by Tom Wilson
I soon figured out that I could wander away from my post outside the classroom and get lost in the massive old school. I’d dodge any teachers in the halls, hit the stairs and descend into the basement under the original structure to the boiler room and the old coal chutes that led down to the furnace-room killing floor. I followed the tunnels under the new wings, into the film room and the bomb shelters that were built after the war. It was a fantasy land and a walk through history at the same time.
I’d run into Ted Wren, the janitor at the school. He’d give me a wink and let me know that I was out of bounds but that he wasn’t going to tell anyone. I knew Ted Wren as a professional wrestler. A local fall guy, no less. He would get his ass kicked during bouts of not-so-well-rehearsed choreography that always ended with Wren bleeding and pinned to the mat in the centre of the Hamilton Forum by all the ridiculous wrestling greats of that era. Haystacks Calhoun, the Love Brothers, the Sheik—not the Iron Sheik, the original Sheik, with his camel clutch and his manager Abdullah Farouk, who was always sneaking foreign objects into the ring for the Sheik to use on his opponents. There was also Gene Kiniski and the great Angelo Mosca, who both got in the ring to make a couple of extra bucks between CFL football seasons as defensive tackle for the Hamilton Tiger Cats. Yvon Robert, Mad Dog Vachon, Chief Don Eagle and Brute Bernard, to name a few more of Wren’s assailants.
One Sunday afternoon Wren left his house, got on the Upper Gage bus and headed down to the Hamilton Forum for his weekly beating. I was six years old watching the local television channel CHCH’s Maple Leaf Wrestling as Wren jumped into the ring with Yukon Eric. Before the bell, Wren lost his shit and blindsided his unsuspecting opponent, putting Yukon Eric into a headlock and trying to poke his eyes out, right there, in fuzzy black and white on my TV screen.
A mob of refs and cops jumped into the ring to pull him off Yukon, and as the cameras pulled away to a commercial, I sat there on my living room floor in shock. Wren got kicked out of professional wrestling that day and then became the janitor at my public school.
From the hallway, my desk was moved inside the principal’s office and it stayed there for the rest of the year, putting an end to my underworld adventures. But I still spent most of my time dreaming up new identities and tall tales. I shook off the obvious facts and took on the stories that most suited me. I was like an addict. I shot myself up with fantasy to make myself feel better and lose touch with everything real.
There…that’s better….
LAND OF THE LIVING
FIRST RECORDS
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Upper Gage and Fennell Square was a hub of activity on that part of the East Mountain. The Dominion store, Reitmans ladies wear, the LCBO, Woolworth’s, Brewers Retail and the hardware store were all housed in an L-shaped strip mall. Sometimes Bunny would pick me up from school and take me to the Woolworth’s lunch counter for a braised hot dog and Orange Crush while she picked up a bottle of Canadian Club for George at the liquor store. Across the street was the Busy Bee shopping centre. Bunny would never shop there because she thought it was cheap and that shopping there would make her look cheap. The Busy Bee parking lot was bleak and empty most of the time. The cars parked there were beaten up, and the people getting out of the cars seemed poor and sad. Mind you, we were some pretty poor, sad people ourselves. We didn’t own a car beaten up or otherwise. In the late 1960s, Bunny found an Austin Mini she decided to learn how to drive. She drove without a licence for a couple of years before she felt her skills were sharp enough to take the test. But before that we walked everywhere we had to go. Bunny and I would carry paper grocery bags home from Dominion, and one always ripped apart, spilling cans of food all over Upper Gage Avenue. I remember Bunny once dropping a forty-ounce bottle of Canadian Club on the sidewalk. The bottle smashed in the bag and whisky poured all over the curb. Bunny broke down and cried, devastated because she had pinched the Queen off the bills for weeks to save up for that bottle. She looked down at me and yelled, “Shit, oh shit! Look at that, Tommy.” She told me to say nothing about the lost bottle of booze, and she never told George about it either. She walked back to the liquor store and grabbed another bottle and threw herself at the mercy of the guy behind the counter. He knew her well enough to give her credit until she could pay the store back.
