Lefebvre hadn’t done anything like delivering bundles of Vox to clubs and record stores downtown. He did community work of a different kind, having helped me in his professional capacity as a working lawyer. I’d met him at the Sunnyside Legal Clinic, which happened to be a couple of hundred yards from my rental house, and he listened to my tale of a recent student referendum gone bad. What had appeared to be a win was later overturned in a decision against the radio station. He devised a simple, but what he thought might be effective, plan to ensure that CJSW would win a pending appeal in front of the University of Calgary Review Board. He asked me whether the radio station could possibly afford to fly a man named David Carter—the Speaker of the Alberta Legislative Assembly at the time—down from the provincial capital, Edmonton, and put him up for one night in a half-decent hotel. I checked with our station manager. She agreed to cover the expense.
The problem specifically was with a referendum the previous March in the 1987 student elections. The referendum question asked University of Calgary students whether or not they would agree to pay an additional one dollar per student per term to offset increasing fixed costs at CJSW. For my part, I was hoping the additional dollar would also cover some cost overruns at Vox magazine (hence my personal investment in the decision). What happened was this: CJSW, which had already been guaranteed two dollars per student per term in a 1982 referendum, had won the 1987 referendum by three votes. The margin was thin, but it was still a win. Or was it? The chief returning officer determined that one non-student had voted and another student had double voted. Three votes were subsequently thrown out, which rendered the referendum vote a tie. The chief returning officer recused himself from casting the tiebreaker because he was not a student during that semester. He turned to his deputy returning officer, who voted against the radio station. Instead of winning by three votes, CJSW lost by one.
With Lefebvre’s help we had a chance to overturn what I believed was a partisan decision. At the appeal six months later, Carter informed the Review Board that the established law in Canadian elections was that the first vote of a qualified voter counts. That voter is subject to disenfranchisement only with the second vote cast. Thus, CJSW, in fact, had won the referendum by one vote. Did I ever need more proof that every vote counts? The win on appeal guaranteed that CJSW would receive something in the order of an additional $50,000 per year in student funding, in perpetuity. Over the decades, Lefebvre’s elegant bit of pro bono has netted CJSW over $1.3 million and counting. All he got out of it was spaghetti and meatballs and some plonk.
I go into this anecdote in some detail to explain two things. One: Lefebvre paying for my ticket to L.A. is not the only conflict of interest I have; I have firsthand knowledge of his generous spirit, which predisposes me to think well of him. And two: this early anecdote of Lefebvre’s behavior shows what kind of person he is, the kind who wants to help people and for whom making money is not the guiding purpose of existence.
And it wasn’t the first time Lefebvre helped the university radio station while I was there. As president of the student union in 1978–79, he managed to push through, or at least set up, legislation that more or less guaranteed autonomy and independence for student media, especially the student newspaper, the Gauntlet, but also eventually for CJSW and the student television station, Universatility, when it came into existence.
• • •
Once I get to the Village Recorder, Lefebvre heartily welcomes me into Studio D. He’s a large man in his late fifties, still waving his Hendrix freak flag high and still wearing his hair the same shoulder length it was during his campus politics days. His stomach protrudes quite a bit more than last I saw him, and his hair’s gone gray, of course, but he’s as outgoing as ever. The first thing I notice is that he addresses people by their first name, always, and, true to his student politics roots, never forgets a name. If he does, he directly asks for the name again and uses it again right away so he can remember it.
Like a politician working his mojo, Lefebvre meets people up front, eyes focused on his immediate subject. In group situations, he brings everyone within immediate earshot into the conversation, making sure no one gets left out. This is a rare skill, and I’ll see it happen again and again. He’ll confess later that all this glad-handing and remembering names is actually a mask for his insecurities—his way of combating being socially immobilized. No one would suspect this.
Ivy Patton, whose husband, Danny, has abetted Lefebvre’s music for years, puts it to me this way: “After we see him there’s this little warm glow that you have, this John glow. He just makes you feel so good.” As for his intimidating amount of money, she says, “He makes you feel like it’s yours too.”
