CHAPTER SEVEN

In early 1968 I met a character who was, in his way, having as large an influence around the city as any musician, politician, or artist. His name was Brazilian George and, as his name suggests, he was originally from Brazil. He had told us, and we had no reason to doubt him, that he and his brother Tony had left Brazil after one of that country’s many political upheavals. He was from the town of Manaus, he said, deep in the heart of the Amazon where the Negro and Solimöes Rivers met. He claimed to have walked out of the jungle when he left Brazil, then ended up settling in the Toronto area and gravitating to Yorkville.

George was a big fan of the Market. He was dealing, mostly soft stuff like acid and grass, but also starting to get involved with a hallucinogen called MDA. They used to call MDA the love drug because it had the tendency to make you feel rather blissed out. MDA, a phenylethylamine, was, in chemical terms, a forerunner to Ecstasy, a recreational drug that became popular in the late ’80s in gay dance clubs and then spread into straight clubs. George was at the heart of the distribution hub for MDA and he was doing it rather well.

I’ll say again that in hindsight I’m not always proud of my early connections to the world of drugs. Yet those were the times, and my involvement was always limited to soft drugs, nothing hard and nothing that required needles. Drug use was an inseparable part of the world I inhabited and, honestly, it didn’t seem wrong at the time. I don’t apologize for it but in the end I was lucky to get out alive. Some of the people I knew didn’t. Would I do it again? Maybe. Further down the line I did step away from all drugs other than the odd toke now and then. But I was young and it was a big part of the culture and certainly a big part of the music scene, so I threw caution to the wind and got involved in it with abandon.

Brazilian George was an appealing person and we became fast friends. You might say he was the nicer side of the Tony Montana character played by Al Pacino in the movie Scarface. He and most of the band members hit it off. It wasn’t unusual to see George and his pals at our shows and the band spent plenty of reciprocal time at his house. MDA was becoming a popular drug in Toronto and money was never in short supply around George’s house. Many in George’s orbit passed the time blasting the latest albums on his very expensive sound system, doing MDA, and partying into the early hours of the morning and even well into the next day, sometimes for several days in a row.

Plans were proceeding for the Market’s first tour of the U.S. We were to open with four days in New York at the Bitter End, which was right across Bleecker Street from the Café Au Go Go. We were scheduled to do shows at several of the famous ballrooms across the country, including a three-day stand at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, September 5–7, where we were on a bill with Chuck Berry and the Steve Miller Band. There would be stops in L.A., Chicago, and Detroit, and then a headlining concert back in Toronto at the Rock Pile (today the headquarters of MTV Canada).

Bart Schoales had become our de facto tour manager and he was making the arrangements to get our equipment shipped to New York. At this time, we were using some pretty high-tech gear made in Toronto by a company called Wire. I’d been told that Kensington Market was one of the loudest bands anyone had heard. I don’t know if this was true but I’ll take people’s word for it. What I do know is that the amps were very large and well made, and literally weighed a ton. I know this from helping to move them around – part of the glamorous life of a manager in those days.

By the time we played the shows at the Bitter End, the record had received a favourable review in Rolling Stone. (In Canada, music journalist Ritchie Yorke had already written in the Globe and Mail that it was “probably the finest album ever cut by a Canadian group.”)

On the evening before we were scheduled to fly to San Francisco, Bart told the band they should get rid of any drugs they had before getting to the airport. In other words, use it or flush it. We were all so inexperienced that we somehow thought there would be a customs search at the airport, even though the domestic flight we were on was between New York and San Francisco. Live and learn. The next morning everybody got rid of their drugs all right, but instead of throwing them away, we took them all. Bart recalls being so high that the airplane disappeared while he was sitting in it somewhere over the Grand Canyon. I’ll have to take his word for it as I can hardly remember the flight at all. What I do remember is Keith McKie, carrying a metal suitcase, walking right through the plate-glass doors of New York’s Gorham Hotel. He’d swung that suitcase in front of him and shattered the glass into thousands of tiny pieces but kept right on walking as though nothing had happened and stepped calmly into the cab waiting to take him to the airport. I heard later that Warner Brothers had picked up the cost of replacing the doors.

