Читать книгу Rocket Norton Lost In Space - Rocket Norton - Страница 4

I had no reason to believe that anything was ever going to happen to me. I was thirteen, a chubby, self-conscious kid with no ambition and less confidence. And worse, I played the accordion. I was just trying to grasp the significance of wet dreams and acne and wondered if they were connected in any way because I had a lot of acne. Still, I was happy to learn that my penis was good for something other than passing water through.

At five minutes to eight o’clock on the evening of Sunday, February 9, 1964, I waited anxiously in front of the family Philco television set somehow aware that this would be the most important night of my life.

It has become a cliché of my generation, but the heart-pounding exhilaration that overwhelmed me that night, when Ed Sullivan delivered his historic introduction and The Beatles exploded onto the screen, changed my life completely and absolutely. Like most, I saw instantly that The Beatles were more than great music. They were a raw, wild and uninhibited force of nature. History likes to paint The Rolling Stones as the bad boys and The Beatles as their tidy little well-mannered cousins; nice boys, good lads, but I sensed that they were dangerous and I liked that; I wanted to be a part of something dangerous too.

The next day I traded my accordion in on a snare drum and a cymbal. In my youthful enthusiasm, I forgot to include a snare-stand. Just as a baseball catcher’s equipment is called 'the tools of ignorance', it may also be said of a drum set. Before the day was out, I was up at the home of my friends, Owen and his brother Clyde, organizing a band.

Owen was eleven, had skipped up two grades and was still the smartest kid in school. When he was four he had told me he was going to be a nuclear physicist; I couldn't even pronounce it. Clyde was nine and was also at the top of his class.

Owen played the guitar and Clyde the piano. I should say that Owen had a guitar, one of those cheap little nylon-string folk guitars, and there was a piano in their house. Suggesting that they actually played these instruments was generous at best. The three of us struggled through old folk songs Oh Susanna and Camptown Races found in a Stephen Fostersongbook in the piano bench and attempted but failed to play a few contemporary songs like California Sun by The Rivieras and Be My Baby by The Ronnetts. It was immediately obvious that I could not sing so I just bashed away as best I could. Tragically, my first session was a disaster. I could mash the cymbal okay and did so with as much frenzied abandon as I could muster, which I’m proud to say was considerable, but because the snare had no stand, it had to lie on a cushy chair which sucked all of the properties of the snare sound into it. All I could produce was a weak 'cluck' every time I hit it. So, my first music sounded like this:

Shhhhhhhh-Cluck

Shhhhhhhh-Cluck

Shhhhhhhh-Cluck

Shhhhhhhh-Cluck

At least I got the 'cluck' on the downbeat!

Sadly, that was the end of Owen and Clyde’s short music career. When I last heard of Owen he had earned his doctorate along with two others and now flies research planes into hurricanes in an effort to better understand them. I don’t need a degree to understand that there’s a lot of wind going really fast. Clyde grew up to be doctor and a Professor of Medicine at the University of British Columbia.

For me, despite this inauspicious beginning, I was already dreaming the dream. I wasn’t even sure what it meant; was it the music, or the adventure or something else? The only thing I was sure of was that I was suddenly empowered with the resolve to pursue it. Even though the rainbow that I was to follow was itself a bit fuzzy, I had faith that it would lead me to the treasures that I desired. There was no backing out now. The journey had already begun and I was determined to make it all the way to the end of the road.

I was born and given the name Gary Wanstall on July 18th, 1950 in Chilliwack, BC, Canada, a little town in the Fraser Valley about sixty miles east of Vancouver. My father, Harry, was working for a meat packing company. I don’t know what he did there but it was some kind of an office job. He was a passive, gentle man and so, to my knowledge, he never hacked-up any cows. My mother, Margaret was, at that time a home-maker. She had this wonderful belief that the world should be fair. The only time she would ever get cross would be if someone acted unfairly towards someone else; her harshest reprimand was, “that’s not fair”, and that has kind of stuck with me through the years. I had a sister, Diane who was very nice, but she was eight years older than me so we never had a close relationship. She was in high school before I even started First Grade and was married with child and gone by the time I was fourteen.

