CHAPTER TWO

I was born August 12, 1944, in the old Mount Sinai Hospital on Yorkville Avenue in the middle of Toronto. Strangely enough, it was within a few yards of that hospital that I would begin to make my mark in the world some eighteen years later, at a time when Yorkville was emerging as the epicentre of Canada’s burgeoning music industry.

I think of it as a strange coincidence because I could have been born anywhere in the world where there was a Canadian air force base. My father was in the Royal Canadian Air Force and he was constantly being posted to new places. Many years later, it was Toronto where my father would choose to retire with me, my sister, Rozanne, and my mother, Eve.

What I mostly remember from my childhood is the constant moving. Some of it was great fun, like going to England on an ocean liner or crossing Canada on old steam trains. But some of it was pretty unnerving. Imagine being the only Finkelstein in small towns in the 1950s and early ’60s and you’ll know what I mean. I learned how to make friends and to be alone at the same time. I learned how to fight and how to negotiate my way out of fights; how to survive and move on. But before I leave you with the wrong impression, let me say that I had a happy childhood that prepared me well for the life I was to live in the music business. My mother always told the story about one of those train voyages across the country during which I returned to our compartment in the sleeper car with my pockets full of change. Apparently I had gone through the dining car and picked up all the tips, not understanding why the money had been left on the tables. She made me take it all back to the chief dining car steward, who had a good laugh at my expense and then gave me a tip for being honest. They don’t teach you that in school.

Over the years, we lived in Edmonton, Winnipeg, Trenton, Toronto, and Nottingham, England. I attended about thirteen schools and, in the end, never finished grade eleven. Clearly, I was a terrible student.

In 1955, the RCAF transferred my father to England. To me, at eleven years old, it seemed like it was going to be the worst thing that could happen. I’d be going so far away, I thought, that they wouldn’t have Coke in cans or grilled cheese sandwiches. We were to be stationed to RCAF Langar, an airbase outside of Nottinghamshire. Langar was the supply base for the five fighter wings that Canada had stationed in Germany and France. The Second World War had ended only ten years earlier and Canada was doing its part for NATO, which included maintaining a mission in West Germany. RCAF Langar was adjacent to the tiny village of Radcliffe-on-Trent and about fifteen miles from the city of Nottingham. We sailed to England on the SS Homeric, a grand transatlantic ship flying the Italian flag. It left from Quebec City, where my grandfather had arrived when he immigrated to Canada from Russia. It was the first time I had ever been on a ship that size. Spending six days at sea, some of them very rough, was the kind of adventure I loved. The ship was a floating palace with a swimming pool, a library, a shuffleboard, and several decks where I was able to spend loads of time just staring out to sea.

The SS Homeric crossed the Atlantic to the French port of Le Havre, and then moved on to Liverpool, where we disembarked. The first thing I remember discovering about England was that, my God, I was right, there was no cola, just something called mineral water. We made our way from Liverpool to Nottingham, where we occupied a flat on the second floor of an old house right in the centre of the city. (The Canadian airbase didn’t have its married quarters finished yet but eventually we moved onto the base.)

Of course I knew Nottingham as the home of Robin Hood and it didn’t take me long to get caught up in the romance of those legendary tales. The city was dominated by Nottingham Castle, and everywhere you went there were statues of one kind or another dedicated to Robin and his Merry Men. I was particularly taken by an old pub from the thirteenth century now called “Ye Old Trip to Jerusalem.” Local lore had it that this had been a place where knights would go to have a pint. After someone, perhaps the bartender, had spiked their drinks, the knights would pass out and be dropped down a tunnel hidden under a trap door located just behind the bar. At the bottom of the tunnel there was a small stream that led directly to the ocean, where the knights would be heaved into a small rowboat that then carried them downstream to a larger ocean-going ship. By the time the knights had regained consciousness, they were halfway to Jerusalem, where they’d be forced into battle against the Saracens during the Crusades.

Our house was near a park called Sherwood Forest, although the real Sherwood Forest was just outside the city. Rob from the rich and give to the poor – I think that idea stayed with me as I made my way through the world.

