Life Real Loud

by Bill Reynolds

  Then bands started playing early Beatles songs, Wayne Fontana songs, all those Carnaby Street pop songs, at the CYO, the Catholic Youth Organization. The Electric Prunes and stuff like that started happening in 1966. Soon even the Beatles got turned on—those were wonderful days.

  Wonderful summers, too. In seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, 1964–66, when Lefebvre was thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, he participated in a choir program. Every spring Father Joe Toole, at the cathedral in Calgary, would choose a dozen boys to take part in a summer music program in Toronto. Lefebvre was flown in and stayed downtown, near Church and Queen Streets, along with some other kids from boys’ choirs. By day they were participants in St. Michael’s Cathedral Choir School, a five-week summer liturgical music camp. He sang in both the boys’ choir and the men’s choir. There were maybe twenty boys and twenty men in all.

  Lefebvre learned a great deal about music during these three summers, about structure, about harmonized and contrapuntal melodies, and about playing the organ. “We were steeped in some spine-tinglingly beautiful music—Renaissance polyphony, Palestrina. It’s a fucking shame that some people are Protestants,” says Lefebvre, “because there’s a really good book of music out there that they would never get to hear.”

  Church music was one part of Lefebvre’s musical education; the other was learning on his own. He had always fooled around with either his or his sister Anne’s acoustic guitar, and he’d been taken piano lessons since the third grade. He studied piano through first to sixth grades before quitting when he was twelve. When he was seventeen he picked it up again. The electric guitar came afterward, as did faking his way through Bob Dylan and Neil Young songbooks on piano. One thing he discovered through this long process was that the guitar was primarily a percussion or rhythm instrument, whereas the piano to him seemed to contain infinite melodies. Not that the guitar didn’t—it just didn’t present itself so easily that way.

  Church music had an additional function at summer camp in Toronto: an alarm clock. “The beds at St. Michael’s School were in a big auditorium,” Lefebvre says. “On the stage was a big pipe organ. On the wings of the stage were the bunk beds. Guys would start practicing organ and the first time slot was 6:30 in the morning. Guess what? You woke up because it was right there.”

  While daytime hours were spent drawing on the well of Catholic liturgical music, nighttime was a different story. Lefebvre would climb out the window and head for the real music action. “We’d stack up pillows in our bunk beds and sneak out to Yorkville,” he explains. “You’d walk out onto Yonge Street and Sam’s would be there. There would be all of these wonderful forty-fives. I remember distinctly walking by this club, just about a block down from Dundas Street, called Le Coq d’Or (the golden rooster).” Lefebvre looked in the window and saw a picture of Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks. If he’d been able to sneak in, he would have seen the Band in a small club prior to backing Bob Dylan on his 1966 world tour.

  Lefebvre continues,

  We’d head up to Yorkville, walk up and down the street, and look at the go-go dancers in the cages at the Blind Onion and the Riverboat. You could listen through the door and Gordon Lightfoot would be playing. I remember thinking it was completely ridiculous that those coffee houses would charge you two bucks for a Coke when you could get one for fifteen cents in the store. So we’d just sit out on the street watching the go-go dancers. It was so dreamy, man, this whole world I had no introduction to except through music—and that my mother didn’t know a thing about. By then I knew who Leonard Cohen was, who Dylan was, and all the pop bands, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who—all that was happening by 1965. God, it was an amazing time to be a kid.

  At the end of the last summer, when my mom finally came to get me, she got really mad because I hadn’t gotten my hair cut all summer. She made me get it cut. I knew then and there that they were all wrong and I was right. So I went on to smoke pot and drop acid.

  Lefebvre was consistent about hair length. It was a declaration of war: he wasn’t going to cut it for anybody. “He’s been like that since he was twelve years old,” confirms his mom. Long hair meant everything, and a quick spin through the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tune “Almost Cut My Hair” reinforces how a head might think: cutting your hair meant giving in to the straight world. Mind you, growing your hair also increased paranoia, as when David Crosby sang about looking into a mirror and seeing a cop car. But Lefebvre and so many other guys in the counterculture thought it worth the risk. Louise was bothered by the scruffiness, but she was also sympathetic. She thought some authority figures took it too seriously. She says,

  When I went to see him in Toronto, the director of the choir asked to see me. John was not cutting his hair and he was sneaking out to Yorkville to go hang out with the hippies. This priest was so upset that he frightened me.

