Without new purpose, once-vital North End theatre could face the wrecking ball

Don’t it always seem to go,

Late musicians all contributed to Manitoba scene

I received word recently my old friend and fellow guitarist, former Winnipegger Bob White, passed away. White was a journeyman musician who toiled on the local scene with early groups such as the Back Pages before stepping into the limelight as a member of Justin Tyme, Spice, Hurricane Hannah, LesQ and Rocki Rolletti.

In 1982, he moved to Vancouver, where he carved out a career as a guitarist-for-hire. His band the Bobcats — featuring another former Winnipegger, Danny Casavant, and for a long time drummer Harvey Kostenchuk — held down a regular gig playing the oldies for packed houses on weekends at the Dover Arms pub. Despite his absence from our scene, White is fondly remembered here not just for his talented playing and singing but for his friendly demeanour and gregarious personality.

“I was honoured to have been able to play with Bob for so many years,” says Casavant, who worked with White in several bands. “His career was a long and interesting one that took him outside Winnipeg. He was like a brother to me, and I learned a great deal from him.”

White was in Justin Tyme’s lineup when the group performed at the legendary ManPop 70 rock festival at the old Winnipeg Stadium.

Record company’s gimmick launched Guess Who’s career

Fifty-two years ago last week, on Jan. 16, 1965, the record that put Winnipeg on the national music map was released.

Quality Records, headquartered in Toronto, sent out radio-play copies across the country of a 45-rpm single mysteriously credited simply to Guess Who? With everything British dominating both the pop charts and the collective consciousness of teens, it was nearly impossible for homegrown recording artists to gain national airplay on radio stations. Regulations that mandated radio play 30 per cent Canadian content (now 35 per cent) were six years away. Quality Records decided to hoodwink radio programmers into giving this curiously labelled record a spin, gambling on the fact the distinct British style and infectious sound of the 45, along with the ambiguous identity, would pique interest.

The ruse worked. Within weeks, Shakin’ All Over was charting coast to coast, and by March it was either No. 1 or in the top 5 on every major radio station nationally. It was then that the mystery was revealed. Guess Who? was none other than Winnipeg quintet Chad Allan & the Expressions. Suddenly, Winnipeg became the rock ’n’ roll capital of Canada. What’s more, the single broke down the regional barriers that had prevented Canadian recording artists from achieving cross-country success.

“The importance of Shakin’ All Over cannot be overestimated for the Canadian pop music landscape of early 1965,” states writer/broadcaster Bob Mersereau, author of The Top 100 Canadian Singles and A History of Canadian Rock ’n’ Roll. “There had been plenty of regional hits from local artists that made the charts in different corners of the country, local artists that got the kids in say, Vancouver or Halifax all excited. But a national Canadian-made smash was a rare beast. National No. 1s were reserved for the Beatles, and after them came a dozen more British Invasion artists. With no Canadian-content regulations in place for radio, no decent recording studios and little incentive for big record labels to promote anything but the proven sellers, regional acts barely had a prayer. But before programmers knew it, they’d been tricked into giving the mystery band an even playing field. Then the kids took over, loving the song and making it a No. 1 hit in several markets.”

Winnipeg’s Steiner Brothers didn’t seek celebrity but made it big

It’s a pretty safe bet few people in Winnipeg, or in Western Canada for that matter, knew the likes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, George Burns, Bob Hope, Dinah Shore or Ed Sullivan on a first-name basis. Winnipeg’s Steiner Brothers did.

Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, the Steiners — Roy, Ron and Rob — performed alongside these and other entertainment luminaries at some of the most famous nightclubs and theatres in North America. Constantly in demand, they were ranked among the best tap dancers in the world.

“We worked with every major star in the business at one time or another,” says Ron Steiner from his home in north Winnipeg, where he and his brothers gathered recently to talk about their show business career.

“I can’t even remember all the people we worked with. Most of them are gone now. We were very well-known and respected in the business because we took it seriously and we loved to perform.”

Singer made her mark

The 1960s was a golden decade for Canadian television music production, with CBC Winnipeg serving as a regional centre for music shows.

Local performers such as Peggy Neville, Reg Gibson, Georges Lafleche, Ray St. Germain and Lorraine West, to name a few, were featured on their own television shows backed up by the cream of local musicians, including Lenny Breau, Ron Halldorson, Dave Young, Reg Kelln, Dave Shaw and arranger Bob McMullin. CBC Winnipeg employed a roster of talented backing singers who served duty on several productions. They included Yvette (Shaw), Micki Allen, Lucille Emond, Barry Stillwell, Hector Bremner and Karen Marklinger.

Marklinger enjoyed a prominent career as a well-respected and in-demand backing vocalist, featured performer, guest star and recording artist. Toronto broadcaster Fred Napoli once said, “Karen Marklinger is, in my opinion, probably the best female vocalist I’ve ever heard in Canada. Her approach is timeless because it has nothing to do with fads or styles.”

“I feel so privileged to have played so often with Karen,” veteran guitarist/bass player Ron Halldorson, who worked with Marklinger at CBC Winnipeg, says. “She had such wonderful phrasing, and her voice just floated through the air. Karen and Yvette were the best singers I ever worked with.”

Veteran musician reflects on spinning wheel of career

In his recent memoir, Blood, Sweat, and My Rock ‘n’ Roll Years, veteran rock musician Steve Katz poses the question in the subtitle: “Is Steve Katz a rock star?”

While he has never trashed a hotel room nor OD’d on drugs, Katz is unquestionably a rock star who has seen it all in a career spanning some five decades. He’s done it all as well, from musician and songwriter to record producer and record label executive. The unassuming guitarist/singer, founding member of seminal ’60s New York bands the Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears, will be sharing stories from his remarkable resumé on Nov. 15 as part of the Tarbut Festival of Jewish Culture at the Berney Theatre at the Rady JCC.

Hanging around Greenwich Village in his late teens in the mid ’60s, Katz (pronounced like the Broadway musical) took guitar lessons from legendary folk performer Dave Von Ronk and served as road manager for 70-year-old blind bluesman Rev. Gary Davis.

Together with other Village habitués including John Sebastian, David Grisman and Marie Muldaur, Katz joined the Even Dozen Jug Band, which recorded an album in 1964.

Oscar Brand, raised in Point Douglas, became music pioneer

Here’s a trivia question: the Sesame Street character Oscar the Grouch is named for what Winnipegger? The answer: folk music legend, singer-songwriter and broadcaster Oscar Brand.

“I was on the original board of the Children’s Television Workshop,” he told me a few years ago from his home in Great Neck, N.Y. “And I was so fastidious about everything that I gave people a hard time. So they named the grumpy character after me.”

Brand died of pneumonia Sept. 30 at the age of 96. He taped what became the last of his Folksong Festival radio shows on New York’s WNYC the week before. His weekly show ran for a record 71 years, the longest-running show with a single host, Guinness World Records says.

In a recent article on Brand, the New York Times wrote, “Every week for more than 70 years, with the easy, familiar voice of a friend, Mr. Brand invited listeners of the New York public radio station WNYC to his quirky, informal combination of American music symposium, barn dance, cracker-barrel conversation, songwriting session and verbal horseplay. Everyone who was anyone in folk music dropped by. Woody Guthrie — Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, as Mr. Brand called his rambling friend — was known to burst in unexpectedly to try out a new song. Bob Dylan told a riveting tale about his boyhood in a carnival, not a word of it true.”

Radio mainstay Howard Mandshein a human encyclopedia of popular music

He’s Winnipeg’s own rock music guru, known to everyone simply as “H.” Howard Mandshein has been a staple on local radio for four decades, his distinctive baritone voice intoning his unrivalled passion for the music he plays. If Mandshein likes a song, you know it. He is an institution, a local legend of the airwaves and concert stages as master of ceremonies, as well as an ardent supporter of the local music scene.

