I certainly wouldn’t argue that the 1970s was a better decade for music than any other. It just happens to be the time when I was

young, owned a Pentax and went to a ton of concerts. These pictures are unevenly distributed through the years—it’s like the bronto-

saurus in that Monty Python sketch: thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the far end. The thick bit in

the middle reflects my time at the University of Guelph, where I became involved with the school newspaper, the Ontarion, and

was for a while the Entertainment Editor. Free records, free concerts and the occasional backstage pass. All I had to do was take pic-

tures and type a few columns of rubbish about music. Over the years I managed to lose nearly half my pictures—prints, negatives, the

lot—Warren Zevon, Albert Collins, Jethro Tull, Gang of Four, the Stranglers and the list goes on. Perhaps they slipped down the same

rabbit hole as my nerdy collection of ticket stubs that were sealed in a ziplock bag for everlasting freshness until I lost it. There were

also a bunch of shows I never brought my camera to in the first place. For instance, U2 at the Maple Leaf Ballroom in February 1981:

camera equipment wasn’t worth the schlep for some Irish band whose album wasn’t even released yet in North America. Still, a decent

number of pictures remain. The ones here are simply those that have survived. PAUL RUTA 2011

ronnie van zant, lynyrd skynyrd brian may, queen Tina weymouth, talking heads

Every picture tells a story, donut

Art direction: Rigo Ruta

I’ve seen Bruce Springsteen five or six times, brought my camera to at least three of those concerts, and all that remains is this lousy contact

sheet. Maybe when I die Saint Peter will give me back my Springsteen negatives together with all those missing socks.

front COVER: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE E STREET BAND, TORONTO 1978

GUESS WHO, TORONTO 1971

Like many Canadians my age, the Guess Who at the CNE was my first concert.

I was 13 and went with my dad. He tapped his foot and pretended to enjoy the show,

bless him. Then we drove home with the radio off. In the years since I developed a

deep loathing for the voice of Burton Cummings and must evacuate the premises at

the first hint of a Guess Who song. I blame it on their nauseating overexposure on

Canadian radio, even well into the 21st century. Some people wretch at the very thought

of green olives; for me it’s the opening riff of American Woman.

In years of concert-going I only managed to score one actual physical souvenir. It was

a piece of junk if you asked my mother—the prime suspect in its eventual disappear-

ance—but a relic of Roman proportions to me. It was a flesh-toned curve of fiberglas,

a fragment of forearm thrown in my direction by Alice Cooper on New Year’s Eve,

1973 after he guillotined and dismembered the mannequin on stage. For years it laid

nestled in a dresser drawer alongside my halfhearted coin collection, some dickies

and a pint of English Leather. Everything from that special drawer is long gone except

for the coins because nobody throws away money quite so literally even when it is in

fact worthless. Come to think of it, Alice Cooper also gave away money that night: at

the stroke of midnight giant balloons burst overhead and Billion Dollar bills fluttered

down. I’m sure I stuffed a few in my pocket. I’m even more sure that those bills and

the broken mannequin arm would fetch far more on eBay today than my entire coin

collection ever will.

Every band that shows up with more than a truckload of amps and a drum kit

owes a lot to Alice Cooper. He pioneered the idea of Rock Concert as Multimedia

Extravaganza, and applied it to a steady touring schedule. The thing is, Alice’s theatri-

cal rigs and contraptions didn’t leave much real estate onstage for the opening act.

You can almost hear the concert promoter think: Lemme see, ZZ Top has only three

guys and they’re from Texas and won’t need anything fancy. So ZZ Top it was, bunched

up in one corner of the stage like a trio in a restaurant. Except they were ZZ Frickin’

Top and the sound they kicked out was enormous: bluesy, rich, hot and gritty. It made

their studio album Tres Hombres seem slick and restrained. They were even better the

following summer, when they had the whole stage to themselves. Several years later,

at the dawn of MTV, they got into that business with the beards and spinning guitars.

Though they felt like a totally different band by then, I couldn’t bring myself to hate it.

It was just a little something they learned from Alice Cooper.

BILLY GIBBONS, ZZ TOP, BUFFALO 1973

ALICE COOPER, BUFFALO 1973/74

In high school in the mid-70s it was your duty to choose a favorite band—or ‘group’ in

the parlance of the day—and you had to stick with it for the whole grade or else you

cheated. Jocks chose no-brainers like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and felt no urge

to update their selections in the ensuing decades. Girls liked the Beatles but settled

for just Paul McCartney because of the rules: no broken-up groups and no actually

dead people. Guys with their bedrooms in the basement picked the New York Dolls

or something dark and stinky like Frank Zappa. Dungeons & Dragons players chose

King Crimson, if anything. Stoners liked Neil Young, Traffic and the Doobie Brothers.

