Liquor first passed my lips in a similar manner to that which it does for many teenagers. I snuck a little Canadian Club Whiskey from my dad’s stash in the back of a cupboard above the fridge. He drank so infrequently that I believe this bottle was already ten years old and still half full. I had to be careful because he would have certainly noticed if too much went missing. Actually, I suspect that he did know but he never said anything. I poured a small quantity into a 7-Up bottle and hurried out the back door. My childhood friend Kenny and I still hung out on occasion and this Saturday night we wandered the back alleys of the neighbourhood guzzling CC & Seven and smoking cigarettes. The booze was bitter and I didn’t like it. I got a little stupid and we knocked over a few garbage cans. The experience that night failed to kick-start what would eventually become a life-long addiction (alcohol – not vandalism).
In May, I saw a revolutionary film at the Vogue Theatre on Granville Street. It was called The T.A.M.I. Show (The Teen-Age Music International Show). It was a film made by a television director named Steve Binder of a concert that took place at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in 1964 featuring dozens of the world’s biggest music stars including Chuck Berry, The Rolling Stones, The Supremes, Jan & Dean and a performance that would impress me almost as much as The Beatles on Sullivan. When I saw James Brown & His Famous Flames do Please Please Please I was mesmerized. Even The Stones’ vocalist, Mick Jagger looked shaken after Brown’s electrifying performance.
The next weekend, I attended my first rock concert. It was Paul Revere & The Raiders at the Agrodome in Vancouver. The opening act was The Syndicate of Sound (who would later have a Top Ten hit with a song titled, Little Girl). The Agrodome was an acoustic nightmare, designed and built for horse shows. Their sound system consisted of two Vox Super-Beatle speaker boxes on each side. This was grossly inadequate for the venue but it was the state-of-the-art in sound reinforcement at the time, and nobody knew any better. Paul Revere & the Raiders sounded great to me. They wore bright red, white and blue American Revolutionary Army costumes and had exciting choreography. I didn‘t see any reason why I couldn't do that - except that I didn't have a band to do it with.
That was about to change. I was approached by two Grade Eleven students named Bob Kripps and Frank Brnjac. They had a reputation around school as hipster guitar players in a band called, The Surfs. I learned quickly that The Surfs was partially a myth. They had played one dance on April 30th with a drummer named Barry and an organist named Keith - no bass player. Barry and Keith were not serious. Bob and Frank were very serious so they turfed Barry and Keith and went looking for me. I guess they thought that I was serious too because they asked if I was interested in trying-out for them.
This was my chance! This is what I had been waiting for! If I passed the audition I too would be a musician, a member of an elite global musical family, brother to The Beatles, sibling to The Stones, friend to Freddy & the Dreamers. I would be entitled to all that came with it, the benefits, the spoils, the women. All I had to do was pass that audition. Every day after school for a week I ran home and practice. I practiced until I wore out every Beach Boys record I owned.
When the big day arrived, Bob and Frank crammed into my den with all the pomp and circumstance that the gravity of the event warranted. The situation was made even more tense with the added embarrassment of having my mother hovering around the house. I put a record on and played along with Surfin’ USA and I Get Around. Then the worst happened. Bob asked if I could play the signature drum solo made famous by drummer Ron Wilson on the 1963 surfing classic, Wipe Outby The Surfaries. For a piece that was recorded as an afterthought “B” side and made up on the spot, it became the benchmark for drummers at the time and is still miss-played by most drummers today. I had a pretty good feel for it and attacked it with gusto.
After I had finished, it was awkward for all of us; I had no idea of whether I had nailed it or not. Bob and Frank stepped out into the narrow hallway and closed the door so that they could discuss me in private. My mother, who was just down the hall, and could hear them clearly, told me later that all they said was, “Well, he can play the roll to Wipe Out and he has good hair”. Based on that, I passed the audition, got the job and took my first major step in the pursuit of my dream. I was finally on the road to somewhere.
Bob and Frank were impressive. Firstly, they had great gear. Bob owned a rare Hofner guitar and a Fender Showman amp. Frank played a Fender Jazzmaster guitar and a cherry-red Gibson ES335, and had a Vox Super-Beatle amp. It turned out that both of their amps were fakes; perfect copies that they made themselves in Frank‘s basement. First lesson of show business - it’s all make-believe.
Frank was tall with long dark brown hair and a sharp nose. He was plugged into the newest sounds coming out of England. He had albums and 45s by groups like The Kinks, The Who and The Yardbirds. He knew who Jimmy Page was, and Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend and Ray Davies as well. He could play songs like Tired of Waiting, I Can’t Explain, For Your Love and others. He had a wacky sense of humour but was very serious about his music.
Bob was a good looking guy; super hip and full of confidence, and he attracted the attention of all the girls. He was also all-the-rage when it came to fashion. He resembled Brian Jones of The Stones. He dressed like him and wore his blond hair like him. He was our lead singer and rhythm guitarist and understood the importance of having a strong presence out front.
Bob was more worldly than Frank. He was an inspired leader who ran focused, intense practices. He knew who The Pretty Things were before anybody. And, he introduced me to one of the best pure rock songs I have ever heard, The Nazz Are Blue, by The Yardbirds.
The summer of 1965 was spent in the rec-room of Bob’s parents’ house. Although we didn’t have a bass player, we still felt that we were a legitimate band. We renamed the band, The Aztecs, because we weren’t playing surf music anymore. We were now into the hard core British rock sound. The popular groups in Vancouver were still big rhythm & blues show-bands like The Night Train Revue, Kentish Steele & The Shantelles (with guitarist Paul Dean), Jason Hoover and the Epics, Rosalind Keene & The Apollos and Billy Taylor & The Spectors (with a trumpet player named Bruce Fairbairn) or Top Forty rock bands like The C-FUN Classics, The Nocturnals, The Centaurs, The Shadracks (with guitarist Craig McCaw and bassist Bob Verge), The Stags and The Shockers (with drummer Dave Johnson). We weren’t even a garage band - we were a rec-room band. Still, even without a bass player, we could rock-out on our hip repertoire of material that I called, 'noise music'. These were songs like I'm A Man by The Yardbirds, The Who's My Generation and anything by The Pretty Things.
With all of this hipness going on, it was unimaginable what was about to happen to me. My stage debut would not include the music of The Yardbirds, The Who or Pretty Things. Instead, I appeared as a monk in the Royal Ballet's Vancouver presentation of Romeo & Juliet at the new Queen Elizabeth Theatre (opened in 1959). The Grande Dame of British ballet, Dame Margot Fonteyn, and the world's greatest dancer, Rudolf Nureyev, were the two principal dancers. Fonteyn was a legend and Nureyev a temperamental, hot-headed, brawling, smoking, boozing phenomenon on feet.
Bob's mother was the chair of a local dance committee and enlisted Bob, Frank and I to take part in the chorus. We showed up at the stage door and were herded down a metal spiral staircase into the bowels of the theatre. One of the army of wardrobe mistresses (not all of whom were biologically female) assigned Page costumes to Bob and Frank but was annoyed because I looked about twelve years old. She settled on a monk's costume and ordered me to keep the hood up so that the audience didn't see a baby-faced Father. As I struggled to squeeze back up the tight staircase I tripped on my