I never wanted to do anything else. I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show when I was four, and yeah, I know you’ve heard that old tale before, but I was four years old and these guys were slick and had great hair and I liked their songs right away and girls were going crazy. I grabbed a broom out of the kitchen, stood in front of the TV set and joined the Beatles.
I grew up in a place where I was encouraged to do nothing—to stay put, stand still, not move, lie low. Nothing was expected of me out there in the world. It was the sixties. Kids still wanted to be cowboys. Men were going into space. Kids wanted to be astronauts. The Leafs won cups. Kids wanted to be George Armstrong and Terry Sawchuk. Not me. All I ever wanted to do was to write songs, play guitar and sing. That was it. That simple.
I entered adulthood unsure of who I was, where I belonged or where I came from, so I made up my story as I went along, and in that, music was my answer to everything. Rather than having the world tell me who I was, on stage, through my songs, I could tell the world. I was free there. No teachers to tell me how to do it. No cops to tell me not to. Just my own wits and guts to lead me. The path forward wasn’t always an easy or straight one, but I was willing to do anything to find my way.
THE HAMILTON PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
The Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital, or HPH as we all referred to it, was set at the top of west Hamilton Mountain on a lush green lawn surrounded by trees at one end and a sheer drop into the belly of the city over dragon limestone at the other. The hospital was perfectly situated for any poor under-medicated lost soul to stroll across the grounds, climb over a three-foot stone wall and jump off into a bloody, broken eternity.
I knew a bunch of guys who ended up in the hospital. They smoked too much dope and halfway through high school started to lose it. By the time they were of graduation age, they showed signs of high anxiety, manic behaviour and schizophrenia. My friend Harry made it through high school, but soon after that he climbed out of his parents’ pool, went to his father’s bedroom, grabbed the gun from the top drawer, walked out the front door onto Rendell Boulevard and turned left on Mountain Brow Boulevard. He went barefoot and still soaking wet down Concession Street and into the Royal Bank with the pistol shoved in his Speedo. He pulled it out, pointed it at a teller’s head and ordered her to give him all the cash, which she did. Harry then jumped through a glass door and rolled onto the sidewalk. Cut and dizzy from his bank escape, he went up Mountain Park Avenue, over the jagged three-foot stone wall and leapt off the side of the escarpment into limestone, tree stumps and, luckily, mud. Still, he broke both ankles.
When the cops showed up at the Royal Bank, all the tellers had to do was point at the broken glass door and up to the brow, where the entire bank staff had watched Harry disappear over the edge. Harry entered the Barton Street jail, where he did the better part of a year before anyone noticed just how crazy he was and arrangements were made to have him carted back up the mountain to finish his time behind lock and key and lost inside a bottle of anti-psychotic medication at the HPH.
I ran into Harry and a couple more familiar faces when I took a little gig playing guitar and singing songs for twenty-five dollars every Wednesday to the droopy medicated eyelids of the criminally insane who were locked up for life in the HPH. The gig came my way via Bill Powell, who owned a three-storey house on Augusta Street, the first floor of which contained the Canvas Gallery with the Knight II Coffee House located on the second. The house was also home to Bill, his wife, Lynne, and their kids, Kim and Stefan. A palace of cable-knit sweaters and Earl Grey tea, it was also the headquarters for Festival of Friends, which happened every year down in the moneyed centre of the city on the wide green lawns of Gage Park.
Bill was always full of ideas, usually bad ideas that involved desperate young guys with acoustic guitars who would do anything to play in front of an audience. Besides running his giant festival, he also had handfuls of crappy gigs, from the African Lion Safari’s food patio to the opening of a Burger King restaurant to a ridiculous wandering minstrel show in the basement of the old Eaton’s department store.
