I was just living with the dealers. What would happen was, guys would come to our houses and buy dope. They’d ring the doorbell and say, “Got any acid?”
“Sure, Tom’s got some,” I’d say. So I’d go down to the usual spot and get a couple of hits of acid, take the money, and give it to Tom or Murray or whoever. You’d sell dope to anybody.
On July 17, 1969, the sky was clear and the temperature hovered around seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, an excellent day for a freak to be alive. Lefebvre says,
That night we were going to see this band we’d never heard, but heard was really good. This guy named Daisy, who ended up being a biker in the King’s Crew—he was the real deal—had a 1953 Studebaker. He was going to pull up and five guys were going to jump in his car and drive up to Edmonton to see Led Zeppelin.
Another guy named John Champlain, he had a 1956 Plymouth station wagon. He pulled up and said, “Man, pack your bags, we got to go to New York! All these bands are going to play—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, far out, man. But first we got to go up to Edmonton to see Led Zeppelin.” John, who had a curled-up mustache that made him look like a musketeer, was the guy who, upon finding his stash had been stolen, capped a bunch of Drano and put it in the same place.
And then the cops came.
So much for Lefebvre’s intention to get to the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 15–18, 1969. He wasn’t the only one out of luck—simultaneous multiple busts at a half-dozen houses netted about eighty freaks. “We were suffering under the illusion that if they didn’t come over and bust you with the dope you couldn’t get busted,” Lefebvre says. “We didn’t comprehend the idea of undercover cops.”
Two RCMP officers and a Calgary policeman had infiltrated the scene by dressing like hippies, coming to the door and scoring drugs. “From that summer on,” Lefebvre said, “we never, ever sold any dope to anybody we didn’t know. They taught us well.”
The cops came to the door at 7:30 in the morning, and Lefebvre didn’t have much time to react. “I just grabbed what was closest to me,” he said. “Turns out I put on jeans that belonged to Tom Dietermann, a guy from California.”
Most everyone in the house was awake because they were expecting Daisy to swing around in the Studebaker to pick them up. Lefebvre and his housemates were herded into their kitchen, where the cops gave them the shakedown. Outside, three squad cars and a police wagon idled.
Lefebvre said, “I went downtown to get booked, which was freaky. I was seventeen. A couple of the chicks got busted, too. Everybody except the girls was older than me—they were sixteen or seventeen. Whoever sold acid at the door got busted. I sold two grams of hash and maybe five hits of acid in three different transactions. For three months or so they were running around town buying dope from guys, taking pictures from down the street.”
Jim Hoggan didn’t get busted. He was never photographed at the front door in an exchange. He was more into giving it away. But little brother Joe was caught and ended up serving time. “He took it on the lam for a year,” says Lefebvre, “so we weren’t in jail together.”
The new consciousness wasn’t supposed to end this way for Lefebvre. His space trucking had seemed unstoppable—from flower power to Hendrix and Cream and psychedelic hard rock, from the riots of ’68 in France and America to the border of the Woodstock nation—he’d been flying. Now he’d plummeted and landed with a thud. Earthbound. Or was he?
He continues,
We’re downtown getting booked, and I saw that they were making guys empty their pockets, seeing what was in their pockets. That made sense to me. It also made sense to me to surreptitiously check my pockets. Well, I found two hits of lime green. I was sitting beside Steve Lewis and so I went like this to Steve [gesturing with his eyes toward his pocket], and he put his hand out and I dropped one in his hand, so I had one and he had one. And I was looking around and [pops tab in his mouth]. So the first night I was in jail I was ripped on lime green. It was good.
Lefebvre says captivity never put him or Lewis on a bummer: “It was freaky but we were calmed down by then, in a weird way. We’d been halfway around the universe and back again. I had a clear understanding that all of this shit was small-minded. A trip’s a trip, wherever you’re doing it—in jail, in London, in Balzac, Alberta—doesn’t matter.”
