by Neil Young
But there’s nothin’ I can say to make him go away.
Well, I never cared too much anyway.
I guess that I’ll forget her someday.
—“I WONDER”
Marilyn and Jackie were a couple of nice girls and it was a really happy time. I hope they have grown up and are living good healthy lives. They certainly deserve to. Of course, life has a way of surprising us all.
• • •
DURING MY FIRST MONTHS at Kelvin, we played a couple of gigs as the Stardusters, and also as the Classics with a new player, John Gowenlock, on rhythm guitar. John had an electric guitar he had made himself. It was funky and sounded pretty darn good, but soon we broke up. I don’t remember why. That was at the end of the year, just before Christmas. It was becoming clear to me that we could rock best with just two guitars, bass, and drums, like the Shadows, the Fireballs, or the Ventures. I met a drummer at school named Jack Harper, who was a friendly and funny guy, and he wanted to play with us. Jack said he had a friend, Allan Bates, at nearby Grant Park High School, and Allan played electric guitar. When I met Allan, he knew a lot of chords and was very good.
From the very beginning, I was driven to make the sound I wanted to hear. It was hard to do, but I had to tell Jim Atkin, a good guy who had stuck with the band for quite a while, that we did not need bongos and vibes. I told Linda that we were changing and didn’t need piano, and I told John that we were going to become an instrumental band, so we didn’t need a singer. I never liked the part of leading a band where you have to change players or lose somebody because you don’t want that sound anymore, and I still don’t like it, but it is key to success. You have to evolve, painful as it may be on personal levels, and the music has to come first. Always the music comes first.
I came up with the name the Squires for the new band. Jack Harper on drums, Kenny Koblun on bass, Allan Bates and myself on guitars. We started practicing at Jack Harper’s house and sometimes in our apartment on the third floor of our triplex on Grosvenor, right in front of the Seabreeze. Once, we rehearsed at Lynne Hamilton’s house. She was Allan Bates’s girlfriend and had become a good friend of the band, petite and cute with a positive and happy feeling. Ken had a homemade bass reflex speaker cabinet he had constructed out of wood from plans he found in Popular Science magazine and an amp he made from a Heathkit. His bass sounded good. I still didn’t have an amp. Money was tight.
The Winnipeg Piano Company, on Portage Avenue, was a big local music store where every musician in town went to hang out. Downstairs were all the amps and guitars. They had such a great variety, I would go down there to be with the equipment, dreaming. Randy Bachman went there a lot, too. Randy recalls that the scene was like little Liverpool. We had hundreds of bands right in Winnipeg and it seemed like everyone was in a band.
There was another smaller store named Ray Hamerton Music, and they carried Fender piggyback amps, which were the absolute coolest in my opinion. There was always one on display in the window. I loved those amps, but I could not afford one.
The Galaxies, one of the top three bands in town, had two Fender piggyback amps: a Showman and a Bandmaster. I can still see their complete setup in my mind with their huge double-bass drum kit and those two big Fender piggyback amps set up at River Heights Community Club. I was in absolute awe of that band’s equipment.
The scene in Winnipeg was very supportive, just as Rassy had described in the little Ensign on our trip from Toronto. There were community clubs everywhere, maybe fifty of them in the city, with dances every weekend and bands playing. Young bands of kids like me were just getting started, going from community club to community club all through the city, climbing the ladder of fame, getting bigger crowds, more money, and more acclaim the harder we worked and the better we got. It was as real as it could be. What a great place to learn how things worked. Winnipeg was the rock and roll capital of Canada.
Somewhere along the line I got an amp; an Ampeg Echo Twin from the Winnipeg Piano Company. Rassy helped me with money to buy it. The amp was good, with two twelve-inch speakers, but as I soon discovered, unless I used the reverb it was just one twelve-inch speaker. The other one was only for the reverb, so the sound was not as big as I thought it was going to be. At least I had an amp, though.
We practiced and got a sound going. We were all on about the same level, although Allan Bates was better trained and knew more. He was cool and really into it. He knew a lot of jazz riffs. We played a couple of gigs, and then Jack had to drop out because he had sports and other stuff to do. Those were his priorities. Jack was always a unique guy with a lot of soul. It was like he was still in the group, even though he dropped out. He kept hanging with us.
Bates had a drummer friend at Grant Park High School whose name was Ken Smyth. Ken’s dad bought him a set of drums in a pawnshop so he could play with the Squires, and the band practiced hard in his basement during January. Supportive parents like that are sure a big part of dream building. We had our first gig with Ken on drums at Riverview Community Club in south Fort Rouge. It was February 1, 1963, and I was seventeen. Ken was a stocky, athletic guy and played really well, with a good beat and positive energy. I think we made five dollars for the night, but it may have been nothing. We kept practicing, played a lot of gigs, and got solid. We were getting good.
Rassy’s Ensign could hold all of the band’s equipment but it was a real stretch. We tied the trunk down with ropes, leaving it partly open, and had three guys in the front and one in the back with the instruments. Sometimes, Smyth could get a car from his family and that was easier, but a lot of the time the Ensign would have to carry all of us, including our equipment. It was “packed to the gills,” as Rassy used to say. We damaged the headliner once loading the car for a gig, and I felt bad telling Rassy. She didn’t freak out. She was behind the band and everything we did. She was more concerned for our safety because we were all crowded into that little car.