You’d go for Bowie if you wanted to get pounded for being a homo, and if you didn’t

want to get pounded by Led Zeppelin fans it was more prudent to opt for T Rex. I could

have honestly chosen a different favorite every week: Steely Dan, Robin Trower, Todd

Rundgren, Stevie Wonder, even Cat Stevens just to impress the ladies. In the interest

of fair play I decided on Deep Purple because a) it wasn’t safe being a Bowie fan in

public, and b) Ritchie Blackmore was the best guitar player I could think of who wasn’t

dead or in Led Zeppelin. Deep Purple was the first big, loud British band I saw, and

I was beside myself with excitement at the concert. If you look closely at the picture,

that fuzzy lump on the right bent over a guitar-shaped blur is Ritchie Blackmore.

A lousy shot, I know, but it makes me happy.

By the time jazz rock filtered down far enough to reach my white suburban ears,

it had been distilled into the single album, The Inner Mounting Flame by the

Mahavishnu Orchestra. Allman, Page, Beck and Howe were suddenly amateurs in a

world that contained John McLaughlin. This discovery launched an insatiable quest for

every ounce of electric jazzy goodness I could find. Enter Al DiMeola, Billy Cobham,

Stanley Clarke, Weather Report, Return To Forever, Herbie Hancock and ultimately

Miles Davis, who pioneered the genre. I was a sucker for DiMeola’s fiery technique

and the bite of his Les Paul. After this concert we rolled down the windows and drove

the streets of Buffalo shouting, Al DiMeola Is God! In hindsight, and after a string of

lame record releases, I now feel we were hasty in our assessment and that God is, by

all accounts, still Eric Clapton.

AL DIMEOLA , BUFFALO 1975

DEEP PURPLE, BUFFALO 1974

My ears rang for days after this concert. It is auricularly unwise to stand, as I

did, thirty feet from a stack of Marshall amps played through by Mick Box, he of

Uriah Heep semi-fame and one of England’s loudest and least handsome guitarists.

I have difficulty imagining him with even leftover groupies, not that I try very hard

or frequently. I lost my Mick Box photos, so here’s a shot of Heep’s remarkably

untuneful singer Dave Byron, who was later kicked out of the band and drank himself

to death, as you do.

You never knew who was in Manfred Mann’s Earth Band one year to the next, and I won-

der if they did either. I believe the guitar player du jour pictured here is Mick Rogers. I had

to look that up. Their big hit at the time was Blinded By The Light. It still is.

DAVE BYRON, URIAH HEEP, NIAGARA FALLS NY 1975 MICK ROGERS, MANFRED MANN’S EARTH BAND, NIAGARA FALLS NY 1975

Concerts at the Niagara Falls Convention Center were often general admission. The

sooner you got there, the closer to the front your square foot of concrete would be.

Keeners like me would arrive well in advance to stake our ground outside and sit

for hours, holding our water like camels rather than lose our place in line to go find

shrubbery to piss in. When the doors finally opened, the inward sprint was a prison

break in reverse. Even if I arrived late I’d weasel my way to the front, a boorish tactic

that normally results in justifiable homicide. But I had a Camera, you see—not an

Instamatic and a packet of flashcubes, but a Grown-Up Camera where you change

the lenses. There was respect. People seemed almost happy to let me all the way

through until my elbows were on the stage. It was the summer after 461 Ocean

Boulevard came out, and the first time I’d seen anyone so good so close. In my head I

can still hear the slide guitar of Motherless Children, a beautiful thing on the album but

mind-blowing loud and live. The opener was Santana, a band that in 1975 I felt was

past their Woodstockian prime. They were far from it, of course, easily providing your

money’s worth by themselves. For the final encore, Clapton and Santana jammed

together onstage. Double bills don’t get much better than that.

This is not a blurry photo. It is a portrait of Carlos Santana’s spiritual kinesis, an

encapsulation of his fluid essence, his transcendental mellifluous persona, his

cosmological gist. I’m not limited by that whole focus thing, man.