“Howard is a sage,” artist manager and impresario Gilles Paquin says. “He knows about music from A to Z. But more than that, he understands how music affects and impacts people. He’s one of the guys I’ll call to get an honest perspective on music. He has a wide understanding of popular music and is extremely well-informed. He’s like Winnipeg music’s very own Yoda.”

In an interview from his home in Aurora, Ont., former 92 CITI FM colleague Andy Frost said Mandshein’s “passion for people and music makes him unique.”

“He means so much to so many people, and yet he is a humble guy,” Frost said.

Looking back at Winnipeg experiment to isolate, enrich advanced students

Beginning in 1954, an experiment in social engineering was set up in several Winnipeg schools.

The program, known as Major Work, was designed to identify who were considered gifted students, remove them from the mainstream and provide enriched educational experiences and opportunities beyond the standard curriculum in a segregated environment.

For six years, grades 4 through 9 (1961 to 1967), I was one of its guinea pigs. Major Work was discontinued by the early 1970s, when streaming became a bad word in education and inclusion, rather than exclusion, became the norm.

I thought my Major Work group was the only one of its kind. I had no way of knowing otherwise, since we existed in isolation. Years later, I learned the program operated in several Winnipeg schools, and there are a few hundred Major Work alumni. I have often wondered if their experiences mirrored my own and if the program had an impact on their further education, careers and life.

Not every Winnipeg musician went on to be the Guess Who

What happened to many local musicians once the lights turned off and the curtain descended? In the 1960s and ’70s, Winnipeg boasted hundreds of bands made up of musicians and singers from every neighbourhood and beyond. Inspired by Beatle dreams, they had taken up instruments, formed bands and played the thriving local circuit, some for a short time while others hung on longer. But for every Burton Cummings, Randy Bachman or Fred Turner, there are a thousand others who never scaled the heights of fame and fortune and instead set their dreams aside for careers beyond the spotlight.

Veteran drummer Al Johnson (the Quid, Chopping Block, Fifth, Next) and guitarists Paul Newsome (Musical Odyssey) and John Burton (Power Company) became railway engineers. The Jury’s guitarist, George Johns, made a smooth transition from making records and playing music to a career in radio becoming a major programmer and radio station owner. Electric Jug & Blues Band frontman Blair Wheaton is currently head of the sociology department at the University of Toronto, while harmonica player Don ‘Stork’ Macgillivray is a journalist. Ed Smith of the Deverons, Cummings’ first band, retired not long ago from a long career behind the scenes at CBC Winnipeg where he might have crossed paths with Janice Harding-Jeanson (Sally Screw & the Drivers) and Kinsey Posen (Blue Frizz). In the late 1980s, the fellow delivering my Dominos pizza one evening was former Galaxies and James & the Good Brothers member Jim Ackroyd.

'I never thought that I would become a lawyer'Chances are if you flew in or out of Winnipeg in the 1970s to ’90s, ex-Mongrels bass player Garth Nosworthy may have guided your plane as an air traffic controller. Mongrels drummer Larry Rasmussen became an upholsterer. The Third Edition’s keyboard player, Milt Reimer, is an accountant, while drummer Marcus Fisher was a longtime firefighter in Vancouver. Two members of the Fifth, Melvin Ksionzek and Richard Gwizdak, became professional photographers. The Love Cyrcle’s Wesley Doll went on to a lengthy career with paper manufacturers MacMillan-Bloedel. Moody Manitoba Morning composer, singer/songwriter Rick Neufeld became a tour bus driver for the likes of Bruce Cockburn and Norah Jones.

“I never thought that I would become a lawyer,” said John MacInnes from his office in Calgary where he has practised for three decades. After founding the Mongrels with junior high buddies Geoff Marrin, John Nykon, John Hardt and drummer Joey Gregorash, MacInnes helped assemble Sugar & Spice — five Rolling Stones-crazed guys and the angelic-voiced Murphy sisters, Kathleen, Maureen and Aileen — in late 1967. In February 1968, the group released a Randy Bachman-penned single, Not to Return, and debuted live before a sellout crowd at UMSU. The following year they recorded a lushly orchestrated anti-war single, Cruel War, and signed to an American record label.

Rockabilly star put down Manitoba roots

I remember hearing a rumour in the 1980s rockabilly pioneer Buddy Knox, the man who sold more than 10 million copies of his own composition, Party Doll, was living in Dominion City.

I didn’t believe it was true. What would Knox — who chummed around with the likes of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and toured the world — be doing in a town of barely 350 people in southern Manitoba?

Knox was born on a farm in the tiny Texas panhandle town of Happy (the town’s motto is “The Town Without A Frown”) in 1933.

“We didn’t even have electricity or a radio,” he recalled in a 1993 interview. “I played guitar and harmonica to entertain myself.”

Ex-Winnipegger found success with jingles after rock hit

The trick to writing a successful commercial jingle is in creating a tune and lyric that, while less than a minute in length, nonetheless sticks in your brain forever.

It’s an art form that requires both talent and a gift for phrasing and nuance. Unlike a hit record, though, the downside of a catchy jingle is while everyone can sing it, no one knows who composed it. Take You’re on Your Way With Esso, one of the most successful Canadian jingles of all time. While I’m betting many of us know it instantly, few are aware it was composed by Winnipegger Graham Shaw, one of the finest jingle composers in Canada.

His list of jingle credits is staggering and includes the Bay, Home Hardware, Canadian Tire, Budweiser, 7Up, Labatt’s, Bacardi Breezer and Bell Canada, to name a few.

“I became the go-to guy for jingles for 10 years in Toronto,” says the unassuming Shaw from his home in rural Ontario.

Manitoba’s blues roots date back to 1960s

Winnipeg may be a long way from the Mississippi Delta and Chicago’s South Side, but that hasn’t stopped this city from fostering a vibrant blues scene.

Beginning in 1960s-era coffeehouses such as the Ting, Wise I and Latin Quarter, blues performers found like-minded supporters for their music.

Blues bands brought exciting electric blues to clubs, pubs and universities. Hotels on the Main Street strip such as the Occidental, Bell, Brunswick (where guitarist Billy Joe Green offered his unique brand of electric blues for several years) and Sutherland offered blues music before the Royal Albert, Marlborough and Viscount Gort hotels began hosting regular blues jams and booking blues performers.

Beginning in the mid-1980s under the management of Rick Penner, the downtown Windsor Hotel became a blues bastion. The Manitoba Blues Society formed in the 1990s to promote and encourage blues music and publish their newsletter, Blues News.

Sharing the stage with a music sensation

This year has seen the loss of so many of our pop-culture icons, and we’re not even halfway through 2016. Much publicity and outpourings of tribute have followed many of these passings.

However, there was one celebrity death that, sadly, fell below the radar of most of us. Canadian popular music lost its original 1960s teen idol, Order of Canada recipient Bobby Curtola, June 4. He was 74.

Decades ago, Canadian music was divided by regions, our vast size and geography making it nearly impossible to achieve national stature. Until the kid from Port Arthur, Ont., (now Thunder Bay) came along. Curtola was Canada’s first homegrown national pop star.

“There was not another pop star on that level in Canada at that time than Bobby Curtola,” says Larry LeBlanc, a veteran Canadian music journalist and senior editor at Celebrity Access.

Stint with Guess Who just one part of Leskiw's eclectic career

Though he is reluctant to accept the title, guitarist and singer/songwriter Greg Leskiw is a Manitoba music elder statesman. He has recorded in every decade since the 1960s, and his impact and influence on the music scene in general and on musicians in particular is extraordinary.

“I’ve stuck with it because I could,” he muses from his Fort Garry home.

“What a crazy bugger I was. I’ve dedicated myself to music. It’s nice to be respected for what you love to do.”

Born in Brandon and raised in Shilo, Leskiw began playing guitar at an early age. He didn’t have to go far for lessons.