But I wasn’t the only one to arrive in the U.K. in 1955. So did Elvis, with a force that hit the Island like a tsunami. I was already being seduced by the music of Bill Haley, who with his band the Comets recorded “Rock Around the Clock” and “See You Later, Alligator.” Everyone was talking about the birth of something new called rock ‘n’ roll. I remember, in particular, Elvis’s cover of Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” his second release on Sun Records. It contained the memorable lines, “I heard the news there’s good rocking tonight.” I think that song set me on a road that I’m still travelling today.

For my birthday that summer, my parents bought me a small record player, the kind that opened like a brief case. You lifted up the top and there it was in all its splendour: a turntable, an arm with a needle, and a speaker. Along with it were three 78s: Guy Mitchell’s “Singing the Blues,” Frankie Vaughan’s “The Green Door” (Jim Lowe had the hit version of this in North America), and also Elvis’s unforgettable version of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” with “Heartbreak Hotel” on the B-side. God bless my parents.

For me and rock ‘n’ roll it was instant love. Not that this was the first time I’d had records. When I was five and living just outside of Edmonton in Jasper Place, I had loads of kids’ records that came complete with picture books. You’d put the record on, read along with the story, and when there was a beep or a bell you would turn the page. I was in grade one at Jasper Place Public School at the time. Many years later, in 2005, my long career in the music business brought me an improbable honour: the Order of Canada. One of the many nice and unexpected consequences of that event was a phone call I received shortly after the ceremony. An elderly woman’s voice asked, “Is that Bernie Finkelstein? Is it the Bernie Finkelstein that once went to school at Jasper Place Public School?”

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“Well,” the lady said, “it’s Miss Brower, your teacher from grade one.”

Unbelievable! On the phone was my favourite teacher of all time. She’d been retired for years, living on a farm just outside of Red Deer. Miss Brower had read about my award in the local paper. She told me that she always knew I would do something of note, that she could tell from my bright shiny eyes in school that I was going somewhere, somehow. I think I fell in love with her at that moment, for the second time.

England turned out to be one of the greatest experiences of my life. At first I attended Cambridge House, a public school, which in Canada we would call a private school. Going to Cambridge House meant wearing a uniform – a school cap, tie, and jacket, a blue blazer with a crest – the whole works. I adjusted, but not as well as I could have, I guess. I kept getting into trouble with the teachers, usually for not doing my schoolwork. (The only subject I liked was English Literature.) The normal punishment was to be caned, usually on the palms, but occasionally you had to bend over with your hands on your knees and take it on the rear end. That was the English way, at least at that school.

I receive the Order of Canada from Michaëlle Jean

I was the only Canadian in the school. With the great interest in all things American, brought on by the success of Elvis and rock ‘n’ roll – and with the kids assuming that being Canadian really meant I was American – I became a popular student. I was also the only kid with a brush cut, which was considered quintessentially American. Naturally, I became the expert on all things North American. To be honest, I knew very little, but since Canada and the U.S. shared so many cultural trends, I talked knowledgeably about yo-yos, Bolo bats, baseball, hockey, chewing gum with cards, and all the usual kid stuff we had in Canada.

When Elvis’s first movie, Love Me Tender, opened, my parents took me to see it. I cried, not because it was so moving, but because it only had one song in it. At twelve, I had already become a hard-core music fan. They also took me to see Buddy Holly & the Crickets when that great band played a concert in a movie theatre in Nottingham. That was one of the greatest thrills of my young life. Over on the left-hand side of the stage, a mike had been set up on a stand only two or three feet off the stage floor. Every once in awhile, Buddy would go over and lean into that mike, singing and strumming his guitar for theatrical effect. I was amazed and delighted. I count myself lucky to have seen Buddy Holly & the Crickets in person. Buddy truly was one of the great musical innovators of all time.

Later on, after we had moved from Nottingham to Radcliffe-on-Trent to be nearer to the airbase in Langar, my week’s big activity was the Saturday morning trip on the double-decker bus into Nottingham to hear the latest records that were coming into the shops. I would stand in line in front of a sound booth that had a turntable and a headset. Finally I’d get my chance to listen to the new releases. If luck was smiling my way I’d have a few shillings to buy a record or two.