Sometimes we’d pull a wooden Express wagon to assist with the load and we’d even bring Trixie along for the ride. We didn’t have a washing machine, so we took our laundry over to the Fennell Square coin automat. I remember that I never felt embarrassed when kids from school stopped and looked in at me and laughed and made faces as I folded shirts and bedsheets. Fuck them, I thought. This was a happy time for us. The trip to Fennell Square was our pilgrimage. I was proud of Bunny and pleased that she needed my help. Bunny always appeared Montreal-crisp and well put together. Her ironed shirts and pencil skirts might have been a bit dated but she was always neat and presentable, like she was ready for a job interview or a visit from the Queen.
Bunny was always ready for a little shoplifting at the Woolworth’s as well. She loved a five-finger discount, and kept that habit going well into her seventies. She’d steal a wide range of goods. She’d take belts off raincoats in case hers got lost or stolen. In fact, for someone who loved to steal, she had an intense fear of people stealing from her. She was always checking her purse for her wallet, for her keys and charge cards in case someone had reached a dirty hand in there while she was daydreaming on the bus as it glided down the Jolley Cut. She kept her cash, no matter how much or how little, in her bra at all times. She taught me to keep my money in my shoe, my wallet in my front pocket and any big bills hidden behind smaller ones.
She kept me as her silent witness to her minor thievery. When I was small, she’d take me down to Eaton’s and sit me in a stall in the women’s change room. She’d tell me to stay put as she went to pick out a fancy dress. She’d throw the dress on over her street clothes and look down to me for my opinion. I’d tell her she looked nice, and she’d go back out and search for a coat. Then a hat, earrings, maybe a watch and some shoes. Finally, she’d take my hand and we’d exit the front doors of Eaton’s with Bunny wearing her brand-new wardrobe.
When I got older and into music, Bunny would skip up to the old Zellers department store on Upper Sherman and Mohawk Road and as a treat she’d pick me up some records she thought I’d like. One day I came through the door for lunch to find Bunny standing there in her apron, beaming, with her hands behind her back.
“Which hand?” she asked.
“Right,” I said, playing along.
She took her arm from behind her back and revealed Black Sabbath’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.
Surprises were rare in our house. “Wow….Thanks, Ma,” I said.
“Now the other hand!” she said, revealing the first Captain & Tennille album. Her choices didn’t make any sense to me. The two albums and the artists had no business together.
On another occasion of this “Pick a Hand” game, Bunny revealed the unexpected pairing of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Donny Osmond’s Alone Together. I imagined her skulking into the Zellers record department, grabbing whatever she could out of the bin and running through the front door, across the parking lot, jumping into her Mini and speeding away…
Bunny’s eclectic selections helped shape how I thought about music. She influenced my connection to music in other ways too. Our kitchen radio was often tuned to AM900 CHML and its weird mix of music, from Don Ho to Glen Campbell to Patti Page, Dean Martin and Johnny Cash and all the elevator intrumental versions of the fifties hit parade and in between.
When I was about ten I got pneumonia. I came out of a deadly fever to the sound of a transistor radio that Bunny had found for me and placed beside my pillow. As I opened my eyes “If You Could Read My Mind” by Gordon Lightfoot played quietly in my left ear. It’s still my favourite song.
I absorbed music with a ferocious passion. Every minute of every day, I kept a transist
or radio with me. Several times I was caught in class with the single earpiece stuck in my ear. The white cord was always a dead giveaway. As soon as I was home I’d stick on my headphones, drop the needle on a stolen record and get everything turned up really loud. I wanted to experience the spit on the mic and the sweat on the brow of the singers. In one step I would go from Willie P. Bennett’s Hobo’s Taunt to Rocket to Russia by the Ramones. Music was total freedom. There were no rules. There was no one to tell me how to listen. No deep study, no professors, no experts. Just my own imagination.
