by Tom Wilson
I’ll walk up the street and when I hit 36th and Brucedale, I’ll break into a run. I’ll run, not walk, back up to Greg and hand—no, toss—no, hand—hand him the smokes, run back down the street telling him I’m late for dinner and I’ll keep running down 36th Street to Queensdale and catch the Upper Gage bus downtown.
The no-plan plan worked. And I told myself that once I had a guitar in my hands I’d slip back up the mountain, knock at Greg’s door and apologize about forgetting to hand him back his birth certificate in the first place.
Waddington’s was only a half a block from where the Upper Gage let me off in Gore Park. I was nervous and anxious, almost faint, actually, in anticipation of my scheme to rip off a guitar from Waddington’s and Chet Atkins, whoever he was. I filled out the forms, offering up Greg Bayliss’s ID and a fake address and phone number.
I was led up a side stairway and into a large room lit by naked light bulbs that revealed dirty walls and that hinted at a deep, dark Hamilton history. I thought of men’s clubs, secret societies, white knights hanging around, planning and pacing across these old hardwood floors.
Waddington’s was right next door to Treble Hall in a block of Renaissance Revival–style beauty, a gem in the heart of downtown. The corner building of the block, facing the intersection of King and John, has a giant neon sign burning out the letters PAGODA CHOP SUEY HOUSE. The sign is to downtown Hamilton what the Hollywood sign is to Hollywood, and that evening its super rays bounced off the neighbouring buildings and through the guitar classroom’s filthy windows.
We all sat down on wooden chairs and a guy at the front of the room began talking too quietly to be heard by the three of us potential students. That’s right, three. Not the maximum twelve. Three. He turned out the lights and started up a 16-millimetre film projector that sent a hum and grind around the room and a shiver up my spine. Onto the small screen came the country gentleman himself, Chet Atkins. Chet talked to us about guitar lessons and learning to read music, but really he could have been saying anything. He could have been cursing or talking backwards, and I would have just sat there, jiggling my leg and staring straight ahead into the darkness. I just wanted that guitar in my hands.
Bam. Lights go up and there’s soft-talking guy and the lady from the cash downstairs holding three guitars out to us, and I nearly blacked out. When I walked around playing air guitar the moves I made felt natural. I couldn’t believe how foreign the real thing felt in my arms. This was not my imagination anymore. This was guitar town, baby, and this moment felt like it was the beginning of the rest of my life.
FIRST BAND
In 1975 Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night came out. After Harvest, after “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man,” Neil said he had found himself in the middle of the road with his soft-soap imitators, so he steered his car off the road and headed for the ditch. He led with his heart and told the story of how it broke. The album spoke to me. It was filled with the excitement that comes when you take chances with music and don’t care who or if anybody listens to it. I took one look at the cover of Tonight’s the Night, dug into the back of George Wilson’s closet and pulled out a ratty old sports coat, which after some bush parties, spilt beer and vomit, began to look like something Neil would wear while banging on his Les Paul, moaning and stomping through “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown.” I had arrived, but nobody was there to welcome me. I’d practise simple chords and changes on that stolen guitar until hard, gnarly calluses formed on my fingers. I borrowed music books from the library to learn Gordon Lightfoot and Bob Dylan songs.
My world was looking the other way. Disco had taken over. People dressed for school like they were stepping out on the town. Everybody looked like Tony Manero and Stephanie Mangano from Saturday Night Fever. I was out of there. Way out there. And I thought I wore out there rather well.
That same year I got hooked into a church youth group because the smell of girls that filled the air of the church was too powerful for me to ignore. The group was called High C, as in high on Christ. I know, but what was a boy to do who couldn’t afford to take a girl to a movie or buy her a pizza?
Looking back, I do remember that the Italian and Portuguese girls at the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) seemed much more grown-up with their more womanly bodies and mustachios. They walked the streets in their school uniforms with their beautiful smiles and tight white shirts and short kilts. But Bunny had sworn off the Catholic Church so I was not allowed through the doors of that swinging CYO scene. Instead, I wandered into the white world of the United Church to find a girl, any girl, to bring out the poet in me.
