Play Me a Rock ‘n’ Roll Song…

Music changed totally for me around this time. I traded in my clarinet and the Kiwanis Music Festival for the bass guitar and Teen Town dances. I had a respectable career as a clarinettist….won a whole bunch of awards at the Kiwanis Festival…travelled to the CNE and helped win the really big trophy….marched in a huge number of fall fair and Christmas parades….played plenty of concerts in the town hall….had quite a run. But by the mid Sixties, pretty well every boy in town wanted to be the next Beatles – and you couldn’t do that playing the clarinet. My friend, Glen, figures prominently in this story as well. Remember Glen’s job in the office at the Queen’s and the money he earned. He used some of it to buy a Silvertone guitar and amp through the Simpson’s catalogue…..and he set out to be a rock star.

He didn’t stick with it though, and, finally, the Silvertone guitar ended up sitting in the corner of his room, the top three strings broken off, covered in spilled pop, and, generally, looking pretty beat up. So he bought a used set of drums. A gorgeous set of old Ludwigs with a huge bass drum and he started banging away on those. And he got sort of okay at it, playing along with records, but soon that wasn’t enough and he wanted someone to “jam” with. At which point, I started to pick up the Silvertone and the accompanying five watt amp, and try to play along with him. The guitar, as mentioned, was missing the top three strings, so I sort of started plunking away on bass lines. And before long, we were struggling through some fundamental rock stuff like “Get Off My Cloud” and other favourites. And we started to invite other guys down – guys who’d taken a guitar lesson or two – and might even be able to sing – and before we knew it, we had a primitive band going.

Problem was you couldn’t really play real bass guitar on a six string guitar with the bottom three strings on. I needed a for real bass guitar, but I had no money. This was the start of Grade 9 and as luck would have it, the school held a fundraiser that involved all of us students selling magazine subscriptions and the more you sold, the more your name was entered into the big draw for great prizes and cool stuff. I sold exactly one subscription – and that was to my parents – so I only had one entry in the big draw. My chances were slim to say the least. However, the fates conspired to blow a fair breeze in my direction for one of the few times in my life, and I not only won a prize in the big draw – I won the grand prize.

Which was a newly invented piece of technology that allowed you to take pictures, then have the photo roll out the front of the camera instantly – you then had to smear a couple of different chemical concoctions onto the picture, and, in theory, it would develop right before your eyes. It was considered amazing back in the day. And I was thrilled to have it. But that was before I found out that the thing wasn’t as easy to operate as it seemed, and you had to continually buy more chemicals and film if you wanted to keep taking pictures. I was already broke. I needed the camera like I needed a whole in the head. What to do?

A few days after I won it, I was over at the Queen’s hanging out in the office with Glen, and I’d brought the camera along. Glen’s Dad noticed it sitting there on one of his trips into the office and started asking me question about it. He ended up buying it off me for $15 and that went immediately into the bass guitar fund. Still, I felt I needed about 50 bucks to get an adequate guitar, and that was a ton of money in the old days. My Dad, who was struggling with six mouths to feed, couldn’t help me out. Somehow, my Aunt Vi caught wind of my dilemma, and she had a bit of money back then because her first husband had been killed in a bad accident right after the war and she got a big insurance payout. So, she lent me $35 and I had my guitar money.

Back in that other time, likely my Dad’s favourite TV show was Circle 8 Ranch – a music show that featured good, old-time country stuff. And, of course, the show had a sort of house band and the fiddle player was a really, big man called “Wee” Rossy Mann. And he had a music store in the tiny village of Bluevale, down near Wingham and Dad suggested we go there to search out a guitar for me. So, away we went, and I ended up buying a Kent bass guitar and the thing came with no case, so I carried it around in a garbage bag for years, and it seemed to never go out of tune. It was a good, old guitar and it served me well over the years. I suspect you’ll hear more about the Kent bass guitar in the pages ahead.

Anyway, the five watt Silvertone amp also wasn’t going to cut it – things were getting louder and louder. So, somehow, I came up with another 60 dollars and, after locating what I thought would work for me in the Toronto Star want ads, my Dad and I travelled to Toronto to buy a Vox guitar amp that I used for a little while. Again, not the ideal set-up for a bass player, but it was the best I could afford at the time and it worked okay. And we started to practice and practice and practice, until, finally, we reached a point where we thought we should go public.

Glen likely wasn’t the best drummer I ever played with – but having him in the band gave us a place to practice in the Queen’s Hotel banquet room where the town’s Rotary Club held weekly meetings and there were lots of other events as well. And when it came time for us to hold a public event, the banquet room was a perfect spot. So, we picked a night, produced a primitive poster and spread word of the “dance” far and wide. We charged a bit of an admission, sold pop and chips and had to have our parents attend as chaperones if we wanted any girls to attend. That’s what it was like back in those days.