Lefebvre turned eighteen on August 6, 1969. He was convicted, sentenced to one year in jail, and entered prison in November 1969. He began counting days at the Calgary Correctional Centre, also known as Spy Hill, located on the northern outskirts of the city. He spent New Year’s 1969–70 with hardened criminals before being transferred sixty miles north to another penal institution. He says,
I wound up doing eight months. Six weeks in Spy Hill, which is a provincial jail, then six and a half months in a joint in Bowden, Alberta. At that time Bowden Institution was called Bowden Institute, and it was for first-time offenders—people doing two years less a day, or less. Anyone who was doing two years or more wound up in a federal penitentiary, either south in Drumheller or up in northern Alberta. Bowden was filled with not-heavy guys and about forty of my good friends. I learned a lot about bridge. They let us have a guitar in there.
The treatment of Lefebvre and his dope buddies wasn’t harsh by anyone’s standards, but it was an amusing pastime and, yes, a power trip for some guards to try to make the lives of these young men miserable. Lefebvre says,
The guards were guys who never made it past private in the army, and here was their chance to boss you around a little bit. Some of them were pricks. I was clear in my mind that although they were in a position of power they were small-minded fuckers. They didn’t get under my skin much because I realized, Okay, you guys got me now, but one day I’m going to be out of here and you’re still going to be here doing the same thing.
Eight months seems like a long time. Three days ahead seems a lot longer than three months behind. I started in Spy Hill, where there’s a bunch of guys who’d been in jail before. You learn quickly what you need to do to get by. The first rule of Fight Club is don’t talk about Fight Club, and the first rule of being in jail is do your own time.
You’ve got to learn who’s in charge. In the inmate community there’s a hierarchy. The guys who have seniority are usually the guys who have been in the most, or who are the toughest on the street, more or less. It’s kind of like the David Milch series Deadwood. The way the inmate prison community is governed is about making it easy for everybody to do their time. Anybody who’s being a dink gets taken care of. Anybody who whines gets taught a lesson. I was fortunate because I knew forty guys who were doing bits at the same time I was. We weren’t all in the same dorms but among the forty of us it became known fairly quickly that these guys are a little bit different and you shouldn’t really fuck with them because they know some heavy people. And we did. Whatever else we were, we were drug dealers, and some drug dealers knew what guns were for. We weren’t all just little kids.
Lefebvre managed to quit doing drugs for four of the eight months he was in jail. In the middle of his stretch, a friend came for a visit and slipped him a bit of something. He recalls,
Actually, I remember Don Ochowicz got out for a Christmas day pass with his family. He came back with three joints and four hits of acid shoved up his ass in tin foil. He was having a hard time evacuating it, but eventually he did. I guess it was with Steve Lewis again—we did another hit of acid together in Spy Hill on Boxing Day 1969. We dropped the acid about two hours before lights out, and after lights out we lit up this joint. We were in bunks next to each other and we were passing this joint back and forth. We got in maybe three, four tokes each when somebody yells, “Hey, those guys got tokes!” So it was one more quick hit each and you ate it, gulp, like this. So we’re stoned on acid and pot and the screw’s running around trying to see who’s smoking dope. Those were the days. On New Year’s Eve there was a show on TV and Simon & Garfunkel
were performing their new song, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
Lefebvre’s story of incarceration seems quaint when compared to the modern perception of jail as a hellhole parallel society that reinforces negative sexual dynamics. Becoming someone’s bitch was never an issue, he recalls, despite the urban myth-making machinery of American television and films: “Sure, they talked about it, but you can’t fuck around with people like that. It wouldn’t take too long for the guys in charge to realize that I knew how to stay out of everybody’s hair. As a matter of survival, you get to know the guys you need to know to make sure nothing happens to you. So if there are violent homosexual guys, I never encountered them in all the times I’ve been in jail. I’m sure it happens, but for every violent homosexual guy there is in jail, you’re going to find two equally violent homophobes.”