I loved 45s. And I loved buying them at Bob Moody’s Record Bar, a mom-and-pop shop that changed my life. They had all the hits off CKOC’s Top 40 on display and a huge back catalogue at cut-rate prices. From Bob Moody’s I purchased the magic of Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie”; the drop of the needle, the end of Tony Joe’s count in, “…fo (four),” and then the best downbeat recorded in the twentieth century. I also bought the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” and the Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek” backed with “Unfaithful Servant.” And I remember buying their “Rag Mama Rag.” I took it home and put it on right away. It sounded like the music was being reflected off a funhouse mirror. I thought I had it on at the wrong speed, but that was just the dirt they brought to those recordings. It was real Southern Ontario soul right there on my turntable. All white-man blues and trucker pills, long drives and late, late nights on a seven-inch piece of vinyl.
In 1969 I was just ten years old travelling in a white Austin Mini down the 401 with an older mum and a blind dad. I was an overweight kid in a lime-green bathing suit that was about two summers too tight for me. There was a smell in the air that I didn’t recognize but I knew was coming my way and a taste that was forbidden but that I would digest for years to come. We were on our way to Port Dover on the shores of Lake Erie. We drove Upper James Street to Highway 6, over Highway 53, passing the A&W, the Red Barn, Tim Horton’s donuts, P-Wee’s pizzeria. We drove into the unknown world of beautiful downtown Caledonia and the Grand River, with its legacy of transporting goods and people as rich as the Mississippi’s. It’s said that the Grand River was cursed by a witch in Cayuga after the town had persecuted her. She promised that the area would cease to prosper and would fall into financial disarray. Shortly after, the railroads took over and the Grand River became an obsolete means of transportation.
On the south shore of the Grand River was a Six Nations reserve. Here the complexion of the land changed, the cars got older, a little rusty, and the women got more beautiful. Great musicians came off the reserve and travelled Highway 6 into towns like Hagersville, down to Turkey Point, Tillsonburg and tobacco country, but I didn’t know any of them when I was ten, and we just drove by.
We continued on down to Lake Erie through Hagersville, Dogs Nest and Jarvis until the lift bridge to Port Dover opened its arms to the summer paradise of Hamiltonians, or more so, East Mountaineers. Crossing that bridge into Port Dover was almost like popping the cork off of a magic genie bottle. The girls all looked like Betty and Veronica from the Archie comics, or better still the centrefolds from my next-door neighbour’s Playboy magazines, and they walked arm-in-arm with long-haired hippie boys past bearded Satan’s Choice members gathering beside the midway, sucking on bottles of beer, smoking joints and lying in the sun, surrounded by the overwhelming sound of the Port Dover beach bumper cars, the roller coaster and bowling alley.
The Band, or the Hawks as they were known before 1968, did six nights in a row, all year long, up and down the 401 and above and below it too. To me they were the sound of Highway 6 South, Lake Erie, tobacco fields, migrant workers and the Summer Garden dance hall. The first sound of freedom.
FIRST GUITAR
Glen Grey was my grade-seven shop partner. His parents got him a carton of smokes for Christmas when everyone else got Hot Wheels and electric football games. Most importantly, Glen had a cheap Japanese knock-off of a Gibson Les Paul. It was black and it was deadly, like a whole pack of wolves with six strings. It drove me crazy how cool that guitar looked and how cool Glen looked playing it.
In grade seven Glen started a band with Bobby Little. They called it the Green Finger. Their backdrop was of course a giant green hand giving a green finger to the audience. Bobby was the singer and painted half his face green to go along with the band’s colour scheme. They all looked like kids except for Glen, who already had full sideburns and long hair. He looked like he stepped off a Harley every morning before getting in line with the rest of us. Looking back now, I think Glen must have been at least seventeen or eighteen. I mean no one thirteen years old had sideburns except for the Italian and Portuguese kids, and no one thirteen years old carried himself like Glen. He was the star of the band and he didn’t know it or care. I remember the Green Finger’s Christmas concert set like it was yesterday.
“I’m Eighteen”
“Venus”
“Proud Mary”
“Be My Lover”
It happened fast in the Highview school gym, and even though I was not cool enough to hang out with the band, the ripple effect of their shitty, out-of-tune version of these songs changed my life.
