Canadianity

by Jeremy Taggart

  I was the host, Sue Johanson was the sexpert and rapper Snow was the musical guest. His single “Informer” was at the top of the charts and he was a big “get.”

  It was also a big break for me. I was still on Street Cents, and this was my first network special. The number of cameras was a little intimidating, but fortunately the on-camera stuff always came fairly easily. Someone gave me a great piece of advice early on. Al MacPherson, a warm grandfatherly cameraman at CBC Halifax, told me when you’re looking into the camera, pretend you’re talking to someone you know, love or have a crush on. It’ll give your delivery a warmth and casualness that it wouldn’t have otherwise. It was easy when I was talking to Al’s camera. He was such a bahd.

  We shot AIDScare/AIDsCare in the Masonic Temple, the big, beautiful building that would later become home to MTV Canada and Open Mike with Mike Bullard.

  My friend Richard Mortimer wrote it (we’d already worked together on Street Cents) and a woman named Lynn Harvey produced it. She was a very accomplished variety producer, and the three of us would soon after team up on Jonovision.

  One of the AIDScare bits involved me dressing up as a life-sized penis (typecasting?) so that Sue Johanson could put a tire-sized condom over me, as a way of demonstrating how to do it properly. The costume was something to behold. It had a ceramic head (with a cutout for my face), a flesh-coloured onesie and brown fuzzy slippers to represent the pubic mound.

  Sue is a wonderful woman, but not tall. In order for her to properly pinch the tip, I had to lean over to one side rather flaccidly. This created a curious silhouette, but it was still a very effective demo for the age group of our target audience.

  The week leading up to the live taping was going well. We were banking some great sketches to roll into the show. Everyone was proud of the work we were doing and very excited for Snow’s arrival. He and his bodyguard Too Tall (not his Christian name, I don’t think) were coming in from Jamaica on Thursday, and the show was shooting in front of a live studio audience Friday night.

  Thursday evening, Snow arrived on schedule and went to his hotel to settle in. When he left the hotel for the sound check, he left his room key at the front desk and said that he wouldn’t be back. Maybe the room wasn’t up to snuff, maybe he planned to stay with friends. In any case, he left the distinct impression that they wouldn’t be seeing him again.

  After sound check, he and Too Tall left in a van with a CBC driver to go hang out with some friends. It must be quite a feeling to be back in your hometown with a #1 song on the charts.

  Then, late in the evening/early in the morning, they decided it was time to crash. But where? Snow had left his key at the front desk. Fortunately, Too Tall still had his, so they went back to the original hotel and up to their room—which was, by now, someone else’s room.

  Imagine your surprise if you were asleep in your room when Snow, TooTall and a posse of partiers burst in unexpectedly. For obvious reasons, security became involved, and later the police as well, who ultimately arrested Snow . . .

  The night before our show.

  That was Part A of the story. Here comes Part B.

  On show day, we continued to rehearse and prepare as though everything would be fine. We finished dress rehearsal, having left a hole for Snow’s performance of “Informer.” Meanwhile, Dee Gilchrist (a production executive at the CBC) was working her magic during Snow’s arraignment to get him freed. “But Your Honour, he’s here to perform at a comedy show about AIDS for teenagers.”

  We flicked on the Citytv news between the rehearsal and the show, and there were Snow, TooTall and Dee running down the steps of City Hall on their way to the Masonic Temple! Just in time!

  The show started. It was going well despite the fact that there was no Snow. How unusual as a Canadian to pray for Snow—lololollolololololololllllll.

  I got dressed in my penis costume, the bit killed and the kids loved Sue. I walked off stage as Snow was about to walk on. We had pre-taped my intro of him, so I wouldn’t have to introduce him in my penis costume. A CBC publicist grabbed me and said, “We need a quick picture with you and Snow.” I said, “Cool, I’m just going to change real quick . . .”

  “There’s no time. This is our only chance to have a promotional pic of the two of you together.”

  Snow and TooTall were leaving the building as soon as his performance was over. So I sighed and stood beside Snow, trying my best to smile as the photographer offered suggestions. “Snow, put your arm around the penis. Penis, put your head on Snow’s shoulder.”