Usually we were the only Jewish family stationed on base, either in England or back in Canada. My bar mitzvah at a local synagogue in Nottingham turned out to be quite the public event. The Canadian air force was big news in the Nottingham area and when it turned out the commanding officer was coming to the synagogue for the ceremony, I made the front page of the daily paper in a picture with my dad and the commanding officer. It wasn’t often that a member of a Canadian Forces family had a bar mitzvah in England, so it became a bit of a public relations event for both the air force and the synagogue.

My dad and I at my bar mitzvah in Nottingham, England

My father, Harold, was a non-commissioned officer in the air force. By the time he retired his rank was warrant officer class 2. I used to joke that he was the Phil Silvers of the Canadian air force. Phil Silvers played Master Sergeant Bilko, a wisecracking wheeler-dealer on the wildly popular ’50s TV show The Phil Silvers Show. To be fair to my father, he really wasn’t much like Ernie Bilko. Still, I could see the similarities, and in many ways enjoyed the comparison.

Shortly after my bar mitzvah we moved from Nottingham right onto the Canadian base at Langar and I enrolled in what was called a secondary school in the small town of Radcliffe-on-Trent. This was entirely a different kind of school from Cambridge House. Here I was surrounded by kids who weren’t going to go on to colleges or universities. It was a working-class school and I enjoyed it as much as I did Cambridge House, even though I was only there for about half a year before I started going to another new school on the airbase itself.

Around this time a new kind of music, called skiffle, was sweeping England. Skiffle was usually played by a trio with a washboard, a guitar, and a tea-chest bass. It was a strange amalgamation of old-time jug band music, country music, and blues. Lonnie Donegan was its leading progenitor. Donegan would have many hits including his cover of “Rock Island Line,” “Cumberland Gap,” and “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O.” About ten years later the Lovin’ Spoonful would ride the same influence of jug band music to enormous success. It wasn’t long before I found myself in a skiffle group playing the tea-chest bass. I wasn’t too good at it, but, boy, did I have fun.

In October of 2008 I had the occasion to talk about my introduction to skiffle. It was during my acceptance speech for the Estelle Klein Award for Lifetime Achievement, from the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals.

I told the gathering about hearing this song “Diggin’ My Potatoes” on BBC radio by Lonnie Donegan. Soon after, I decided to call the station to request the song, but when I finally got through I was told the record had been banned. Banned … wow! When I figured out what that meant, I ran right out and bought the record, and my skiffle group made that song a regular part of our repertoire.

So, as a teenager, I had already learned the value of having something banned. I wish it had happened more often to my artists during my career! The few times it did always led to something good, even if the banning itself was an uncomfortable experience. When U.S. stations began to ban Bruce Cockburn’s “Call It Democracy,” I found myself in several knock-down, drag-’em-out fights with our record company. Yet, in the end, the song found its audience, and it remains one of Bruce’s most popular songs, even these many years later. I have always said that when a song is banned in the U.S. it gets noticed, but when it’s banned in Canada it stays unknown. Another way to put this is to say that Canadians are very good at sweeping things under the carpet, while Americans are very good at selling the carpets.

Part of being in a skiffle group meant going to public contests where the various bands would compete for fame and glory. By the late ’50s there were an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 skiffle groups in Britain. It turns out that John Lennon was listening to exactly the same songs on the radio as me, at the same time that I was. He had formed a skiffle group called the Quarrymen, which became the foundation for the Beatles. I’ve often wondered if our little group and the Quarrymen might have played at some of the same contests. What I do know for sure is that we never won a contest. But, hey, I was playing in the band, even if it was the first and last time I ever played music in public.

Curiously, for a guy who has made a career out of representing performers, being a performer myself was never a big obsession of mine. I was too busy listening and enjoying the music to learn how to play it, even though I can think of no talent that I admire more than the ability to write and play a great song.

While in England I also got my first tape recorder, an old Studer reel-to-reel, and started using it to record songs from the radio, usually late at night. There was no commercial radio in England during this period. The BBC had a government-sanctioned monopoly on the airwaves and didn’t really embrace rock ‘n’ roll.