My first real memories are in Vancouver at my grandparent’s house at the corner of Second and Trafalgar in a neighbourhood called Kitsilano. The family had returned to the city and lived there while my dad started working for a bank; I'm certain he didn‘t harm any livestock there. Groucho Marx is alleged to have said, “As a baby I was very young.” I agree. I have no recollection of Chilliwack. I have always considered my grandparent’s place to be my first home. It was 1952, the dawn of the golden age of the automobile, but milk was still delivered by horse-drawn wagon and there was even a junk man that came round with a big old horse pulling his cart.

My parents bought a little house at Oak Street and Fiftieth Avenue in 1953 when there was an actual working farm across the street. It was the Baby-Boom era and the farm was quickly subdivided into a breeding ground for punks like me. Eventually, every house on the block had kids. We would all meet up spontaneously in gangs of twenty or thirty or more and play hide & seek, kick-the-can, red-rover and such until it was dark and our moms hollered for us to come in.

While I was playing tag with my friends, a fifteen year old radio deejay named Red Robinson began to sneak an occasional rock & roll record onto the turntable during his program on CJOR Radio. On June 27^th, 1956, Red presented Bill Haley & His Comets at the Kerrisdale Arena and rock & roll arrived in Vancouver. Later that year, on September 24^th,Little Richard also played the Kerrisdale Arena where he was mobbed by fans and a near riot erupted. Red Robinsonmoved over to CKWX Radio. He became one of the important deejays in rock & roll when the station went to 50,000 watts – making it the most powerful radio station north of San Francisco and west of Winnipeg.

When Red introduced Elvis Presley at Empire Stadium on August 31^st, 1957, all Hell broke loose. Vancouver teenagers went crazy and the police had to shut the show down after Elvis had sung only one song. They restored enough order to allow him to return but he only managed four more songs before he had to be whisked away for his own safety. He did a total of nineteen minutes. This was my town.

Little did I know, but rock and roll bands were springing up all over Vancouver. The Hi-Fives, The Orbits and Vancouver’s first recording stars, The Stripes with vocalist Jim Morrison and a guitarist named Ian Tyson had a double-sided single, Ready To Rock and So Long Goodbye on the Arctic label. Les Vogt & the Prowlers came out with Rock Me Baby, Get a Move and I'm Feeling Sorry all recorded at Al Reusch's Aragon Studios and released on Aragon records. All these great bands played teen dances throughout the Pacific Northwest.

In 1958 I got a Sony transistor radio for my eighth birthday. It was an aqua-marine plastic beauty, top-of-the-line, with a genuine imitation leather carrying case. I carried that radio everywhere I went and listened to all of the glorious rock 'n roll stars of the fifties; Little Richard, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, The Everly Brothers and every single one of the Bobbys.

Even though I gave no conscious thought to music, it was having a powerful influence on me. I loved 'novelty' songs like the ‘58 hits, Witch Doctor by David Seville and Chantilly Lace by The Big Bopper. Whenever I hear those songs today I think back to long hot summer days in a time when I had no cares in the world. In a case of 'youth is wasted on the young', I remember The Purple People Eater by Sheb Wooley playing on the radio one day as a cute little girl named Debbie Turpin from my Grade Two class chased me all over the playground for a kiss. At the time it was sickening . . . Years later, in high school, Debbie developed into the prettiest girl in school and would sooner have stuck a fork in her eye than kiss me. Frankie Avalon’s, Venus, in 1959, is another mint song that invokes strong childhood memories. It was probably on the radio when I was home enjoying an unearned day-off from school with some faked illness. In the summer of 1960 Ray Peterson’s sappy hit, Tell Laura I Love Her made me cry when I first heard it on my way to baseball practice.

There was something in the story of the young would-be race car driver who gets killed trying to win a thousand dollars to buy his girl an engagement ring that really got to me. It’s odd because, as a ten year old, I had no real concept of love. I felt safe and secure in my family, and nobody could ask for a better childhood, but there were never any displays of affection or talk of love at my house.