  For what it’s worth, he could not have been more of a gentleman. Friendly, accommodating, kind. He saw the humour in the situation better than I did.

  Somewhere in the bowels of the CBC in Toronto, there are press pictures of Penis Me and Snow. Chart-topping rapper Snow, giving the peace sign with his arm around a dickhead. I keep meaning to get my hands on one, blow it up and get it framed.

  I saw him again years later at a bar in Toronto. He’d become friends with Mike Smith and was still the same awesome dude. We had a great chat about songwriting and he shared his strategy, which is that the best songs all have a nursery rhyme quality. Interesting philosophy.

  And you can’t tell me “Informer” isn’t a dope-ass jam. Still.

  For the Love of Drums

  Taggart

  Drums mean a lot to me. I knew they would be part of my life even before I could play them, almost a “Yeah, I’ll get to it” kind of deal. I felt a connection with them from the moment I touched a drumhead. I’ll never forget—it was in Grade 3. A kid from high school came to my school and played some beats in an assembly at Mulmur-Mono, near Shelburne. He played like “Wipeout” or “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Either way, it blew my mind. I was a drummer. I knew it. The calm, the cool.

  Drummers are like goalies or even golf course superintendents. They are a little bit different. They affiliate with all walks of life. Drummers tend to not care what people think. We just want to play. We don’t care about needing the listener. We know that if you’re good enough, that shit doesn’t matter. We connect with time. We disappear into it, and try to affect the feeling of it. Pushy or laid-back, or right in the middle. What you hit in the backbeat makes the feeling.

  Even though I was all in after seeing that kid play in assembly, I just had a feeling that I would delve into drumming like a madman someday, but not yet. Maybe it was the fact that my dad was through with drumming himself.

  I’ll never forget the sound of drums being destroyed in our basement in 1979. At four years old, I was far too young to understand what was going on, but I remember the smashing and banging. It was New Year’s Eve, and Dad had no gig. He lost it. He quit drumming professionally. His closure needed an exclamation point, and that meant destroying all his gear. Holy boats, what a sound. It was a true finisher. He came upstairs from turning everything to dust and never played drums again.

  So I grew up not seeing or hearing drums at all, with the exception of the kid at my school assembly. Dad would show us rudiments like double strokes and paradiddles, but it was casual and nobody really took it anywhere further in the house. It was always far in the back of my mind to play. I was so into baseball.

  Flash forward to Barrie, Ontario. I was fourteen years old and I had just got home from school. I was in the back parking lot of our apartment building on Innisfil Street. I looked on the pavement beside the car and saw a taped-up pair of drumsticks. All broken, but repaired with greasy clear tape. I picked them up and got really horny at the idea of becoming a drummer all of a sudden. I marched upstairs to talk to Dad, I was so fired up. I came up to him, sticks behind my back, and told him I wanted to learn to play drums and showed him the wretched set of sticks. His faced soured and he said, “Why would you wanna do that?” with an angry, beaten feel.

  “I like it, it’s cool, Dad,” I said with absolute fear. He responded, “Well, if you’re gonna do it, you should be the best, or don’t bother.”

  Well. That
was good enough for me. I figured I’d give it the same go as I had with baseball. I was ready for the challenge. Dad started giving me lessons on everything he could help me with. He made me a practice pad out of foam rubber taped tightly around a book wrapped in a towel. Classic. I had to wear out that pad before I could even think of getting a drum kit. I burned that pad up for three months, and there was a huge hole in the middle of the surface. Time for a drum kit!

  I looked in the Buy & Sell newspaper and found an ad for a small Ludwig kit and cymbals for 250 bucks. I was so excited, I bugged my mom for days ’til she finally caved and we went to get the drums. The guy selling the kit had it in his garage. He opened the door and showed my folks and me the drums and cymbals. My dad was cracking up at how shitty they were. They were made up of scraps of random kits. They all had Ludwig decals screwed into them, but they were mismatched and brush-painted black. Just horrendous. The cymbals were basically tin toys—all small and thin, black and spotted green flecks. Basically, the worst drum set in history.

