Border Crossings

The relationship with Lucille and the one with the band played its course out and one day I woke up and knew it was time to leave.  I fled to Toronto in the wake of an exodus of local musicians heading for "music city " to make it big. I had only a few dollars in my pocket after purchasing the train ticket but off I went, stars in my eyes and my head in the clouds like so many young travelers before me, with no idea of the trials awaiting me.

This was during the time when Yorkville was a hippie Mecca and also jam packed with venues where the latest and best of the new music was being performed live.  So it was no accident that this is where I headed, straight off the train, walking the streets and looking for a girl whose name had been given to me by a mutual friend in Winnipeg.  She had told me that I would be able to stay with her or she might find me a place to crash at least.  I remember walking into Boris' Nightclub where the group Luke and the Apostles were holding court, drowning the small club in high decibel rock.  I had been told that someone there knew where I could find the girl I was looking for and this person, who was taking tickets at the door, told me to look for a girl with a star on her forehead.

I walked for a few more hours and suddenly there she was, walking in the streets with a group of friends, all of them looking like figures out of a mystery play in their colorful costumes and slow, leisurely movements.  I stayed at her mother's house for a few days and then, through the friend who was my contact with her, I received a message that Lucille was coming to join me, having left Winnipeg against her parent's wishes.  I was overjoyed but challenged, for now I would have to find a place to live for both of us.

I met Lucille at the CN station and the first meeting was an indication of the heartache to follow, for I saw her, before she saw me, kissing a young soldier who she had obviously met on the train. I tried not to judge but jealousy had the firm upper hand. We sat in a park in downtown Toronto, her luggage piled on the bench beside us and I had visions of us sleeping there. However, looking through the classified ads of the newspaper I happened to notice an ad for a singer in a rock band and I telephoned, on impulse,  Lucille in the booth with me.

The man at the other end was Doug Campbell, who'd played with Neil Young's band The Squires, in Winnipeg and he hired me over the telephone to sing in a bar band he'd formed. Doug was on guitar, Brian (Ducky) Donald (who had played with Chad Allen and the Silvertones in Winnipeg and in the Sea Cadet band with me years ago) on drums, Bob McCann on bass, and finally yours truly up front on vocals. When he heard I didn't have a place to stay and that I was with Lucille, who he also knew, he invited us to come and stay in his apartment. This stroke of amazing good fortune and compassion saved me from what might have been a sojourn in the streets.  Later on, aside from singing in the band, I took a day job selling men's sweaters at Simpson's to help with the rent.

The strip along Yonge street and the Yorkville clubs featured some of the big names in rock, jazz and blues, so my musical education was proceeding apace. Also I got a first hand look at the stiff competition all vying for a place in the local limelight, many of whom made my "chops" seem severely limited by comparison. As the months went by, my frustration grew.  Lucille was moving away from me, first emotionally and then physically as she started staying away overnight.  After one of her outings, this one having stretching into nearly a week, she called me to meet her downtown.

I recall, as though it was yesterday, it had been raining.  She was standing on the street waiting for me holding a pink umbrella. She took me to see where she was living and without mincing words showed me the room where "Danny and I are sleeping", Danny being a bass player in one of the prominent local bands.  This drove the message home like nothing else could have and the bond between us was abruptly cut .

There followed from this a period of confusion, that even now as I try to recall it in detail, the sequence of events escapes me. If only I could find that Toronto General Hospital notebook that was probably my first journal, I would be able to clear the fog in my memory.  However, when the band broke up and before I found my own digs, I stayed with a group of friends who had recently arrived from Winnipeg, above a Harvey's hamburger joint on Wellesley Street.  Among the new arrivals were Gordon MacPherson, the guitarist from Friday the 13th and Jay, a girl I had know well from my early band days in Winnipeg.  There were four or five of us sharing the rent of this little noisy room and one fateful night we shared a "tab of acid", my first experience into the realm of the psychedelic, washing it down with a bottle of chocolate milk.