Unique albums by local bands have fascinating looks

As an ardent vinyl collector for more than five decades, as well as a zealous Manitoba music booster with an eye to preserving our local music history, I have in recent years been drawn to searching out albums that are unique to our province.

In many cases, these are albums that weren’t huge sellers nor on major record labels. Quite the contrary, the artists who recorded these gems may have financed the recordings themselves for small independent labels and sold them to a loyal fan base.

Several of these album covers boast local imagery only a Manitoban would recognize, rendering them of even greater significance to posterity.

Here, for your edification and nostalgic pleasure, I offer a few samples of fascinating local recordings that have crossed my path (all quotes are from previous interviews). Perhaps one day these and others like them will be enshrined in a Manitoba Music Hall of Fame for future generations to appreciate.

Burton Cummings' stellar solo career long overlooked

One week from today, the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences will induct Winnipeg’s favourite son, Burton Lorne Cummings, into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. This is his second induction into the Hall, having been honoured in 1987 as a member of the Guess Who. This time around, he is being recognized for his post-Guess Who solo career.

Following his gold-plated tenure fronting Canada’s original rock ’n’ roll superstars, Cummings launched a solo career in 1976, beginning with the million-selling single Stand Tall. Gold singles, platinum albums, television specials and multiple Juno awards followed as Cummings became one of Canada’s best-known, most respected and universally celebrated music icons from the latter 1970s through the mid-’80s. For Canadians, Cummings’ music represents the soundtrack to our lives. He is Canadian music royalty.

The criteria for nomination as set out by the academy state a potential inductee’s “first recorded release must have occurred a minimum of 20 years prior to end of day Jan. 1 of the current year.” That means Cummings became eligible for inclusion in 1996. Next week’s honour is certainly long overdue. One wonders what took the academy so long.

The boy from Bannerman Avenue in Winnipeg’s tough North End who, as a kid, spent all his paper-route money on records, notched up some staggering statistics. He’s released 51 albums, 47 singles and earned 23 Canadian gold singles, 22 Canadian gold albums, eight Canadian multi-platinum albums, one American platinum album, six American gold singles, six Juno Awards and five RPM Awards, along with 22 SOCAN Classic and three BMI America awards for his songwriting. He has been honoured with the Order of Canada, the Order of Manitoba, the Order of the Buffalo Hunt and the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, and received an honorary doctorate of music from Brandon University. Here in his hometown, both a performing arts theatre and a community centre bear his name.

Decades into career, indigenous icon's creative drive burns bright

At last month’s Grammy Awards celebrating the best in music for 2015, two Manitoba recording artists were among those nominated for Best Historical Album. Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966-1985, a two-CD or three-record box set, included archival recordings by country artist Ernest Monias, known as the Elvis of the North, and folk performer Shingoose. Vancouver-based record collector, archaeologist and curator Kevin (Sipreano) Howes spent 15 years searching for the hard-to-find recordings by some two dozen indigenous artists and remastered them for this vital collection. Although the box set was beaten out for the coveted Grammy by a Bob Dylan historical collection, it succeeded in garnering considerable media attention worldwide and shining a light on music long neglected.

“The relevancy of the messages in these songs, with their substance, depth, culture and soul, are still very timely today,” Howes told the Globe and Mail. “It’s resonating with people because so little has changed… and because there is a desire to appreciate, preserve and share this culture.”

For Shingoose, the long-overdue attention for his earlier work is very much appreciated.

“It was exciting,” he says from his home at a care home in Fort Garry, where he has lived since suffering a stroke in 2012.

Unsung bands helped build rock scene

Burton Cummings once said that while daydreaming in school one afternoon in 1965, he started a list of all the bands he knew of that were active on the local scene. He got to 200 before stopping.

Colourful names such as the Dawgs, House Grannies, the Many Others, the Cellar Dwellers, Pebblebeaters, Matched Set, Footloose & Fancy Free, the Luvin' Kynd, Deverons, Misfits, Mourning Missed, Shondels, VIPs, Syndicate, Crescendos, Pallbearers, Feminine Touch and Pink Plumm conjure up fond memories of fun evenings spent boogalooing at your neighbourhood community club.

The Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Neil Young garner the lion's share of attention whenever the subject of the flourishing local music scene in the 1960s comes up, but there were several hundred bands that made that scene swing and kept teens dancing at community clubs and sock hops. They may not have scaled the dizzying heights of fame and fortune, but they were nonetheless hometown heroes and standard-bearers for Winnipeg rock.

While each band has a story to tell, here are a few local rock stars' stories from back in the day.

Vinyl revival

One of the biggest music-business stories in the last couple of years has been the surprise re-emergence of records.

While hardly a threat to digital downloading or even CD sales, vinyl sales have been on the upswing, increasing some 38 per cent in 2015 from the previous year. Even contemporary artists such as Taylor Swift and Alabama Shakes are having their latest efforts pressed on vinyl, showing vinyl's domain extends beyond the mouldy oldies.

Nielsen Music, which tracks music sales in various formats, said 5.6 million vinyl records were sold in 2015, more than double the figure for 2010. And it's not just baby boomers leading this resurgence: young people are discovering the joys of vinyl recordings.

For many of us who grew up with vinyl records -- the 12-inch 33 1/3 r.p.m. long player album (LP) and the seven-inch 45 r.p.m. single -- there is a special feeling that comes from listening to a record. For some listeners it's partly nostalgia, but it's also the depth and richness of the sound a decent-quality vinyl pressing offers.

Swingin’ spot brought in big names

While much is made of Winnipeg's flourishing rock 'n' roll scene in the 1960s, the city swung to a different beat in the decade that preceded it.

The latter 1940s and '50s were a golden age for dance bands, with nightclubs and dance halls throughout the city and beyond. Hundreds of local musicians were kept busy with steady work as the demand for live big band music was insatiable.

Clubs such as the Cave on Donald Street at Ellice Avenue, Rainbow Dance Gardens (later J's Discotheque) on Smith Street at Graham Avenue, Harry Smith's Club Morocco on Portage Avenue, the Highwayman supper club out on Pembina Highway near University Crescent, Jack's Place (later the 4th Dimension coffeehouse) behind the Pembina Drive-In theatre, the Normandy Dance Hall on Sherbrook Street, the Alhambra Dance Gardens on Fort Street and the Roseland, on the second floor of the Bradburn Building at Portage and Kennedy Street, were drawing crowds every weekend. You could also take the Moonlight Express train to Winnipeg Beach and dance at the Pavilion, which boasted the largest dance floor in the province.

The best-known of the many clubs and dance halls was the Rancho Don Carlos at 650 Pembina Hwy., just south of where Grant Avenue intersects with Pembina, between what is now a McDonald's restaurant and Knight Auto Haus. The Rancho opened its doors on New Year's Eve 1951, and over the next six or seven years booked some of the top names in the entertainment world, including Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Vicki Carr, Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Hope, Lena Horne, Harry James, Spike Jones, Frankie Laine and Sophie Tucker, and comedians such as Shelly Berman and Myron Cohen, among others.

A look back at how women braved Winnipeg's early male-dominated rock scene

It’s often been said that back in the 1960s, boys joined rock ’n’ roll bands to meet girls.

From my own experience, I discovered rather quickly girls were more interested in me if I held a guitar than if I caught a football or hit a home run. The thriving local music scene was predominantly male. Nowadays, mixed-gender bands are much more commonplace. Back then, however, there were very few female rock ’n’ rollers playing with the guys.

“It was like girls playing hockey,” notes Revellie Nixon, drummer for mid-’70s all-female band Honey. “You just didn’t see it. Girls had to work harder to earn respect from the guys because, like hockey, being in a band was such a guy thing. We had to overcome the stereotype that a girl couldn’t rock. I constantly had to prove myself.”