Most of our Squires shows were nearby; local gigs within a ten- to fifteen-mile radius, at community clubs, high schools, and church dances. We started at five dollars for our first night and moved up to twenty or thirty-five bucks a night as we got better. The wooden bass reflex cabinet Ken had made to go with his Heathkit amp was too big to fit in the car. It had to be cut down and made smaller. That was sad. We all liked the sound. It stayed pretty good, though. We cut the bottom off at an angle so it could lean back just like a Fender piggyback amp would when you used its chrome legs and tilted it.
We actually started to get a little following. We would notice the same kids showing up all around town to hear us. That was pretty cool. We played all instrumentals and I was writing a lot of them. We interspersed our originals with the Ventures, the Shadows, and other popular groups’ tunes. We were a raggedy lot in that little car going from gig to gig all around Winnipeg in 1963. I was still feeling that feeling in my soul when the seasons changed and fall was about to end. I was growing. The leaves were turning.
I was doing the band’s booking with a lot of help from our network of friends. It was pretty grassroots; friends played a huge part. Before gigs we would get together at the Grosvenor house, and I would cook us dinner, which was mainly Kraft Macaroni & Cheese with wieners, beans, and ketchup, followed by peanut butter sandwiches.
In the wintertime, we would have to get the car going during dinner so the heater would be warmed up by the time we left and our guitars and drums would be safe from having their finishes crack. It was mighty cold! We would load up, and off we would go together to the gigs in Rassy’s Ensign, while Rassy was off working the TV show.
One of our regular gigs was at Patterson’s Ranch House, located at the corner of Logan and Keewatin in Winnipeg. We used to play there on weekend afternoons and take a share of the gate, which was not much money. It was a country-and-western place, as the name attests. One of the country bands, Bluegrass Bob and the Bobcats, played there often. I rem
ember seeing a trailer with their name written on it. That name really stuck in my mind. It took a lot of nerve for us to even ask the boss if we could play there. Obviously we couldn’t play there at night because we were so young and didn’t play country music, but he let us play in the afternoons. Sometimes we would play for ten or fifteen people on Saturday and Sunday.
It was Saturday night
And I was just sixteen
I had a couple a dollars
Stickin’ in my jeans
And I walked down to the corner
On a wintery night
It was howling and a blowing
And a-drifting snow
And my friends were waiting for me
’Cause we wanted to know
Who was playing music
Down at Patterson’s Ranch House
Tonight . . .
Well they never let us in
Because we looked too young
But we hung around the doorway
Just to have some fun
Watching all those duck-tailed dudes
With their groovy chicks
With those ’57 Chevys that were
Raked just right
And the “candy apple” flashing in
The bright streetlights
They were packing up the parking lot
At Patterson’s Ranch House
Tonight . . .
Well everything’ll be just great
Even though I don’t have a date
We’ll hang around and stay up late
Listening to the rockin’ band
Ya know Garry has a friend inside
Who’ll maybe take us out for a ride
And slip us a beer on the side
Down at Patterson’s Ranch House
Tonight . . .
Well I hung around the doorway
In the freezing air
And music was the reason
We were really there
We were shaking all over
to the sound
of the new Guess Who
I saw a rocking Burton Cummings
And a young Neil Young
And no one had a clue
What they would soon become
They were just
Diggin’ the music
Down at Patterson’s Ranch House
Tonight . . .
Well everything will be just fine
If we can make it to the dance on time
Peeking through the cracks for a sign
Of our favorite local rocking band
And I’m stealing every lick I can
I’m gonna be a guitar man
Playing in a rocking band
Down at Patterson’s Ranch House
Tonight . . .
—BABA FARID, “PATTERSON’S RANCH HOUSE TONIGHT”
It would be cold as hell when we went in there to set up in the afternoon. The dance hall was upstairs, with a large wooden floor and a stage at one end. At first, there was no one there when we played and we just played to practice, but we advertised a little with notes on the bulletin boards at other clubs and had some word of mouth. I think the most people that ever attended had to be around thirty or forty. We thought that was great! The place probably held about three hundred to four hundred.
After we finished playing, it was very intimidating going downstairs into the restaurant area to ask the boss for our share of the gate. The building was all old wood with sawdust on the floor, a very old and well-worn country-and-western bar/restaurant. Sometimes it was a long wait, sitting in a booth, waiting for him to come out. We never knew if he was giving us the right amount and there was no way to check. It was a very little amount of money, but he always gave us something. I mean, he could have given us anything he wanted and what could we have said? We were scared shitless of this guy; we were so green. I think he was a pretty cool guy to give us a shot at all. I guess he had a soft spot for kids like us. Music people and club people almost always take care of their own.