It was mid-winter, and the streets outside were filled with slushy ice and snow. The window of the room looked out onto the roof of the Harvey's Hamburger storefront, which formed a kind of shallow balcony.  It was full of uneven mounds of snow which seemed to be illuminated by the streetlights and tinged blue.  The first indication I had that anything unusual was happening was when I found myself staring at the snow mounds, which seemed to be coming to life and were now moving or undulating slowly before my unbelieving eyes, turning into blue snow-beings.  I laughed nervously and heard my laughter coming from some place very far away, from a voice familiar and yet strange. And then the kaleidoscope familiar to users of LSD began to unfold, transforming the walls of the tiny room into a sea of moving and colored forms.  I enjoyed the ride for about a half hour before the paranoia began to set in.

At first it began as a conversation between two of us left alone in the room, myself and another young man.  The others had gaily trooped off down to the village, oblivious or immune to the sometimes negative effects of the acid.  But by degrees, the person I was talking to transformed first into a domineering tyrant and then into a wolf man with slavering jaws and I fled in terror into the hall and down the steps into the wintry streets, in my socks and shirtsleeves. In my mind, there was no time waste as my life was in danger.  However, out in the streets the real danger began as car lights ballooned into alien spacecraft and I lost all ability to distinguish the "familiar" world from this blooming, waking nightmare.  At one point I remember racing across a street in a maelstrom of honking horns and flashing lights and careening into the back of a policeman, who shouted after me as I raced onward.

The night seemed endless as I "tripped" through one strange event after the other, finding myself in cafes and house parties and eventually, certain someone was trying to kill me, settled into a booth at an all night coffee shop and watched eagles soaring over the surface of my coffee as I calmed myself down and the effects of the acid began to wear off.  I still can't believe I got through that night without being either hurt or arrested.  About 5 a.m. I worked up enough nerve to try to walk home but heading down Bloor Street the acid kicked in again and I heard footsteps echoing behind me and certain that demons were on my trail, tried to get into a church, only to find the doors locked.  Finally, I found a phone booth and called a friend who I pleaded with to come and meet me, because I could not go back to the rented room and face the wolf-creature that I used to know as human.

This first trip opened up in me a gulf of psychic fear that I had only glimpsed in my past life, a fear which had tortured me for many years, a fear of many things and nothing but which had now taken on definite shape and form.  The road to healing this fear would be a long one but somehow I managed to recover from this episode and life went on, if not quite as normally as before.

I finally found my own place, a rooming house on Sherbrooke Street near Bloor and settled down to weekends playing the Oakville Hotel and weekdays, dressed in a suit, selling men's clothing.  Christmas came and went and the band lost the gig and fell apart, the drummer having been promoted by the company he was working for to a managerial position south of the border. In the meantime, though, Doug who was working days as a luthier at a the Doulgas Guitar Factory (upstairs from Yorkville Sound if I remember correctly), made me my first acoustic guitar.  He had seen me struggling to learn to play and encouraged my efforts greatly.  "Look at those fingers go!" he'd exclaim, high praise from a musician I admired so much.  After work, to the tunes of Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot, I practiced my chords and fingering until the guitar started to feel like a familiar friend.

Then one day, out of the blue, I got a telegram from Paul Stewart my Friday the 13th band mate in Winnipeg, who asked me to come to Bismark, N. Dakota to fill in the spot of rhythm guitar with a group called the Tradewinds Five.  They were a six piece show band who played rhythm and blues and who'd made a big splash in Winnipeg.  I'd only been playing guitar for less than a year but encouraged by Paul's faith in me, I accepted.

I took a train down through Chicago to Bismark and the great American romance of music and trains fairly hummed in my mind as I passed boxcars reading Atchison Topeka and Rock Island and in my mind I was only a step away from the promise if realizing my dreams of success. But that success was not to be. On reaching my destination I was given a crash course in the music of the group and stayed up every night when the others were taking a break from practice, going over my riffs.  I knew I had a long way to go and my confidence, especially on electric guitar was not great.  I remember a comment by one of the group member's fathers, who saw me practicing one night in the garage.  "You're going to be the best of them all", he said, "because you are dedicated."