Lefebvre is also egalitarian in his dealings with others. He’s at ease talking in the same direct, friendly manner to waiters, CEOs, cab drivers, artists, musicians, and lawyers. This is what happens when you’ve been both a somebody and a nobody, when you’ve been a regular Joe and then king of the world, when you’ve not only killed time but done time. The only time a tonal shift occurs, to one of formal deference, is when he is on the phone with the lawyers he’s hired to represent him. The change in tenor reinforces the seriousness of the FBI charges—twenty years and one hundred percent forfeiture. And maybe more than one hundred percent, if the DOJ decides any other property he bought—for his mom, say—counts as well.
After I’ve been in the studio room for a few minutes and been introduced to Brian Ahern, Lefebvre says, “Bill, you haven’t changed in twenty years.” Well, he knows how to flatter a guy, so maybe I ought to be on my guard. He does have this preternatural ability to make everyone feel included and at home inside his protective aura. It doesn’t matter whether he’s introducing his family to waiters at chichi restaurants or his Salt Spring Island girlfriend, Hilary Watson, to musicians in the studio, his excitement is infectious.
“Look at this!” he says, pointing to a gold record hanging on the wall that celebrates the fact that the Rolling Stones recorded “Angie” at the Village. Even now, accustomed as he is to his massive windfall, the Village’s atmosphere gives him a tingle. Lefebvre can afford to pay to bask in the storied history, hoping the perfume of pop success will linger over Studio D while he’s here. “Steely Dan recorded here, man!”
It’s true. The Dan recorded its first album, Can’t Buy a Thrill, and several others, here. The Village began in 1922 as a Masonic Temple, but in the sixties, perhaps appropriate to the era, the Maharishi located his Transcendental Meditation headquarters here. The studio itself was founded in 1968. Supertramp, Neil Diamond, Heart, Cher, Stone Temple Pilots, Cracker, John Mayer, Smashing Pumpkins have recorded here, and the list of successes goes on. Recent clients include Kelly Clarkson and Coldplay. Just a week earlier, Lefebvre had breezed by the now ex–Mr. Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin, sitting on stairs, yakking on his cell.
Right now Lefebvre is into the final wrap. A cache of tunes has been digitally stored, awaiting mixes. Tomorrow he’ll re-record some vocal and keyboard parts he and Ahern don’t like. Lefebvre confesses that he’s worried about the lack of guitar muscle on some tracks—not so much on the country-inflected pop but the straight ahead rock ’n’ roll tunes. The way he envisioned the songs in his head, and on his acoustic guitar when he wrote them, isn’t necessarily the way they’re turning out. The rhythm guitar seems buried, and the songs aren’t rocking hard enough for his taste. This, he hopes, is not a big deal, since mixing is a long way off. Generally he sang and played guitar on most tunes, plus a bit of piano, while accompanied by session aces hand-picked by Ahern.
The aces all have history. Al Kooper, for instance, cofounded the Blues Project in 1965. A year later, as a session man, he came up with the famous organ line that propelled Bob Dylan’s six-minute AM radio masterpiece “Like a Rolling Stone.” Then he helped initiate a horn-driven rock craze in 1967 by founding Blood, Sweat & Tears before releasing a string of solo LPs.
Kooper is now in his mid-seventies, and Lefebvre says, fondly, that he is at heart still a “seventeen-year-old greaseball from Philly.” Later, Lefebvre will kick a bunch of money Kooper’s way to help him finish his latest solo recording.
Glen D. Hardin was one of Buddy Holly’s Crickets in the early sixties. He then became a member of the Shindogs, the house band that backed up various guests on the television pop show Shindig! in the mid-sixties. In the seventies, Elvis Presley picked Hardin to lead his band. His credits run several browser screens in length, including Gram Parsons, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris.
Others enlisted for the month include drummer Jim Keltner (Little Village, Bob Dylan, on and on and on), whom the others jokingly dubbed “King Jim”; bassist James “Hutch” Hutchinson (Bonnie Raitt); keyboardist Matt Rollings (Lyle Lovett); pedal steel guitarist Greg Leisz (k. d. lang, Bill Frisell); session guitarist Dean Parks; and Patrick Warren, the Chamberlin specialist, who has played with Aimee Mann, Tom Waits, and Joe Henry.