And we gave our first public performance as rock musicians and we played our hearts out……Little Red Riding Hood, Hanky Panky, Wild Thing, Gloria, Tobacco Road were a few of the tunes. We didn’t have a huge turnout but a few kids came and we did okay. I remember we did a huge psychedelic thing in Tobacco Road and Glen kicked his drums over and the rest of writhed around on the stage while a home-made strobe light flashed and made us look like we were moving in slow motion. It was very theatrical even back in those days. Even then, we had some slight notion that we were entertainers as well as musicians. It wasn’t much, but it was a start……

Minor Sports…

My experience with minor sports was fairly limited when I was a kid. My Dad gave me a chance to play stuff, but it just didn’t stick. I tried baseball one year and I think I was in about Grade 4, because that’s the year My Dad took me to Canadian Tire to buy me a brand, new baseball glove for passing. I still have the glove and it’s one of my prized possessions from when I was a kid…..I only played a couple of innings of organized baseball, though. I went out to a couple of practices and things were going okay, then we played our first game and I came up for my first at bat. Opposing pitcher went into his wind-up, he let the ball fly – he missed the strike zone and I forgot to duck and took one right to the side of the head – remember, no batting helmets back in the old days….we were tough back in those days….tough and stupid.

Anyway, I quit baseball on the spot – that was the end of my career. I couldn’t see much point playing anything where you could actually get hurt. So, I pulled myself out of the game, walked over to my Dad, and told him I was retiring. I continued to play a lot of sandlot baseball and had great fun doing that over the years, but never played another inning of organized ball.

I also played organized hockey, but, again, it was a brief foray. I’m pretty sure I played the year I was 10 and I’m pretty sure it was Peewee division. I’m pretty sure I was a fairly good hockey player when I was a kid. I’d grown up at the lake and spent all winter long skating, so I was pretty good at it and could go forwards and backwards with ease – something a lot of kids my age couldn’t always manage…..I was made a defenseman on the team and things looked good for my hockey playing future.

Our coach was quite a young guy and he was really enthusiastic and wanted to do a good job with the team. Somewhere he heard about a special program that was being offered by Jello where if you collected up enough boxtops, you could get actual hockey sweaters for the whole team. Wow! Now, remember, this was back in the days when minor hockey wasn’t a Cadillac operation. There were no team uniforms – not even sweaters – for the players. Instead, we wore our own jerseys, brought from home, and what that meant was that nearly every player in Hanover minor Hockey had either a Toronto Maple Leaf sweater or a Montreal Canadiens sweater because those were the two teams everybody in our community cheered for back in the old days. We were all Toronto Maple Leaf or Montreal Canadien fans with the very odd kid cheering on Boston or Chicago. Everybody wearing the same sweaters worked okay in practice, but when we played games, we had to wear these T-shirt-type things over our sweaters, so that teams could sort of have on at least the same colour.

So, our coach got us matching sweaters – green and white – and we became the Shamrocks – a name we weren’t really all that pleased about because it didn’t sound all that tough…..And the season was underway and we played pretty well and only lost a couple of games all year – both times to a team called the Flyers, who had this one kid who was a really excellent player. Unlike today’s minor hockey, when we held our practices and played our games, there was almost no one in the arena. The place was virtually empty because we had ice time at about 7:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. The only time my Dad had a chance to watch me play was at the end of the year when there was a Family Night. Parents just didn’t tag along after their kids in those days. In fact, I had trouble doing up my skates tight enough at that age, and my Dad always worked on Saturdays, so I well remember my Mother helping me lace up my skates in our kitchen, so I could skate off up the road to play hockey at the Coliseum.

Anyway, we were pretty excited about Family Night when all of our parents would be coming to see us play. Our team, the Shamrocks, had finished the season in second place in the four-team house league division. That meant that we were playing in what was being billed as the championship game for the Peewees. And, of course, the Flyers had finished first in our division and they were the other team in the big game. So, we played them and battled hard all the way through the game, and the arena was packed to the rafters and it was pretty exciting stuff. Our nemesis, the dreaded Flyers, scored an early goal on us, and try as we might we couldn’t get it back, but the really important thing was that we held them to that one goal – our goalie was outstanding and so were me and the other guys of defense. I can still remember one play when our team got caught up ice, and I was the lone defender back on a three on one. Somehow, I got my stick on the puck on one of their passes and managed to steer it into the corner and thwart their rush. I could almost hear my Dad cheer on that one.

It was sort of a fun year, I guess, but for some reason, I had no urge to go back the next year and I never played organized hockey again. In fact, I’ve never felt like much of a team player, which I’m not sure is a good thing, but it was the way I was nevertheless….I had one more experience in the world of team sports, but that was later, after I made it to high school….and that was fairly memorable as well. But that’s another story…….