With so many hours to fill and only so much reading to be done, Lefebvre had to figure out how to pass the time without losing his gourd:
We played a lot of bridge, all day Saturday and Sunday. It’s an intellectual game—that’s what makes it interesting. And in jail, it’s even more interesting because everybody there knows two hearts and two hearts [rubbing his nose] mean two different things. The second one means I’ve got a whole bunch of hearts but only up to the queen. If you just say two hearts then you’ve got at least the king and maybe the ace. They’ve got all this cheating built in. So you’ve got a tournament in jail, you got four guys sitting at a table and each guy sitting at the table has a scrutineer, and your scrutineer watches the guy beside you. It’s like: “He twitched!” “No, you twitched!” Pretty funny.
Louise Lefebvre, trained by faith and vocation to empathize with suffering, visited her oldest son regularly. She was heartbroken but supportive. Her psychology training and counseling at St. Mary’s—the girls’ school had amalgamated with the boys’ school and become St. Mary’s High School—came in handy. Every Sunday she drove north on Highway 2 for seventy-five minutes to the big house. John’s fifteen-year-old brother, Ted, who had always looked up to John and still does, accompanied her. Once there, they played bridge together—or tried. Ted, who watched, had other ideas. “He knew the ace of spades was a good card,” Louise remembers, “so he stuck it up his sleeve. It really botched up the game. Ted put on a brave front but was upset about John’s arrest, I found out later.”
Ted was not the rebellious type; he was inclined to fit into the system. He was also more of a jock in high school and hung out with Danny Patton, who would later engineer and play on Lefebvre’s recordings. Ted became an oilman in Alberta, and Lefebvre readily admits, “It was quite a burden for Ted to have me as a brother.” Then again, Ted took the idea of blood brothers seriously. “His English teacher brought me an essay he wrote about his brother,” Louise says, “and it was a beautiful love letter. He was so upset that people thought less of John.”
John’s sister, Anne, also visited him in Bowden jail, although less frequently. They all whiled away the hours with bridge and conversation. Louise was doubly tested the year of Lefebvre’s drug bust: her only daughter had a child out of wedlock and gave her up for adoption, and it would take almost four decades for that trauma to heal.
Effectively, Lousie Lefebvre had become the house shrink. “The bust was good for Mom,” says Lefebvre, who thinks of his and Anne’s troubles as his mom’s Gonzaga U practicum. He continues, “Well, it was bad too, but it was good because she was forced to realize that people in trouble aren’t necessarily bad people. It’s hard for a mom to think of her own child as a bad person, and she knew that neither Anne nor I were particularly bad. Maybe we were disobedient vis-à-vis the law, but she knew us to be capable of making good judgments.”
In response to her son’s recent assessment, Louise says,
Oh dear. I never thought John was a bad person, just a bit foolish. I know I worry too much about what people think, but it’s hard when people ask, “Where’s your son?”
“Well, he’s—you know—he’s in that boarding house in Bowden.”
• • •
Lefebvre was released from prison on July 15, 1970. He says the authorities were sadistic in extending his departure date. They kept him in the Bowden pen on purpose until ten days after a major rock festival had left Calgary. The Festival Express was a short-lived transcontinental road show concocted in Toronto. Festival dates included that city, Winnipeg, and then, on July 4–5, McMahon Stadium in Calgary, home of the Canadian Football League’s Calgary Stampeders. The musicians and their equipment traveled by chartered train, which allowed for much indulgence along the way. The bill included Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Buddy Guy. The Band was the headliner, and other Canadian acts included Ian and Sylvia Tyson’s Great Speckled Bird and French-Canadian rock star Robert Charlebois. Mashmakhan, riding worldwide fame with the novelty hit “As the Years Go By,” hoped to be hometown heroes when the train stopped in Montreal. They were foiled. The date was lopped off the tour after panic-stricken locals successfully petitioned the city to prevent the trainload of drugged-out rock ’n’ rollers from setting foot inside the city limits. The men who ran Bowden knew Lefebvre was a longhaired, dope-smoking hippie who loved rock ’n’ roll, and they knew he was looking forward to seeing all the great bands. They also knew that all his friends would be there and that he wouldn’t, which Lefebvre imagined gave them great satisfaction.