Assessing Ahern’s choices, Lefebvre says, “When these guys are behind you, it’s hard to fall down.”
• • •
In 1978–79, Lefebvre was president of the University of Calgary Student Union. He graduated from U of C’s Faculty of Law in 1983 and for a few years practiced at McCaffery and Company, and elsewhere, before chucking the corporate life in favor of becoming a people’s lawyer. With Jane Bergman, another lawyer, he founded a bohemian-style retail outlet called Sunnyside Legal Clinic. After several years, they sold off the clinic and headed to India for a much-needed respite. Returning to Calgary, he opened a leather goods shop. Whiling away the long retail hours alone, he attempted to write a novel. The shop went bust, so he went back to the law. Then he sold coupon books for a living, which was about when his lawyer pals began to worry for his sanity. He subsequently landed at a condo management firm but wondered what he was doing there. By his mid-forties, Lefebvre had about all he could take. He chucked it all to play music full-time. Staying up half the night, jamming at clubs with a musical partner half his age, busking in the morning at CTrain stops for eggs-and-sausage cash, getting up at four in the afternoon, smoking up—now that was a fun life.
All those attempts to flee his profession failed, and Lefebvre was forced to return, over and over, to his bête noir. During the mid- to late nineties, his former partner Bergman tossed him the odd commercial real-estate law gig, which was how he came into contact with the businessman and venture capitalist Stephen Lawrence. A decade younger, Lawrence had also attended U of C and dabbled in student politics. He was an aficionado of satirical pop music and known to friends for his bullshit detector, but otherwise he was a pure business guy. Lawrence wanted to make a fortune and be a player. He received his master’s from the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) in London, Ontario, before returning to Calgary.
At the time, Lawrence required basic lawyerly assistance with the paperwork and filings for purchases and holdings and construction. Lefebvre could sleepwalk through that, and he was an affable guy. He and Lawrence struck up a friendship based on a few laughs and professional respect, even though Lefebvre’s heart would never be in the work.
For a company accused of money laundering, Neteller has an ironic origin: a car wash. In 1997, Lefebvre did some work for Lawrence, who was developing a strip mall in the Midnapore area of south Calgary. Lawrence leased out all of the storefronts but one, the cash-only car wash. He hired Jeff Natland to run that, a teenager who spent his days filling soap dispensers and emptying change boxes, and his nights surfing the internet. Lawrence discovered Natland was a computer geek who used his dad’s credit card to cruise legal gambling sites based in the Caribbean. Lawrence asked Natland if he might be able to create a blackjack program. Don’t see why not, the kid replied. Lawrence considered the idea of starting his own online site in a legal Caribbean jurisdiction. After trial and error, he and Natland realized the most vulnerable point in any online gambling chain was its secure money transfer system. Lawrence and Lefebvre would ultimately create Neteller with the specific purpose of solving that problem.
In 1999, Lawrence pinpointed his niche: processing internet gambling transactions in a new and efficient way. Meanwhile, the gregarious Lefebvre sold the idea to a couple of crucial investors and talked it up to bookies in Costa Rica and other places. Lawrence was the business brain, Lefebvre the sales and marketing brain. Natland was the IT brain but didn’t want to stick around. He headed to Silicon Valley, where venture capitalism was white-hot. Lawrence and Lefebvre came up with a company name, Neteller. It was just the two of them in 2000. They worked out of a cavernous office space downtown. They split their circadian rhythms into twelve-hour shifts and worked the phones, building the business from nothing. Lawrence had other businesses to attend to, so Lefebvre then stretched himself, working up to eighteen hours a day. He didn’t need money because this was his life: sleep, drive, work, repeat. For months.
Then, after restricting themselves to a meager monthly draw, and Neteller surviving a few near-death experiences, the pair suddenly started to make a profit in 2001. That profit soon ramped up. It became a gushing profit, an endless oil-well-pumping kind of profit. And then not just a gusher but a perpetual motion machine of profit, shooting checks at Lawrence and Lefebvre and the other five original investors like a pinwheel firing rockets on Independence Day.
