Blood, Sweat and Tears Read online

  The screws didn’t mind you singing or talking to yourself as long as you didn’t try to communicate with anyone else. They knew that if a man didn’t have some way to vent he’d go mad and they didn’t want to deal with that. Singing became part of my daily ritual. The guys would gather around the air vent and I would belt out the blues. By the time I got out of the hole word had spread all over the joint and my reputation as a singer was made. Now I wanted to sing every chance I got. But singing a cappella just wouldn’t cut it. I needed an instrument. In my dorm were four Ojibway kids named Fisher. They were in for signing up for firefighting crews and then setting forest fires. “Damn,” I thought, “you must be really desperate for work to do that. That’s one of the most dangerous and dirty jobs in the world.” One of the Fisher boys, Brent, had a guitar with him when he was arrested. It was kept in a locker in the gym and one afternoon he showed it to me. It was an almost unplayable mail-order Kay acoustic guitar, a real piece of junk. It only had five strings and they were about an inch off the fretboard. Brent knew a few chords and could play a couple of Johnny Cash tunes so I asked him to teach me how to play.

  Prison rules prohibited musical instruments in the dorms—guitar strings could be a lethal weapon—so I improvised … Aha! A cribbage board. A guy in the carpentry shop planed it down to roughly the shape and dimensions of a guitar neck, and I drew strings and frets on the mock fretboard. I found a guitar instruction book in the library, Mel Bay’s Guitar Chords, and began to practice, sitting on my bunk playing chords that only I could hear. In the gym once a week I got to borrow Fisher’s guitar for a couple of hours so I could actually hear what I had been practicing. He let me work on the guitar too. I ordered some mailorder strings, took the nut off, ground it down on the concrete floor and reset the neck angle so that it was actually playable.

  My first love was the blues. I felt a particular kinship with this music written by men like myself who toiled on prison work gangs. Country musicians like Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie also struck a responsive note in my soul. These were dirt-poor working-class hobos with nothing to their name but their music. I knew exactly how that felt. Colour had no meaning to me—white music, black music, it didn’t matter. It was all the blues to me. Within a few months my reputation with the guitar had spread through the joint and some of the guys petitioned the superintendent to let me sing at the annual prison Christmas concert. Ironically, big Joe Paterson became my biggest fan and supporter. A few years later, when I was working the bars on Yonge Street, Joe would come in often and catch my set. Years later I heard that big Joe Paterson had muscled the wrong guy and a skinny little drug dealer had shot him dead.

  That Christmas I played on a makeshift stage in the gym with a squeaky microphone and the cheap guitar. I played a couple of Jimmy Reed tunes, “Peepin’ and Hidin’” and “Big Boss Man.” I knew some Robert Johnson, some Leadbelly and of course the prison favourite, a Johnny Cash tune, “I Walk the Line.” I played for nearly an hour and the place went nuts. The guys cheered and clapped and hollered for more, and I was in my glory. I loved every minute of it and left the gym that day with a dream. Maybe I could actually do this for a living. Maybe people on the street would react the same way as the guys in the joint. Maybe I could really be a musician. Maybe I wasn’t totally useless.

  A few months later the Fisher boys were paroled and Brent left me his Kay guitar. “Hell,” he said, “you play it better than I ever will, it’s yours.” Now I was a regular fixture at every prison event. Christmas, Easter, any holiday was an excuse to ask the superintendent for permission to give a concert. I think the screws enjoyed my music too and the institution welcomed any event that could keep a lid on the place. It was understood that any violence would mean the end of the concerts, so everybody was on their best behaviour. Before long I had recruited a little band and there were concerts every month. I lived for those weekend concerts and practiced every chance I got, learning new tunes and even making a few crude attempts to write my own original songs. For the first time I began to believe that my life could be more than an endless cycle of prison sentences. Believe it or not, if that’s all you’ve known you can come to believe that’s all you’ll ever know. A pat on the back, a little approval, even from a bunch of chronic losers, can work wonders.