When the plane arrived in San Francisco I had finally reached the city of my early dreams. Only four years after moving out of my parents’ house in Downsview with a vague idea of going down the road, I found myself in the city of Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums, and of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, only now it was also the city of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Our temple would be the Fillmore West rather than Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookshop, although I took it all in and happily spent an hour or two at the store. It was there that I bought my first copy of the Whole Earth Catalog, a magazine that was to come in handy just a year or so later. But for now, there couldn’t have been a better place to be than San Francisco. It was loose, free, and vibrant. Everything seemed to be happening there.

We made our way over to the Fillmore on September 5, the afternoon of the first show. Bill Graham, easily the most famous rock promoter in the world, was there to greet us. Bill could be a pretty tough guy with a no-nonsense attitude – you didn’t want to cross him. (I remember an article where he was quoted as saying that he knew things were over with the Jefferson Airplane when the band made it seem like they were performing a ballet when they were simply crossing the road.) He was also an extraordinarily hard worker, which I really admired. Here he was, helping us unload our truck and set up our amps. Talk about high-priced help!

I had met Bill in New York during the Paupers’ shows with the Airplane and again in Toronto for the free City Hall concert at Nathan Phillips Square, which had featured the Dead, the Airplane, and Luke & the Apostles. Bill operated three of the most influential venues in America – the Fillmore West and Winterland in San Francisco and the Fillmore East in New York. He had helped to popularize both the style and the look of the movement with the wonderful posters being designed for the shows he was presenting. (Today, the wildly imaginative imagery and hallucinatory typography of these posters, by artists like Wes Wilson and Stanley Mouse, have made them valuable collector’s items.) Even though the show was being headlined by Chuck Berry and included another notable act, the Steve Miller Band, Bill had commissioned a poster dominated by a Canadian moose done up in full psychedelic style. It was a tribute to the Market and I thought it a great honour.

That night, the Steve Miller Band opened the show, with the Market performing next and then Chuck Berry playing last, backed by the Steve Miller Band. Chuck didn’t carry around his own backup musicians at that time. The show had been sold out for weeks and the house was packed. People were sprawled all over the floor, with some standing at the back and along the sides. An overpowering smell of hash, grass, and incense filled the air. The house light show, which included plenty of strobe lights flashing constantly, was almost like having a fourth act on the bill. Everyone who came to the show was given a poster on the way in.

Felix Pappalardi and other top Warner people had flown in from New York, and were hanging out with the entire San Francisco branch. Backstage, it felt more like a carnival than a dressing room area, and everyone was smoking some of the strongest pot I’d ever had. To say we were all getting stoned would be an understatement of the highest magnitude. Brazilian George was there along with many of our other friends. He was handing out MDA to everyone backstage, calling it a gift in return for the generosity of Owsley Stanley, who was the first to manufacture large quantities of pure LSD. He gave away tabs of acid by the thousands throughout the Bay area, leading some to say he was responsible for psychedelic music, if not the entire hippie movement.

At one point during the evening, while Steve Miller was onstage, Chuck Berry joined us for a backstage toke. Chuck was wearing one of those waiter-style jackets he was famous for and George, not recognizing him, assumed he actually was a waiter and politely asked him for a Coke. You’d think Chuck Berry would have been insulted but instead he simply got George his Coke. Later that evening, when Chuck was onstage, he gave George a wave and a wink. I think Chuck got pretty high that night along with the rest of us.