  I had to have them!

  I just wanted to play some beats. I didn’t care that they were the worst drums ever, even though they totally were. We somehow never even got a deal. We still paid $250. The guy must have sensed my desperation. But I was over the moon. I couldn’t wait to get home and set them up.

  I Tried Degrassi (But I Didn’t Inhale)

  Torrens

  Not saying I’m responsible for Degrassi: The Next Generation, but I’m also not saying I’m not. Okay, I’m probably not. But . . .

  During Jonovision, we often asked viewers what they’d like to see on the show. Over and over again, kids suggested a reunion of the original cast of Degrassi. It had been a few years since we’d seen them in Degrassi Talks (the way-ahead-of-its-time discussion show aimed at high school students) and there was a curiosity about the now-twentysomethings.

  Quite quickly, our story producers found and booked Joey, Snake, Spike, Stephanie Kaye, Arthur, Yick—the whole band was getting back together! We began putting some feelers out, cautiously optimistic that it could happen.

  When people heard we were doing a reunion, they freaked. Fans from as far away as San Francisco booked flights to come and be in the audience. There was so much to talk about that we decided it would be a special two-part episode.

  So the legend goes, there was so much buzz around the episodes that Linda Schuyler realized there might be life left in the franchise after all those years. She pitched Degrassi: The Next Generation, and the rest is TV history. It may well have already been in the works, but I still like to pretend I had at least something to do with it.

  A few years into Degrassi: The Next Generation, they wrote a two-part season premiere in which Emma (Spike and Shane’s now-fifteen-year-old daughter) discovers that her dad isn’t a doctor as she’d been told all these years. In fact, he’s a patient at a mental hospital.

  You might recall that, in the original Degrassi, Shane took acid and jumped off a bridge. In the storyline, he was in a coma for several weeks and was left with significant physical and mental disabilities.

  Billy Parrott, the actor who played Shane in the original series, didn’t want to reprise his role in this fashion, so they were stuck with a two-episode script but no dashing blond actor to play the role.

  Enter me. That might be the most uncomfortable sentence I’ve ever typed.

  Not sure if it was thanks for hosting the reunion or the sheer fact that I was a blond actor about the age Shane would’ve been when the episode was filmed. In any case, I was asked to play Shane McKay and instantly said yes. What an honour!

  I accepted before reading the scripts and had second thoughts immediately afterwards. Not because they were badly written—they were great. It’s just that I wasn’t sure I had the acting chops to pull it off. It was, after all, a pretty dramatic role on a show known for high drama.

  This was the story: Emma is feeling left out because her mom, Spike, is expecting a baby with Snake. Emma sneaks away from school to go and look for her dad, and she finds him pacing in a tiny room. She struggles with whether to pursue a relationship with her dad, who wasn’t quite the romantic figure she’d always been led to believe.

  Here are the other clues in the script about Shane MacKay, post–unspecified brain injury:

  1.He’s easily upset.

  2.He rocks back and forth and knits to calm himself down.

  3.He speaks with a debilitating stutter.

  Fortunately, all-time great Bruce McDonald (check out Highway 61 for serious Canadianity) was directing the episodes, and he’s the loveliest dude. Gentle, kind, encouraging.

  The episodes—both the TV ones and my character’s violent ones—turned out very well and I’m really happy that I did it. Proud, even. If you’re ever looking for ways to crush a lazy Sunday afternoon, it’s worth a Google.

  So there you go, bahds. Solid Canadianity right there.

  Great Moments in Canadianity

  Megaproducer (and father to Tori) Aaron Spelling was aware of Degrassi and liked the idea of doing a show about teenagers going through real issues. Linda Schuyler met with him about the possibility of doing an American version of the show.

  She explained that one of the reasons viewers so identified with Degrassi is because the kids looked real. The creator of such sexy and stylized shows as Dynasty, The Love Boat and Charlie’s Angels didn’t think the “real-looking” thing would fly, so he went on to make his own high school show, Beverly Hills, 90210, starring BC native Jason Priestley.