Lefebvre’s sentence, one year in prison, was half of what many of his friends were handed. They were given two years less a day, the maximum amount that could be meted out for Bowden. A few guys were saddled with serious time—four years—in a federal pen. The reason Lefebvre got off lightly in comparison was because his mom found representation for him through Catholic family connections. Asa Milton “Milt” Harradence retired in 1997 as a judge of the Alberta Court of Appeal, but in 1969–70 he was a gale-force criminal lawyer on the provincial jurisprudence scene. He was also a sharply right-wing patriot. He had been a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II and then a member of the Confederate Air Force in Texas—kind of like John Birchers with wings. Harradence was elected to Calgary City Council in 1957 and reelected in 1960, only to resign. He took over the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta in 1962, but in the 1964 provincial election he failed to win a seat in the legislature. In 2001, C.D. Evans was impressed enough by his law colleague’s career that he wrote a hagiography called The Western Flair.
While Harradence may have been a bust on the provincial political scene, by 1969 he knew a lot of people and how to outmaneuver legal adversaries. Lawyers were wary of having to go up against him in court. In Lefebvre’s case, it wasn’t verbal pugilism that prevailed but cronyism. “Harradence was a gregarious sort of fellow,” says Lefebvre. “He took my bail bond, which was six hundred bucks, for his retainer and never asked for another penny.” Nothing happened for a long time, and then, as Lefebvre recalls,
Milt finally calls us in for a meeting and goes, “We’re going in next Tuesday to plead guilty.”
I said, “Guilty? For six hundred bucks I can stand there and say ‘Guilty’!”
So he comes across the table at me, rolling up his sleeves, and says, “I used to be the champion golden glove boxer in my category, and I’ll teach you a lesson, you smart aleck.”
My mom is screaming while this bunch of bravado is going on. And there’s this other young guy there, Milt’s junior criminal lawyer, who says, “When you come to court to plead guilty, wear shorts and cut your hair.”
“Cut my hair?!”
“Yeah, cut your hair! Wear shorts! Suck a lollipop! Do whatever you need to do to look like a kid.”
I was getting a really good education.
Lefebvre was seventeen, busted, in danger of doing serious time, and going before an older judge. His lawyer was a one-hundred-percent pure Alberta redneck who understood the difference between winning and losing. Clean up real goo
d, sonny boy, before you go before the Honorable Mr. Justice H.W. Riley.
Harradence lined up three character references for Lefebvre. The first was Arial Gogan. Lefebvre knew Gogan a bit from when he worked at Holy Cross Hospital, in the kitchen, as the night cook, warming up the day’s unused food for the night crew’s midnight lunch. Lefebvre also made cereal, Cream of Wheat, in a huge vat, which occasionally tipped and spilled mush all over the floor. The rest of the time he went to the back of the kitchen and smoked hash. To Lefebvre, Gogan was a buddy from the Scottish intelligentsia. People used to stay up late and pull out the whiskey and guitars. When someone whipped out a version of “With God on Our Side,” Gogan would spit, “That’s not Bob Dylan—that’s an Irish rebel folk song!” And he’d bellow, unaccompanied, the plundered original.
Lefebvre’s second character reference was Father Pat O’Byrne, an influential man who was director of Catholic Charities for the Calgary Diocese. He was a socially aware fellow whose younger brother Paul became the bishop of Calgary.
Reference number three was William C. Howells, the father of Lefebvre’s friend Dave Howells. The elder Howells was an influential oilman in Calgary. When Howells got up to speak, Justice Riley jumped out of his chair, put out his hand, and said, “Willie, what the hell are you doing here? Good to see you!”
“And they shook hands,” says Lefebvre. He continues,
Willie Howells and Justice Riley were great drinking buddies. My buddy Dave and his friend Henry used to pour them into the car and drive Riley home and drive Willie home. They were friends. Harradence was the guy who knew exactly how to play that card—not what you know, who you know.
And, of course, Milt knew all of these relationships existed. So where other guys were getting two years less a day and two years probation, I got one year and no probation. They marched me right out of that courtroom. My mom came up to the bar that was between us and gave me a hug and said, “He’s just a boy!” A bunch of my hippie friends were there and said, “We love you, John!” And then out the back door and into jail. That was it.
Life Real Loud Page 8