Strange Way to Live. Carl Dixon
streets, and that was it for lessons with Mrs. Shumpski. Nightly piano practice had become intolerable. I knew my friends were gathering to play baseball and ride bikes, play army man, have rock fights, or arrow fights with pulled bush ferns … all kinds of great stuff. My childhood was just “go, go, go” from morning until night. Every minute outside was a good minute. Besides, I couldn’t see how the piano music I was learning related in any way to the music on the radio, which had me fascinated.
A conflict brewed as my mother tried to get me to stick with piano. My dad wanted this, they saw my natural ability, and they’d invested in years of lessons. The breaking point came one night when my mother tried to make me sit down and practise after dinner as usual, and I yelled, “F*** off, Mom!” A chill went through the house in response, with my sister and our babysitter in the background. My mother calmly told me to go to my room. My piano lessons tailed off after that.
In those days all children gained valuable musical experience from singing in school. Music class really meant singing class, and though there wasn’t much focus on technique, there was an expectation that every child could sing and should sing. This notion has largely been abandoned now, along with other aspects of an arts-based educational system.
School choirs were obligatory when I was growing up, and most children eagerly took part, singing from the songbooks that school boards purchased in bulk. I loved hearing my voice blending in as we’d sing “Aura Lee,” “The Church in the Wildwood,” or “Red River Valley.” When I hear these old songs now they put me in a sentimental mood. Singing them can still make me happy.
My first guitar teacher, Mrs. Tallon, seemed ancient. I suppose she must have been in her forties, but I thought of guitars as something for young people. My mother dropped me off every Saturday morning at Mrs. Tallon’s home for a group lesson in which I was the youngest. Almost eleven when I started, I kept at it for about six months. We had a Dick Bennett method book, and then, to “liven things up,” Mrs. Tallon would hand out typed copies of songs for us to play and sing: “Little Boxes,” “Jack Was Every Inch a Sailor,” “Windy,” “This Land Is Your Land.” I guess she was a folkie.
“Windy” reminds me that there was a girl named Wendy in the class, a bit older than me. I had a little crush on her. That helped me to persevere, even though two things were chafing. First, my beginner guitar was an el cheapo model my uncle had given me second-hand. It had raised-action strings that required more strength to press down than my child’s hand could comfortably produce. Second, I felt very little closer to my goal of making the kind of sounds that were bursting all around me. I’d ask if we could play Creedence Clearwater Revival or Beatles songs; I think Mrs. Tallon disliked the “mod” sounds pushing out her favourites.
Getting closer to the magic music wasn’t going to be easy. I could increase my knowledge through devoted Top 40 radio listening (this was before FM rock radio was widespread), by borrowing records from friends, or by using my allowance to buy 45s. When I turned eleven, my allowance went up to a dollar a week, so every Saturday I’d go into town on my mother’s grocery shopping trip. I’d try to bring a friend, and we’d stand before the record display at Woolworth’s, scanning the riches that lay before us. What a thrill to see the latest from The Beatles, the Stones, Creedence or The Guess Who. Sometimes I’d be enticed to buy something I hadn’t heard because I knew the artist: James Brown, The Youngbloods, Elvis (who was already way passé to kids by then). It was as if those perfect black discs contained a key, offering admission to the great exciting world beyond our little northern town. Picture sleeves on the 45s added to the appeal: “Man, they look so cool! I wanna look like that. I’m growing my hair! Maybe my mom will get me a pair of those bell-bottoms.” You have to wear the proper gear to show the world where your allegiance lies.
I was keen to somehow become a performer. My dad had a portable record player with a speaker in the lid that you propped up to play discs on the turntable. This resembled the guitar amps I’d seen on TV, so one day I took it into the back yard and lip-synched to a 45 with my neighbour. We convinced the little girls next door that we were really playing and singing as we held our crappy beginners’ guitars. At least, they said they believed us.
My first real performance singing and playing guitar for an audience was at age eleven, the father and son banquet night for my Manitou Park Boy Scout troop. Our Scout leader heard I’d been taking guitar lessons and enlisted me to perform “You Are My Sunshine.” I practised for a few weeks and then that night shyly sang the song, seated on a chair on the stage with some of my patrol standing behind me to add their voices.
This was one of the many years that my father was living away from us for his teaching job, but it was my greatest wish he be there with me that evening. I didn’t want to look like I had no pa.
I was well used to only seeing my dad at Christmas and summer holidays. Still, I couldn’t help wishing.... And then, when I got home from school on the day of the banquet, there was my dad in the kitchen, waiting for me with a big smile. He’d booked the day off and driven across the province to do the impossible and be there with me. I’ll never forget the pride at having my father there watching me perform, on one of the rare occasions that he was able to see one of my childhood events. I hope I thanked him properly.
So there I was, this kid in Northern Ontario in the ’60s, when the sounds of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Guess Who, Simon and Garfunkel, and the dozens of other great bands we still hear to this day first washed over the world. I can’t describe adequately the thrill as those sounds grabbed hold of my cerebral cortex. Loud, brash, unafraid, and strong was how the music felt coming over the radio. I was instantly hooked, and from then on the beast awakened inside me had to be constantly fed.
Soon after the father and son banquet, my guitar lessons were done for the summer. A couple of years followed in which there was no music instruction or practice. We’d moved to Haliburton, where it wasn’t offered, and I’d given up for a time the idea that I could learn what I needed from lessons. What I did instead was take my record listening and buying to the next level.
Twelve years old in Haliburton, looking like the kid in Almost Famous.
Photo: Carl Dixon
The beauty of the vinyl LP was in the very limitations of the medium. Each side could only carry seventeen or eighteen minutes of music grooves; more than that and the sound quality would deteriorate. The result was that you could listen to any artist’s full piece of work, the best they had to give you on that release, in thirty-five minutes or less. This time constraint meant that the artists could turn out albums more frequently and give more attention to the details of each project. Many of the classic rock LPs ran no more than thirty minutes in total. With albums, you could give an LP your full attention and still feel fresh to slap on a different one after that. It wasn’t the much-discussed “warmth” of their sound that made vinyl LPs great; it was the time limits built into them. The nature of the listening experience, and the meaning of that experience on a personal level, has been altered a great deal since my youth. Maybe the idea of the “album” as a discrete artistic statement is what made it marvellous.
It was a non-playing musical life I had as a pre-teen in Haliburton. I read music magazines and talked about music and bands constantly, assuming that everybody was like me and cared about these things as much as I did. I had some very patient friends in those days who cheerfully went along with my obsession. It wasn’t just me, though. Back then music was more central to the culture, a real movement. It seemed important, and for a too-brief period it really did reflect the changes going on in the world. A singer could be a leader to many simply because of the lyrics to his song. We all wanted to believe in the virtue of the people who made the records. It was easier to believe in The Beatles than, say, Richard Nixon.
I spent every penny I could get on new records, and when I didn’t have money, God help me, sometimes I shoplifted them. My need was insatiable.
First piano, then