It was at one of these High C gatherings that a counsellor named Ken Keith pulled out a guitar and started playing Jim Croce songs and a few Christian diddies like “This Little Light of Mine.” I didn’t pay much attention to the music, but I did notice how the girls, exhausted from all the Jesus talk and the heat coming off the electric radiators in the small, modern chapel, looked suddenly hopeful, as if this guy in a powder-blue leisure suit with an Ovation guitar might just save them from death by boredom.
After that Sunday I signed myself into the music department at my high school. I had no interest in joining the school band. I didn’t even have an interest in showing up to class or reading music. All I was focused on were the two upright basses that the music department owned. I’d been listening to the album Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a collection of beautiful white-man blues, country, Appalachian folk and bluegrass music the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band recorded with the godfathers, grandfathers and legends—Roy Acuff, “Mother” Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Merle Travis and Jimmy Martin. Listening to this record, studying the liner notes and staring at the pictures on the three-album set, I discovered the playing of Junior Huskey. He was the guy with the out-of-fashion black-rimmed glasses and short, Southern-looking haircut whose bass playing put the heartbeat into the songs on that record. Junior Huskey was the reason I wanted to play the upright bass, and why I was in music class at all. I eyed those two basses, and when my chance came I carried one of them from the instrument holding room and out the auditorium loading door. I held on to it for the rest of my time in high school.
Meanwhile, back at High C, Ken Keith was still playing Jim Croce and Cat Stevens in between the usual white-bread god songs. Ken was older, in teachers’ college and dying to get in front of an audience to do his thing. He’d grown up performing as the sidekick to Rollo the Clown, his father, who was also a church elder and a car salesman. When Ken found out that I had an upright bass hiding in my bedroom, he asked me if I could play. I said sure. He said, “Bring it in to High C. Let’s play.” And that was that.
We started playing a “folk mass” at church. We played “Rise and Shine and Give God the Glory Glory.” Hands were clapping and my bass strings were thumping, and my feet left the altar. I looked over the heads of the congregation, over the circus and the sewer. I was free for the first time in that moment and nobody could bring me down off the ceiling. Well, nobody except Ken. After church we’d get together to play some more of his favourite John Denver tunes. Ken and I just weren’t on the same frequency.
I’d been so moved by Tonight’s the Night that I started writing songs as soon as I figured out a few more chords on my other stolen instrument, the Waddington’s guitar. I was a crap guitar player and not a great singer, but when I sang my own words with my own chords, I could sing them whichever way I wanted. And if I messed up, then that was fine and dandy with me. I figured my songs might come in handy at the church group. I borrowed a twelve-string guitar from my neighbour Ricky Strang and played a couple of my originals—“Bad Time for Love” and “Music Man”—for the group. The next week Counsellor Ken returned with his own songs to play, including one called “Thanks for People.” He had me learn that one and taught me the back-up vocals. My songs were immediately shelved, and it was all about “Thanks for People.” I’d stand there beside him and sing “Awwwwweeeee aaaahhhhhch awwwweeee
,” and whisper the line, “thanks for people,” behind him.
Each week Ken would come in with a whole new batch of pretty horrible songs that leaned on desperate, down-and-out characters and featured Ken as a godlike narrator. They were modern-day Bible stories for children, only with adult themes, like “Dark Lady,” about a lady who does drugs and lives in a hotel room across the hall from god and dies. Then Ken decided we were going to put a band together, which is when I should have come right out and said no. But instead, like a guy who wants to break up with his girlfriend as she’s moving into his apartment and unpacking her bags, I just let it all happen.
He came up with a few names, ran them by me and finally decided on Serenity. Serenity? What was happening to my life, I thought. By this time, I had Ricky Strang’s twelve-string guitar on long-term loan. Ken got another guy to join the band who could not sing or play but who owned an electric guitar and small amp. Jim was even older than Ken and had a job as a junior exec at Procter & Gamble, so what he was doing in Serenity was beyond me.