I took them all, every single one of them. I even drove all the way to Pittsburgh to play at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in a tent full of deep fryers and drunk clowns making lame balloon animals for kids who’d been towed down to the city’s cultural centre by their half-witted parents. For three days, I walked around the tent with my guitar playing for people who obviously hated me. The deep fryers, the barbecues and the August sun beating down on the tent got to me and I almost passed out hourly. The extreme heat didn’t seem to affect the drunken clowns, but I guess I was just a little more delicate back then.
I wasn’t the only one to take Bill’s bait. Future members of the Shakers, Dave DesRoches and Rick Andrew, and Fred Eaglesmith took it too. Today Fred is as wily and gnarly and successful as any independent businessman strumming a guitar can be in this country. But back in the late seventies Fred was just another guy who needed twenty-five bucks, and for some reason getting locked behind barbed wire fences and steel doors to go deep inside the hallways of the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital didn’t seem to bother us. The gig may have scared off many less-driven, soft-handed folkies for life, but not me and Fred, and Bill knew it.
Getting thrown into a locked-down ward full of volatile madmen and madwomen was one of those things I didn’t notice myself doing until way after the fact. I took my cues from Bill Powell, who believed in me, but he was half-carney and half-artist himself. He wanted to sell my act under the banner “Indian Tom,” with one, only one feather sticking out of the back of my head. He had faith in music and culture and knew both were desperately needed in Hamilton. Folk music, independent art galleries. Long before Toronto turned its eyes towards us and decades before hipsters coined phrases like “art is the new steel,” Bill was the guy who took chances when no one else would. But I took a look around town and saw there was nothing happening for me to latch on to, and nothing that wanted to latch on to me. I’d heard someone say once that you’re not always born where you’re supposed to be. I thought maybe that was my cosmic problem. I had to get out. George Thorogood put a song of mine on hold for his new album and my friend Bruce Cameron was living in Hollywood, so I saw an opportunity and went off to take on the world.
L. A.
Johnny Lee’s “Looking for Love” was playing up and down Hollywood Boulevard day and night through every speaker, in front of every storefront and from the transistor radios and boom boxes held by lost souls wandering through time and space in L.A. The song was my soundtrack to failure.
Every morning I walked up Orchid Avenue and turned the corner towards the Howard Johnson’s for breakfast. Breakfast was mostly coffee and toast and peanut butter. It wasn’t that I couldn’t make that at home. It was just that I needed to get out of the apartment to feel alive, and there’s nothing that makes you feel more alive than being surrounded by death. I flew to L.A. in 1979 to give myself a bit of a change in scenery. I was reading Bukowski and listening to Tom Waits, and I knew Jim Morrison’s ghost was somewhere around here too, probably roaming the parking lots with Bobby Fuller and Sal Mineo and maybe Gram Parsons. The place stank of people dying to be stars, and of others dying as stars. It was crazy town, a neon morgue. Disney-style tourist traps hadn’t swooped in yet to clean up and take out the dead, so the stains were still on the bedsheets.
I was staying on Bruce’s couch in the living room of his apartment on the corner of Orchid and Franklin, a block from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Hollywood’s famous Magic Castle (the most unusual private club in the world) was in one direction, and the wilderness beyond the red carpets in the other. The world of people who didn’t quite make it.
I’ve often said I was in L.A. for months, but the fact of the matter is I went there to make a life and lasted about six weeks. I just couldn’t crack it. I felt frozen stiff, as though the world was racing ahead of me and I couldn’t get its attention. I remembered feeling this way when I was small and Bunny and George would shut down the house at five o’clock and go to bed. The world outside was alive, but I was dead, lying in bed like a prisoner as the summer sun went down. L.A. seemed to nail me to the floor in the same way.
The weeks went by and the money ran out until I was living off chilli dogs and playing my guitar for change in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I was earning enough to get by, but not enough to get out of there. At night, I’d drink wine and watch the low-riders show off, see drug deals and fights played out under giant billboards of Olivia Newton-John and Xanadu. I’d end up back at the apartment wishing I could fly off the couch and through the ceiling, over the mountains and into the deep blue, straight north to Ontario and home to Hamilton.