  John’s hair was the length of the Beatles’—that’s not long. That priest, I thought after, You’ve got your head in the wrong place here. You shouldn’t be criticizing a young man for that. But yes, John shouldn’t have been sneaking out.

  Outside those welcome summertime forays into Toronto nightlife, Lefebvre had his favored Calgary hangouts. One was the Prairie Dog Inn, a Seventeenth Avenue SW pizza joint located between Seventh and Eighth Streets, on the south side, with a skinny row of outdoor tables elevated slightly on a balcony that overlooked Tomkins Park across the street. Lefebvre recalls,

  Mike, who ran that restaurant, was a little fat Mexican guy. He had a jukebox in the back, with songs like “Ruby Tuesday” and “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” and Jefferson Airplane. We’d smoke pot and go in there and buy pizza and beer, pizza and Coke. It was kind of like a beat place—gingham red-and-white tablecloths, beads hanging in the doorways.

  There was the Java downtown, too. It was on First Street. Guys with motorcycles and black leather jackets would go there, chicks with long straight blond hair. It was more beat than the Prairie Dog, a little bit more on the greasy intellectual side. They weren’t longhaired guys; they were guys who looked like Jack Kerouac. Later, it turned into the Love Shop, one of Calgary’s first sex shops. And there was the Apollo Ballroom. It used to be a church, on Eighth Avenue a bit west of Fourth Street. That was where “Bible Bill” Aberhart preached—that was his church.

  Aberhart, a Baptist minister elected premier of Alberta from 1935–43, believed people needed to spend their way out of the Great Depression and gave away government cash to families.

  Lefebvre continues, “They’d get bands in there like Redbone. They had that song ‘Come and Get Your Love.’ We had tons of fun and nobody knew what the fuck we were doing. Our parents, I mean. The first time I did acid was probably 1967–68. People didn’t have a clue.”

  Especially the people who ran St. Mary’s Boys’ School, for which Lefebvre no longer had time. More interested in acid than economics, he dropped out of twelfth grade in January 1969, two courses short of graduating. He wanted to be a freak, and his friends at the time were the Hoggan brothers, Frank, Jim, and Joe, especially the latter two. They all went to St. Mary’s Boys’ School together and formed part of a group of psychedelic Calgarians that also included Steve Lewis, Murray Christie, and Craig Humphries. All of them except Jim and Joe Hoggan, said Lefebvre, are dead. “Those guys were hard-livers.”

  While Lefebvre increasingly felt he had little time for a straight education and, like most teenagers, was chafing under his mom’s discipline, Louise decided to go back to school and get a master’s in counseling and psychology. She commuted back and forth between Gonzaga University, Spokane, and Calgary. While she was away, Anne was the oldest and in charge. John was the wild one—that was a given—but Ted could be counted on to be responsible. And there were family friends on hand to help out, as there had always been.

  Even when his mom was away, Lefebvre felt somehow that she was still in control. After his father died, an inesca
pable thought grew in his mind that the mom he had known in those early years had ceased to exist and a new version had taken over, a kind of mom/dad composite: “My mother overcompensated and concentrated on being a disciplinarian rather than a mother. She was trying to get us out to music lessons, get us out to serve mass in the morning, get us out to choir practice.”

  It would be obvious to anyone outside the immediate family unit that Louise had to revise her parenting strategies after the loss of her husband. And maybe it wasn’t much of a stretch: based on Lefebvre’s memories of his dad, Mun wasn’t exactly the stern disciplinarian when he was around. But teenage perceptions, however refracted, can harden. Lefebvre explains, “In a way, I spent most of my adolescence and maybe my early adult years—and maybe even some of my middle adult years—jonesing for affection and approval all over the place.”