  The End of Baseball

  Taggart

  As I got more into the drums at age fifteen or sixteen, I got less into baseball. I was tired of the grinding politics with coaches and parents, the pecking back and forth between parents and coaches, the clash of different classes of the parents of the players. It got thick and tiresome for me. Maybe it was the constant daily practice in between team practices. But the game hardened for me with the repetition and technical view I had drawn of it. All this stuff was turning me right off the game. I was done with ball, and all I wanted to do was play drums.

  Just as things were getting horny for my baseball opportunities! I was invited to come out for an Atlanta Braves training camp in Toronto, a chance to be looked at by the legitimate scouts and trainers of the Atlanta Braves. My mom drove me there, and as we rolled into the park I couldn’t believe the number of kids that were there. I was legitimately into not getting out of the car and rolling back home. I felt it was a no-chance situation for me.

  My mom wasn’t letting me get out of this, though. She was right there for every step, scoring every game from my squirt days. She told me to get the fuck on that field, and I got out of the car. It was a plethora of kids, I’m gonna say hundreds. Almost every one of them was taller than me. Some of them were seven feet tall and covered with hair. The group was made up of the best players from all over southern Ontario, and me—a five-foot-nine seventeen-year-old confronting the Monstars from Space Jam. Some of these guys were already throwing in the nineties! I topped out at eighty-five and my love for the sides of the plate.

  I ran, hit, fielded, ran, caught, bunted, ran and pitched for what seemed like hours. After the tryout I spoke to a couple guys with browned potato-chip faces about my future. They spoke highly of my accuracy and the movement on my curveball. The only junk I had. They said I could maintain good contact at the plate, and they would like to see me at another tryout that would give me a chance to go into their farm system. Maybe score a sweet free boat ride through a swank school with a scholarship.

  There was something weird about that experience—maybe the validation from the chip guys, maybe seeing giants with far more strength than me play the game with ease. All I know is that my passion for baseball was left on that field, or maybe in the parking lot. I didn’t want to touch a baseball unless it was for shits and gigs. Which was a bummer, because my disassociation from the game included no longer watching major league baseball on TV. Th
is happened in spring of 1992, bahds. I screwed myself out of both Jays World Series championships! I was fairweathered and pissy with the Jays for a few years. Dumb, eh?

  Canada Day in the Capital

  Torrens

  One summer during the off-season from Jonovision, I thought I would volunteer as a driver on the CBC Canada Day show. It’s quite a spectacle when a hundred thousand Canadians gather on the front lawn of Parliament Hill to celebrate.

  It’s also usually hot. Like, change your shirt four times a day hot.

  My first job was to drive a cube van full of cold drinks from Toronto to Ottawa. I love driving, and this was a fun adventure for me. The plan was to drive up with the drinks and drive back with some set pieces that were made in Ottawa to store in the CBC art department’s lockup. That was quite a place, as you can imagine. Props and sets from Air Farce, Wayne & Shuster, The Tommy Hunter Show. I loved to go down there and wander the aisles, trying to spot recognizable items.

  Anyway, this particular week was unseasonably, unreasonably cold for Ottawa. Like, hot chocolate in late June cold. All this to say my cold drinks didn’t exactly fly off the shelves the way they normally would. The production had to instead buy a bunch of coffee and tea to try to warm up the crew, who were manning and womanning their outdoor positions for hours on end during this freaky frosty snap.

  At the end of the week, not only did I have all the set pieces in my van, but also all the cold drinks that no one ended up consuming. My li’l rig was way overweight by the time I left Ottawa for Toronto.

  Now it makes sense why kids in passing cars were pointing and waving at me. It’s not because I was a trucker, offering a friendly toot in passing. It’s because my axles were bent and my wheels were like Bambi on ice.

  I pulled into a truck stop in Belleville and drivers literally came running out, pointing and laughing. Turns out the axles were seconds away from snapping on the 401. Oops. I had to ditch some drinks and switch cube vans to get back on the road.