Kensington Market at the Fillmore West

It was time for the Market to take the stage. I went out into the audience and joined Felix, who was sitting in the middle of the ballroom, and the band hit the stage. How were they that night? I would say they alternated between great and bad but were consistently really loud. As the show built, I could feel the band and the audience getting higher and higher. In some ways it was a completely free-style performance. Sometimes it seemed like they were all playing different numbers simultaneously, and every once in a while the music seemed to be soaring to new heights. I don’t think that even this thoroughly hip, music-savvy San Francisco crowd had ever seen or heard anything quite like it before. When the band played its last number, a song called “Ring On Good Times” (a number they unfortunately never did record), Keith’s performance was so intense that he actually bent the mike stand while leaning on it, slowly bending over and outwards towards the audience. Try bending a mike stand sometime. It’s no easy feat. I know that I can’t do it.

Felix was astounded and kept telling me that this was awful and great at the same time. Of course, he wasn’t exactly straight either. I think on balance it was a show where the band just got too stoned, and the combination of the adrenaline rush with the over-the-top psychedelic atmosphere of the Fillmore completely overwhelmed them. I’d have to call the evening a draw. At the next two shows, calmer and clearer heads prevailed, and they had fine concerts.

Then it was off to Los Angeles for shows September 12–15 at the Whisky a Go-Go, the mecca of rock. Located along the Sunset Strip, which was always lined with cars, the club was jammed with people throughout the night. It was the home of the Byrds; the Buffalo Springfield; Arthur Lee and his band, Love; and the Doors. The Whisky was also where the great Otis Redding had recorded his famous live album two years earlier. The club had given its name to the mid-sixties go-go craze, personified by the Whisky’s house artist, Johnny Rivers.

Before going to the club, we checked into the Tropicana Motel, L.A.’s equivalent of the Chelsea Hotel, only with sunshine, on Santa Monica Boulevard. The Tropicana was owned by the greatest left-handed baseball pitcher of all time, Sandy Koufax. He had been a hero of mine when I was a kid and a rabid Brooklyn (later Los Angeles) Dodgers fan. I don’t know which made me more excited, to be in Sandy’s motel or to be in a room right beside Sly Stone from Sly & the Family Stone. The Tropicana, which was a few storeys high and built in a square surrounding a kidney-shaped outdoor pool, was notorious. Jim Morrison lived there off and on and record companies booked out-of-town bands in its rooms, which were often trashed during all-night parties. Sadly, it was also the motel where Janis Joplin was found dead just a few years later.

The Tropicana was home to Duke’s Coffee Shop, which became known as a musician’s hangout. Its regulars included Tom Waits, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Rickie Lee Jones, along with many local and out-of-town musicians and groupies staying at the hotel. Duke’s was known as a place where you could get anything you wanted, not the least of which was the best freshly squeezed orange juice and breakfast in the world.

We had a day off so we were hanging around the pool taking it easy when our old friend Nick St. Nicholas, the bassist from Steppenwolf, appeared. Nick asked us to come to his room so he could play us a new song he had just finished writing. There, we lit a joint and he pulled out his guitar. We could barely hear him over the sound of the air conditioner but then we realized that the new song he said he’d written was Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” When he finished, he asked us what we thought. Unsure whether Nick was having fun with us or really believed he’d written it, we told him it was great and he should think about recording it. That night, we all went down the road to Barney’s Beanery for dinner but the subject of his new song didn’t come up again. Given the times, it all seemed like just another normal day on the road.

For our three nights at Whisky the headliner was Spooky Tooth, the British group whose first album had just been released, and the opening act was the Chicago Transit Authority, a band that had recently moved from Chicago to L.A., signed with Columbia Records, and released its first album. Chicago Transit Authority was, for a while, the house band at the Whisky. Later the name was shortened to Chicago, and it became among the most successful and long-running pop-rock groups in history. At the time, though, the band seemed quite ordinary to us, though its members were nice people to work with. The Market performed well but the guys were underwhelmed by the crowd, which was large but rather subdued. Keith McKie thought the majority of the audience members were on Quaaludes and he may have been right. It’s also possible that it was just an ordinary audience and the members of the Market were spinning at a faster than normal speed.