Ken gave Jim one song to sing at every show. He always chose “Softly” by Gordon Lightfoot and dedicated it to his wife, who was never at any of our concerts. Well, they weren’t really concerts. They were more like musical interludes, three or four songs performed at church services and functions like plays, picnics, bake sales and Boy Scout father–son banquets. (We did manage one concert at an old-folks home, but the staff thought Jim’s five-watt amp was a little too loud for the seniors, so we never really finished that one.) Our audience at these interludes was most often made up of the High C’s, who had to follow us around, and really old people, who had nothing else to do but sit there and nod off while hanging out at the church for whatever action there was to soak up. It was a safe gig. A horrible gig, but a safe one because no one would ever know what I was up to. Serenity was my super-secret life, a life that I led without consequence.
That is, until Ken came in one Sunday and told me he had booked a real gig for us. A real gig. For real money! “It pays fifty bucks,” Ken said. “And get this, Tom—it’s all going down in the cafeteria of your high school.”
What?
I saw A Foot in Coldwater in an after-school concert in our auditorium. They had a massive hit on the radio called “Make Me Do Anything You Want.” It was pretty impressive. I also saw Steel River play in our school gym. They had less of a hit on the radio called “Southbound Train.” That was pretty impressive too. These bands were cool, and the guys in them long-haired, dirty bastards. They looked like guys you’d try to avoid if you ran into them downtown. But now Sherwood Secondary would be getting a taste of Serenity.
I wanted to die. My secret life was about to be revealed to the biggest group of assholes on the face of the earth: my friends. I closed my eyes and pictured Ken in his powder-blue leisure suit and Jim in his double knits throwing down some super-soft Christian out-of-tune folk-rock for the school I tried to avoid even when I was supposed to be there.
The night of the concert was a blur. I wore my Neil Young Tonight’s the Night uniform in an attempt to bring some cool to the occasion, and then I got stoned. The concert went by fast, but not fast enough. I stood there with Ricky Strang’s twelve-string guitar around my neck, staring out like a deer under the wheels of a transport truck. I was already dead as Ken made stupid jokes at my expense and told stories with moral endings about drugs and premarital sex. Looking out into the dark cafeteria, I saw the football team and the cheerleaders and my buddies from the smoking area and the Italian mobster kids in their Studio 54 disco getups and I sank into a deep depression. My legs were broken and my head was smashed just like the dead deer I was imagining in my stoned head. My life was over.
No one was ever going to buy weed off me again, and if they did, they’d complain about the count or the quality or the price. Even my buddies who blew stuff up in chemistry class knew how bad we were. When I walked into my home room the next morning, they were already laughing. Ted Clement stopped only for a second and only to squeeze out two words. “You suck.”
My buddy Dave Cross agreed wholeheartedly. “Yeah, man. You were terrible. Just horrible.”
I couldn’t have picked a worse band to be in. I knew I had to move on.
FIRST TASTE OF ROCK AND ROLL
George’s confectionery stand was in the post office at the corner of Main and John Street. Bunny helped out, filling in supply orders and making bank deposits a couple of times a week. I would hang around and watch George take cash and dole out cigarettes, candy bars, bags of chips and bottles of Coke and ginger ale. It was amazing to see a man with no sight run his hands across the inventory and grab the desired flavour of Hostess potato chips and the right pack of smokes, tossing them across the counter to his customers. Payment was handled through an honour system, of course, and reflected the respect people had for men who had sacrificed so much. It was easy for George to trust his patrons.
When I was thirteen, George was harassed and bullied by a group of punks who had no such regard. When they looked at George, they just saw an easy target. They mocked his blindness, slapped him around a bit, stole his money and all his boxes of cigarettes. And when he tried to defend himself with his wooden cane, they grabbed it from his hands and threw it down the hallway of the post office. They kept this up for a while, I guess, and they picked times when the place was fairly deserted. Fucking cowards.
I sat in George’s chair in the living room, crying as I listened closely to George whispering the details of the attacks to Bunny in the kitchen. My spirits sank. George had been my very own war hero. I brought his medals to school for show and tell, and marvelled at his bloodied air force flight boots that were kept in his old RCAF bag in the basement. But the man I had proudly led through parades on Remembrance Day was again a fallen soldier, only this time I was there to hear every horrible detail.