ERIC CLAPTON, NIAGARA FALLS NY 1975 CARLOS SANTANA, NIAGARA FALLS NY 1975

ALLEN COLLINS, LYNYRD SKYNYRD, BUFFALO 1975

Color film was expensive and three rolls per concert was all I could afford on my

allowance. Three rolls was about 100 shots, which a reasonable person might

assume was plenty—until you consider the conspiracy between moving targets

and manual cameras. Half my shots would be hilariously out of focus, under-

exposed, pictures of my shoe and stuff like that. Another 49% would be just

plain crummy. I was glad to end up with one useful shot in a hundred, though

sometimes I did get two or three. Anything more than three and I was Annie

Leibovitz. Lynyrd Skynyrd at the New Century Theatre is a typical example of

meeting my quota of one. This picture is the best of only five shots that escaped

the ravages of my inept archiving habits and the 95 missing ones were no better

to my recollection. But I’ll never forget how great Skynyrd was that night. My

only complaint is that the guitar solos in Free Bird lasted less than half an hour.

I’m not sure what it is that endears these guys to so many people. Maybe in part

it’s the cloud of tragedy that looms over Southern rock bands, and maybe it’s

because they always seemed so darned joyful anyway. Whatever it is, nobody

doesn’t like Lynyrd Skynyrd.

FM radio in the 1970s was different. They played the good stuff, not just the

popular stuff, though it was often the same stuff. In Niagara Falls we listened mostly to

Buffalo stations. American DJs seemed freer and freakier, and the frisson of all things

Buffalonian appealed to us Canadians ensconced over the border in Black Sabbath

T-shirts ironed by our moms. One summer I was the night cleaner at a snack bar in

the tourist district. It took from midnight to 8am to pumice the griddle, flush the ice

cream maker, swab the patio and, saving the worst for last, unclog the ladies toilet.

As the hours passed, the music on the radio got freer and freakier, unrestricted by

apparent program direction—though in hindsight I realize they didn’t play a speck

of black music, only white interpretations of it. In the wee hours they’d play an

album in its entirety—sometimes a classic like Thick As A Brick, but more interesting

to me was when they’d dig out unknown stuff from German prog rock to Southern

boogie. The night they played John Prine’s first album I froze in mid-mop to listen.

It was the first time I’d heard country music as anything but cornball crap, a low

form of art ranking just above polka. Against all preconceptions, Prine was young

and sang with a tolerable twang, with lyrics rich in humor and heartbreak. That

summer I hitchhiked to Toronto to see him, when hitchhiking was a fine means

of transportation. The next summer I did the same. By the time he played the

University of Guelph years later, however, he was in the throes of his drunken stupor

phase. The show was sloppy and embarrassing, and I gave up on him for a decade.

Eventually he sobered up, acknowledged his ‘missing years’ and went on to record his

best material yet. And to think he came so close to throwing it all away.

JOHN PRINE, TORONTO 1975

Frank Zappa famously asked the question, Does humor belong in music?

The answer may be found arithmetically: Music + Humor = Novelty Act. Even

Zappa, a mirthmeister in his own right, was best when he took his own advice

and shut up ‘n’ played his guitar. But when you’re Loudon Wainwright and your

big song is Dead Skunk In The Middle Of The Road, people don’t come to your

shows for the blazing solos. (I was there only because he opened for John Prine.)

Wainwright aimed for funny too often, using humor to compensate for so-so songs.

His equally famous wife was Kate McGarrigle, into whom he managed to deposit

his genetic information before the divorce, resulting in two abundantly talented

offspring, Rufus and Martha. As an absentee father he never came to know his

children, as evidenced by his song Rufus Is A Tit Man. Guess again, Loudon.

LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III, TORONTO 1975

Like KISS and Alice Cooper, the Tubes knew they weren’t in the Music Business;

they were in the Entertainment Business. Showmanship first, musicianship second.

Their concerts were like watching a rock video, except it was live on stage and

several years before there was such a thing as a rock video. They had amusing props,

dancing girls and sparkly hats—and nothing says show biz quite like a sparkly hat.

They also possessed an entertaining clutch of songs, White Punks On Dope being one

people remember. The Tubes were ahead of their time but couldn’t afford to wait for

everyone else. They ran out of money, steam and recording contracts, and went their

separate ways. But if they ever do a reunion tour, I’d go. What the heck.