Joe Smith came to the club one night and was quite encouraging about the band. He also regaled us with stories about working with the Grateful Dead. I understood his message: he was letting us know that no matter what we might throw at him, he could handle it. I learned a lot just by listening to Joe’s stories. Incidentally, remember the brouhaha about the Market cover photo in the snowfall? Well, we did go out to Warner’s studio lot and finally did a photo session with fake snow falling and a giant wind machine blowing it around the set. Who knows, it might have been the same snow they used in White Christmas. The pictures looked kind of nice but never did get used.

Next stop, Chicago. The Kensington Market was there for almost a week doing multiple nights at Aaron Russo’s Kinetic Playground, then did a show in Evansville, Illinois, with the Paul Butterfield Band and an in-store record-signing session at a plaza in suburban Chicago. Aaron Russo was the Bill Graham of the Midwest, looming large over the area’s music scene. The Playground was another psychedelic rock palace with strobes, a light show, tons of incense, and all the other accoutrements of the era. Aaron would go on to manage Bette Midler and the Manhattan Transfer as well as to produce movies like The Rose and Trading Places.

Because we were going to be in Chicago for a week I had time to look around, and for reasons that now entirely escape me, I bought three suits. They were on sale, but given that I never wore suits – I was working in rock ‘n’ roll, not banking – I’m not sure what I had in mind. Perhaps an image change of some kind. Maybe New York and L.A. were rubbing off on me. Or maybe I was getting tired of always having to explain who I was and what I was doing, which was not uncommon in the late sixties. If you looked like a hippie you were always under suspicion. It was mostly long hair that brought this on, but clothing raised its share of problems as well. In any case, I bought the suits, picked them up the day we were leaving Chicago, and put them in the equipment truck for transport back to Toronto. That was going to be our next stop before going back across the border to Detroit for what would turn out to be a memorable gig at the Grande Ballroom. I guess I just wasn’t meant to wear suits, at least not then, because the truck caught on fire just outside of Toronto. Although most of the band’s equipment was undamaged, my suits were nothing but ashes. A sign of things to come.

Although the gigs in Chicago went well enough, the record-store signing was a complete bust. Nobody showed up and it was so frustrating that our guitarist Gene Martynec, a critically important part of the band, quit and just took off. We did find Gene later that day and convinced him to stay with the band so we didn’t have to cancel any of the Chicago shows. Still, Gene’s reaction illustrated the cracks that were beginning to show in the foundation of the band. What with the copious amounts of drugs, the roller-coaster nature of performing and touring, and being constantly away from home, it’s not surprising that nerves were becoming frayed. Even though everyone had agreed they weren’t in it for the money, we were all constantly broke and it just wasn’t always as much fun as it had once been. Still, we soldiered on and did what had to be done. After the week in Chicago we returned to Toronto, where we would be headlining a two-night stand at the prestigious Rock Pile.

The Rock Pile was Toronto’s Fillmore. Located at the corner of Yonge and Davenport in the old Masonic Temple building, it was on the same circuit as the other ballrooms we had been playing in the States, complete with light show, a permanent haze of smoke, and room for 1,400. (The building now houses CTV and MTV Canada.) The Who were following us by a few days and Led Zeppelin were on their way too. The Market was one of the few Canadian bands that could headline a show there, never mind sell out two. At this point, we had become such nomads that we stayed at the Regency Hotel on Avenue Road, even though Toronto was our hometown.

There was a lot of anticipation among the sold-out crowd when the band took to the stage. And the band delivered. The audience loved them. There was no doubt that the Market was getting louder and louder, maybe too loud, but to my ears they had a great two-night stand. At times it seemed as though the sound didn’t even bounce off the back wall; it seemed to be pinned there as successive waves of sound came blasting off the stage. The show received mixed reviews from the local press; some of them loved it and some hated it. But the Market had managed to do what no other local band had yet done – headline the Rock Pile for two nights. It was an exciting few days in Toronto, followed by our next gig in Detroit, where we would learn the true meaning of loud.