However, a reaction against the dominance of the BBC developed around this time: pirate radio. The most famous station, Radio Luxembourg, broadcast at night from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, a tiny country bordered by France, Germany, and Belgium. During the ’50s, Luxembourg’s stations targeted the growing teenage market by emphasizing pop music, similar to top-forty radio stations in North America. (By the early ’60s, pop music stations like Radio Caroline and Radio London began providing the same service by broadcasting pop music from ships anchored in international waters.) I used to stay up late into the night taping the various shows on Radio Luxembourg so I could listen to the music whenever I wanted to.

Sometimes the disc jockeys would only play part of the records, like maybe a minute and a half, but still, what great stuff I was listening to: the Everly Brothers, Mickey & Sylvia, the Coasters, the Del-Vikings, Johnnie & Joe. Such terrific music and just about all of it holds up today. Strange to think about taping the music way back then, in light of today’s controversy over digital downloading and copyright infringement. I guess there really isn’t anything new under the sun.

My parents encouraged me to join the boy scouts, and I agreed to give it a try. By chance, a World Jamboree was to be held in England during 1957 and my troop was selected to go. It was held for a week in a place called Sutton Park, outside of Birmingham, and would end on August 12, my birthday. Well, it turned out to be a week of incredible heat coupled with torrential rains that seemed, to me, of biblical proportions. I soon had enough of waking up to a soaking tent and wet food. Without warning either my scout master or my parents back home, I took off from the campsite.

Around the time my scout troop, and no doubt the Jamboree’s organizers, were sounding the alarm that a boy had gone missing, I had stopped at an outdoor pavilion with a long lineup in front of a jukebox. (The English would queue up for anything and everything.) I got in the line, and when my turn came, I deposited my sixpence and played “Young Blood” by the Coasters. Later that day, I was picked up by the local police and my parents arrived at the camp to take me home. I don’t recall celebrating my birthday that summer but I remember playing that Coasters record like it was only yesterday, and it’s a record I still like a lot.

So the die was cast. The sound and message of rock ‘n’ roll were a stronger lure to me than anything else. No boy scout badges or even my parents’ most fervent wishes for me could hope to compete with the powerful attraction of that jukebox and its treasures in that park.

Soon after my ill-fated episode with the boy scouts, we were transferred back to Canada, this time to Eighth Wing in Trenton, Ontario. Again we sailed on a grand ship, a Canadian Pacific liner called Empress of England. After the six-day ocean crossing we stopped to visit relatives in Ottawa on our way to the base in Trenton. There I was at fifteen, in Canada again after a three-year absence, excited to be back in the world of baseball and hockey, and within striking distance of the home of rock ‘n’ roll. We spent a few days at my grandmother’s cottage in Britannia, now an Ottawa neighbourhood but at that time a small town to the west of the city. The cottage was really small – just a couple of rooms and a tiny, always crowded kitchen – but very magical to me. The family of Lorne Greene, the CBC news anchorman – who that year began a new job playing Pa Cartwright on a U.S. TV show called Bonanza, which would make him a star – lived next door, but I don’t remember meeting Lorne Greene while I was there. I spent most of my time reading Comics Illustrated and drinking loads of Pure Spring pop. It was summer, and life was good.

When the talk with my Ottawa cousins turned to music, some interesting things became apparent. When I enthused about the song “Tutti Frutti,” surely one of the greatest records ever made by Little Richard, they didn’t know what I was talking about. They’d been listening to Pat Boone’s version of “Tutti Frutti” on local radio. And the same thing was true for many other songs, including Pat Boone’s cover version of the great Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame.” There was no comparison in the quality of the recordings or performances. The originals were, well, primal, and the covers were like white bread. Something was wrong here, but what was it?

Several years later I understood it to be race discrimination on radio playlists. A fact of life in the U.S., but a sad commentary on Canadian radio’s willingness to play follow the leader. All of this would have a big impact on me later in my career but, at fifteen, I didn’t really know anything about radio, other than that I enjoyed listening to it.

While my father worked at the military base in Trenton, I furthered my education. I learned to drive, shoot pool, smoke cigarettes, and find a bootlegger. By then I didn’t just like music, the way other teenagers did; I couldn’t get enough of it. Everything from Elvis and Buddy Holly to Chuck Berry and Little Richard. But there was more, not just rock ‘n’ roll but the records that my parents liked: Sinatra, the show tunes from Broadway, Judy Garland. You name it, I liked it. The big event of my day was turning on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand after I got home from school and watching the dancers move to the hit records.