For a heterosexual I was oddly captivated by Gino Vannelli. The lush pre-Disco

synthesizers, the glossy Latin polyrhythms, the gooey sophistication of it all. One day I

saw him waiting for a limo outside the Windsor Arms Hotel. I went up and said I was

a big fan. He only blinked at me: this uncombed teenager in plaid flannel and Kodiaks

had to be some kind of wise guy. My advice: never approach a famous person just to

blurt out your admiration. Nothing good will come of it.

GINO VANNELLI, BUFFALO 1976

THE TUBES, BUFFALO 1976

The guy who arranged most of the entertainment at the University of Guelph was

Wayne Hepburn, known to all as Herbie. Herbie knew nothing about music and

cared less, but he had a knack for booking acts the moment before they became too

big for such low-profile gigs. Robert Palmer, when Bad Case Of Loving You was gain-

ing airplay. Billy Joel, the month The Stranger was released. Chris DeBurgh at the time

of Lady In Red. Al Stewart, just as Year Of The Cat and that sax solo started getting

played on the radio once an hour, every hour, for 365 days, until the Chinese zodiac

mercifully changed to Year of the Rabbit. Herbie didn’t just bring in stuff that has

since become the gravitational core of Housewife FM. Week after week he brought us

blues, jazz, folk, punk and comedy. Herbie couldn’t dance to save his mother—I’ve

seen him—but he sure knew how to keep an entire university on its feet.

In the 1970s it was impossible to be a long-haired concertgoer in Ontario and fail

to see Max Webster 150 times. They were a regular opening act for Rush. But if you

asked the snootier fans, it was Webster and their frontman Kim Mitchell they came

to see and Rush was merely the band that came on after. Not that anybody ever left

a minute before Rush had finished. It was too easy to like Rush—even some of the

girls did—but you had to be a connoisseur of fine weirdness to get into Webster’s wry

lyrics, angular rhythms and quasi-glam stage presence. Despite success in Canada,

they didn’t quite catch on elsewhere. It’s not fair that the guys who gave us Patio

Lanterns and High Class In Borrowed Shoes go under-appreciated when meanwhile a

pile of shite like Styx is internationally mistaken for rock music.

MAX WEBSTER, POSSIBLY WELLAND c.1976

AL STEWART, GUELPH 1976

It’s not that so-called progressive rock is entirely evil. Who doesn’t dig ponderous bass

solos, soulless guitar work and keyboard players with Baroque pretensions? More than

anything, it’s the lyrics that kill this music for me—the druids and dreary Tolkienisms,

the lessons in Norse mythology and Henry VIII. No thanks, professor. Songs should be

about girls, cars and breaking the law. Still, I made an effort to understand this stuff and

randomly chose Gentle Giant as my pet prog rock band. And why not? One of their

more inventive songs is based on the writings of psychiatrist RD Laing, so that made

them ... interesting. And yes, they are virtuoso musicians with tricky time signatures

designed to thwart any attempts at dancing. And they were stunning live. But in the

end it’s all too clever by half, as the Brits say.

DEREK SHULMAN, GENTLE GIANT, GUELPH 1977

One great thing about Harry Chapin was how readily he made himself available

to college journalists. Other stars acted like they were bestowing some kind of

favor by letting you write a page of glowing copy and distribute it among 20,000

record-buying students. Chapin visited campus a couple times and was always

generous with his time. The interview wouldn’t end before the cassette tape did, and

when I ran out of questions he’d ask me some. (For the record Dan Hill was the

same, only more so. What’s with these folkie dudes?—they’re all so incorrigibly nice.)

Beyond music, Chapin was a tireless humanitarian, fundraising millions to fight

hunger. The man lived a fruitful and exuberant life, but he burned himself out

creatively and physically. At age 39 he had a heart attack while driving on the Long

Island Expressway and died in the resulting crash.

HARRY CHAPIN, GUELPH 1978

The best major label marketing guy in the late 1970s was Jim Monaco at A&M

Records. He’d slather us at the Ontarion with free records and concert tickets, arrange

interviews, whatever—not with their big acts so much, but with unknowns that need-

ed promotion. Bryan Adams, for example. He would go onstage at a certain Guelph

bar after the strippers: XXXotic Dancers!!! plus Bryan Adams, read the marquee.

Knowing that the invitations would keep flowing, we sometimes abused Jim’s gener-

osity: We’re too busy to cover Bryan Adams, we’d say, hoping to sound apologetic,

but let us know when Supertramp comes to town. One day I received in the mail

what looked to be an arrest warrant, but was in fact a ‘summons’ from A&M to meet

an up-and-coming reggae/punkish sort of outfit. The Police? Never heard of them,

Jim. I didn’t go. And I never did meet the guys in Supertramp either. Or Bryan Adams.