I’m ashamed to admit that the day he came home battered up and scared was the day George stopped being my hero. He seemed small and weak to me, and I was washed over with feelings that bullied my childhood beliefs and pushed my heart so out of line that I just couldn’t get it put back into place.
George was never the person I went to for advice. And the distance between us was only widened by Bunny’s insistence on using George to make me feel guilty for my adolescent acts of rebellion and drunken stumbles. She’d pull me into the kitchen and ask, “What the hell is wrong with you? What would your father think about this? Your father lost his eyesight in the war for you. You can’t embarrass him like this after all he’s been through for you, after all he’s sacrificed to give you a home, to give you a life.”
Years later I wished he was more of a father or at least more of an authoritarian. I needed him to curb my wild nature and show me what was right and wrong. I needed a force to deal out the rules, but sadly George was not up to the task of taming a young man who was veering quickly off track. He and Bunny were old. They were tired. And the problems I would cause were beyond their comprehension.
—
There were wild men everywhere you looked in Hamilton in the seventies—blue-collar devils, like Peter Fonda’s dim-witted cousins. Kind of handsome and really fucked up, with perfect hair, bruised knuckles and crooked noses. All of them looked desperate. The north-end monsters, the factories, were unavoidable; there was no way to outrun them. These wild men didn’t know how to run, anyway. They were the guys you’d send over the hill first to get their heads blown off in a war. In Hamilton they turned up their amps and took the fight into the streets and the bars everywhere they went. Hamiltonians became known as fearless rounders—all the edges beaten off them, round and ready to roll.
I knew them only by their street names. Hubcap, Slash, Crash, Slash Booze, Heavy Kevi, Curse, Nightmare, Slim, the Chicken, the Cock, the Ditch Witch, Bucky, Ear Bone, Sticky Dore, the HHump, the Itch, Swing Out—they were the regulars, or at least the ones that were regularly talked about because they took the chances or had the drugs or j
ust got out of jail or were going to court or got some shitty gig doing the fourth-set country and western matinee down on Barton Street at the Prince Edward Tavern, or an even shittier gig playing guitar for some band that did Doobie Brothers covers six nights a week in the east end somewhere. At least the Prince Edward Tavern gig offered a hot meal and a chance to play some great old Buck Owens and Lefty Frizzell songs
For musical inspiration, Hamilton looked towards Detroit, not Yonge Street. We ate up the Stooges, Alice Cooper and MC5 because we could figure out how to make that kind of noise. The city had its own overdriven, steel-on-steel matrix that affected our reality. The buzzing in the air drilled holes into the skulls of young men. Fellow Hamiltonian Daniel Lanois used to call this endless buzz the Hamilton guitar sound because no matter what electrical socket you plugged your amp into in Hamilton, you got the buzzzzz. It was like the industrial post-war knob-and-tube wiring that you couldn’t get out of the walls. The wiring was already doing the job for us, creating our future. It was proof that we were alive, and it gave us the confidence to throw down harder than the next town. It was like getting into a cage with a drunk raccoon. You knew you were going to get hurt but you had to do it. We were falling out of broken homes. Not just the homes of parents who separated or divorced, but homes occupied by broken people. All of us were stepping out, looking for a bit of light, a bit of freedom.
At the same time, as the city’s coffee houses were closing their doors, a place called the Pizza Patio opened down on King Street. It was situated in the old entrance to the Capitol Theatre. The grand venue had been torn down by a city hall full of assholes and turned into a parking lot and only the lobby remained intact among the burned-out storefronts, pawn shops and dive bars that littered the face of the downtown core. Pizza Patio was the only place my folkie heroes—Willie P. Bennett and David Wiffen and Brent Titcomb—had left to play. So I got myself a gig at the place. Six nights’ worth. I put up posters and made some phone calls and filled the room with piss tanks and old pals. I made six hundred dollars playing there my first week. Six hundred dollars in 1976 was a hell of a lot of money for a broke seventeen-year-old kid with a guitar.