  By the time Louise returned to Calgary to take up her post at St. Mary’s Girls’ School as a guidance counselor, her eldest son had a well-developed rebellious streak and was clambering to get into the real world of being a working stiff and getting high a lot. When he was sixteen he got hired onto a construction crew contracted to build Woolco department stores in Calgary. Turns out Lefebvre didn’t have much time for construction, either. On his first crew, he lasted until his initial check arrived. He quit and headed to the Highlander on Sixteenth Avenue NW, a tavern that had long been one of Calgary’s notorious drinking establishments, located just west of Fourteenth Street and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. People went there with the intent to drink and party hard. “It was a huge barn in those days,” says Lefebvre, “eight hundred seats and a rock ’n’ roll band. You could order a table full of draft.”

  On weekends and sometimes even nightly, especially in summer, the space was crammed with drunken Calgarians, many of whom had ingested or smoked something else besides. “You could drink tons of beer and smoke lots of hash and drop lots of mescaline and psilocybin and be hippies in the bar.” Not just hippies, though. Students, laborers, transients on the road to Banff—didn’t matter, the place could fill up with rock ’n’ rollers and rednecks and acidheads and old drunks and dope smokers and crazies. By the end of the night everyone would be blitzed from all the cheap draft. From age sixteen to twenty-four, almost a decade, the Highlander was a Lefebvre stomping ground, a place to hang out, get loaded, score dope, chase women—a young man’s entire universe in microcosm.

  Lefebvre did stick around construction sites long enough to pick up some schooling from an older coworker, a journeyman:

  One day I was working with this carpenter. He seemed like a really old guy to me—he was probably forty. He was down on one knee and nailing at some concrete forming, rough carpentry. I was helping him. He was always down on one knee and all of a sudden he turned around and put his elbows on his one knee and shook his head and said, “You haven’t been away from home long, have ya?”

  I thought, How the fuck did he know that? That was my first intuition that I had some things I had to learn how to hide yet. I started paying a bit more close attention to guys who were around me and how they were responding. There’s a mystique in our society about what men do and what men don’t do and you get a really good picture of it from the construction side of things. Everybody you run into has the same basket of problems. They may have a different flavor, maybe a different extent. But our problems are no worse than anybody else’s, probably a lot less than most people’s.

  I remember this other guy, a smaller guy but he was big and round and he had one of those mustaches that you twist the end of it. I was eighteen and he was forty-five maybe and an unskilled laborer. I asked him about himself and he said there was a point at which he was drinking two bottles of whiskey a day.

  “Two bottles! How can anybody possibly drink two bottles a day?”

  “It’s not that hard.”

  He had pins in his shin where he’d broken his leg from being drunk. Pins in his shoulder cause he’d broken his collarbone being drunk. Told me he drank so much rye it made him fat. Probably rye and Coke, right? I’m looking at the guy and thinking he’s spending each day of his life thinking, If I work all day, then after I work I can do whatever I want for as long as I want, as long as I get up to go to work at eight. And if I just do it long enough to get pogey [welfare], then I can do whatever I want all I want and collect my pogey.

  At age sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, well on his way to becoming a hippie, Lefebvre managed to get a few glimpses of the future, at least what it would be if he wasn’t careful about it. He learned that a lack of ambition wasn’t what underlined the plight of these construction lifers. There was ambition all right—the ambition to arrive at oblivion’s doorstep every night. He explains,

  The real goal is to get away from something. You’ve got a hole inside and you think you’re going to fill it up with alcohol or meth or whatever. You’re not loved by someone you want to be loved by. But you can’t remember that, you just remember the scar.

  It’s like when you go to jail, you’re feeling really bad for yourself. You want to tell anyone who will listen how you got fucked. And you get about one second into it and some guy looks at you and says, “You know what, kid? Shut up, ’cause you’re making a fool of yourself. Do your own time.” These guys have things like children dying, terminal illnesses, alcoholism—big problems. It’s a little bit harsh, the lesson, but it’s important.

