December 18 2011 - Entry#6
High school, as it is for a lot of people, was to be a game changer for me. Aldershot High had been waiting all these years, steps away from the apartment building where we lived, just opposite the park and pavilion where I'd played floor hockey on my first stage. After years of walking past it on my way to public and middle school, I'd finally arrived.
I immediately joined the high school band, choosing alto sax as my instrument. My father had always liked it and probably suggested the choice. One of my favourite movies of all time, Some Like It Hot, featured one of the main characters as a sax player; a cross-dressing sax player. But that part didn't rub off on me. I was more interested in Marilyn Monroe. In the meantime, my brother was going through music lessons and instruments at a ridiculous rate. The drums, accordion, trumpet, you name it, he was either trying to follow in his brother's footsteps or just bowing to pressure from our parents. In any case, he hated it all and eventually convinced us that fishing was his life's passion. Any hopes of a Partridge Family band in our household were shattered.
Some Like It Hot Band
The band usually participated in one band exchange every year. We'd travel by bus to another school a few hours away, perform at some big assembly and then stay overnight at students' homes. On one particular excursion I'd brought along an acoustic guitar and started playing at the back of the bus. Friends gathered around and someone mentioned that there was a girl at the front of the bus who had also brought her guitar. They decided to ask her to join us and, when they brought her back, there was Sandy. Either one of us didn't know it then, but that would be the beginning of a very long musical partnership.
My drummer from The Right Side was also onboard and quickly jumped on the chance and suggested we throw together an impromptu band. For some reason we just designated Sandy the bass player and I showed her some simple parts to play on the bottom low strings of her acoustic. A bit sketchy I know, but we were using any ploy we could think of to keep the cute trumpeter around. I'm pretty sure that by the end of that trip, we had the line-up for our new band all worked out in our heads.
So, in between rehearsals for the high school band, we managed to piece together a pretty decent pop group; Rod on keyboards and vocals, Gary on drums, myself on guitar and our new addition, fourteen year old Sandy, on bass. We called ourselves Impulse, perhaps something to do with the decision to have Sandy on board. We'd never heard of a group with a girl bassist, though I'm sure the Talking Heads were probably kicking around somewhere, so we thought we were quite unique. It did get us attention right off the bat and would continue to for the years of adventures yet to come.
As fate would have it, Sandy broke up with her old boyfriend and started dating the drummer. Just like that. No warning.I'd just been too unaware and shy to see it happening. Story of my life. Gary had no such roadblocks and didn't waste any time. Maybe that's why I've always been suspicious of drummers. I always have to read between the lines with them. I'd just have to bide my time...
January 19 2012 - Entry#7
Around 1979, things began to shift dramatically under our feet. We'd been so absorbed in our elitist world of self indulgent music, we hadn't noticed that the main stream was being turned up-side-down. Punk was kicking out the old rockers, the new romantics were bringing back glitz and glam and the new wave was washing away anything that stood still on the musical landscape as we knew it. I'd lost interest in 70s commercial pop long ago and had managed to avoid disco altogether. This couldn't have come at a better time.
Our keyboardist Brett Wickens picked up records and turned me onto one new and brilliant band after another. Gary Numan and The Tubeway Army, The Flying Lizards, The B-52s, OMD, Lena Lovich, The Stranglers, Devo. The list went on and on. Never had I heard so much diversity and originality and pure creativity. I felt my prog-rock legs stumble slightly beneath me. This was something I could wrap my head around. And, most amazingly, with some editing and a few adjustments, the music we'd been making as Tryst wasn't so far off the mark. A band that I thought was destined for basements and libraries suddenly had a home. We could be part of this.
We had most of the tools; guitars and synthesizers, even an early chorus effect pedal called the Clone Theory that I used, but the one element we still lacked was the all important drum machine. In the late 70s you couldn't just walk into a music store and buy one. At least not the stores in our town. Brett's parents had one of those old home organs in their living room with the built in rhythms; useless goodies like the samba, fox trot and waltz. We were able to find one or two simple straight beats and those became our drum machine. We soon got tired of having to crank up the old organ looking for our settings, so we just recorded three or four minutes of the best drum beats onto a portable cassette player and there it was. Our first drum machine.The first official Spoons song, though we were still floating somewhere between Tryst and the Spoons, was called Alphabet Eyes. I'd call it a Spoons song because it has almost no trace of our progressive past and plenty of the Spoons sound that was yet to fully develop. It's actually quite a good song that we might want to look at again, a snapshot of the Spoons just as we were grabbing hold of something new. The recording starts with some strange squawks and garbled tape sounds; me trying to hit the play button on the tape deck with my foot to get the drum loop going. Very high tech.