  I counted down the days and dreamed of someday actually playing in a band. This made my time even harder. Now I had a reason to be out of there and the days crawled by. I tried to keep my nose clean but the violence and the rage always simmering just under the surface in the joint could explode at any time for the slightest reason. One day a fight broke out in the mess hall. I didn’t start it but I was right in the middle of it, swinging. This was a serious infraction—a fight involving a large group of prisoners could be considered “inciting to riot.” There were about a dozen guys involved. We were all brought up on charges and transferred to Millbrook, a maximum-security joint near Peterborough, Ontario, not far from Toronto.

  I did my last six months at Millbrook. It was a sterile, spotlessly clean, super-max facility. Inmates left their cells for only a few hours each day, to work on scrub gangs, on their hands and knees with a scrub brush and a bucket. The rest of the time, eighteen hours a day, was lockdown, but that didn’t bother me at all. Inmates at Millbrook were very isolated from each other, so the rules regarding things like musical instruments were more relaxed and I was allowed to keep my guitar. I even had a radio. There was lots of time to practice and learn new tunes. In the spring of 1962 I walked out of Millbrook with twenty bucks in my pocket, a mail-order guitar and a dream. I was going to be a blues singer. I took my one-way bus ticket to Toronto and I never looked back.

  Me and Amaretto

  Got no home since the roof caved in

  Had no lovin’ since I don’t know when

  Just enough money left to last the night

  But things look different in the mornin’

  How many times have I told myself

  It don’t help matters when you run your mouth

  Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins once told me, son

  Things look different in the mornin’

  Me and Amaretto and a night of sin

  Left me on the floor with my head kicked in

  Coulda been the liquor or the barroom light

  It all looks different in the mornin’

  In walked trouble in a skin-tight dress

  We musta got married, but I must confess

  Over in Nevada where there is no wait

  Things look different in the mornin’

  Woke up sleepin’ in a heart-shaped bed

  Lookin’ in the mirror right above my head

  Tryin’ to remember all the things I said

  Cause she sure looks different in the mornin’

  Lyrics by David Clayton-Thomas. Copyright © Clayton-Thomas Music Publishing Inc., 2005.

  4

  ROMPIN’ RONNIE

  It’s a sick, empty feeling to be released from the joint, especially if there’s no one waiting for you. For nearly four years all decisions had been made for me—when to eat, when to sleep, where I worked. Now, when the gates of Millbrook clanged shut behind me and I was a free man, it was terrifying. I was twenty-one years old and completely on my own. I had this crazy delusion about being a blues musician. But I had no idea where to begin. The only thing I knew for sure was that I would die before going back to prison.

  The John Howard Society got me a job as a helper on a plastics extruder at Canada Wire & Cable—dirty, smelly work but it put a roof over my head and allowed me a few bucks in my pocket to pursue what I really wanted to do, play music. A few weeks on the job and I noticed that many of the men were missing digits from their hands. The fine copper wire zinged through the extruder head at hundreds of feet per minute, and one careless move could result in a finger being severed. The men joked and laughed about this in the lunchroom. A missing finger was regarded as a badge of seniority—“Yep, lost this one on
ol’ number nine back in ’54.” It was no badge of honour to me. I wanted to be a guitar player and needed all ten of my fingers. I knew I wouldn’t last long on that job.

  I met a pretty eighteen-year-old redhead from Willowdale named Nancy Hewitt. We double dated with Bill Pugliese and his girl. The four of us were always together. Nancy was completely in love with this guitar-playing rebel with a prison record. I loved her too, but I had another agenda and I really didn’t want to get tied down before I had a chance to see what I could do in music. I was determined to get into the music business or die trying. Nancy loved to hear me sing and play and would sit for hours listening to me practice, but I think she always thought that it was just a phase I was going through and that sooner or later I would come to my senses and settle down. She nodded and smiled patiently when I told her of my dream of someday being a musician, but I don’t think she ever really believed it. Who ever heard of a rock star from Willowdale? It was a tumultuous relationship. We broke up constantly but we always got back together. It was hard not to in a small town where we saw each other every day and knew all the same people.

