her frown tried to settle me down while she prepared to read Jim the riot act.
Over time my mother and father fought and argued more and more. And there were episodes, drunken and not, when he hit my mother, whenever he thought it was warranted. He always tried to make up afterward, but one time he beat us both and blackened one of my eyes. That would be the beginning of the end for my mother; as for me, I just disconnected. And when my father’s violence started to become a regular thing, my mother said she was leaving. She gathered many of the photos of the two of them and cut them in half or destroyed them. He didn’t know how to undo the damage and fix the situation, so he agreed to a divorce. They both came to me separately to ask who I wanted to live with, my dad in an awkward, sincere way, my mother as if she knew I had no choice but to go with her.
Then one morning my mom asked me to join her at the kitchen table. “I’ve got something to tell you. Sit down.” She looked across the table and spoke of Jim with ice in her voice. “I have to tell you this now. And maybe I should’ve told you before….He’s not your real father.”
“What? He’s not?” I gasped. “I don’t understand. He’s not my real father? Then who is? And who is he?”
“I’ll tell you later,” she whispered like it was a secret, and would say no more.
Trying to go to sleep that night, I couldn’t quiet my mind. I wanted to feel like nothing could rattle me, even such powerful news, but a voice in my head kept saying, I don’t know who I am anymore—orphan, bastard, stepchild? I was desperate for more information, but my mother never had been much for sharing stories about our background.
Over the course of the next few days, though, she gave me bits and pieces of the true story regarding my birth father. His name was Alexander David Klegerman. She met him when they were both working at Coro Jewelry, after Jim had deployed to Newfoundland. Alex, as they called him, had taken the job at Coro to learn about the different degrees of gold plating, but his main talent was gambling. He was a card shark who’d become convinced by his mother that he possessed an extraordinary gift of memory. She herself had an incredible memory, honed through years working as a bootlegger after the Great Depression, never committing anything to writing—no addresses, no phone numbers, nothing. She made the money in the family, cooked, cleaned, and raised her four kids while her husband prayed and met with other respected Jewish intellectuals in the community.
Alex became a card counter. The game, he saw, was not luck but mathematics. In time he became quite successful at the local poker games. The stakes grew, and he began winning not only bigger pots of money but also cars, jewelry, sometimes even mortgages. A handsome, well-dressed, street-smart hustler with money in his pocket and a silver tongue, Alex had never seen anything quite like Rosemarie “Dolly” Chrysler before, with her high cheekbones, red skin, big eyes, and glowing smile. To him she seemed possessed of a pure spirit not found too often in the big city. Inspired, he brought her gifts and made her feel special. Their contrasting backgrounds felt intriguing and fresh.
If Jim Robertson was a down-to-earth, regular guy, Alex Klegerman was the polar opposite. There’s no doubt Dolly was taken by the excitement of Alex’s scoundrel ways. Jim wanted to get married, and a twenty-year-old Dolly appreciated his commitment, but she wasn’t sure of her feelings and didn’t know what to do. Jim was stationed over a thousand miles away. As the months passed, Alex and Dolly grew closer and closer.
Then, tragically, Alex was killed in a hit-and-run on the QEW highway while changing a flat. A passing truck slipped onto the shoulder, hit him, and kept going. A friend who was with him wasn’t hurt but witnessed the whole horrible thing. They had been on their way to New York City for some kind of “sting” that the friend wasn’t at liberty to discuss. Rumor spread that Alex’s death wasn’t an accident. There were all kinds of nefarious theories
, but nothing was ever proven.
Scared and devastated, Dolly went into seclusion at her aunt’s. Not long after, she received a letter from Jim saying he would be returning to Toronto soon and wanted to marry her. Under the circumstances, she agreed.
Though she didn’t yet know it, Dolly was pregnant.
—
I took all this in with surprising ease, though there was a numbness in my heart. I wasn’t sure if it was because I held a deep anger toward Jim or because it now made sense that I had never felt a strong connection to him. In any case, my mother’s anger was enough to go around.
My last days in Scarborough were full of Jim explaining that Doll had driven him to this bad behavior and that he wasn’t really a hurtful person. “It was her fault,” he kept saying. “And this stuff about me not being your real father—that’s ridiculous. Of course you’re my son. I don’t know why she would even say that. It’s just out of anger.” I felt a little sorry for him trying to convince me of his truth, which he truly believed, but I still couldn’t accept what he’d done to my mother and me. It could never be undone.
My mother decided to call Alex’s brother, Morrie Klegerman, whom she’d known even before she met Alex, to tell him the truth about my birth, and she arranged for Morrie and his younger brother Natie to come out to Scarborough. A few days later they met us at a restaurant down on Kingston Road. Morrie seemed very happy to see my mother after all these years, but Natie asked questions with an undertone that suggested he was wary of her intentions. My mother wasn’t asking for anything; she just wanted to make them aware of Alex’s child.
I could tell Natie was sharp and had a keen eye by the way he spoke and looked me over. He had blond hair and a very likable face, and he stared with piercing eyes over the bridge of his crooked nose as he smoked and drank coffee. Morrie, on the other hand, had dark hair and a warm, round smile. Only when they laughed could you see the resemblance.
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