I believe that it was my willingness to accept pretty much any story wholeheartedly, to feel it as though it was real, that has always made me an overly sensitive audience. When I went to see the movie, Plan Nine From Outer Space(universally lauded as the worst movie ever made), at the Orpheum Theatre on Granville Street in 1959, I thought it was so real and got so scared that I had to run out and wait in the lobby. All my little friends came out laughing at the absurdity of the film while I had to sleep with the lights on for days after so that the fake monster with the long fingernails wouldn't get me.

I didn't buy records. Firstly, what little money I had was spent on baseball cards. I had a huge collection comprised of thousands of pristine cards including Mickey, Willie, Whitey and Yogi as well as Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Warren Spahnand all of the immortals of the time. I may have buried the entire priceless collection somewhere in the back yard. I wish I knew. It would be worth a fortune today. Secondly, my sister bought all the Ricky Nelson, Connie Francis and Johnny Horton 45s I could handle. For some curious reason, He’s So Fine by The Chiffons in 1963 was the first 45 rpm record I ever bought. Seems like an odd choice but I liked their 'Doo Lang Doo Lang' Doo-Wop sound. Following that, I got on track right away by making Twist and Shout by The Beatles my first album purchase.

I never liked school. On my first day in Grade One I cried so long and with such indignation that the principal telephoned my mother to come and pull me out of there. When I discovered that this was something I had to do five times a week for twelve years I believed that my life was over. I despised school so intensely that it physically hurt to attend class. I hated those big clocks they had in every classroom. I would sit and watch the second hand plod from one digit to the next as if I were trapped in some sort of purgatory for dummies. For most of Elementary School I thought I was stupid but as I squeaked into High School I realized that I just wasn’t interested in any of this.

It was around this time when I discovered something I did find interesting ... Girls!

If this is a story about sex, drugs and rock & roll (and I’m certain that it is) then it begins in the classrooms of Grade Eight, where half the population was most definitely of interest to me, an obsession that has lasted a lifetime. I don’t think I was abnormal in this way of thinking. It seemed that every boy in class had trouble keeping his stuff on his desk. And while he was down there picking it up, who could help but risk a quick peek up the dress of some not-so-unsuspecting female. Once begun, this was an endless game because there is so much mystery about what goes on up there that no boy ever really figures it out no matter how many pens and pencils are sacrificed. Perhaps Bobby Curtola’s, Three Rows Over,was written just for me?

In 1964 girls got pretty dolled up to attend school. In fact, the girls at Sir Winston Churchill High School were forbidden from wearing slacks or pants. I was much in favour of this particular rule because skirts and dresses allowed for the possibility that some lacy under thing might be spotted by accident or sweet fortune. The flash of a slip, garter, hook, belt, whistle, strap, wire or anything frilly would certainly provide an immediate thrill and it could also be stored in my depraved adolescent memory and conjured up later; again and again ... and again, when alone in bed in the dark. Then there was the mother-lode - panties! But this was about as common as a unicorn sighting as girls are taught from infancy that a flash of their panties is a crime of the highest level; “knees together - a lady reveals nothing.” Hence the little ditty, “I see London, I see France, I see _ _ _ _’s underpants” is about the most severe scolding any little girl can suffer. Women’s lingerie was pretty complex in those days but, fortunately, by the time I got in there, we were in a full-blown sexual revolution and nobody was wearing anything. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

There was nothing indecent going on. But there was a power greater than all of us at work here. It inspired all the young maidens to unloose their pigtails and backcomb their hair into billows of hair-sprayed hives, to exchange their sneakers for pumps, to spend endless hours at the make-up table and douse themselves in intoxicating perfumes. It was all too confusing at that point so I continued with my strategy of peeking by day and whacking off at night.

At the end of the school year, in June, they had a dance for Grade Eighters. The band was a Top-Forty band called The CFUN Classics, so named because they were sponsored by the most popular radio station in town, CFUN Radio. Their leader was a sax player who doubled on organ named Claire Lawrence, the bassist was Glenn Miller and their vocalist, the great Howie Vickers. Guitarist, Brian Russell, went on to play many years with Anne Murray and drummer, Gary Taylor, became a nightclub owner in Vancouver later on. They were fabulous, playing their instrumental hit, Ace’s High as well as current hits like Dawn (Go Away) by The Four Seasons and lots of older rock & roll songs like The Night Has A Thousand Eyes by Bobby Vee and Telstar by The Tornadoes. I danced once when they played The Twist by Chubby Checker because that was the only dance I could do. The event itself was depressing but seeing a good band up close excited me even more.