Our show in Detroit was at the Grande Ballroom, the historic dancehall run by DJ Russ Gibb who worked with local legend John Sinclair to bring in psychedelic bands from San Francisco as well as international acts like the Who, Cream, and Pink Floyd. The bill was the Kensington Market with the Pacific Gas & Electric and MC5. Until hearing MC5 I always thought the Market was the loudest band in the land, something with which I was never too comfortable. But when the MC5 took the stage I really came to understand the meaning of loud. Led by Wayne Kramer, the MC5 became famous for their live record Kick Out the Jams recorded at the Grande. I can’t say I was a big fan but I admired the band’s anti-establishment politics that were far to the American left, almost all the way to anarchism. For me it was an introduction to what was later to become punk or heavy metal, depending on where you were coming from.

While we were in Detroit we got a call from Toronto informing us that our friend the Cosmic Visitor had been arrested for throwing a garbage can through the front window of one of the stores on Yorkville Avenue. When he was caught, he was wearing a cape and claimed to be a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. He was also demanding a jury of twelve angels. Things were constantly in flux on Yorkville and there had been a lot of unrest on the street. The drugs were moving from soft psychedelics like pot, LSD, and psilocybin to amphetamines and crystal meth. There was also a growing biker population, along with more and more discontented people, although it was still a street for the most part dominated by hippies and an atmosphere of social revolution, expressed through both music and dialogue. The Cosmic Visitor was one of the many getting caught up in the sweeping changes that few truly understood, and, as in all social movements, some people became casualties.

The talk of government action on Canadian radio content was picking up steam. Around this time, musicians and those working in the music business, both young and old, were starting to feel that no matter how hard they tried they weren’t going to get a fair shake on Canadian radio and that something had to change. I had heard rumours that the federal government was open to legislating Canadian-content regulations for radio, and although I didn’t feel that I knew enough about it, I began to think that this might indeed be the way to go. As a manager, I would sometimes be asked to comment on the possible regulations, and even though I felt my bands had been treated well enough by local radio, it was also true that the amount of Canadian music being heard on the airwaves was minuscule. Despite all of my time spent in the U.S. and travelling around North America, I wanted to work in Canada, with Toronto as my base, and it seemed not only advantageous for my acts and for myself but beneficial for all Canadians to hear their own artists on local radio. Why not? I knew from experience that Canadian acts were as good as, and sometimes better than, American or British ones. This attitude would shamefully cost me plenty later in my career, as it wasn’t uncommon for some broadcasters to punish you by withholding airplay for speaking out too loudly about Canadian content. But I’m proud of my role as an early advocate on this issue, and if I had to do it over again I wouldn’t change any of my actions. Canadian content clearly, at least to me, was and is a policy that worked and continues to work. I may not have bought into all aspects of the peace-and-love social revolution during the sixties, but I was an unabashed supporter of the cultural revolution that I could feel building in Canada.

Returning to Toronto after the Detroit shows with the MC5, we started to think about doing another album. The new songs were stronger than the material on the first album and both Felix Pappalardi and the executives at Warner were ready to record once again. But first we had the idea of adding another member to the group.

Bart Schoales had introduced us to a Toronto-based mixed-media group called Intersystems whose four members were sculptor Michael Hayden, architect Dick Zander, poet Blake Parker, and musician John Mills-Cockell. John played the most astounding new instrument, called a Moog Synthesizer.

I remember the first time I heard John play his incredible machine. Intersystems operated out of a large loft on George Street at Adelaide. It was an amazing place with all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff spread out all over the studio, everything from schematics to paintings, but nothing was more amazing than John’s Moog. The Moog was the first electronic music machine and was being manufactured right across Lake Ontario in Rochester, and John had managed to get his hands on one of the few that were commercially available. We had never heard anything like it before in our lives. Not only did it sound amazing, it looked amazing. The Moog was right out of a science fiction movie. A large machine, it stood almost six feet tall, with a keyboard, a vertical panel of blinking lights, and a jungle of electronic cables that John would plug and unplug while playing. Our imaginations ran wild at the possibilities. Yes, there had been some electronic music in rock, but no band had ever included a musician playing a Moog. Determined to be the first, we asked John to join the Market and he said yes.