On our first tour down through Fort Sill, Oklahoma, it became painfully apparent that despite my struggle to master the necessary skill on guitar, I wasn't moving fast enough.  It wasn't that I couldn't play guitar well enough, but I couldn't manage to co-ordinate my playing with the Motown revue style dance steps the band performed during it's numbers.

I was half-asleep, aboard the bus one day and I heard the musicians discussing my fate, so rather than be fired from the band, I quit. Guitar in hand and thumb outstretched, I headed for California, to begin my career as a solo minstrel.  Despite the fact I could not hold my own here, I knew I was destined to become a guitarist.

Once again luck smiled on me in the form of another Doug, Doug Sohren, who picked me up hitch hiking after a cold night riding through Oregon in the open back of a pick up, and took me in his little green VW bug all the way to San Francisco. He gave me his address in Palo Alto before we parted company and it was there I finally stayed, after a few "sobering" days in Frisco trying to find a place to stay.  It was there, however, where I stumbled into Union Square and met Chris Lunn whose "folk and blues workshop" musicians were giving an outdoor concert. When he saw my guitar he invited me to come up to the open mike at the Tangent in Palo Alto and play.  About the only songs I knew well then were Roberta Flack's version of Ewen MacColl's The First Time and California Dreamin' , though I was competent enough on a few others to come and play. But all I can really recall about that open mike, except being petrified, was the performance of an 18 year old eccentric, Woody Guthrie look alike who stood up and with the air of a young master played several of his self penned tunes, one of which, Fireside completely changed the direction of my life. For, on hearing that song played and sung, I knew then that this is what I myself MUST do and from that day my songwriting began, along with a close friendship to the young singer who helped change my life, Jim Luft. Shortly after meeting Jim, I wrote Another Land, my first "real" original song, which Chris published in The Kept Press, his little music & arts revue and which song I still play. It was not only Jim's writing which influenced me but the way he played guitar and he sat with me many a day to freely share his knowledge so that I began to acquire the skills necessary to fingerpicking. Jim is now known as Jim Page and has produced many fine albums.

Shortly thereafter I made an appointment with a local booking agent who got me a steady gig in Los Gatos at a club called "The Cats" where I played 6 nights a week.  I opened for the house group, about an hour warm-up set of folk and pop songs and afterwards I joined them, singing mostly showtunes and older standards.   I also took up bass and for a while plugged away at a stand up electric Ampeg bass while singing in one of four or five part harmonies with this group which called itself the Diminished Fifth. They were Dale Price, piano, Toni Crowley (a fabulous singer and part owner of the restaurant ) and Jim Borba on vocals, and finally me on bass. We were joined from time to time by Maggie Fortune (Furtado) and Vern Bennett who sometimes filled in for Dale. This gave me the opportunity to work on my writing and do the Bay Area's folk circuit at least once a week away from the club. I moved to Los Gatos to do this and stayed for nearly a year, working steadily.

At this time, Dale Price, the pianist with the group, recommended me to Tommy Broccato a jazz musician from San Jose who began instructing me, first on electric bass and then suggesting I learn to read music for guitar. Tommy was a natural and good mentor,  praising my early efforts and giving me the confidence to grow in my knowledge of guitar. But after a while it seemed that my songwriting was not getting the proper focus and that the musical energy was too divided to enable me to get totally into my own creativity, which was now my main goal.  So I quit my gig at The Cats, a major decision for me and took a job in Santa Cruz playing in a bar called the SurfRider. A steady gig at a beach-side restaurant called the Crow's Nest ensued from this and so I moved to Santa Cruz.

This period was a big artistic leap in my life. I found a little cottage not too far from the beach and was able to support myself nicely while focusing on the writing, playing steadily on weekends and having the rest of the week to travel to other gigs. I had also learned to drive in Los Gatos and bought a little yellow Morris Minor which ferried me around.