What followed was some of the most prolific, and sometimes ridiculous, song writing of my life. Songs like Highlight (about an albino girlfriend who needs lots of eye liner so she doesn't disappear in the bed sheets), The Wreckers' Ball (a formal and ultimately final bash for demolition experts) and Picnic On Kitty Litter Beach (absolutely no idea on this one). The music was angular and brash, almost spoken more than sung. Each instrument seemed to be in it's own paranoid world. If some young, new band redid these songs today, they'd either be committed or hailed as geniuses. I'd be interested to find out.
February 29 2012 - Entry#8: The First Gig
Everything about that fateful first Spoons performance at the end-of-year Aldershot High School dance would be utterly spontaneous and, as is usually the case with spontaneous things, completely out of control. The big night came. With our trusty Saturday Night Live episodes and new wave album covers to guide us, we somehow stumbled on a band look that entailed sticking a coat-hanger in my tie and bending it upwards so it looked perpetually windblown and Sandy putting wires into her pig-tails in a Pippy Longstocking meets Lena Lovitch creation. There was a lot of wire action going on which, alone, could ultimately spell trouble. The result was an edgy, slightly punk vibe that, despite our more artsy musical stylings, would be enough to set the ball rolling towards disaster.
We set up in the high school cafeteria, perfectly suburban for our first gig. Sound check went well. Our old drummer/technical wiz Peter was our sound man and had rented a small p.a. system and a couple of lights. Everything was running smoothly, too smoothly obviously. It was barely dark out and the doors were opened.
Kids started filling in almost immediately, a lot already primed for something to happen. Very soon the cafeteria was jammed with a much larger crowd than we'd ever anticipated. The couple of teachers who'd volunteered to oversee the party were already looking like they should have made other plans for the weekend. There was a definite edge to the air, like things could explode at any second. Which they soon would.
We walked on stage, tie and pig-tails flying, plugged in and, before the first song was even finished, saw the room erupt around us. As if on cue, a mosh pit materialized, chairs went flying, tables were overturned. Someone had brought a carton of eggs and used the cafeteria wall for target practice. Someone else climbed our p.a. speakers and dove into the crowd. Fists flew. The volunteer teachers tried to do something, anything, but got pushed to the outside of the mob like so much fluff. It was a full blown punk fest.
And we just kept on playing through it all. We were scared as hell but, at the same time, took it as a compliment. We thought we'd driven the audience into a frenzy, which wasn't the case at all. We had nothing to do with it. We were just the excuse for something that was going to happen no matter what. We could have played Pat Boone or Osmonds songs. It didn't matter. Our fate had been sealed before the doors had even opened.
As far as first gigs go, this was a ground-breaker. The kind high school legends are made of. It was also the realization of our principal's worst nightmares. Fortunately, it was the end of school and we never had to meet him face to face. Somehow we avoided that small detail. But phone calls were made and word was out that he'd had us banned from playing any high school in southern Ontario ever again. I hope it made him feel better, because it didn't hurt our budding careers much. We would soon be going on to bigger and better things. Word of our little band kick off had gotten around.
April 18 2012 - Entry#9 - Red Shoes and Spiders From Mars
A local music magazine called The Red Shoes heard about the Aldershot show and promptly put us on their next cover. The article inside was glowing, milking the now famous concert for all it was worth. We did our first photo shoot in the basement of a little house backing onto the Royal Botanical Gardens where my father had his business. It was so remote and secluded that we had started to call it the "cottage". We rehearsed in a tiny room upstairs, sometimes while my father worked in his office downstairs. How he managed to get anything done is amazing. I think he usually had classical music cranked up loud to help drown us out. In any case, he was very good about it.
Royal Botanical Gardens
My father had an incredible assortment of books that he kept in a sort of library at the cottage. I could scan through them and, at any point, come across something that would provoke and inspire me. He was interested in a lot of things. We shared a love for old trains and I enjoyed anything about train travel. There were plenty of science fiction books to light up the imagination, one of which would one day help inspire the lyrics to Nova Heart. But I also discovered books on the paranormal, from case studies of ESP to the memoirs of Lopsan Rampa, a westerner who had submersed himself in eastern culture; writings about the "third eye" and "out of body travel". This, as you can imagine, was not your average reading material for someone my age. The Hardy Boys would have been more like it. But I was hooked. I absorbed as much as I could from my father's crazy library. Thanks to him, I learned to keep an open mind very early on.