THE POLICE, TORONTO 1978

Here’s Rod Stewart during his mid-life crisis, circa Do Ya Think I’m Sexy. Well no I don’t,

pops, and anyway Hugh Hefner wants his purple tracksuit back. Halfway through the

show Rod ducked backstage to get his hair re-blowdried. I’m not even kidding.

ROD STEWART, TORONTO 1978

JEAN-LUC PONTY, GUELPH c.1978

It’s not easy for a man with just an electric violin to hold an audience’s attention for

a full evening, even for a prodigy like Jean-Luc Ponty. He filled in the gaps with tape

loops and phase shifters—cheesy effects by today’s standards, so cheesy that they’re

hip again. Ponty was a leading figure in 70s jazz rock and my interest in his music led

to the discovery of other, more diverse artists. For our shopping convenience many of

them were collected on the wonderful German label ECM. Keith Jarrett, Terje Rypdal,

Dave Holland, Eberhard Weber, Steve Tibbetts, Jack DeJohnette—some are still giants

in modern jazz; others are precursors to what is now tagged New Age, Ambient,

Chill, World Music and blah blah blah. In those days nobody felt the need to slice

terminology so thinly to legitimize a given style of music. We listened to and accepted

music for how it sounded, not for what the marketing department wanted us to call it.

I shared a house with an Engineering student named Paul. I got the first Elvis Costello

LP for Christmas 1977 and Paul had a silkscreen. So of course we made T-shirts, based

on the album cover art for lack of other Costello imagery to work from. Paul & Paul in

matching yellow T-shirts—how cute is that? Then we drove his rusty Civic to Buffalo

to see Costello at the SUNY campus the night before his famous El Mocambo gig.

I have no reason to doubt that ours were the first two Elvis Costello T-shirts on the

planet, and may still have mine in the back of a closet somewhere but I’m afraid to

look in case I find it.

ELVIS COSTELLO, BUFFALO 1978

Mystery shrouded Leon Redbone like fog. No one knew who he really was or where

he came from. Even one-to-one he was blurry and indistinct; talking to him was like

an awkward elevator conversation, as if he’d prefer not to mingle with people of his

own species. A bigger mystery is why he was popular with the college crowd at all

given, frankly, everything about him. His Groucho-Marx-on-safari look, his gnomic

stature and moth-eaten wardrobe, his mumbling detachment from the audience and a

song catalog drawn from an era that predated even our fossilized parents. He was the

opposite of anything else a college student would pay to hear, but we didn’t like him

in an effort to be ironic or contrary. We liked him because he was great.

LEON REDBONE, GUELPH 1978

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson after Elton John. We drove to Buffalo, filed into

Rich Stadium (where the Bills play football), brushed away the beer cans and cigarette

butts and squatted on a patch of turf at the 50-yard line and waited forever. Then

it rained. Not heavily; just enough to allow my agoraphobic discomfort to blossom

into full misery. To make matters worse, Kiki Dee came onstage for the duet Don’t

Go Breaking My Heart, a ditty more suited to Sonny & Cher than the mighty Reg

Dwight. Fast-forward three years to summer 1978. Some Girls was the new Stones

album, which I loved mostly for Beast Of Burden, a song I can still listen to a hundred

times in a row and not get tired. The Stones were on tour, so a return to Rich Stadium

was mandatory. 50-yard line again, beer cans and butts. At least this time it didn’t rain.

The sound quality was the same boomy mush you always got at big outdoor concerts

in those days, but you didn’t go see the Rolling Stones for the audiophile experience.

You went because you wanted to be within 50 yards of the dirtiest, sexiest, most

dangerous and glamorous rock band there ever was.

ROLLING STONES, BUFFALO 1978

Call me a philistine but I don’t hear what everybody else seems to hear Freddie

Mercury’s singing. Sure, I like Bohemian Rhapsody as much as Wayne and Garth do,

but after a few songs the histrionic warbling gets tiresome. Brian May, on the other

hand, now there’s a clever one. The voice that speaks through his homemade guitar

is likely the most unique in rock music since Hendrix: it’s a miracle of textures that

sound at once organic and otherworldly. Even if Brian May couldn’t point to the sun

on a sunny day I’d vote him Head of Astrophysics at Liverpool University just for being

awesome. Still, I’ve never been a huge Queen fan and I went because I had free tickets

and a story to write. I half hoped they’d play Brighton Rock early in the set then I could

sneak out. But they were jaw-droppingly great; their ability to recreate their studio

sound onstage was astonishing. No doubt I was the only one there that night taken by

surprise. Possibly the best stadium rock show I’ve been to.