For parents who had grown up during a depression and lived through a World War, my mom and dad accepted my seemingly frivolous intention to become a drummer better than I would have expected. I’m sure they thought it would be a passing phase and, instead of discouraging me, they supported my efforts, such as they were. My dad even drove me to drum lessons. Being consistent with my status as a bad student, I hated drum lessons too. Even though I believed that this was a waste of time, I learned the sacred drum rudiments from the bible of drum books, Syncopation. I practiced the various stroke-rolls, the ratamacue and all of the paradiddle family including the double-paradiddle, flam-paradiddle and the classic paradiddle-diddle. My teacher, who was an ancient man with a smelly studio in his ratty little shack on the East Side, conveyed these rudiments to me sanctimoniously as if this was the Masons' secret handshake but all I could think was, what fucking use to me was a paradiddle anyway? Years later I was astonished to re-discover the paradiddle, and all of its rudimentary relations, and I incorporated them into my drum solo.

1964 was an amazing year for music. The British had begun a musical invasion of North America led by The Beatles. Eight of The Beatles' songs hit Number One that year including, She Loves You, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Can’t Buy Me Love and others and combined The Fab Four held the top spot on the Canadian charts for a total of nineteen weeks. Their first feature length movie in black & white, A Hard Day’s Night, drove us all crazy with Beatlemania. When The Beatlesplayed at Empire Stadium in Vancouver on August 22nd the fans repeated the Elvis riot of 1957. At one point the police chief forced emcee, Red Robinson to interrupt the concert and beg the audience to calm down. John Lennon was not pleased. “Get off the fuckin’ bloody stage,” he shouted at Red. I believe that Red is proud of that to this day. The riot was so frightening that Beatles manager, Brian Epstein called an audible and by-passed the hotel in favour of a quick departure at the airport. International reporters called the concert riot a “slugfest”. Vancouver had done it again.

And the British Invasion was supported by other English bands like Dave Clark Five with Bits & Pieces, Gerry & The Pacemakers and I’m The One, Peter & Gordon with A World Without Love, Manfred Mann’s Do Wah Diddy and The Animals’ classic rendition of, House of the Rising Sun. The U.S. fought back with the most loved frat-house anthem of all time, Louie Louie by The Kingsmen, and number one hits like Memphis by Johnny Rivers, Rag Doll by The Four Seasonsand Roy Orbison's biggest hit, Oh, Pretty Woman.

All of these great songs were played on C-FUN Radio by the 'C-Fun Good-Guys'; Red Robinson, Fred Latremouille, Mad Mel, Jolly John Tanner and Daryl B. Daryl B soon jumped ship and went over to the new competing top forty station in town, CKLG. Their jocks were called the 'CKLG Boss-Jocks'. They were; Daryl B, Roy Hennessey, Rick Honey and Russ Simpson. There was a heated rivalry between the stations and both the Good-Guys and the Boss Jocks would appear at any public event including supermarket openings and charity car washes.

In the fall, I entered Grade Nine. The Good-Guys showed up at a back-to-school sock hop with The Nocturnals. The Nocturnals were genuine recording stars with a national hit record titled, Because You’re Gone. C-Fun used them as background to promote the radio station. Deejay Jolly John Tanner, who was about six foot eight, sang a rendition of Ian Whitcomb’s You Turn Me On in falsetto while doing The Freddy. That’s not a sight you forget easily.

In the late afternoon of September 28^th, Good-Guy, Fred Latremouille appeared on my television as host of a new local Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television program called, Let's Go. It was supposed to feature music and fashion for teens and the first show included, as co-host, a stiff young woman, obviously without broadcast experience, who reported on fashion. There was a house band featuring members of The C-Fun Classics and local singers such as Howie Vickers, Tom Baird, Susan Pesklevits, Rosalind Keene and Mike Campbell. By the third episode Red Robinson had elbowed the uncomfortable fashion reporter aside and took over as co-host. The show was very popular and continued as Music Hopin one form or other until June of 1968.

