Why Am I Doing This?

When I was six years old, my family lived in a then new, muddy suburb on the northern reaches of Toronto called Willowdale. This was in the early ‘60s. I had, at the time, three sisters (I now have five). My parents had bought this new house as part of the call of developers all over Toronto to move to the wide open spaces that were once farmland and were now becoming neighbourhoods with strip malls and new schools and, this being Canada, arenas.

We had a large house, the kind you wouldn’t find further into the city. In the basement, our parents had designated one room as the kids’ “playroom.” Among the toys in there, was a little record player. I can’t remember what records we little ones were listening to, but my dad, Jack, had left a stack of what he called “78s” on a shelf. I had heard him talk about his love of the jazz of his youth, but I had no idea what this jazz was.

One day, I got curious. I picked up one of his 78s and put it on the record player. Somehow, I knew enough to switch the record player setting from 45 to 78. I turned the power on and set the needle onto the record. The song was called “Traffic Jam” and the artist was Artie Shaw and his Orchestra.

I heard a drummer introduce the music with a sizzling pattern on what I would learn was a snare drum (I learned later the drummer was a very young Buddy Rich). Then the band streamed in with a clarinet leading it that sounded like an ambulance siren. And then, over the next couple of minutes, the band burned through a workout that had me wide-eyed. Picture McAuley Culkin in Home Alone when he first slaps his dad’s aftershave on his face. That was my face.

That was it — I was hooked. I listened to the rest of Jack’s 78s — from the slow blueser, After Hours by Erskine Hawkins and his orchestra to Benny Goodman’s majestic Sing, Sing, Sing (Gene Krupa’s iconic solo was my chief inspiration in becoming a drummer) and many others.

That was when I became a music disciple.

1050 CHUM in Toronto brought rock ‘n’ roll to me…the pioneers Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Elvis and Little Richard and then a new band, four guys from Liverpool called The Beatles. Then the Stones, Lesley Gore, the Dave Clark Five, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, The Supremes and…well, you know the story.

I went nuts for all of these rockers, while also continuing to delve into jazz. By the time I got to high school in 1971, I had become a drummer and soon started playing with some guys in a folk-rock band, covering the music of artists like Neil Young, Bob Dylan and America (remember Sister Golden Hair?).

I became crazy about the Allman Brothers, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Deep Purple, Joni Mitchell, The Band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Chicago, the Doobie Brothers, that huge wave of singer-songwriters in the folk-country vein (Crosby, Stills, Nash and sometimes Young, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Carol King). And there was disco, which I actually adored.

But I also began to realize I was dismissing other artists who were really popular. Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath didn’t work at all for me. I loved the blues, but this didn’t feel like the blues to me. It felt dark and gloomy and noisy. A genre called prog rock introduced Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Jethro Tull, Rush and Yes. I heard bits of all these bands and none of it grabbed me with the joy of a Chuck Berry guitar solo or the charm of Elvis.

In 1974, I went with a group of friends to Seneca College one cold December night to hear a guy from New Jersey make his Toronto debut. His name was Bruce Springsteen and with his E-Street Band he rocked the roof off of the Seneca field house (the fancy name for a gym). Tickets cost $7.50. That show, three hours long, got us dancing so hard that our sweaty hair froze when we back outside into the winter late that night.

What got me about Bruce is that he seemed to be channeling the rock pioneers. I could hear Elvis and Chuck in his songs. He paid tribute to Roy Orbison in one we heard that night, Thunder Road, and at the end, he did Mitch Ryder’s Detroit medley. THIS, to me, was the rock I started with.

As much as I loved Bruce, as the early ‘80s arrived, I could feel my love of rock dissolving. I didn’t like the punk that had come up a few years before. I didn’t quite get what New Wave was. I had never cottoned on to heavy metal or prog rock. The joy I felt from early rock and the bands of the mid ‘60s wasn’t coming through for me anymore. When Bruce released Tunnel of Love in the late ‘80s, I waved it away and signed off rock. I remember quite liking Paul Simon’s Graceland. But that was it.

But around 2012, I joined a rock band for the first time in decades. It was in a program called The League of Rock where you pay some dough and they put you into a band for 10 weeks. My new bandmates were calling out songs that we might cover. “Love is the Drug” was one. A song by a ‘90s female band was another (I never could learn to play the drum pattern, so we dropped it). One after the other was suggested and I didn’t know any of them. This continued as I joined a band with some friends. Songs by Rush, the Foo Fighters, and Aerosmith were called out and I realized I knew none of them.

And then, in a moment of clarity in 2016, I was sitting at my desk at the University of Toronto. I was editor of the university’s magazine about research — which meant that we were writing about what was going on around the world. I was no scientist, but, as a journalist, I could learn about stem cells and the forces behind climate change and explain all of that. Same with research into the illegal gun trade, equitable housing and Shakespeare.

So I thought, “If I can learn all that, why don’t I make rock music into something I could learn?”

In thick, black marker, I wrote HEAVY METAL HOMEWORK on a piece of paper and stuck it to the wall.

I started reading about the genre and something took me to focusing on Led Zeppelin. I bought some CDs. I read a biography of Robert Plant. Within weeks, I was totally crazy about Zep. I was now saying they were as good/important/talented as anyone I’d ever heard.

And that was when I got the idea for this blog.

I didn’t get serious about it until late in 2021. Bored by the lockdowns necessitated by the pandemic, I decided to launch the blog as a passion project. I expanded my range from only heavy metal and included all of rock and came up with the title “Music I Missed.” I sent an email to about 60 friends who I could remember having good music talks with over the years. I later added about 40 more. I explained my project and asked for their recommendations.

“Tell me who you love, not who you think is ‘the best’,” I asked.

I got a terrific response. So much so that I have years of listening ahead of me.

So, here I go. I’ll be listening and then posting about every two weeks. I’ve set up each post so it’s easy to read. There will be no artists here who I’m familiar with. This is exploration for me.

I haven’t written a record review since my days at Ryerson’s journalism school in the ‘70s. My goal back then was to be a music critic. But you know how it goes — a job offer came forward from a Catholic weekly paper. Much to my surprise, it was a terrific dive into journalism. I got into writing about the religion (I told them I was pro-choice, but they still hired me), which took me into telling stories about theology matters that I never did understand but also about poverty, the developing world, the homeless, and refugees. Then another offer presented itself and I wrote about chemical manufacturing and then another and another, so it was mutual funds, health care, education, viruses, race, housing and hundreds of other topics. I never did fulfill my goal of becoming a music critic. But maybe, after 45 years, this is it. Please bear with me as I start re-exercising those writing muscles.

So, as Jack Black said so eloquently in School of Rock: LET’S GET ROCKIN’!