QUEEN, TORONTO 1978

JANE SIBERRY (LEFT), GUELPH c.1979

Like Ronnie Hawkins, Baldry was a one-hit nostalgia act who lived out his

expatriate life orbiting the bar scene of Southern Ontario and occasionally

beyond. Always had a crack band and always drew a crowd. Wider success

unjustly eluded him, and he is now chiefly remembered as the guy from

whom Elton John took half his name. His version of You’ve Lost That Lovin’

Feelin’ ought to be a worldwide staple of adult-oriented radio.

LONG JOHN BALDRY, KITCHENER c.1979

College towns tend to have the best music scenes, and Guelph’s was

better than most. On campus in a typical month we would have grownup

entertainment like Sonny Terry, Jesse Winchester and Stephane Grappelli, plus

college circuit perennials like Rough Trade and David Wilcox, plus local punks,

beatniks and experimental artistes of varying degrees of merit. The city of

Guelph had a bustling music scene of its own, mostly of the homegrown folkie

persuasion. If you had an acoustic guitar, a stool and cruelty-free lyrics, the

gigs awaited. One such granola act was Java Jive, with Janie Stewart on vocals

and her friend Wendy on ethereal accompaniment. I was much flattered when

they asked me to take promo pictures in Janie’s pumpkin patch. Then one day

Janie Stewart went away and cut her hair, changed her music and reemerged

fully formed as Jane Siberry. Most artists evolve slowly over time; others have

the guts to go home, completely reinvent themselves then go have lunch with

Brian Eno.

I bumped into Neil Peart in a parking lot in St Catharines, 1975-ish. I was on my

way to meet friends for coffee to show them pictures from the recent Rush concert,

and then we’d go bowling. I was proud of those shots as they were among the first

I’d taken where you could actually tell who was in the picture. Neil was locking his

car. I waved the envelope of enlargements at him: ‘Hey Neil, what a coincidence!’

I spread the prints across the hood of my dad’s Buick. Neil came over and nodded

at my work and said polite words. It was then I realized that I had several pictures

of Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee but none of him. As a matter of practice nobody

takes pictures of the drummer, though I did not care to mention that verbally in

person to Neil Peart, who is not a small man. I have since lost all trace of those

1975 pictures. Drummer’s revenge.

ALEX LIFESON, RUSH, GUELPH c.1978

Search me why I even went to a Ted Nugent concert. Anyway, here’s Mister

NRA in his camouflage pants. What a dick.

Every Canadian with a camera has a picture of Gordon Lightfoot more

or less like this one, though other people splurge on color film. I heard

somewhere that your citizenship is revoked if you fail to produce at least one

Gordon Lightfoot concert stub as proof of patriotism. Attach it to your tax form

and you may be eligible for a deduction. I suspect this is not an actual law, but

to my knowledge no Canadian has risked violating it.

GORDON LIGHTFOOT, TORONTO 1979

TED NUGENT, KITCHENER 1979

Chris Spedding is the most famous guitarist you’ve never heard of. Here’s a guy

who declined the invitation to replace Mick Taylor in the Rolling Stones. He’d

rather concentrate on his own material, thanks anyway Mr Jagger. As fate would

have it, Spedding frankly never wrote good enough songs to find much fame on

his own and it’s his splendid session work he’s known for. His clients include Elton

John, Paul McCartney, Bryan Ferry, Pretenders, Sex Pistols and a hundred more. I

met him a couple times and though he liked to talk, he never wanted to discuss the

Stones thing—or anything in the past, really. Maybe he was one of those optimistic

guys who lived for the future. Or maybe he regretted the fact that opportunity had

knocked once then went over to Ronnie Woods’ house.

WITH ROBERT GORDON, TORONTO 1979CHRIS SPEDDING, TORONTO 1980

Record companies sometimes overestimated my rock journalist credentials and I

thank them for that. They’d invite me to special events like when Sam ‘The Record

Man’ Sniderman awarded gold records to Cheap Trick for their live album Cheap

Trick At Budokan. There was free food and drinks. Sniderman swanned around

magnanimously. Guitarist Rick Nielsen told jokes. Drummer Bun E Carlos sat and

smoked. An older woman followed bassist Tom Petersson around the room the

whole time, holding his hand whenever possible. How sweet, I thought at the time,

he’s brought his mom.