While I was shopping for back-to-school stuff at the downtown Hudson’s Bay Company department store one Saturday in September, I lucked upon a performance by Terry Jacks & The Chessmen who were set up in the boys wear department. They had a big hit locally with an instrumental titled, Meadowlands, which featured their guitarist Guy Sobell. They played some really great rock & roll and put a charge into the huge crowd packed into the store. Standing there with my little bags of socks and shirts and corduroys, I realized how stimulated I was. Seeing this done on television was one thing but, live and in person, I understood that it could be done and done well even here in my home town.

By this time some of us had started to stop using gloop in our hair. This simple process caused the hair to fall naturally and made it appear suddenly longer. This was a serious issue at Sir Winston Churchill High School. Our Principal was a Rhodes Scholar and a severe disciplinarian. Shortly after The Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, a senior at school named Brian, had arrived in class sporting a Beatles’ haircut or, his regular hair without a-little-dab'll-do-ya. He was sent home and told not to return until he had a proper hairstyle. This story made the front page of the Vancouver newspaper with a quote from our Principal in which he said, “We don’t want anything outlandish here that would cause undue giggling and silliness in class.” He was obviously ill prepared for what was about to happen.

When I pulled the same stunt, the same thing happened to me. This was the first shot in a sociological war that waged at Churchill, and at other schools, for the next five years. It wasn’t just about hair. It was about freedom ... and, there was an entire dress code at stake!

Then there was the matter of smoking. In 1964 every person on the planet smoked cigarettes. People smoked everywhere; if you were seeing your doctor he might light up a snipe right there in his office. I had begun smoking around the age of twelve and contributed my fair share of toxic fumes into the immediate environment. At Churchill, students were forbidden from smoking within a block of the school. This was a definite violation of my basic human right to inhale poisonous tar if I wanted to. Something had to be done about all this and it would all start with hair. There would be many casualties but it was a war that had to be fought, and I was willing to fight at the front.

After my disastrous first attempt at playing music, I had retreated to the small den of my parent’s house where I set up my cymbal and snare drum in private. I had no one to play with so I put The Beatles’ Please Please Me on the Hi-Fi and matched drummer, Ringo Starr, as close as I could on the cymbal and snare over and over and over again. It’s a good thing my mother was out of the house working as a secretary at that time or she might have closed down my show long before I could get it out on the road.

At Christmas that year my drum kit expanded to include a floor tom. I should have added a bass drum but I didn‘t know any better and wouldn‘t have known what to do with it anyway. My record collection also grew with the addition of two new Beatles’ albums, Beatlemania - With The Beatles (which was actually The Beatles first Canadian release in 1963, but came to me second) and Long Tall Sally (both titles released in Canada on Capitol Records) and two albums by The Rolling Stones titled, The Rolling Stones, and 12 X 5, (both released on London Records).

Even though it would be Ringo who would shape my eventual style as a drummer, those early Stones albums were to be profoundly influential on my overall musical taste, especially songs like the raw and sexual, King Bee, the crude and powerful, Not Fade Away, and an instrumental track titled, 2120 South Michigan Avenue, in tribute to the legendary Chicago blues recording studio at Chess Records, where 12 X 5 was recorded (and named after the recording company’s address).

As 1964 came to an end I was ensconced in Grade Nine and pretty much a loner. I had had two best friends as a kid. Michael was a year older and Kenny was a year younger. I had been close to both pals but we had never really been a trio. Mostly, I played with one or the other. For most of my childhood I was practically adopted into Mike’s family. I spent almost all of my pre-teen summers at their country cottage near Ferndale in Washington State. When Mike graduated into high school a year ahead of me, he dumped me. And, when I entered high school a year ahead of Kenny, I dumped him. There were a few guys that I hung out with but, for the most part, I watched a lot of television.

There certainly were no girls in my life, at least not real girls, but there was no shortage of alone-under-the-sheets imaginary action. All I had to do was visualize the womanly shape of my young French teacher, or the flash of a knee of the cute little girl in Math class or Elly May Clampett in those tight, frayed jeans she wore on the Beverly Hillbillies, and I’d be popping off all night long.