Patti Ireland, who drummed for the Human Kynd and the Soul Brothers in the ’60s, said she wanted to be in a band after seeing the Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Neil Young: Still rocking at 70

Neil Percival Kenneth Ragland Young turns 70 Nov. 12. As a member of two of rock music's most revered outfits -- Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young -- his music lit up the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip and defined the Woodstock generation in the 1960s.

The New York Times declared Young's song Ohio the greatest protest song of all time. The two-time Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer set the template for the '70s introspective solo singer-songwriter while also thrashing out riffs with Neanderthal rockers Crazy Horse.

Since then, Young has recorded in a wide array of genres -- punk, rockabilly, techno-pop, country-rock, R&B -- before a new generation of Nirvana-weaned rockers in the '90s anointed him the Godfather of Grunge. He has released more than 60 albums in a career that continues to careen across a wide musical landscape with no sign of slowing down. Young's most recent album, 2015's The Monsanto Years, finds the veteran rocker railing against corporate agriculture and its genetically modified foods. While many of his contemporaries are content to be nostalgia acts, Young's creative spark endures.

Charting the mercurial ex-Winnipegger's myriad twists and turns is enough to make anyone dizzy.

Proud pop pirate

In the early 1960s, rock 'n' roll-crazed teens in the United Kingdom had few options to hear their favourite records on British airwaves. State-operated BBC limited the amount of rock played and exercised censorship over which songs received the all-important airplay. Independent Radio Luxembourg, broadcast from the continent, offered some relief, but it was often difficult to tune in to and only broadcast rock music in the late evening.

Enterprising Irish entrepreneur Ronan O'Rahilly saw an opportunity to tap into the huge youth market by circumventing the BBC's exclusive hold on broadcast licensing. In 1964, he launched the first unlicensed pirate radio station, operating just outside British waters from a refitted ship named Mi Amigo.

Radio Caroline, named for U.S. president John F. Kennedy's daughter, broadcast rock music 18 hours a day (or as long as the signal remained steady from the floating radio station) and offered American-style disc jockey patter, in contrast to BBC's staid hosts. Two Radio Caroline ships operated simultaneously, one off the south Essex coast in the English Channel and another anchored off the Isle of Man. Advertisers were also keen to get on board the pirate-radio bandwagon, skirting the BBC commercial ban.

It was a winning formula that quickly spawned several imitators moored in international waters off U.K. coasts, such as Radio London, Radio England and Radio City.

When Manitoba's drinking age lowered to 18, it meant a new audience for Winnipeg bands

On Tuesday, Sept. 15, 1970, Manitoba's musical scene changed forever.

That's the day the provincial government lowered the drinking age from 21 to 18, becoming one of only three provinces at the time -- Alberta and Quebec being the other two -- to peg the age of alcohol purchase and consumption at that lower marker. Other provinces would ultimately reduce theirs to 19.

You still couldn't stand up with a drink in your hands, and dancing in pubs was restricted, but the lowering of the drinking age was the first step in the evolution of our alcohol-consumption practices.

The impact was both immediate and seismic. My band, Euphoria, was playing a month-long gig at the City Centre hotel at the corner of Carlton Street and Ellice Avenue. Into our second week, the pub had generally been subdued. The 21-and-older crowd was relatively tame, enjoying the songs we played -- Joe Cocker, Three Dog Night, Santana, etc. -- and quaffing their beverages politely. That was Monday. Come Tuesday and the lower age, the rather sedate pub ambiance transformed into a wild party as the horde of 18-year-olds invaded. Many of the regular patrons found themselves muscled out by this new crowd that expressed their love for rock 'n' roll vigorously and consumed booze as if Prohibition was commencing the next day. Our volume level rose to compete with the rowdy din coming from the audience. Suddenly, it was fun playing the pubs.

High and dry

Manitoba's 1970 summer of outdoor music festivals began on May 24 with the Niverville Pop Festival, which transformed from a friendly hippie fest into a colossal mud bath after torrential rain disrupted the event. So it seemed sadly fitting the concluding summer event, Man-Pop, would suffer a similar fate. But unlike the Niverville event, Man-Pop continued indoors thanks to quick thinking and a team effort.

What resulted 45 years ago has become the stuff of legend.

Man-Pop -- the only rock festival sponsored by the provincial government -- was held on Saturday, Aug. 29, 1970. What began as an outdoor concert at the Winnipeg Stadium finished more than 15 hours later inside the Winnipeg Arena with one of the most memorable shows ever to grace a local stage, even a makeshift one. Chances are many of you reading this were among the 14,000 or so who attended the event.

Intended as the last of the major events marking Manitoba's centennial year, Man-Pop boasted a 13-act roster that included many of the best-known local bands, plus hard-rock heavyweights Iron Butterfly and Led Zeppelin. Six months earlier, Centennial Corp. chairman, former provincial cabinet minister and respected businessman Maitland Steinkopf had solicited suggestions for headliners from the public.

The long lost Who

You'll never Guess Who I managed to track down: Manitoba music's man of mystery, original Guess Who keyboard player Bob Ashley.

Following his departure from the band in December 1965, Ashley virtually fell off everyone's radar screens here. Even his former bandmates didn't know his whereabouts and royalties went unclaimed for years. Few knew the man behind those memorable clinkity-clink piano chops on Shakin' All Over or the lavish grand piano flourishes in Hurting Each Other enjoyed a widely-respected, award-winning career in musical theatre and cabaret for some 47 years and is still performing. "I don't know why people think I'm mysterious," Ashley said with a laugh, from his home in Toronto. "If people wanted to find me they could. It wasn't hard. I wasn't hiding from anybody."

In Toronto, Ashley was able to reinvent himself leaving his rock 'n' roll past behind to carve out a prominent spot as an in-demand composer, arranger, musical director and dance accompanist. Most of his associates never knew he had been a member of Canada's top band in 1965, touring the U.S. in the company of many of the biggest stars of the day.

Cultural crossover: Label tapped into demand for Ukrainian music

In the mid-1960s, the biggest-selling Manitoba-based recording act wasn’t the Guess Who, but Ukrainian-language country duo Mickey & Bunny.

Their recording of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, sung in both Ukrainian and English, sold more than 70,000 copies, making them one of the most successful recording artists in Western Canada.

Mickey & Bunny recorded for local V-Records, which Alex Groshak established in 1962 and operated out of his home on Fleury Place in Windsor Park. Groshak was a visionary who saw a vast untapped market for ethnic music in the Ukrainian-Canadian community.

“I feel that Ukrainian music is very unique and one of a kind, given to us by previous generations, and it should be preserved for future generations,” he said in a 2005 radio interview.

Manitoba’s rock roots run deep

Canadian rock-music elder statesman and proud Winnipegger Randy Bachman recently declared, "Calgary is the music capital of Canada and maybe North America."

Wait, what? The man who penned Prairie Town, a paean to the joys of growing up playing rock 'n' roll in Winnipeg, and enlisted fellow Winnipeg rocker Neil Young to wail it with him, is, if not singing, then talking a different tune these days. Interesting that Young recently said, "Winnipeg was the rock 'n' roll capital of Canada as far as I was concerned." Hmm.

What's the reasoning for Bachman citing Cowtown as ground zero for Canada's music history and not, say, Toronto or Winnipeg? The $168-million National Music Centre (NMC) being built in the Alberta city. Calgary is betting huge bucks on the notion that if they build it, people will come.

When you look back on the early roots and evolution of Canadian popular music over the last 60 years or so, Calgary is most definitely not the city that immediately comes to mind as a wellspring for influential Canadian musicians, nor a breeding ground that drew young artists from across the country such as Toronto's Yorkville enclave in the '60s or Vancouver's Gastown in the '70s. Hailing from Calgary, the Stampeders scored a dozen hits in the '70s after moving to Toronto. But apparently that doesn't matter.

Tour of duty: Winnipeg band played for U.S. troops in Vietnam

For most Winnipeggers, the Vietnam War was a distant conflict that appeared on our nightly national news broadcasts but remained remote from our reality.