CHEAP TRICK WITH SAM SNIDERMAN, TORONTO 1979

MARK KNOPFLER, DIRE STRAITS, TORONTo 1979

Dire Straits owe their success mostly to me. It was I who immediately recognized

the brilliance of their debut album and told everybody on the planet, including

but not limited to dozens of my immediate associates in the city of Guelph and

beyond. Their record company, however, labored under the illusion that the

explosive popularity of Dire Straits owed more to the heavy international airplay,

glowing album reviews and sold-out concert tour of North America. History

will tell which of us was right. In any case, not only was I refused the exclusive

interview I demanded but I took further umbrage at having to buy my own

$5 ticket to the show. They played the University of Toronto’s Convocation

Hall, a tiny venue intended for unamplified scholarly events. Dire Straits were

predictably fabulous but, with only one album’s worth of material, the concert was

short. Although their success and profitability continued to grow, my mailbox has

yet to produce even a small royalty cheque or brief letter of gratitude.

Ultravox was a skinny-tie/foppish-hairdo band, like Japan or the Cure but without

the good songs and serious musicianship. In other words, nothing like Japan or the

Cure but for the ability to strike arty poses and be English. I remember little from

my interview with singer John Foxx except his advice on where to buy punk clothes

in London, as if I were about to embark on a Chelsea shopping spree. That night

Ultravox played at The Edge, a sadly defunct venue stuffed into a Victorian semi-

detached at Church and Gerrard. As Toronto’s launching spot for many punk and

post-punk bands great and small, it is hallowed ground and the building deserves

an historical plaque lest we forget.

JOHN FOXX

ULTRAVOX, TORONTO 1979

This just in from Captain Obvious: If you’re a great instrumentalist you need equally

great material to play. Either write it yourself, as did Steve Cropper and Curtis

Mayfield, or provide brilliant accompaniment like Larry Carlton or David Lindley.

Do neither and you wind up as Roy Buchanan, a man all dressed up with sublime

abilities and artistically nowhere to go. I met him after this El Mocambo gig and he

was morose. He seemed to resent even being there, like a grand magician reduced

to performing tricks at birthday parties. He had reasonable early success with critical

acclaim coming out the yin-yang, and counted Jeff Beck as an official admirer. His

albums became less and less innovative over the years and interest in this particular

master of the Telecaster petered out. In 1988 he was arrested for drunk & disorderly

and by morning had hung himself in the jail cell by his own shirt.

ROY BUCHANAN, TORONTO c.1979

Howie Mandel kicked my car. It happened during a brief period when I

wondered if I shouldn’t try taking the Rock Journalist thing to the next level,

i.e. the level where you get paid. Canadian Musician was a new glossy magazine

then and I approached the editor with a couple story ideas. They already had the

Anne Murray/Oscar Peterson ground well covered, so I’d be their grungy rock

specialist—the term ‘indie’ hadn’t yet been coined. The recording of the new Bob

Segarini album in Toronto was my first story, and I spent evenings documenting the

process at the now-demolished Eastern Sound studios in Yorkville. Bob’s friend Howie

Mandel, an aspiring comedian at the time, dropped by one night so we took a

break and crossed the street to Yuk Yuk’s comedy club. On the way back, Bob made

reference to my decrepit car parked at the curb. So Howie kicked it. I don’t know

why. Maybe because he’s a jerk. My second and final story for Canadian Musician

was a sketch of the Diodes, owners of the punkish gem Tired Of Waking Up Tired,

and at gigs they always got the party started. Yes, I got paid for these stories, but it

worked out to 39 cents an hour. And though I enjoy a dented car as much as the

next guy does, it just wasn’t a solid career choice.

DIODES, TORONTO 1979

At last count, there were one billion things that can go horribly wrong in staging a

live performance. It’s a wonder things don’t jump the rails more often. So can we

please have a big round of applause for all those roadies, sound mixers, set build-

ers, lighting guys and technicians of every type. Thank you. Still, every once in a

while you get treated to a train wreck. This picture shows John Cale at the piano,

playing something pensive and mature. A couple songs later he switched to guitar

and everything went to hell—an equipment malfunction or demonic voices in his

head, I don’t recall which. Cale threw down his instrument and flung microphone

stands, cussing like a proper Welshman. This went on for a good few minutes until

the stage resembled Keith Moon’s hotel room. Then he stormed off. It was way

more entertaining than if everything had gone according to the set list.