About the only time I wasn’t listening to music was when I was in the pool hall in downtown Trenton. Shortly after we’d arrived in town I found my way there. It was on the main drag and there was something about it that instantly attracted me. The dark room, lit by shaded lamps hanging over the tables, the air filled with smoke and a slight scent of danger, gave me the the feeling I was a character in a noir movie. The sound of the balls bouncing off each other on the green felt was as clear and crisp as the sound of twigs snapping on a cold winter day. Everything seemed urgent in a pool hall – the constant state of suspense at each table put everything else into sharp relief. My kind of place for sure.

I got pretty good at the game, too. Good enough to play for money. One of the unwritten rules of pool is that what counts “isn’t what you make, but what you leave.” There’s no sense trying to make an impressive shot if it could leave an easy set-up on the table for your opponent.

I had a bit of natural skill in me, and more than a little of the natural-born hustler. Sure, I loved shooting pool – but I really loved it when I was playing for money. The game I most liked was called golf, played on the largest table in the room, usually with five or six players. The object was to use the shared white cue ball to shoot your assigned coloured ball into all six pockets clockwise around the table. When it was your turn, you had to shoot the cue ball from wherever the player before you had left it. It was truly a game of skill and strategy. Sometimes we’d also put little mini skittles around the table to make the game even tougher. Points were added to your score any time you scratched, or knocked over, a skittle. Once you got your colour ball into the pocket, every stroke after that counted against you. The player with the most points against him would pay everyone above him, right through to the top player, who would be collecting from all the people below him. As you can imagine, it was a cutthroat game, but loads of fun. Depending how much you were playing for per stroke, you could win – or lose – a lot of money. I started spending more time in the pool hall than at school, but I was getting an education anyway.

My father taught me to drive around the base in his 1956 blue and white Chevy Bel Air. It was just a six-cylinder, but what a great car it was. There was nothing like having several square miles of almost deserted roads on which to practice. I just had to make sure I steered clear of big planes taxiing by. It didn’t take me long to get my license, and shortly after that I had my first night out, alone with the car.

One of the other things I learned at the pool hall was where and how to buy a mickey or two from a bootlegger. Off I went with a couple of friends to visit the town’s friendly dealer of illicit alcohol. Sadly for me, it happened to be the night the cops were staking him out, and when they saw three teenagers driving away with a couple of bottles of rum, they just couldn’t resist making the arrest. A few minutes later, I was in the local jail. It wouldn’t be the last time I would spend a bit of time behind bars, but it was the scariest. My father and mother were not pleased, and it took me a few months to get the car again.

Do you want to know the definition of paradise for a sixteen-year-old? Driving and music. There just wasn’t anything better in the world. Rolling the window down and cranking the radio up as loud as you could. And it was paradise, four years later, hearing one of the first records I was involved with playing on the car radio. It’s still a big thrill when I’m lucky enough to hear them today.

Still, when I was sixteen, I didn’t have a single thought about being involved in music. I knew as much about the music business as I knew about physics, which was nothing at all, judging by my report cards. I just loved the songs. I thought these records magically appeared like some sort of manna from heaven. Records like “Cathy’s Clown” by the Everly Brothers, “Stay” by Maurice Williams, “Stagger Lee” by Lloyd Price, and “Running Bear” by Johnny Preston, to name but a few that were all over the radio at the time. It never occurred to me that there was a business involving music. This subject wasn’t on my school’s curriculum, or anywhere near the air base, or at my primary hangout, the pool hall. If I had any ambition at all back then, it might have been to become a professional pool hustler.

At school dances, I mostly leaned against the back wall or stood outside smoking, but I loved hearing the music. Usually there’d be a DJ playing records but occasionally we’d have a live band. The sound of a record from the back of a gym is pretty impressive. This hit home years later, when we were doing Murray McLauchlan’s one-off single “Little Dreamer.” (I always really liked this song even though it wasn’t one of Murray’s biggest records.) While we were doing the final mix, I asked the recording engineer to make it sound like we were listening from the back of a high-school gym. He knew exactly what I meant and I think we got the sound right.