We told Felix about it and he seemed interested but he wanted the band to come to New York as a five-piece without John. He had booked a sixteen-track studio, a technology that was only in its infancy then, and we could only record there for two days. Getting the sixteen-track studio was a bit of a coup and he didn’t want to spend time getting to know a sixth musician – especially one playing something as far out as a Moog. We would then move back to Toronto to an eight-track studio, and it was there that he would have the time to check out the Market as a six-piece with the Moog.

We headed down to New York to begin work on the album that would eventually become Aardvark. Why the title Aardvark you might ask? Well, we had noticed that the Warner’s catalogue was listed alphabetically, so the Market’s first album, Avenue Road, was near the top. We thought it was a noble goal to be first in the catalogue the next time around. Besides, we thought it was a cool title on its own and seemed to suit the proposed content of the album.

And indeed we did get to be first in the catalogue when the album was released. The graphics for that album were very special and quite intriguing. They featured the album title written in an Art Deco–inspired font and an aardvark on stage on the front cover, and on the back, the same aardvark, sitting by a window looking out to sea with a telescope. The artwork was done by Bruce Meek, who later designed some pretty amazing covers for Procol Harum, among others, but then left Toronto for Amsterdam, where he became the art director for the European edition of Vogue.

In New York the band recorded “Side I Am,” a truly strange and mysterious song that took full advantage of our newfound wealth of sixteen tracks. This meant the band and Felix were able to do lots of overdubbing. Although some of the ideas were clearly influenced by the Beatles, much of it remains breathtakingly original even when heard today. We tried a few other things during our brief stay in the sixteen-track studio but soon returned to Toronto and took up residence at Eastern Sound, an eight-track studio located on the corner of Yorkville and Bay. It seemed appropriate that the Market would be recording right on Yorkville.

John Mills-Cockell joined the band in the studio with his Moog and it blew Felix away. He couldn’t believe the sounds that John could produce from the synthesizer. There is no doubt that some of the Aardvark album was miles ahead of its time. Although many Canadian critics and music historians missed this, or have forgotten about it, for those who were aware this record was truly cutting edge, a harbinger of what was to come with the marriage of rock ‘n’ roll to synthesizers. A great example was the song “Help Me,” which was written during the studio sessions by Luke Gibson and Felix Pappalardi. It features a throbbing Moog bass line that triggers other haunting sounds from the synthesizer while drummer Jimmy Watson plays along with the Moog and Keith and Luke provide soaring vocal harmonies. Another pioneering track on that album is called “Half Closed Eyes,” a marvellous union of folk-style guitar and Moog that at times is almost otherworldly.

It was during the Aardvark sessions in Toronto that I was first introduced to cocaine. Felix had brought some into the studio and late one night he asked me to join him down the hallway. Felix always wore a beautiful, hollowed-out whale tooth on a chain around his neck, where he kept his stash of cocaine along with a little silver spoon for measuring it out and making lines. On this night, he laid out several lines of the white powder for the two of us to snort. I’d heard about coke but didn’t really know much about it; however, we had introduced Felix to MDA, which he liked, and now he said he wanted to return the favour. In some ways an unfortunate marriage, but not one I blame Felix for. If it wasn’t then, it would have been somewhere with someone else. I did survive the experience, although it took several years before I finally stopped using it. By the early seventies coke had become endemic in the music business and there’s no question that it threw many people off track. I don’t recommend it, but it was readily available and I got involved. In the end, luckily for me, not much turned on it.

