In June 1971 I went to a party, and��this woman told me, “There’s a terrific artist you should meet who needs a lawyer . . . he’s in jail.”
—Stan Weisman
Music was not the only thing Rick got up to in Toronto; he persisted with some of the bad behaviors from his youth. Stan Weisman, the Toronto attorney who defended Rick, negotiated his contracts, and financed him for years, first met Rick when Rick was in a Toronto jail in the mid-1960s.
Rick’s record in the criminal division of the provincial court, the lowest level of the Ontario criminal court, reveals quite a few run-ins with the law in 1965 and 1966. On April 7, 1965, he was convicted of guitar theft and received a suspended sentence and twelve months on probation. Later that year, he was convicted of possession of stolen articles. On September 12, 1966, a judge ordered him deported to the United States because of his Canadian criminal record after a hearing held in Toronto’s Don Jail. It’s not clear if he was deported and then returned to Canada or whether he appealed his original deportation order and stayed.
He was again ordered deported on July 7, 1967, and eventually left the country. Because crossing the border was easy in those days, he later returned to Canada. He was ordered deported again on June 4, 1971, but was released on $500 bail pending appeal. In October 1971, he was convicted of marijuana possession and fined $200.
Legal problems aside, Rick’s penchant for theft often made it difficult for people to continue liking him. As Canadian musician Tony Nolasco puts it, “He borrowed money from everybody and never paid it back.”
During Rick’s early days in Toronto, Weisman was always slipping him money to get by on, and Rick would take it without offering anything in return. On one occasion, though, apparently under attack by his conscience, Rick told Weisman, “I feel bad taking money from you. I have a reel-to-reel tape recorder [the ne plus ultra of the era’s technology]. Give me one hundred dollars and you can have the recorder.”
Weisman gave him the hundred dollars and took the recorder. But “two days later he phoned me saying, ‘I need the tape recorder. I’ve got tunes in my head I’ve got to record! This is my career!’” Weisman says. “So I gave it back to him.” When Rick finally returned the recorder to Weisman, it was useless: the reels were wobbling, most likely from overuse.
It’s unlikely Rick sabotaged the tape recorder, but he definitely sabotaged other items that weren’t his. For instance, Danny Marks, a guitarist in one of Rick’s later bands, incurred Rick’s anger by quitting over Rick’s objections. Marks had lent the band a concert amplifier, which he now wanted back, but fearing a confrontation and perhaps physical retribution from Rick, he asked a fellow musician to retrieve it. Marks told Nick Warburton that the other band member brought it back and it looked OK. Then he plugged it in and turned it on “and poof, a big pall of smoke comes up.” Marks turned it around and looked in the back of the cabinet, and each of the four vintage speakers had a hole poked through its paper core.
In the mid-1960s Weisman lent the carless Rick his five-year-old Oldsmobile and, as he noted in 2013, “I have yet to find that car. I never saw it again.” This was not an unusual move for Rick. People grew so aware of his “borrowing,” in fact, that one of the songs later recorded (but not released) by one of his Canadian bands was a funk instrumental called “Rip Off 1500” about Rick’s alleged “borrowing” of that dollar amount.
“Whenever he’d visit my house, I’d get an eighty-dollar bill the next month for a long-distance call he’d made on my phone,” musician Stan Endersby says. Most of Rick’s associates were not terribly angered by Rick’s borrowing because they assumed he was using the money to rise in the music business and would take them with him. Rick also occasionally took the trouble to buck up friends who were in trouble. When Peter McGraw was going through a difficult divorce, he remembered fifty years later, Rick was the only person who came up to him and said, “You know, Peter, she doesn’t know what she’s throwing away.”
But Rick Abel, who worked for Rick for years, remembers the time he was sharing a house with a couple in the Los Angeles area. “[Rick] came over to our house, we had nothing, we were barely scraping by, but Rick was the kind of guy, he’d walk into your house, and he would be like a raccoon. . . . His eyes would be immediately drawn to whatever he saw that looked like it might have some sort of value. He was like a kleptomaniac . . . it’s like he felt that,‘It’s there, and I want it, so I can take it.’
“He had gone into the bathroom that was right next to [the couple’s] bedroom where [the woman who lived there] kept a little silver pillbox. He just took it and walked out. Right after he left, she says, ‘Hey, he stole my pillbox.’”
It was when Rick “borrowed” from those who weren’t in his orbit that he got in trouble. On one occasion early in his stay in Toronto, for instance, Rick crossed Jack Long, part-owner of a popular Toronto music store called Long & McQuade. The store was very musician friendly and had a reputation for benevolence. “If you were late on a payment, they’d be OK,” Endersby says of Long & McQuade. “And they gave people credit that shouldn’t get credit.” But credit was not an option for Rick. He visited the store one day and stole three microphones he needed for his band’s performance at a club that night.
As it happened, Endersby was in the audience that evening while Rick was performing “Hitch Hike,” the Marvin Gaye tune later performed by the Rolling Stones. “Rick was singing ‘Hitchhike! Hitchhike, baby!’ when suddenly Jack Long walked in,” Endersby says. “Then there was a click as Jack grabbed the first microphone. Then Rick goes to the next mic and [sings], ‘I’m gonna find that girl if I have to hitchhike ’round the world,’ and Jack took that mic too. Then Jack went for the third mic, and Rick said, ‘C’mon, leave me that mic. I need one to sing.’ But Jack took it, and the show was over.”
Although he was never arrested during this period for a crime of violence, Rick was certainly capable of such behavior. According to Weisman, during a regular basketball game in Toronto in January 1973, Rick and one of Weisman’s private investigators, whom Weisman calls “a mild-mannered guy,” jumped up for a rebound simultaneously. “Rick claimed he got elbowed in the face,” Weisman says, “and as he came down he hit the other guy in the face, splitting his lip open almost down to his chin. The guy passed out and Rick ran away.” Others in the group carried the injured man to a nearby hospital.
“That’s an extreme example,” Weisman admits but adds, “Rick would lose patience easily. He was a lovable guy but had things from childhood, I suspect, that made him angry and frustrated. . . . He knew he had a lot of talent but was dealing with small-time people.”
Asked if he ever considered pulling the plug on Rick, particularly because of his nonstop “borrowing,” Weisman responds by talking about Rick’s “genuine charm” and said, “Rick knew he was going to succeed, he knew he was going to pay me back . . .”