The only music connection I had in town was a singer I knew from Canada named Bill Hughes. I had opened some shows for him at the Knight II Coffee House, and he was a vague but approachable way in. Bill was a gifted songwriter and high-tech acoustic guitar player. He was also the writer of a catchy Life Savers TV commercial jingle that sat on the tip of North Americans’ tongues in the mid-seventies.
Bill had been in a band, Lazarus, who were signed to Bearsville Records and had lived in ultra-hippie Woodstock in the late sixties and early seventies. Rumour was they’d come up to Canada to do some gigs and stayed to avoid the Vietnam draft. They were managed by Albert Grossman, who also managed Bob Dylan, the Band and Janis Joplin, to name a few. I imagine the royalties for the Life Savers ad went into Grossman’s pocket and up the Band’s nose because Bill was not living the high life when I met him. Oh sure, Lazarus had a star quality that most coffee house performers in Canada lacked, but they were still hacking it out with the rest and the best of them.
I called Bill up and he was really cool. He’d been signed to Epic Records and was making a record for them, and he had a manager in L.A. He invited me out to play a few songs at a gig he had in a club on the Redondo Beach pier. He even got his manager to pick us up on Orchid Avenue. We all drove down to the gig in his manager’s BMW, Bill and his manager lying back in the front seat lighting up joints and passing them back to me and Bruce.
Turns out Bill was playing in a cocktail bar with a tiny stage. He looked and sounded great up there, glasses tinkling and smoke everywhere. Bruce and I got up and played a few songs, but we sucked.
The best part of the night was the amount of hash Bill’s manager had on him. Big cubes of the stuff, about half an ounce each. We all went out between sets to smoke under the pier, and during one of those breaks I asked him what a cube of his hash went for. I don’t remember what he told me, but he did ask me if I’d be interested in selling some for him down in Hollywood. I had no money of course, but I convinced him to front me two of the cubes, promising I’d have the money back to him in a week. I told him I’d been playing for change on the boulevard and had got to know my clientele. Amazingly he said yes. Bam—I was in business.
I went from a hack with an old Yamaha guitar banging out Merle Haggard songs to an official Hollywood Boulevard drug dealer. I knew I had to stay cool though. I had to remain the pimple-faced kid out there busking for change if I wanted to blend in and keep out of the way of the other dealers.
I went back to the apartment and cut the hash up into ten-dollar quantities. I vowed I’d only work the trade during the daytime, high tourist flow. My little plan worked, and within the week I had the money back to Bill’s manager and was picking up four more cubes to take back and sell. Within three weeks I saved enough money to buy an airline ticket home.
I landed at LAX unprepared, and I flew out of there a little more knowledgeable and a free man. I left my first love, folk, so that I could find an audience for my music. I stopped wearing my idols on my sleeve. I still loved Willie P. Bennett, Stan Rogers, Paul Langille and David Wiffen, but I traded them in for a Gretsch Nashville and a Fender amp. I kept writing folk music, but now it was loud. It got me an audience that was turned on and excited about music, and as a result I was excited about music again.
INSPIRATION
By the time I got home from L.A., it felt like everything had changed. Two months had gone by in Hollywood, but it seemed like years had passed back home. Dave DesRoches and Rick Andrew had been opening shows for Teenage Head in the late seventies, and while I was away selling hash and eating chilli dogs on Hollywood Boulevard, they were busy writing amazing songs and putting together the Shakers, a band that would flatten all bands that got in their way.
Dave DesRoches became Dave Rave, and as the Shakers, he and Rick Andrew hit their stride, and fast. They had lots of stage time as an acoustic duo, but coffee houses didn’t know what to make of them. They played songs like “Poison Ivy” by the Coasters and “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues” by Arthur Alexander, and their original songs didn’t have any obvious reminders of Dylan, Cohen or Joni Mitchell. The folkies hated them, just as they hated Fred Eaglesmith and me. It’s no wonder Dave and Rick went in front of punk and rock-and-roll audiences, who were more open-minded and confident about their music tastes.