After he finished recording Aardvark, Felix returned to New York and formed the band Mountain with guitarist Leslie West. Mountain’s first album, Climbing!, included a top-forty hit now considered one of the all-time classic rock tracks, “Mississippi Queen.” The group’s second album, Nantucket Sleighride, dealt with the lore of whales, which the pendant Felix always wore around his neck also evoked. I always liked Felix, and although there were problems with the records he produced for us, it wasn’t because of a lack of passion for the projects. He was especially effective on Aardvark, to which the band had brought an unwieldy and ambitious musical landscape and that Felix handled with aplomb.

One day Felix and I were walking through Greenwich Village when we ran into an old friend of his, the drummer and co-founder of Blood, Sweat & Tears, Bobby Colomby. Bobby told us that the band’s other co-founder, Al Kooper, had just quit a few days earlier and they were looking for a new lead singer. I told Bobby about David Clayton-Thomas, whom I had always admired and thought of as one of the greatest white rhythm and blues singers. David was now back in Toronto and performing in the Yorkville area. Thinking of the blues and R&B influences of Blood, Sweat & Tears, I figured David would be a perfect fit for the band. Bobby followed up on my recommendation and the rest is history, as they say.

Tragically, Felix was shot to death by his wife, Gail Collins, in 1983. They say drugs were the cause but I don’t really know what happened, other than that the world lost a fine musician and producer and someone who had had a strong influence on me.

The Market began playing live shows again with John and his Moog Synthesizer as part of the band. While the Moog could be sensational, it was also a bit of a technical challenge. The synthesizer kept going in and out of tune and there wasn’t much you could do about it other than wait for John to retune it. This was not conducive to dynamic, fast-paced shows. Fortunately, audiences were forgiving once they heard the sounds coming off the stage, to say nothing of the pure spectacle of seeing the Moog’s many red lights flashing on and off in sequence to the music. It had a certain magical quality and looked like something out of a science fiction movie. But despite this revolutionary new instrument in the band and the very fine album that was about to be released, things weren’t going all that well.

One night at a show just outside of Toronto, Jimmy Watson showed up with his head completely shaven. Backstage he started painting his shoes blue. Midway through the concert he grabbed a mike and started to berate the audience for wearing leather shoes. The band managed to complete the show, but it was taking all of our combined abilities just to keep the group together. No one was making any real money and there wasn’t any infrastructure in the Canadian business to help you out. Basically you were on your own. Today you have programs like FACTOR (Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent On Record), MuchFACT (to provide assistance when making music videos), the Radio Starmaker Fund (which helps artists and record companies invest funds to market their music and tours), and the Canadian-content regulations, which can give you some comfort as well as a leg up, as you make your way through the morass of the business. But back then, you were on your own. We were hurting for many reasons, some of our own doing and some that were completely out of our control.

Anyway, Aardvark was finally released, and although it was enthusiastically greeted, the record really didn’t seem to have the commercial hook that was going to give it and the band traction. Not that any of us were thinking all that commercially, but perhaps we should have been. Maybe things would have turned out for the better.

I could see that the band was at the breaking point, and I would be the first to leave. I found myself increasingly worried about the amounts and types of drugs I was taking, a worry further compounded when I woke up one day with a girl on one side of me and a small but lethal bag of pure meth on the other. I decided right then that it was time for a change. Yorkville was also in the throes of radical change. There was the so-called hepatitis epidemic that was supposed to be sweeping through Toronto and thought to be centred in Yorkville. I’d heard rumours that the street would be cordoned off and quarantined.

One day I went to have coffee at the Lothian Mews along with a few members of the Market and rock journalist Larry LeBlanc. The Mews was known for its “European-style” outdoor patio and espresso, and although we never really thought of it as a real part of our Yorkville, it was close at hand, located between Cumberland and Bloor. We sat at a table on the patio and waited and waited for service. Finally after what seemed like forever, a person who must have been the café manager came over and told us they wouldn’t be able to serve us. The reason: we were hippies and might be contaminated with hepatitis. When he asked us to leave, I was outraged and we all flatly refused to go until we’d been served. A few minutes later, no fewer than fifteen cops arrived. They ran into the Mews courtyard like a scene from an old silent movie where the police are chasing bank robbers, the only difference being that these cops were looking seriously mean. They told us that if we didn’t immediately vacate the café they would arrest us. Well, we decided that discretion being the better part of valour, we’d leave, but I’ve got to say if I had it to do over again I would stay and let them try to lock me up. It would have been interesting to hear the charges. I can see it now: Bernie Finkelstein, you are charged with having hair that is too long, how do you plead? But we left.