  I had a steady job, made good money and rented a basement apartment in Toronto. Nancy lived at home with her parents in Willowdale, an elderly couple who’d had Nancy late in life. They were not happy about her hanging out with this tough kid fresh out of prison, but Nancy saw something in me and they always treated me kindly. We were young and in love and, as we had nothing to do but make out in the back seat at the drive-in like all the other kids, Nancy got pregnant. So we did what kids did in 1963—we got married. We were both way too young but it was what you did in a small town where everybody knew everybody else.

  We rented the top floor of Bill Pugliese’s house in Willowdale and Nancy gave birth to my first daughter, Christine. Nancy was in heaven but I was miserable. I felt trapped. My dreams of being a rock musician were over. I was facing a lifetime of shift work and severed fingers at Canada Wire & Cable. The money was decent but I hated the job. I lived for the day shift when I would have evenings off to catch any of the hot R&B shows that regularly came through Toronto. I bought a used Fender Telecaster and an amp on instalments from the Long & McQuade music store, and in my spare time I began to hang around the clubs on Toronto’s Yonge Street, known as “the Strip.”

  The Strip was a six-block-long row of bars and strip joints populated by a rough crowd of rounders, hookers and hustlers. The clientele consisted of steelworkers from Hamilton, truckers, loggers and miners from Sudbury, in town for the weekend, looking to blow off steam along with their paycheques, and there were plenty of bar girls available to help them do both. Music was being played in the bars on the Strip, mostly blues and country. Johnny Cash or Carl Perkins would be playing at the Edison Hotel one week and the Muddy Waters Band or B.B. King the next. The blues had migrated up from Chicago and Detroit, brought to Toronto by Motown and Chicago blues artists who loved the fact that there was no colour bar in Canada. In the States in the early sixties, black artists played on the black side of town in funky joints and white bands played on the other side of town in the best clubs. But in Canada the R&B acts played anywhere they wanted. They were booked into the top clubs in Toronto and played to mixed audiences. Not only were they accepted in Toronto, but they were idolized by the young Canadian musicians. James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, B.B. King, the Temptations, the Four Tops, they all played on the Strip. My personal favourite was the Muddy Waters Band, from Chicago. Willie Dixon, Otis Spann and Muddy Waters, with his bottleneck Telecaster. This was the real thing, raw, unpolished and visceral. This was “The Blues.” I would sit at the bar at the Edison, nurse a beer and soak in the music of the greatest blues band in the world.

  The closest thing I had to a religious experience in those days was the first time I saw the Ike & Tina Turner Revue on Yonge Street. When Tina and the Ikettes hit the stage, it was like a body punch. The energy, the fire—it changed my life forever. James Brown and the Famous Flames used to play a roller rink in Toronto’s west end. The tightest R&B band in the world, right there onstage in front of me. Every young band in town had a singer trying to do James Brown’s dance steps. Wilson Pickett, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding—they all played on the Strip in those days and their music found a home in Toronto.

  The king of the Strip was Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins, an Arkansas-born rockabilly singer who had come out of the Memphis scene along with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. Ronnie brought his Deep South music to Toronto. He had a band built around a couple of guys who came up from Arkansas with him, drummer Levon Helm and Will “Pop” Jones, a honky-tonk piano player. Jones soon left and went back to the States, but Ronnie and Levon loved the Toronto scene and saw opportunity in Canada. They recruited some young local players: Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. Along with Levon Helm they became the legendary “Hawks.” The Hawks would go into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as The Band. This was the Ronnie Hawkins Band, and the young musicians of Toronto absolutely idolized them. To this day I believe they were the greatest rock & roll band ever. Their blend of Canadian country music, Arkansas rockabilly, Chicago blues and Memphis R&B was some of the purest rock & roll I’ve ever heard.

  Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks played bars all over Ontario but reigned supreme at Le Coq d’Or, a rowdy joint that was at the centre of the Yonge Street Strip. The room was loud and raucous, with a noisy bar on one side and a stage complete with go-go cages on the other. This was Ronnie’s base of operations. Upstairs he had his office, a gym and an after-hours club called the Hawk’s Nest, where all of his friends would congregate. Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Frank Zappa—he seemed to know everybody, and you never knew who might show up there.