JOHN CALE, GUELPH 1980

People make it their business to complain about Bob Dylan. When he went

electric, when he went country, when he went rock, when he went acoustic

again. Most of all, people complained when he went Christian, as if his genius

to that point sprang from specific Jewishness. I like this period in Dylan’s music

because, as a practicing non-churchgoer, I found the spiritual turn irrelevant. Good

music is good music, just as Marvin Gaye and Prince are great whether they sing

about Jesus or girls in tight skirts. And if anyone has earned the right to sing about

the topic of his choosing it’s Bob Dylan, though it may be a little late now for his

girls-in-tight-skirts period. This was the only concert I ever bought scalped tickets

for and it was worth it. I only wish that on the Slow Train Coming tour he had

brought Mark Knopfler and Pick Withers, the Dire Straits guys who played on the

album. There you have it, another complaint.

BOB DYLAN, TORONTO 1980

Jimi Hendrix notwithstanding, my vision of Hell is the Woodstock Festival. Film

footage of the event reveals it to be like a Hieronymus Bosch painting with the

mediaeval Dutch peasants replaced by 350,000 half-naked hippies. I don’t want to

stand that close to sweaty vegetarians even with their clothes on. As a result I shy

away from anything containing the Festival word, though one of the best concerts

was exactly that. Elvis Costello headlined the Heatwave Festival and was his usual

fabulous self. The B52s, Pretenders and Rockpile were equally great. But Talking

Heads stole the show, debuting material from Remain In Light, an album I took a

particular shining to for its West African influences—in heavy rotation on my turntable

at the time were Fela Kuti, Sunny Adé, Ebenezer Obey, Eddie Quansah and Victor

Uwaifo. That stuff is still in heavy rotation; it’s just not on a turntable anymore.

DAVID BYRNE, TALKING HEADS, OSHAWA 1980

For the most part rock music is not what you play, it’s how you play it. Style

over substance. Keith Richards, who has plenty of both, said all it takes is

‘five strings, three chords, two fingers and one asshole.’ To that the Ramones

could add: No songs over three minutes. They reduced music to its core,

stripped away every sonic ornament. They gigged endlessly, with songs that

sounded the same, played at the same mile-a-minute pace—this in an era

when other bands sat around expensively in studios, turning their bloated

selves into the Alan Parsons Project. Ramones concerts mirrored this brilliant

economy of effort: singer Joey Ramone never budged from this exact posture

the whole night. How could anyone ask for more?

RAMONES, GUELPH 1980

XTC, Guelph 1981

In the wake of the flood of new music in the late 70s, a Toronto television station

developed a show called—wait for it—The New Music. To film the segment with

XTC they sent a haircut named JD Roberts (that’s him in the picture, far right) who

asked such questions as ‘Who’s Nigel?’ and expected a sincere reply. I stood by

and took pictures. By the time all the questions had been asked, the band was

ready to go back to the Holiday Inn and I could only say thanks and goodbye. It

was an opportunity missed. XTC never toured again, due to leader Andy Partridge’s

incurable stage fright. From the safety of studios XTC—and Partridge in various

partnerships and solo guises—continued to record effusively and with Beatlesque

versatility. They had hits, they had misses, and the craftsmanship got better and

better. Elvis Costello may be the obvious successor to Paul McCartney’s diminish-

ing role as Tunemaster General of the Western World but Andy Partridge should

at least be interviewed for the job. If not, he has certainly earned a place on any

well-considered list of top 100 guitar players in the game.

A pack of Marlboros made John Lydon and me best friends forever until the

smokes ran out. I had scheduled a short interview with the PiL singer after their

show at the Masonic Temple. American cigarettes weren’t generally available

in Canada then, so when John saw my contraband pack he invited me to stick

around. It was like dropping coins into a vending machine: as long as I fed him

the Marlies, John kept talking into my tape recorder. Maybe it was the nicotine

buzz, but he was chatty and witty and more articulate than I expected—why

does it surprise us when rock stars are intelligent?—and once he let down his

Johnny Rotten facade he seemed to be a perfectly nice guy. One of the most

productive and pleasant interviews I’ve done.

JOHN LYDON, PUBLIC IMAGE LTD, TORONTO c.1982