Of course, the hepatitis epidemic turned out to be a hoax completely trumped up by the city and the vested real estate interests, the idea being to clear the area of hippies and other undesirables, and to drive up the value of the real estate so it would be safe to sell overpriced purses, wallets, and jewellery to the kind of people who had just too much money on their hands. There were very few cases of hepatitis ever found despite the many medical alerts sent throughout the city, and by no stretch did those cases add up to an epidemic. It seems that almost everything will revert to form given the opportunity, and the natural form for most of the population is to be straight and uptight. The Yorkville I had known and loved was now in its death dance. It would hang on for a few more years – in fact I would become partners with the owner of the Riverboat a few years later, and that club managed to stay open until 1977 – but for all intents and purposes the street as I knew it was dead.

In early 1969 I came to the conclusion that it was time to get out of Toronto. It was more a move of self-defence than anything else. I felt if I remained in the city I was going to possibly die, and I could see that the Market was on its last legs, so I decided to quit before the group broke up. I was not particularly happy about this, much like I wasn’t happy about leaving the Paupers, but it was still early days for me, and I was doing what I thought was best for the bands as well as for myself. Later on it would take a nuclear blast to make me leave anything.

About a year earlier I had gone up to Killaloe, a town just south of Algonquin Park, with my lawyer and friend Buzz Chertkoff. There was a hippie community around Killaloe and Buzz was doing some legal work for a commune, as strange as that may sound, started by a fellow named Dalton McCarthy. I had really enjoyed the weekend up there. I felt it was one of the world’s loveliest places. The countryside is full of rolling hills with plenty of lakes, rivers, and streams and it’s about as wild as you can get and still have roads where you can drive around in a regular vehicle. I decided that’s where I’d head after leaving the Market. I even thought I might quit music and maybe just live off the land in some manner. This was 1969 and I was now twenty-five. It had been an action-packed seven years. There had been some good times and some bad times.

Unquestionably on the good side I had been involved with two great bands that had seen some success, but on the other hand, despite their accomplishments, neither had broken through in any significant manner.

It’s important to know that “making it” in the traditional sense was never my main goal, in fact I’d have to say that until the time I headed for the country, I really didn’t have a personal goal. Of course I wanted my bands to succeed. After all, there is no sense doing this kind of work if you’re not going to be in it to win, but to win, you’ve got to know the game, and I can assure you, at this time I really didn’t know the game. Though, as Albert Grossman had pointed out, I might have known as much as anyone else, I was also aware that I was making most of it up as I went along. I had done a few smart things, the main one being to work with some very talented musicians, and I’d been keeping my ears open for great ideas and encouraging those ideas to flourish when they crossed my path. As well, I had hooked up with some of the world’s leading music figures, Albert Grossman, Bud Prager, Bill Graham, and Felix Pappalardi.

I had to face that the careers of both bands had come crashing down around me and that I had to shoulder some, if not most, of that responsibility. In both cases there had been a lot of frustration in dealing with the big record companies. And it wasn’t because they weren’t good at what they did – they were. And it wasn’t because they weren’t nice people – I liked almost everyone with whom I had worked. Still, when the chips were down they didn’t have to listen to me, and I was finding that hard to take. Not because I think I’m always right – I know that not to be true – but mostly because I thought I had a better vision of the future and it felt fatal for me to have to put that on the back burner.

I also think that I was still operating on a built-in clock from my years of being an air force brat. My family had moved just about every two years, and strangely enough I had quit both bands after exactly two years. Later on, I would watch out for this tendency, almost to a fault.