Somehow I had managed, against all odds, to find a way to support myself, get a driver's license and open a bank account all without a social security number and playing under a pseudonym, which I felt was an easy name to pronounce and remember for booking purposes and might also keep me out of trouble with the tax department, since I didn't have a "green card" which would allow me to work in the States. I gradually became the house entertainer at the Crow's Nest and was on the verge of local fame, at least, when I received a surprise visit from my good friend Ken Worley, who worked as a bartender at "The Cats" and who showed up at my gig one night and asked to speak to me privately. He warned me that two government inspectors, presumably with the IRS, had been looking for me in Los Gatos and that the owners had told them where I was working. He advised me that it might be wise to "disappear"  and so I did. Quickly dispersing all my belongings and leaving my car with him, I withdrew the nearly $1000. US that I'd earned over the year and headed for LA where I took an Aer Lingus charter to London, England.

Why London? One of the main reasons was that through another good musician friend of mine by the name of Vern Bennett, who played lounge piano in the area as well as teaching music,  I had met artists Ray & Jill Ginghofer, who'd lived for a year in the Greek Islands and had showed me photos and advised me that if I ever went there I could live cheaply and learn much. They had given me a notebook full of addresses, the most impressive among whose was the poet Robert Graves' in Majorca (although I never did make it to Spain). I decided that I would stay in London and then proceed to Greece for the winter.

In London, the poet Tony Clarke, a friend of the Ginghofers, helped me find "lodgings" in Chelsea, in the basement flat of Barry and Denise Shearing (and their infant son Stewart) who became good friends and helped me greatly during my stay.  The house was in stately Tedworth Square near the Royal Military Hospital and my new address prompted the Ginghofer's to write to me as "Dear Ted of Tedworth Square". Tony, who was living in the attic apartment of the same house gave me further information on the island where Ray & Jill had stayed and where he too had wintered.  We became friends and I admired his spartan flat, decorated only with the barest of essentials, a hotplate, a bed, a few books and notebooks and a small table on which his typewriter was mounted.  He was the embodiment to my eyes, of a working poet, perhaps the first I had ever met.  He had given up a career with Lloyd's of London, after serving in the army as a career officer and transformed into a gentle, white haired, English "hippie" poet.  He took me under his wing and guided my first few steps in the teeming British metropolis I now found myself in.  Later on, I would have the privilege of reading some of his new poems and putting one of them, Finding's Keepings (or The Milkstone) to music.  (When I played this new song for Tony he gave me the praise I craved, remarking, "Now I know why Ray and Jill sent you to me.")

Meanwhile, I checked out the local folk clubs and busked in the streets and underground stations, managing to keep my funds from dwindling too quickly. The English players I met and befriended, among whom I mention Chris Davies, an acoustic blues guitarist painter, and Dave Ellis, a fine fluent guitarist, taught me a whole new approach to playing.  Also I was able to play the same clubs with such great players as Gordon Giltrap and Sam Mitchell and I became quickly aware of how stiff and mechanical my playing was where freedom and fluidity and ease of execution were needed. But it would still be many years before the lessons I learned there took deep root in me. I was encouraged in my song writing and learned to be a stronger performer and reached a point where I was offered a short tour of some South England folk clubs. But I had reached a point of crisis within myself.

This was largely connected to my experimentation with LSD and mescaline which had begun in Yorkville and continued in California. As so many did in those days, I used these psychedelic drugs to explore the energies within me. Once every few months or so, I would take one of these hallucinogens to try and face up to the demon of fear within me that had haunted my life since Toronto and I felt that sooner or later I would be able to confront and banish all fear by being brave enough and probing deeply enough. But fate would have it that I ran into a California acquaintance in Oxford Street just outside Soho one day who had a tab of acid for me. The resulting trip scared me so badly that there was no way I could keep my commitment to the folk club tour. It seemed to open up all the areas of weakness in me so that I was left totally vulnerable and without confidence. But the acid trip had also shown me how powerful the playing of music could be, spiritually, for playing guitar in the middle of this horrible experience seemed somehow to banish the feeling of psychic danger and produce in me some real healing. Perhaps this experience spurred my interest in learning more about the healing aspect of music.  In this state of mind, I turned down my tour and left London for Newhaven and Dieppe, bound for Greece.