Glen was inside a group of guys I had no business chumming around with, and I had no real interest in them except they all had electric guitars. I was standing on the fringe of their schoolyard conversations when I overhead them talking about Alice Cooper making an appearance on the debut episode of ABC TV’s In Concert, November 24, 1972. Alice Cooper on TV? I’d only seen photos of him in magazines and on posters down at a head shop on King Street called This Is It.
ABC TV’s In Concert was a special show for the time. It came on at 11:30 p.m., after the news. Its cameras went right into the concert halls, recording live performances when anything could happen. Lots did. I saw Billy Preston dropping f-bombs one time, and lots of stoner moments, drunken rants, musicians getting crap thrown at them on stage, people falling down and brawls in the audience. It was real, raw television viewing.
That first episode of the show featured Curtis Mayfield, Seals and Crofts, Bo Diddley and Jethro Tull, but it was Alice who kicked things off with a violent roar, swigging beer, throwing a trash can, wielding a switchblade. After that I spent a lot of time staring at the Love It to Death album cover, which featured Alice looking super cool, super freaky, and the rest of the band standing around wearing three-pick Gibson SGs, except Dennis Dunaway who had an SG bass. They looked like a street gang from outer space. Lipstick-smeared bikers or cowboys or futuristic mobsters. Dangerous as hell. And that’s what we all wanted to be. Dangerous as hell with Gibson SGs hanging off our shoulders
“Chet Atkins introduces the Quick-Pickin’ ’N Fun-Strummin’ Home Guitar Course,” was the advertisement Waddington’s Music placed in the entertainment section of the Hamilton Spectator. The course came with an instruction record, a book and in-class teaching and—the clincher for me—Waddington’s would hand out a “lender” guitar to anyone who signed up for Chet’s guitar lessons.
I’d been on a long, painful road, watching, waiting, hoping for a magic moment when I could finally start banging away on some old plank. I couldn’t ask Bunny and George to get me a guitar. They didn’t have the money for that kind of thing and I didn’t want to put them in the position of having to tell me so. But there it was. The ultimate goal. Advertised right there in the Hamilton Spectator. My chance at the only thing I thought about besides Amy Blacklock’s ever-growing breasts and the mysteries inside the book Chariots of the Gods. I knew that if I only had a guitar I could do anything, go anywhere. A guitar was the rabbit hole that I could fall down and escape into another world.
I called Waddington’s. The woman who answered explained that they took groups of twelve people into a class and introduced them to the Chet Atkins method. “Uh huh, oh yeah. And there’s a guitar at the end of the lesson, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” she told me, “If you sign up for the Chet Atkins lessons we give a home practice guitar
to use while you are enrolled in the class.”
“Do I get to take the guitar home that night?”
“Well, if you sign up, yes. All you have to do is give us a home address, phone number and show identification and you can take a guitar home,” the Waddington’s lady said. This was going to be easy.
“I’ll be down there Wednesday night. My name is Greg Bayliss.”
Greg Bayliss? Why of all names did I pick his?
Greg Bayliss was about four years older than me and lived on my street, though I rarely saw or spoke to him. It was presumed up and down East 36th Street that Greg was one sandwich short of a picnic. I just thought he was quiet, mysterious, like a unicorn that just happened to live down by Queensdale Avenue. Greg had been shipped out of Blessed Sacrament and off to Crestwood Vocational School. Plenty of near geniuses were sent to that school, and plenty emerged from its doors and into the workforce as superstar tradesmen.
I went down to Mr. Walker’s house, where Greg often hung out fixing old cars in the driveway. I found him bent over the open hood of a ’71 Ford Maverick. I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned around. “Hey Greg, how are ya?” I said.
“I’m good,” he said and was about to turn around when I blurted out, “Hey can I borrow your ID to go to buy smokes?”
“Sure,” he said. “And while you’re there, pick me up a pack of Exports will ya?”
Shit…
I didn’t have money for cigarettes. I’d have to go home and scrounge around for change. I managed to put together enough nickels and dimes to make up the forty cents I needed for a pack of smokes. After I left Russell’s Variety, I walked up Fennell, turned down East 37th, the whole way thinking about how I could give Greg his smokes without surrendering his birth certificate.