And yet, at the height of the conflict, in which more than 50,000 Americans and several million Vietnamese were killed, Winnipeg-born singer Fern Rondeau entertained war-weary American GIs only a few kilometres from the fighting. Along with her husband, Pete Turko, and several local musicians -- collectively known as A Touch of Class -- Rondeau witnessed the horrors of war in the eyes of the soldiers.

"Onstage, you would look down at these young guys, many of them with their faces still covered in paint from being in the bush, and you could see the sadness in their eyes," Rondeau says.

"We'd sing happy songs to try to cheer them up. That was hard. My job was to make them feel better. They'd watched their buddies die in their arms and were feeling bad enough."

Deluge failed to dampen the fun at the 1970 Niverville Pop Festival

The pastoral rural community of Niverville, some 30 kilometres south of Winnipeg, boasts a population of roughly 3,500, mostly of Mennonite descent. Many of its residents work in Winnipeg and commute back and forth, transforming the town in recent years from agricultural hub to bedroom community. The town's lone claim to history is it was home to the first grain elevator in Western Canada.

There is, however, another significant milestone not found in the regional historical accounts, one longtime residents may be less likely to cite. On May 24, 1970, 45 years ago next week, some 10,000 young people descended on a field outside the town for the Niverville Pop Festival. What began as a sun-filled, fun-filled day of music and hippie ambiance (and all that went with it) turned into a mud bath of epic proportions, giving rise to a now-legendary experience. For Manitoba's budding hippie community, it was their very own Woodstock.

Though the Woodstock movie, with its distinctive split-screen imagery, had yet to première in Winnipeg (it would open at the Gaiety Theatre on Portage Avenue at Colony Street on June 18), the excitement surrounding the three-day festival in upstate New York the previous summer had fired the imaginations of Winnipeg youth. It was inevitable a pop festival would happen here.

Unlike its inspiration, which was initially organized as a for-profit concert event, the Niverville Pop Festival had a philanthropic purpose. The year before, teenager Lynne Derksen fell during a hayride. Her hospital treatment required the use of an oxygenator -- a medical device capable of exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood during surgical procedures that may require the interruption or cessation of blood flow in the body. One was flown in from a San Francisco medical facility.

Love’s life a tragic tune

The name Doug Love may not resonate with many people, and his contributions to the local music scene are slim. But it could have turned out much differently. For the brief time Love flashed on the scene, he left an indelible impression on those who were fortunate enough to see him play or to work with him.

Love's story is that of a gifted musician with a promising career derailed and a life displaced. His disappearance from music circles was abrupt, and for decades even those who had known him wondered what became of him. He was a mystery man.

"Doug was an outstanding musician who possessed guitar-playing skills that surpassed most," recalls his cousin, guitar player Jeff McIntosh, "skills that very few individuals had the opportunity to experience. Out front he was most definitely a rock musician, but behind the scenes, he was a jazz and classical player, a person I always (compared) with Lenny Breau.

School of ROCK

At my very first teaching interview after graduating in the spring of 1978, what excited my potential employer was the fact that prior to my decision to become a high school history teacher, I had played in rock bands for several years. That set me apart, bringing my rock experience to students. What I anticipated as a potential liability -- given preconceptions of the rock-band lifestyle -- proved instead to be my ace in the hole.

Throughout my 30-year teaching career, I taught guitar, ran a guitar club and organized rock-music events. I was the rock 'n' roll teacher.

When I went to university prep school St. John's-Ravenscourt, known for world-class debaters and mathematicians (and later hockey star Jennifer Botterill) in the fall of 1990, it was suggested I consider organizing a choir. Huh? Instead, I organized an official school rock band.

The concept was to audition potential musicians and singers, select eight or nine to be the band, prepare a set list of suitable songs and rehearse after school once a week for a performance at the annual Spring Sizzler or school dance. Thus began what would become the school's Rock Show program.

Rock and racism

When you look back at the thriving rock music scene in and around Winnipeg in the 1960s and '70s, one thing is glaringly obvious: It was predominantly white.

There were few visible minorities represented, and of those, even fewer aboriginal musicians. But on the outskirts of that scene, a flourishing indigenous music community existed that not many non-aboriginal people knew about. Award-winning veteran bluesman and Manitoba Aboriginal Hall of Fame inductee Billy Joe Green recalls a sense of segregation that existed back then.

"We didn't pursue white venues because we knew we'd have the door slammed in our faces," he said. "We came from the streets and had experienced the apartheid that existed."

Errol Ranville, founder of award-winning country-rock band C-Weed, said, "When we started out, we approached a lot of popular non-aboriginal clubs and were turned down. The owners told us they didn't want to attract our kind of crowd, meaning aboriginals."

Old barn was a BLAST

Opened with a gala concert by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra in October 1955, just in time for the start of the Western Professional Hockey League season, the Winnipeg Arena quickly became the premier local venue for hockey, family events and concerts. The 9,500-seat arena replaced Shea's Amphitheatre (named for Shea's Brewery), which had a capacity of 5,000 and was located on the site where Great-West Life's headquarters now stands.

As a kid, going to an event at the Winnipeg Arena was a big deal. I often attended Sunday-afternoon hockey games with my dad and brother, Ron, watching the Winnipeg Warriors or Winnipeg Maroons. Admission was $1 for adults, free for kids. I don't remember much about the quality of the hockey. My attention was focused on candy, the peanut vendors and waiting for the Zamboni to appear. Dad worked with Bill (the Beast) Juzda at the Canadian Pacific Railway and took me down to the bench before a game to meet him when he played for the Maroons after his time in the NHL. He remembers my shock at the Beast's scarred face.

"That's the mark of a good defenceman," Dad told me.

Mountie with a microphone: Drug bust by undercover cop rocked city’s music scene

It was the biggest drug bust in Manitoba history at that point, with a total of 69 people charged.

The story made news across the continent and even hit the pages of Time magazine. But it wasn't the size of the July 1970 bust that drew media attention, it was the manner in which the RCMP carried it out.

An undercover Mountie posed as a singer in a Winnipeg rock band for 10 months, playing local pubs while making more than 200 buys of illegal drugs in order to identify and ultimately nab drug dealers.

The circumstances of the case still rile many local musicians who were on the scene at the time. The ramifications were far-reaching, and several lives were seriously impacted.

Series a national stage

In the 1960s, there was no national music industry in Canada. While several thriving music scenes existed in regional pockets across the country, there were no nationwide charts, not even national distribution for many of the record labels. You could have a No. 1 record in Halifax that was never heard beyond the Atlantic provinces.

But one television show helped bridge those regional gaps: Music Hop. Weekdays at 5:30 p.m., CBC TV presented a half-hour, cross-country music roundup that showcased the flavours of five regional music settings. Music Hop broadcast regional talent to a wider audience and did much to foster a national music identity. Teens in Vancouver, for example, were introduced to artists from Halifax or Montreal. Similarly, Winnipeg performers were able to showcase their talents nationally. It allowed regional artists to tour beyond their local boundaries and release records nationally. In 1966, CBC boasted the show drew some one million viewers, most being under 20 years old.

Debuting in 1963, Music Hop was initially a Toronto show hosted by Alex Trebek of Jeopardy! fame, in his first TV hosting gig. The popularity of the show led CBC to expand the concept across Canada the following year.

Sound by GARNET

This Tuesday marks the eighth anniversary of the passing of Thomas Garnet "Gar" Gillies, the man who created the sound of Winnipeg rock in the 1960s, a sound that shook the world by the early 1970s.

From the mid-1960s until 1989, Garnet amplifiers and PA systems, made right here in Winnipeg, represented the apex of sound, size and power.