Lefebvre and Lawrence started pulling in bonuses in the tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. It was “Listen to a story of a man named Jed,” except the man’s name was John, and his gusher went off in 2003, burst high then morphed into Jack’s beanstalk. Lefebvre, who had been busking on the streets of Calgary just a few years before, was insanely wealthy by his early fifties, worth a quarter of a billion, maybe even $300 million on paper, in just four intense years.
• • •
What did a man like Lefebvre do with this sort of wealth? Well, he threw it around like a happy-go-lucky hippie. He bought things with the knowledge that it did not make one iota of difference to his bank balance—and it didn’t, because the green stuff kept blasting his way faster than he could spend it.
And so, like anyone who has ever come into a sudden convoy of cash, Lefebvre has his toys—in Malibu alone, a pair of houses, a silver BMW Z8 in each garage, and a seven-foot Bösendorfer grand in the living room of Malibu 2. His real home is not Malibu and Los Angeles, although he enjoys the buzz of money and celebrity and sun and smog. His actual residence is located on the west side of Salt Spring Island, one of the Southern Gulf Islands, about thirty miles north of Victoria, British Columbia. Salt Spring is a former hippie community that became popular in the eighties and nineties with yuppies—wealthy yuppies, that is—and is now home to approximately ten thousand permanent residents. In addition to a home on Sunset Drive, Lefebvre bought a shuttered drinking establishment called the Vesuvius Inn, which overlooks Vesuvius Bay and is a five-minute drive from his Sunset Drive home. He intends to reopen the music venue, which would give him a regular place to jam with other island musicians—who knows, maybe Guess Who/Bachman-Turner Overdrive guitarist Randy Bachman or 54-40 drummer Matt Johnson. Lefebvre also keeps a house in Calgary, his hometown, in the Mount Royal neighborhood. His personal jet, a 1984 Cessna Citation II, is parked and maintained at a hangar in Springbank, Alberta, fifteen miles to the west of Calgary.
Still, at some point, the spending began to exhaust Lefebvre. He decided to fulfill a vision of what he thought he was destined to do: give it all away. “I always thought,” he says, “being a philanthropist would be a good job.”
Lefebvre gave money to friends and family, and he gave money to people who asked for it if he decided they needed it. Then he started to think on a grand scale: what if I start giving money—lots of money—to environmental organizations? So he created the John Lefebvre Foundation, which gave millions to the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Educ
ation; the David Suzuki Foundation (which proclaimed Lefebvre the largest financial supporter of environmental charities in Canadian history); his friend Jim Hoggan’s DeSmogBlog, which set out to expose the climate-change deniers as frauds sucking on oil industry teats; and Daniel Taylor’s Four Great Rivers Project in Tibet, which raises environmental consciousness in China.
The word philanthropist had a nice ring to it. Lefebvre could see himself playing the role indefinitely. Until the Neteller project, his life had been a bizarre zigzag. He barely accepted being a lawyer, grasping at one dubious job opportunity after another—anything to relieve the boredom of law. His first two marriages had failed, and there was a long, successful common-law relationship, until it wasn’t. The string through all of the personal and professional turmoil was that nagging, intermittently urgent desire to play music full-time.
And so life’s chain jerked him around until he got hold of it and took control. For all the late-blooming, starry-eyed ambition he now indulges, and for all the nouveau-riche lifestyle he has accessed in recent years, Lefebvre is a surprisingly earthy rich man. His baubles and endless disposable income haven’t changed him much. He’s like the Peter Pan who knew he was growing older but refused to acknowledge it. He struggled with the despised concept of maturity but then, at the half-century mark and with the Neteller assist, realized that he now didn’t have to mature, would never have to, and his wide-eyed enthusiasm just got wider.
Lefebvre seems to have kept the seven deadly sins in check, at least to the extent that they haven’t overwhelmed him. After running a gauntlet of excess, he was told by his doctor that he needed to cut down on the number of expensive reds he consumed. It’s true that Lefebvre has become a wine snob. For him, a bottle of plonk goes for around seventy bucks in Canada. Regusci Winery and Caymus Vineyards in Napa Valley produce two of his favorite everyday cabernet sauvignons. The doc didn’t tell him to cut down on the pot smoking because he didn’t have to—the DOJ’s mandatory piss tests took care of that.
Life Real Loud Page 2