  With the construction industry populated with such stoic but dead-end characters, Lefebvre was even more convinced he was in the vanguard of a revolution moving toward some new type of consciousness expansion. He was smoking dope, dropping acid, and developing a new way of seeing the world—a new connection with the cosmos. It was an intense period of discovery, and he and Jim Hoggan were all in.

  They began reading Alan Watts’s This Is IT and other philosophy books. In his essay “This is IT,” written in the fifties, Watts argued that the true religious experience has nothing to do with religion or cosmology and everything to do with what is happening in the here and now. In the awareness, recognition, and acceptance of an eternal present, existence ceases to be a problem. Instead, we marvel that all things are self-evident and just as they are—as opposed to how we think they ought to be. Watts experimented with acid, mescaline, and marijuana in the early sixties, and Lefebvre and Hoggan followed his path. They would drop acid together and discuss this new consciousness they were developing, and it changed their lives.

  Of course, sometimes they were so tripped out—trying to levitate in the living room, thinking they had levitated, telling Lefebvre’s mom they in fact had levitated—it was hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t. One time Louise was in Bragg Creek, twenty miles west of Calgary, and she received a panicky call from her son, “Mom, can you come right home?” Louise was terrified, but it turned out Lefebvre and his friend Jim had been practicing Transcendental Meditation. When she walked into the house, all her son could blurt was “Mom, I saw the white light!”

  Louise recalls,

  I used to come home from work and see there was a pear on the mantel—a real pear—and John’s friend was there. And you could smell incense. One of John’s eyes would turn in. They were meditating on the pear. Whatever it meant, I don’t know.

  “John, you’ve been smoking that stuff again.”

  “What stuff?”

  By this point, Louise was no fool. She was a school counselor, and police officers had paid a visit to St. Mary’s to show her and everyone else samples of pot and hash. They all took a good whiff so they would recognize the former’s pungency and the latter’s sweetness. A younger teacher or two may have been obliged to feign ignorance.

  Lefebvre soon moved out. He rented a room in a house in a downtown neighborhood called the Beltline with about a dozen other hippies, freaks, and acidheads. “It was a big house, maybe four or five bedrooms, with more in the basement for a couple, and a bed in
the living room.” Lefebvre had a girlfriend named Patty who lived there with him. Or, more precisely, he had a girl he slept with. “Sometimes these other girls would come and Patty would say, ‘Yeah, that’s okay, go ahead, I’ll just sleep over here.’”

  Jim Hoggan lived with his brother Frank in a house along the Bow River (which runs west to east and bisects Calgary) across from downtown, on Memorial Drive. Lefebvre recalls,

  And near 1152 Memorial there were a couple of houses—1148 had some hippies in it. There were some guys who were actually selling dope and making money at it.

  And then, where I was living, there was Murray Christie and Tom Johnson, an older hippie who had been in Britain. He had those boots with the little high heels on them, his fuzzy hair and muttonchops and British hippie clothes. He was hardcore, actually. He had already been interested in speed and he would take heroin sometimes.

  An LSD trip lasted for eight to ten hours, which was a good deal. Even so, a hit went for anywhere between four and six bucks. “It was a lot of money in those days, but hey, it lasted a long time for me—decades—so it was worth it.” Forty-one years later, on the receiving end of three tabs of Sandoz Laboratories–quality LSD for his fifty-ninth birthday, Lefebvre would revisit his acid salad days. A half tab was all he would need to reinforce his conviction about the drug’s positive, mind-expanding power.

  Between the three houses on the north side of the Bow and Lefebvre’s Fifteenth Street SW pad, there were plenty of opportunities to score acid. Word started to get around. Freaks would come to the door, often freaks no one at the household really knew, maybe a friend of a friend, maybe not. Lefebvre wasn’t dealing to make money. He wasn’t even dealing to cover his own consumption of drugs. He was just living in the house. If a hippie came to the door and wanted some acid he would happily oblige. He says,