As a teenager, there were three places I loved to hang out: Winnipeg Piano on the corner of Portage Avenue at Edmonton Street, the Record Room just half a block east, and Cam's Musical Supply out on Ferry Road in St. James. All three are long gone now. While I generally annoyed the sales clerks at the first two establishments, the genial, middle-aged man in suspenders, half-glasses and suede Beatle boots at Cam's always had time for me. Gar Gillies had time for everyone, and that's why his was a very special place for every musician, whether novices such as me or local rock gods.

The name says no, their careers say ‘oui’

In the mid-'60s, while the rest of Winnipeg was boogalooing to the British Invasion sounds as interpreted by hundreds of local community club bands, an oasis of francophone music and culture was being nurtured in St. Boniface.

The brainchild of Collège St. Boniface teacher Antoine Gaborieau, who was determined to preserve the French language through music, le 100 Nons has grown from a tiny coffeehouse-style venue where young francophone artists could meet and perform into a permanent non-profit organization that organizes weekly concerts, recording opportunities, a rehearsal space and most of all provides support, encouragement and mentoring.

From humble roots, some of Manitoba and Canada's finest francophone singers, songwriters and musicians have emerged. Among those is Daniel Lavoie. A superstar in both Quebec and France, Lavoie has sold millions of records and appeared on some of the biggest stages and concert halls in the world as both a solo performer and in rock operas such as Sand et les Romantiques and Notre-Dame de Paris.

Born and raised in tiny Dunrea, south of Brandon, Lavoie was first introduced to French music through le 100 Nons after entering boarding school at Collège St. Boniface as a teenager.

When Winnipeg rocked

Neil Young said in a recent interview with CBC radio that "Winnipeg was the rock 'n' roll capital of Canada, as far as I was concerned."

Few can argue with him. If you were a teenager here in the 1960s, you know Winnipeg was one of the most exciting places on Earth. Young's latest book, Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars, includes several warm and wonderful anecdotes about the local music scene back then and his role in it. It truly was a magical time.

"Winnipeg in the '60s was like that movie That Thing You Do, only multiplied by a thousand," says Randy Bachman of the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. "It was so exciting and alive with music."

Even before Shakin' All Over, the 1965 smash hit by the Guess Who, tuned the rest of Canada into what was happening in Winnipeg, a thriving rock scene was already well in motion. Beginning in the mid-1950s, community clubs in neighbourhoods throughout the city were the catalysts for the rock 'n' roll teen explosion.

Soaring with Parachute Club

In the mid-1980s, Parachute Club's infectiously effervescent dance hit Rise Up was all over the airwaves, and its colourful video of multicultural inclusion was in regular rotation on MuchMusic.

The Toronto group's song has since transcended the pop charts to become an anthem for empowerment for women, the LGBT community and even the late Jack Layton, who employed it to rouse the NDP faithful (Parachute Club lead singer Lorraine Segato sang Rise Up at Layton's memorial service).

At the height of their success, Parachute Club won six Juno Awards, six CASBY awards (Canadian Artists Selected By You, given out by Toronto radio station CFNY), several gold and platinum albums and a place on Canada's Walk Of Fame, and performed before tens of thousands of adoring fans across Canada and in Europe. Their self-titled debut album was produced by whiz kid Daniel Lanois (U2, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel), while their third album, Small Victories, was co-produced by (and featured) John Oates of Hall & Oates. The band also successfully sued McCain Foods for unlawful use of their signature song, Rise Up, in a commercial for rising-crust pizza.

Few knew one of the principal members of the group was a Manitoban. Singer/percussionist Julie Masi was born and raised on a farm near Dominion City and sang in Winnipeg for a decade before moving to Toronto. In Manitoba, she was known by her maiden name, Julie Opocensky.

Perfect HARMONY

Between Elvis Presley being drafted into the U.S. army in 1958 and the arrival of the Beatles on North American shores in 1964, folk music enjoyed a prominent place in popular music.

Ushered in by the Kingston Trio's surprise 1958 hit Tom Dooley, folk music graduated from fringe status to the commercial mainstream as teens and young adults scrambled for acoustic guitars and five-string banjos. Michael was rowin' the boat ashore in countless coffeehouses, cafés and church basements across the continent.

Winnipeg's answer to the Kingston Trio was the Roamers, a trio who, in the early to mid-'60s, enjoyed considerable popularity in nightclubs. Their musical abilities and impressive harmonies, coupled with an appealing singalong presentation, drew enthusiastic crowds wherever they performed.

"There weren't a lot of folk groups around Winnipeg at the time," notes Roamers guitarist/bass player/singer Greg Brownell, who lived across the street from Neil Young on Grosvenor Avenue in Crescentwood. "That made us pretty unique." Why folk music? "It was simple to play and sing, and people just loved to sit around and sing it."

Right notes, WRONG TIME

Timing is everything. In the early '80s, while trio Elias, Schritt & Bell were enjoying tremendous success locally with their mellow, acoustic-based original songs sung in mellifluous harmonies, the music world was embracing harder rock.

"It was just the right time locally for what we were doing," recalls singer/songwriter Steve Bell, "but it was the wrong time internationally because music had gotten very testosterone; angry, edgy music. Beauty seemed to not be in vogue. All the record labels told us, 'Great sound, guys, but 10 years too late.' "

Together a mere three years, Elias, Schritt & Bell are remembered fondly for their exquisitely crafted music. The trio also served as the launching pad for Canada's most-acclaimed Christian contemporary recording artist, multiple Juno Award winner Steve Bell.

Tim Elias and John Schritt were childhood friends growing up in Winkler. By their early teens, they started singing together, making their debut accompanied by a bass-playing friend known as Foot in the audio-visual room at Garden Valley Collegiate. Elias played guitar, Schritt played sax and flute.

The run of his life: John Einarson remembers ‘Decker’s Dash’

Fifty years ago Monday, en route from London to San Francisco to begin their first North American tour the following night, the Beatles made what was expected to be a routine refuelling stop in Winnipeg.

What resulted, however, was far from routine. Alerted by radio stations to the Fab Four's stopover in our fair city, hundreds of Beatle-besotted teens descended on Winnipeg International Airport, packing the outdoor observation deck and the entrance to the runways. A phalanx of Mounties kept the throng safely back as the crowd unleashed a deafening chant of "We want the Beatles!"

Spotting the pandemonium as the plane, renamed Jet Clipper Beatles, taxied in, manager Brian Epstein coaxed the four Liverpudlian musicians to acknowledge the mass of screaming fans. Stairs were hastily moved into place as the four Beatles emerged from the plane, waving to the crowd. Descending the stairs, they were immediately besieged by reporters seeking comment on the commotion. Thus, Winnipeg became the first spot in Canada where the Beatles set foot.

The visit lasted no more than 25 minutes before the band was back on the plane and on its way. But not before 17-year-old Silver Heights Collegiate student Bruce Decker bolted past security and up the stairs where the Beatles had just been standing. Nabbed and carried off by two Mounties before he could meet his heroes, Decker became an instant celebrity to the cheering teen crowd. Dubbed "Decker's Dash," the story made front-page news in the papers the following day, and a homegrown hero was born.

Rockers reversed British invasion

For Beatles-crazed North American teens in the early 1960s, Liverpool was a music mecca, and the Cavern Club was the base of the entire British Invasion.

This dank, dingy, brick-walled subterranean club -- a former bulk wine cellar located in the heart of Liverpool's business district -- was where the Fab Four made their name and were discovered by manager Brian Epstein. The band performed on the tiny stage some 292 times between 1961 and 1963 before global fame precluded Cavern appearances. Nonetheless, the club looms large in Beatles lore.

On Aug. 9, 1965, four Winnipeg lads boarded a CNR train headed for Montreal, where they would board a ship bound for Liverpool. Popular local rock quartet the Crescendos -- singer and sax player Glenn MacRae, drummer Vance Masters, guitarist Terry Loeb and bass player Denis Penner -- were about to live the dream of a million teenagers.

"We had seen the Beatles movies and Ferry Cross the Mersey and figured that's where it was at," says MacRae.