• • •
SUMMER CAME and the Squires were growing in popularity. We had a DJ from the local Winnipeg station CKRC accompanying us to some of the gigs, and our name was always on the radio. Crowds were getting bigger at the community clubs. CKRC had a recording studio and an engineer, Harry Taylor, who liked recording all of the local groups that were good. He was into it just like we were, trying to catch a break by recording a hit in the little studio. The studio had a couple of mono tape machines, so sound on sound recording was possible. Bob Bradburn, our DJ, set it up for us to go to the studio and audition for Harry, to see if he thought that he could record us. It was a huge deal. We prepared for the audition with extra practices and were really well-rehearsed.
One day, we loaded all of our equipment into the Ensign and headed downtown to the CKRC studios. When we got there, we played all of our originals. Harry Taylor listened to us, and he picked a couple of them, and said, “Let’s do those two.” One was called “The Sultan” and the other one was “Image in Blue.” They were based on the Shadows’ sound and we had them down. We made another date to come back, and prepared to record those two songs. A week later, we returned and ran through them again and again. Harry experimented moving the microphones around, trying different echo, even trying different microphones. He was quite into it. Harry, with his Buddy Holly horn-rimmed glasses and white shirt, was a very serious engineer.
CKRC studio was located on the second floor of an old multistory brick building on Carlton Street, in the heart of downtown. In fact, it was the old Winnipeg Free Press Building, where my father had gotten his first job as a journalist. I didn’t know that at the time, but there I was, at 300 Carlton Street, following my dream, just a few feet from where my dad started to follow his when he was about the same age. I wish I could have called him and told him about it when I discovered it years after that session. I think it would have made an impression on him somehow, made him understand how similar we were.
When we got in the studio, Bob and Harry had an idea. They wanted to add a gong to “The Sultan” to make it sound more dynamic. I thought it was a great idea. They also wanted Bob to say the title, at the end of “Image in Blue,” and they wanted the title changed to “Aurora.” That took me a minute to get used to, but I did accept it. At the end of the record, Bob would say “Aurora” in deep echo. We ran through the tunes a couple of times, and the final recording date was set: July 23, 1963. That day, we came in and recorded successfully and left the building with our hearts soaring.
We were recording artists! Bob had gotten us on V Records, a label that was making its first venture into rock and roll after releasing polkas exclusively for years. We were trailblazers! “The Sultan,” backed with “Aurora” as the B-side, was released as a V Records 45 rpm single four months later. I will never forget the thrill of hearing it on the radio for the first time. I was walking in the clouds!
1958 Standard Motors Ensign
CHAPTER EIGHT
few weeks after recording our single, Jack Harper and I went on a summer vacation to Falcon Lake, about one hundred miles east of Winnipeg. Jack was still one of my best friends. It was a beautiful vacation spot—a lake with boats and a swimming area, a dock, and cabins everywhere. We went in the Ensign. Rassy let us take the car and have a good time. Jack and I had brought a pup tent and enough money to buy food, which we sometimes cooked on the public grills that were available in the campgrounds. We pitched our tent and set up our little dwelling. It was cool to be there, independent and on our own.
I didn’t like to go swimming because I was shy about my physical self, being really skinny and not a sports type at all, but I still had a great time. There was plenty to do. There were lots of other young people there, families with their children and people just coming for a couple of days in ca
mpers.
Nearby, there was a dump. There were always a lot of big bears there, scrounging around looking for something to eat. It was fun driving the Ensign there at night with the lights out, slowly creeping in under the moonlight, getting close, and suddenly turning on the headlights so we could see all the bears. They would all look at us, their eyes gleaming red in the reflection of the headlights.
There was a little place with a jukebox, and I would play “Four Strong Winds” by Ian & Sylvia, over and over, learning all the words and singing along. I loved that song. I had the feeling that it was about my life, and the music touched me deeply. I completely related to it and lived it every time I listened. It was everything to me.
Four strong winds that blow lonely,
Seven seas that run high.
All those things that don’t change,
Come what may,
Our good times are all gone,
I’m bound for movin’ on,
I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way . . .
— IAN TYSON, “FOUR STRONG WINDS”
There was something about how immersed I was in that song that made me realize I had to get the same quality into my own music. I started singing along, loudly if I was alone and quietly if anyone was near enough to hear me. I knew my voice was high and I could tell that I sang in a different way from real singers, but in my soul, in my heart, I knew I was really singing and it felt right.
We would sometimes go to Lynne Hamilton’s family cottage, where we would hang out with all the kids who were at the lake. Lynne, as I said, was a fun girl and Allan Bates’s girlfriend. One night we sang “Four Strong Winds,” and I kept saying we had to do it over and over until we got it just right. I can imagine that I was really carried away with getting it right and I probably was a bit over-the-top. That was just my energy for music.
About that time, I met Pam Smith. Pam was my first love. I still remember her well. I know I always will. She was very kind and loving, funny and cool, and she was very pretty. She had a twin sister, Pat, and the two of them were really a blast to hang with. Jack, Jim, and I were always looking for them. Pam and I hung out and talked a lot. I confided in her some of my insecurities about how skinny I was and she told me it wasn’t that important, stressing that there were other qualities about me that were more important. She made me feel good about myself. We got really close and eventually I gave her my Kelvin ring. We were going steady. That felt really good.