We shot the Red Shoes cover against a wall of old boxes in the basement. Shortly we discovered, being so close to the botanical gardens, we shared the old house with some ominous wildlife. Our rehearsals at our little cottage soon became notorious for giant, mutated spiders sitting in. These were of Hollywood B-movie proportions and seemed to be attracted to amplified pop music. To this day, I still compare all other spiders to those of the infamous "cottage" variety. I'll see if I can look up the proper Latin name sometime.One day Brett brought two friends to one of our rehearsals. We'd never seen anyone like them in the flesh before. Two local hairdressers named simply Reg and Joe, they had more style than anyone we'd ever met. With fluorescent Flock Of Seagulls hair and wild, angular clothes they'd designed themselves, it was a huge wake up call for us. We were way too tame and very much in need of some help in the image department. Reg and Joe loved our music and, then and there, became our style council for many years to come. And it couldn't have happened at a better time. We were about to break out of Burlington.
Through the Red Shoes cover story we landed an opening slot for the Diodes at the Hideaway Club in Oakville, just east of Burlington. We were taking this fame thing in small steps. The Diodes were the first Canadian semi-punk band that secured a national record deal. Their song Waking Up Tired was a bit of a party-all-night anthem back then. Strangely, we fit the bill. We were no punk band, but somehow our quirky pop music was edgy enough to keep the hardcore faction in the audience at bay. It also helped having Sandy in the band. Any thoughts of tossing beer bottles seemed to be squelched by teenage lust. Ironically, there weren't any of the punk antics we experienced at out high school show. This was tame in comparison. I think we would compare all other gigs to that fateful first one for a long time. Kind of like the cottage spiders.
June 10 2012 - Entry#10 - John Punter and Nova Heart
It was December of 1981 and time to do a proper recording of Nova Heart. Andy and Angus at Ready booked us into Sounds Interchange, one of the big three studios in Toronto in the 80s. Compared to the homey Grant Avenue, this was a factory for making music. With multiple studios and endless halls to get lost down, countless great albums have been produced there through the decades. The rows of gold and platinum albums that lined the walls proved that fact. And their supply of snacks and sweets was definitely up a few notches as well. A sign of any great studio to a bunch of kids in a band. There were bowls of junk food everywhere; a vital part, it seemed, to enduring late night recording sessions and making a world class album.The studio sat on a part of Toronto that at one time had been under water, when the lake came up much further than it did then. Land fill had artificially added a few miles to Toronto's shoreline. I later saw a map of the city showing where the original shoreline had been. It appeared that a lot of mystery and strange tales enshrouded what had once been sea bed.
According to one bleary eyed engineer at Sounds Interchange, the studio was said to be haunted; something to do with the building that had sat in its location previously. He'd even done some research on its history. But in all the time we worked there, no ghosts ever gave us any trouble; so I assumed they were of the friendly variety. Kind of like the spirits in the ghostly orchestra that watched over us in the old pavilion of my youth.
A major snow storm had hit western Ontario. Getting to the studio from Burlington was quite the trek, even for those bred on Canadian winters. For others, like John Punter, it was like stepping onto the North Pole. We anxiously awaited his arrival from the airport and, when his taxi pulled up outside Sounds Interchange, he stepped into knee deep snow wearing nothing but loafers and a flimsy windbreaker. Rushing out of the storm into the building, we got our first glimpse of our fearless leader accompanied by a barrage of expletives about Canadian weather. We were a little taken aback by the ill tempered Englishman but then, as he brushed the snow out of his hair, a big smile spread across his face and he embraced us warmly one by one. It was as if he'd returned home after a long ordeal in the arctic. We were happy that he'd survived.
John Punter holding Arias & Symphonies Gold Disc
After some chit chat and settling in, it was time to see the room where we'd be recording. We hoped everything would be up to John's standards. In our eyes he was the star, having worked with the artists that he had. Then the in-house engineer, Mike Jones, who'd be assisting John, walked into the room and John's eyes popped. Coincidence of coincidences, they'd known each other years ago, having learned their trade together at the old Decca Studios in London, England. Old school chums, so to speak. I imagined cricket bats, britches and old school ties. What a great bit of luck. They'd have no problem working together. They'd also have no problem turning into young boys again and playing old school tricks on us, just like they'd done back in jolly old England. Over the course of the next few weeks we would somehow manage to make a record, despite a lot of shenanigans from our reunited production team. One day Derrick arrived to find his drum shoes glued to the floor beside his drum kit. Another time we discovered a young studio intern, one who tended to nod off during late night sessions, duct taped to as chair in the control room, still snoring away.
John and his old mate Mike were good, very good. But their masterpiece was yet to come; an intricate gondola system devised out of Styrofoam cups dangling from recording tape. The control room was probably fifteen feet wide, with huge tape machines on either side. They'd spliced one continuous piece of recording tape from one machine, up to the ceiling, over our heads through little hooks, down to the other machine and then back again to the other side. They then attached the foam cups like tiny gondolas, turned on the tape machines and set the whole thing in motion. It was so magnificent and ridiculous at the same time, we couldn't help but applaud. Apparently, this is how they used to make records in the old days.