Presidential performance

Back in May, I had the distinct honour of being invited to a private reception for Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.

As Charles worked his way through the crowd chatting politely with whoever was in front of him, he came upon me. Introducing myself by stating I was a music historian, I then asked him if he recalled attending a concert by Winnipeg's greatest musical ambassadors, the Guess Who, at the White House in the summer of 1970. He paused to reflect for a few seconds and then said he did remember the event.

Charles, along with his sister, Princess Anne, attended two Guess Who concerts that summer, the first in Winnipeg, the second two days later at the White House.

The first was organized by the Manitoba Centennial Corporation as part of the province's 100th birthday. Along with the royal siblings, 275 young people from across the province were chosen to attend a dinner and dance at the International Inn's Hollow Mug dinner theatre. Besides the Guess Who, Monty Levine and his orchestra and the Mug's repertory singers, the Internationals, also performed.

The first Folk Fest

This Wednesday, the 41st Winnipeg Folk Festival kicks off at Birds Hill Park with a mainstage show headlined by legendary blues artist Bonnie Raitt.

The multi-day outdoor festival has become one of Canada's premier summer events, drawing fans from across the continent. But if founding father, guru and visionary Mitch Podolak had listened to me, the Winnipeg Folk Festival might never have come to be.

In early 1973, I was living in the third-floor attic suite of a funky old house at the corner of Gertrude Avenue and Daly Street in Fort Rouge, playing in rock bands and attending university. CBC documentary filmmaker, banjo picker and avowed Trotskyite Mitch Podolak, along with wife Ava Kobrinsky, occupied the more spacious main-floor suite. Podolak must have seen me carting my guitar case up and down the stairs, because one day he stopped me in the stairwell.

"What do you think about a folk festival for Winnipeg?" he asked. A folk festival? I was a die-hard rock 'n' roller. "Nah, it'll never fly."

Rock ‘n’ roll weekend

In the 1970s, whenever he was asked if the Beatles would reunite someday, Paul McCartney's answer was unequivocal: "You can't reheat a soufflé."

The band could never be the same, and a less-than-stellar performance could do irreparable harm to its legacy. In addition, there were unresolved issues dividing the band members.

Reunions can be risky business. Attempting to relive the past is never easy and can be fraught with pitfalls. Nonetheless, on the weekend of June 27 and 28, 1987, nine of Winnipeg's best-loved 1960s-era rock bands reunited for a concert event called Shakin' All Over: The Winnipeg 1960s Bands and Fans Reunion, organized by the Variety Club. All proceeds from the event were earmarked for the charity.

This was the first reunion event of its kind and required a herculean effort contacting musicians, many of whom hadn't seen or spoken to former bandmates in years, asking them to put together a set of songs. Some hadn't touched their instruments in years, while others had carried on playing.

A boy and his guitar

Chad Allan wrote and recorded a song called I Wouldn't Trade My Guitar for a Woman for Brave Belt's 1971 debut album.

Thankfully, I've never faced such a dilemma, but I can certainly relate to the sentiment. The guitar has played a central role in my life and defined who I am.

Like millions of pimply faced teenagers witnessing the Beatles' North American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, 1964, I was instantly smitten with the Fab Four and their instruments. At that point, music wasn't a factor in my life. My older brother, Ron, had a penchant for Jan & Dean surf/car songs I listened to by default but never felt inspired enough to want to play along with.

Then I saw George Harrison on that fateful February evening. I began hounding my parents to buy me a guitar. Hesitant at first, Ron borrowed a cheap Zenon electric guitar from one of his buddies for me to test drive. With no pick (a visionary, I used a dime coin years before Queen guitarist Brian May's sixpence pick), no instruction book and no amplifier, I nonetheless managed to plunk out a few melodies, one of which, after much painstaking effort, was the opening riff to The Jury's Until You Do.

Flower power’s hour

The Top 40 format was created in the early 1950s based on the notion that listeners wanted to hear their favourite songs over and over. By the mid '60s, AM radio across North America was formatted on the Top 40 model, which was fuelled by 45-r.p.m. singles. However, as album-oriented rock became increasingly popular in the latter '60s, there was no place for this music to be aired. The rarely used FM radio band offered higher fidelity but was seen as a home for classical music or public broadcasting.

Winnipeg radio in the '60s was still very much an AM-radio, Top-40 format. Then, in 1968, came Now Flower, 92.1 CKY-FM's experiment with a free-form 'anything goes' rock format. Despite being on the air for only three years, the program was revolutionary for its time and had a major impact on local radio.

Now Flower was the brainchild of CKY radio operator Jan Thorsteinson. "I asked Herb Britton, program director at CKY-FM, if I could program music for Saturday morning from 7 to 10," recalls Thorsteinson. "At that time, the station was a middle-of-the-road format, Mantovani and all that elevator music. I was surprised when he agreed." Thorsteinson put his own stamp on the time slot. "I started off just playing music for my own entertainment. There was no model I was following. I didn't have a clue what was going on at other FM stations. I just figured, if I'm going to be sitting around playing music, I might as well play music I like. There were lots of albums that never got airplay on the AM station, so we had plenty to choose from."

What began as a one-off Saturday-morning diversion soon evolved into a phenomenon broadcasting all weekend and 4 p.m. to midnight on weekdays. "I discovered that there were other people that wanted to hear this stuff, too," says Thorsteinson. "Herb gave us a great deal of latitude. CKY just figured there was an audience for this album-oriented music and went with it." Each episode of Now Flower would sign off with Quicksilver Messenger Service's version of Happy Trails.

Randy Bachman’s folly

A song born from an impromptu onstage jam at an Ontario curling arena would become the Guess Who's crowning achievement.

American Woman topped the North American charts 44 years ago this week, selling some two million copies. It has since been anointed Canada's greatest recorded single. Yet at the moment of their greatest triumph, with a coveted Billboard No. 1 record, the band was in turmoil.

Following a nasty confrontation in a New York hotel room on the afternoon of May 16, guitarist, songwriter and de facto bandleader Randy Bachman was out of the Guess Who.

"One of the saddest events in Canadian music was when Randy left the Guess Who," says veteran Canadian music journalist Larry LeBlanc. "Randy got a real shellacking in the music press when he left the Guess Who."

It’s only rock ‘n’ roll

Many musicians playing the thriving local community club and school sock-hop circuit in the 1960s drifted back to school or to non-music vocations after a few years of fun, their glory days behind them.

Not so the four members of The Eternals. The two sets of brothers -- Ron (keyboards) and Ted Paley (drums) along with John (guitar) and Harry Hildebrand (bass) -- parlayed their love for music and recording into lifelong careers in music technology. In doing so they pioneered the business of recording and sound in western Canada.

Hailing from Rosa, Man., the Paley brothers hooked up with Steinbach's Hildebrand boys in the early '60s. Playing rock 'n' roll in a strict Mennonite community was pretty audacious for the latter brothers. Ron Paley recalls John purchasing a Fender amplifier from a local merchant in Steinbach. "It was his pride and joy but when the store owner found out John was using it to play rock 'n' roll, he came to his house, retrieved the amp and gave John his money back."

Always fascinated by the recording process, the group set up their own studio in a barn on the Paley family's farm. "We had recorded with Bob Burns producing us at Kay Bank studio in Minneapolis," explains Ron, "and loved it. So when they were selling their recording board and mics we bought them and set them up in the barn." As John recalls, "Mrs. Paley wouldn't let us bring her piano into the barn so we had to run a long cord from the house to the grainary where we had the board set up."

When the coffeehouse was king

In 1958, the Kingston Trio's recording of the 19th-century folk ballad Tom Dooley topped the pop charts, selling more than six million copies and inaugurating a folk music boom.

Almost overnight, coffeehouses dedicated to presenting acoustic folk music sprang up everywhere. Winnipeg was no exception, with places such as the Java Shop and Establishment offering folk fare and espresso coffee. But the granddaddy of local coffeehouses was the Fourth Dimension, or 4D, located at 2000 Pembina Highway at University Crescent in south Winnipeg.