Dave’s cousin Claude was recruited to play drums, and Tim Gibbons to play guitar. Tim’s parents had come to Hamilton from Newfoundland, met each other at an East Coaster social and settled about seven blocks from Bunny and George’s place. Big Bill Gibbons’s roots were country music and the whole family loved it. They once went to see Hank Snow at the Hamilton Forum and the public address system broke down. “No mics, no speakers,” said Bill Gibbons, “but you could hear Hank Snow clear as a bell.” Tim had great taste and genius instincts about what to preach on and what to leave behind. I filled napkins in diners with things he said that I later put into songs, and he didn’t think twice about the great one-line poems he shot across the table while devouring bacon and eggs. Dave Rave and Tim Gibbons were dreamers, and their music made every fibre of my being come alive.
THE FLORIDA RAZORS
We were all just kids, but my band the Florida Razors may have been just a bit older than the rest of the pack. I was the proper age to be in the knuckle-headed trenches of 1981, but the rest of the band flew in from different planets and time warps.
Carl Keesee was a bass player from Oklahoma. An American who came to Canada for a gig and never went home, he was like an exotic desert creature you’d find on the side of the road. There was no one like him around town, and no one who could play the bass as well as him. He was in Lazarus with Bill Hughes, so had the Life Savers success as well. I met Jason Avery at the Knight II Coffee House. He was a folkie guy who loved country music and the French gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt—which was not on the listening list for most punk bands around town. He played every note loud and with unexpected phrasings. His guitar solos made our audiences dance like they were auditioning for parts in a shaky pre-war cartoon. Greg Cannon was from the East Mountain. He was a total rounder and looked like an ex–speed freak, but his claim to fame was having played in a popular local band called Buxton Castle. He wore that era head to toe: handlebar moustache, long dirty-blond hair, bell bottoms, and platform shoes that he’d strut around in to give himself extra height. He hit his drums like they were running away on him. He was a monster.
We were from Hamilton: we were nuts and our options were limited, so we played rock and roll because it was all we had and it was all that made sense to us. I think all those young fellas like the Tragically Hip who came to see us sensed we meant business and that’s what they loved about us. They sensed guts. They felt the fear and excitement of Hamilton. There was a danger in what was coming out of Steeltown.
Teenage Head marched into Toronto and made off with the whole scene for the same reason. While most Toronto punk bands were posing with guitars and safety pins through their noses, Teenage Head was in the basement practising, getting it right so that when Gord Lewis turned up his Marshall amp, the sound that came out was like nothing else north of Johnny Ramone.
I had no idea what we were doing. I just wanted to play in a band that could play fast and loud and without apologies. We strayed off the beaten path and brought our frantic rock and roll to the draft room, Legion Hall and tobacco-country hotel circuit of Highway 6. It was tough down there, and if you didn’t want to get a screwdriver in your ear or a fist up your arse, you’d better think fast and play faster. So we did.
We rode the 401 from Detroit to Montreal playing every hole and Queen’s Hotel we could find. We hit town in those days with the intent to survive, and I had a “to-do list” of mental and physical chores that had to be executed to keep us in tip-top shape and keep the wheels on the road financially. Because we played six nights a week in the same spot, and played three or four shows a night, we lived upstairs above the bar. We felt right at home to run up a mighty bar tab, stole food from the kitchen after hours to cook on a hotplate we carried with us, sold weed and speed to the patrons under the nose of the local dealers, partied with the locals after hours, screwed the waitresses, got in fist fights with owners, waited for the cash—no cheques ever—and on Saturday night, we got the hell out of there.
You do stupid things, when you’re hungry.