Oliver Jones. Marthe Sansregret
why he was screaming until it retracted. Then I saw the blood on the side of his face. We were backstage ready to go, and the man who cleaned the place just said: ‘That’s what you get when you drink too much!’”
Perhaps because this experience stayed in his mind, Oliver was always determined that no substance would control him. “I was too shy and I would be afraid that if I drank, I would lose all my inhibitions. I guess I may have associated stupidity with drinking to excess. We would say that a drunken man speaks a sober man’s mind. Lots of times, people say things when they are drunk that they have in their minds but that they would never have the courage to say when they are sober.” Oliver would often be the only one in a group without a drink in his hand. “For one thing, I never liked the taste nor the smell of beer. I remember having tasted a rum and coke at the Lantern Café with Richard Parris and a drummer, to celebrate someone’s birthday. That was the first drink I ever had. It was pleasant because it was sweet and I love sweets.”
But even one alcoholic drink, sweet or bitter, was too much for Oliver. “I can take this much of it and my arms just go numb. And it has happened all my life. If I make a toast with somebody, just a sip of wine – I don’t know what gin and scotch taste like, although I have tasted cognac once – I get sick. Any time that I take alcohol, the smallest amount, three minutes after, my arms are numb for six or seven minutes. I’ve asked doctors what would cause this reaction and they said that I have an incompatibility.”
Playing in clubs that served alcohol meant that Oliver was also exposed to smoking as a youngster. However, he was turned off it at a summer day camp in the western part of the Island of Montreal, where city children were taken to play in the fields and in the woods. Oliver and his friends crushed some dried maple leaves, rolled the “tobacco” in newspaper and pretended they were smoking cigarettes. “The taste was terrible, so I never got into smoking either.”
***
Oliver began to play in clubs when he was only ten. He met a few other child performers, mostly singers and dancers, on these occasions. Due to their youth, certain rules had to be observed. “We were not allowed to come out into the audience. We had to stay backstage. But I didn’t do a lot of those shows; I did them only on the weekends or during school breaks.”
Oliver played in churches on Friday evenings, and at the Children’s Hospital or in homes for the aged on Saturday or Sunday. He also played at Bordeaux Prison, where he encountered some of the boys he had grown up with. “It was kind of embarrassing, but I never felt any danger. We were young.” He played in amateur music competitions in theatres and auditoriums, mostly in the east end of Montreal. Oliver also participated in Billy Munro’s music talent show on CKVL radio in Verdun. He found that Billy was a nice man who made sure that the young performers got a break – as long as they behaved impeccably at the station. He won first prize on the program twice and came second once. Billy invited him to be part of the show he presented during the intermissions at movie theatres, complete with singers and dancers.
Besides all this, Oliver played the piano in Chuck Hughes’s bandwagon. This fine entertainer produced acts at the Carpenters’ Hall on Bleury Street, bringing in professional dancers and singers, and sometimes bands, from the United States.
Oliver occasionally had a chance to perform with three of his childhood friends, Eddie and Berry Nurse, and Ralph Whims (along with his mother Bernice) in shows at the Delorimier Stadium, where nothing inappropriate for young boys went on.
The situation was different when he performed in clubs. One evening when he was eleven, he witnessed something that was definitely out of the ordinary. Oliver was sitting at the piano ready to accompany a live show when he saw a line of striptease artists emerging from the wings on one side of the stage and a group of policemen coming from the other. Realizing that something that wasn’t on the program was about to happen, he jumped down and ran out the back door of the club.
He didn’t think that his mother heard about the raid. His father, on the other hand, might have. But Oliver didn’t want to risk asking him.
***
When the war finally came to an end, Wrenfred Bryant, back from Italy, paid a visit to his aunt and his “little brother.” He presented Oliver with a guitar he had bought in Rome during one of his leaves. Although the instrument showed the effects of humidity after a two-week ocean voyage without protection, Oliver was very proud of his gift.
After his cousin left, Oliver decided the guitar was due for a reconditioning. But when he sanded off the varnish, he noticed that the wood had become very thin, so he applied a generous coat of white paint to it. The next day, trying to tune the guitar, he found the sound harsh and off key. It was all too obvious that the instrument was out of commission. Oliver went back to his piano.
He started replacing musicians in small clubs. “The most important one for me was Le Montmartre, on Saint-Laurent Boulevard just north of Sainte-Catherine, a tough area. The one thing they would tell us was to stay away from De Bullion Street – the area of the brothels. We never listened much; we just knew that it was nearby and that we had to be careful because it was a rough area. But as kids, we never got into problems. There were so many clubs over there. We always had some friends playing on Saint-Laurent, but I really was not that worried. Maybe we were just too young to realize the danger.”
***
Oliver was thrilled by the arrival of spring. In addition to the relief of having mild weather, he loved to see his mother, sisters, and other girls wearing their pastel-hued spring dresses and straw hats decorated with cloth flowers or celluloid fruits. He and his father would also dress in light colours when the long winter ended. Oliver particularly appreciated the change of seasons because during the winter he was usually dressed in heavy, dark suits that he thought were too old for him.
For Oliver, spring was the time to play songs like Irving Berlin’s “Easter Parade,” and when baseball season started, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in honour of Black American baseball star, Jackie Robinson. On the May 24th holiday – Queen Victoria’s Birthday, otherwise known as “Firecracker Day” – he loved watching the fireworks at various Montreal parks and lighting bonfires using materials left behind on moving day, including old mattresses. This would usually bring the firemen over to cool down the party with their hoses.
Oliver’s favourite season was summer. Songs like “Mockin’ Bird Hill” and “In the Good Old Summertime,” made popular by Les Paul and Mary Ford, “Tennessee Waltz,” and “Belmont Boogie” were all part of his hot-weather repertoire. Summer also meant more gigs: in waterside clubs around the island and in resorts in the Laurentians, dances were held on Saturday nights with live band music.
When autumn arrived, he would feel a bit melancholy; it was time to return to school. As for the temperature, although he had never known another climate, he always disliked the cold. Yet his mother, who had grown up in the tropics, would often exclaim in French: “Ah, il fait chaud…!” Oliver, meanwhile, played “Autumn Leaves,” the French chanson that had been adopted by jazzmen the world over. In October, on Halloween night, Oliver wore any kind of costume he could put together, donned a mask, and went trick-or-treating with Bruce, Richard, and another friend of theirs, Luigi Vani. On their rounds, they offered to play music for their “treat.” People were so pleased with them that they gave them money instead of candies.
If Oliver found autumn difficult, it was nothing in comparison to winter with its unpleasant cold-weather chores of shovelling snow, bringing in heating coal or wood and taking the ashes out. The cold also prevented him from practising his favourite outdoor sports. Oliver went to the gym until the day he was conquered by the Canadian sport par excellence, hockey. He plunged into this activity with characteristic passion, to the point that his family thought he had gone overboard. “Having three sisters and being the only boy, you remember things that used to get you mad or embarrassed. Even today, my sisters still tease me about it. I used to go out to play hockey and stay until the last minute. I knew we were eating supper at six o’clock, but I’d come home to be told off by my mother: ‘Boy, why do you wait until the last minute?’ I remember coming in not feeling my feet – no relief – I couldn’t do anything