  The Hawks were the role models for every young musician in town. We absolutely worshipped them. They wore mohair suits, so that became the dress code for every young band in Toronto. They got their razor-cut haircuts at a barbershop on Yonge Street, so all the young musicians in town got their hair cut there. Robbie played a white Telecaster, so every guitar player had to have a white Telecaster. They’d add a song to their repertoire and within a week every band in town would be playing that song. Levon would add a cymbal to his drum kit and the next day every music store on Yonge Street would be sold out of that particular cymbal. Once, while loading in behind the club, a truck backed over his crash cymbal and he had to play with a broken cymbal for a few weeks and—you guessed it—young drummers all over town drove their cars over their crash cymbals just to get that Levon sound. To be invited up on that stage to sit in with the Hawks at Le Coq d’Or was the dream of every young musician in Toronto.

  On Saturday afternoons many of the bars had matinees. No liquor was served at the matinees, so the underage musicians could hang out and get to know each other and if they were really good they might get to jam with their heroes. I was already in my early twenties so I could get into any of the bars on the Strip, but at the Saturday matinees you might be invited to sit in with the Hawks, and that’s where I wanted to be. Ronnie Hawkins was the genial master of ceremonies at the Le Coq d’Or matinees, and one afternoon I persuaded him to let me sing with his band. I think I sang a Ray Charles song, “Night Time Is the Right Time,” and a couple of Jimmy Reed tunes. Ronnie was impressed. He took me under his wing and gave me my first paying job in music, singing with his band. Years later Ronnie told me that he had called his friends in Nashville that day and told them, “You won’t believe this, but there’s a white boy up here in Canada, fresh out of prison and tough as nails, who sings the blues like he was born black.”

  I quit the job at Canada Wire & Cable and began playing music full-time. Nancy was sure I had lost my mind. I had a steady job with benefits and I was throwing it all away for an uncertain future in a bar band. I only worked with Ronnie when he was in Toronto. When the Hawks went on the road I was unemployed. I didn’t care. This was my chance.
The first time I stepped onstage with the Hawks I knew I was born for this. I was a lousy plastics extruder operator, but I was really good at music and everyone knew it. Everyone, it seemed, but Nancy. She wanted no part of these rough bars downtown, and who could blame her? I think she still believed this madness would pass and I would go back to my day job and be a decent husband and father, but I was too far gone already. I had tasted what it felt like to be onstage—to be really good at something, to be loved by an audience, to feel a great band kick into an R&B tune and make the whole place come alive. I was hooked and there was no turning back.

  In the joint I had learned how to handle myself, which allowed me to hold my own in the brawling bars on the Strip. If some drunken steelworker took exception to the way his girl smiled at me, I was more than willing to discuss it in the alley behind Le Coq d’Or. I’ve been known to walk off the stage in the middle of a song, knock a drunken heckler on his ass and return before the guitar solo ended. This was par for the course in the bars on the Strip. Even the genial Ronnie Hawkins was no one to mess with in a bar fight, and bar fights were an almost nightly occurrence. Most didn’t involve the band. We learned how to smile and keep on playing no matter what was happening. Ducking flying beer bottles was just part of the job. Ronnie kept in shape for his gig at Le Coq d’Or by sparring upstairs in his own fully equipped gym with Canadian heavyweight champion George Chuvalo. These were rough joints.

  Having another singer in the band gave Ronnie the opportunity to leave the stage and circulate around the club, playing the backslapping, joke-telling host to the crowds that always packed the place when he was there. He told the same jokes and used the same lines every night: “Son, that girl is so tough, she’s got a vibrator with a kick-starter.” Everyone had heard them before but it didn’t matter—people just loved hearing him talk with that Arkansas drawl. Everybody loved Ronnie. He made everyone feel like they were his personal guests in the club. I learned a lot from Ronnie Hawkins. I learned that this wasn’t Burwash and that decking a guy was not always the first option. I learned how to handle an audience offstage and on. Ronnie also had an uncanny ability to spot musical talent. Even after the Hawks left to back Bob Dylan, Ronnie Hawkins always had the hottest rock & roll band on Yonge Street.