Opened in 1959 in the former Jack's Place dinner and dance club, the 4D was one of a chain of three other clubs (Fort William, Winnipeg and Regina) owned by Gene Ciuka of Regina. Jack's Place had enjoyed a long run during the big band jazz era. Marsh Phimister and his band held court there for several years. But by the latter '50s, it and other dance clubs had folded. The once all-white club beside the Pembina Drive-in Theatre was repainted black, given a dark bohemian interior (black walls lined with a snow fence and dim lighting), and recast as the 4D. Charlie Clements, from Regina, was installed as manager of the coffeehouse.

Besides booking travelling folk artists such as Casey Anderson, Len Chandler, Tim Rose, the Dirty Shames, Gale Garnett (We'll Sing in the Sunshine), and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, the venue often featured local performers. "We gave a lot of people their start here," boasts Clements, who also recalls the night Harry Belafonte, in town at the Rancho Don Carlos, snuck in through the back door to watch Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee.

When COUNTRY ROCK went into OVERDRIVE

On the evening of Sunday, March 30, former Winnipegger Randy Bachman will become the only Canadian Music Hall of Fame member inducted twice. In 1987 he was inducted along with the other members of the Guess Who. Now he enters with post-Guess Who megastars Bachman-Turner Overdrive. While the Guess Who put Winnipeg on the North American music map, BTO put it on the international map. Randy's current stature as Canadian music elder statesman is well-earned.

Between those two multi-platinum bands there was Brave Belt, Randy's first band endeavour after he left the Guess Who. Brave Belt was a commercial failure, a country-rock experiment that cost Randy almost all of his Guess Who nest egg. But it was the hard lessons learned from that failure that helped propel BTO to the top of the rock music pantheon by the mid-'70s.

What initially began as a solo album by original Guess Who singer/guitarist Chad Allan transformed into a band once Randy came onboard.

"I wanted to make a fresh start with a new band," says Randy, who recruited youngest brother Robin on drums. "I knew that if I did a pop band again it could never be as good as the Guess Who, and I could never find a singer as good as Burton Cummings. Rather than be a second-rate Guess Who, instead I went totally anti-pop."

Dance party Dad

BOB Burns was Winnipeg’s very own Dick Clark. As host of CJAY’s popular Saturday afternoon American Bandstand 

Teen Dance Party , the self-styled “oldest teenager” was more than a television personality spinning records for boogalooing teens. Burns was a mentor, friend, counsellor and role model.

“He encouraged all the good stuff in a way that didn’t sound like a lecture,” stresses former Teen Dance Party Pepsi Pack dance team regular Marta Rehberg. “He was like an older brother or a father.”

“The most important part of the show was the kids,” Burns once said.

The night that changed everything

It was 50 years ago today...

For the baby boom generation, it's a defining moment: Feb. 9, 1964 -- the night the Beatles made their live North American television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show.

With Beatlemania in full swing across the pond and I Want To Hold Your Hand already climbing the local radio charts, we over here had yet to see the Fab Four perform. Several million Canadians, including yours truly, tuned in that evening and had their world changed forever. One observer noted it was as if our world suddenly turned from black and white to Technicolor. Overnight, everything became Beatles, Beatles, Beatles.

"I will never forget that night," says Colleen Titanich. "My father thought it was the beginning of the end of the world because they had long hair. I was eight years old and I thought they were so cool!"

Where nirvana was just downstairs

Throughout my teen years, my Saturday-afternoon routine involved taking the Corydon bus downtown and doing the Portage strip between the Bay and Eaton’s.

The coolest shops — Lillian Lewis Records, the Record Room and the Stag Shop — were on the north side. But the jewel in the crown was always Winnipeg Piano at the corner of Portage and Edmonton. For me and a thousand other wannabe rock ’n’ rollers, Winnipeg Piano was our mecca and offered the stuff of dreams.

Winnipeg Piano Co. Ltd. was opened in 1903 by A.E. Grasby in what was later the Dayton Building at Portage and Hargrave. Following a fire, the store relocated to 383 Portage Ave., where it remained until 1972.

Business was brisk during the Great Depression years as people sought to make their own entertainment around the family piano (the company had its own line of pianos).

In praise of THE UNSUNG HERO

Winnipeg has had more than its share of music luminaries. Their names are known worldwide and it's an impressive roster of talents who got their start in or around our fair city. They've left their mark and championed Winnipeg to the world.

But there are also those who made their mark and left a legacy without ever scaling the heights of fame and fortune. Their contributions, sometimes below the media glare, may be less known but are no less significant. These are the unsung heroes.One of them was Garth Nosworthy.

I first encountered Garth in the halls of Grant Park High School in the spring of 1965 when his rock group, TC & the Provincials, was playing for a student election campaign. I was transfixed by this young man, as small as me, wielding a red Gibson Les Paul Junior guitar bigger than him. At 13, he was already a formidable guitarist.

I later learned Garth had been playing since age five. I can still recall the band playing a pep rally in the school gymnasium before a Pirates football game and changing the words of the Dave Clark Five's current hit, I Like It Like That, to: "The name of the coach is Yakamischak."

They fought for your right to hear the F word

Until Winnipeg-based musical comedy duo MacLean & MacLean won a landmark Supreme Court decision, it was illegal to utter the F word onstage in an Ontario pub or club. The self-styled "Toilet Rockers" forced the province to rewrite its antiquated liquor laws and struck a blow for free speech and the right of club owners to hire whomever they choose.

"Everybody said only we were doing it onstage," Blair MacLean said in an interview I did with him in 2005.

Hailing from Glace Bay, N.S. (immortalized in the Guess Who recording Glace Bay Blues, co-written by the MacLeans), Blair and younger brother Gary grew up around music.

"On Saturday nights, the folks would all go to the armoury for a dance, then come home, drink moonshine and sing songs," Blair said. "We used to listen at the top of the stairs. Gary and I would listen to all these cheesy records, like Mario Lanza, and imitate them."

Winter’s tale

Don't give me

no hand me down world.

I got one already.

The endless party

By day, sunbathers and swimmers lounged around the pool or dined in the restaurant. But at night, the Holiday Sun and Swim Club, opened in 1964 at 1870 Pembina Highway, transformed into the Fireplace, the hottest nightspot in south Winnipeg.

"It was like a party there every night for everyone, including the staff," recalls former cook and bartender Nick Perry. "I loved working there."

While the Druxman family, which included ex-Blue Bomber George Druxman, operated the Pembina Hotel, the Druxermans owned the swim club, including its restaurant as well as the adjacent Eden Roc Motel and miniature golf course -- all on the east side of Pembina Highway. They were, in fact, the same family, but some had chosen to drop the "er" from the name.

In the latter '60s, Bruce Druxerman took over his family's various enterprises.

Shakin’ the music scene

Yes Virginia, there really was a Guess Who without Burton Cummings.

In the spring of 1965, the Guess Who put Winnipeg on both the national and international musical map with their raucous recording of Shakin' All Over. The voice on that recording, a No. 1 hit across Canada and a No. 22 hit on the coveted American Billboard Hot 100, was Chad Allan -- a year before Cummings would join the band on keyboards.

The fact is, there would not have been a Guess Who without Chad Allan.

As Randy Bachman acknowledges in his forthcoming book, Tales From Beyond The Tap, "There can be no denying that without Chad Allan, Burton Cummings and I may not have had the successful careers we've enjoyed. He was the catalyst for our success, whether he realized it or not."

Long may you run

This Tuesday, former Winnipegger Neil Percival Kenneth Ragland Young turns 68. Never one to slow down, the mercurial rock iconoclast recently announced dates for an upcoming tour. When asked recently if he considered retiring, his response was, "Why? It's kind of like having a car and not driving it. If you've got it, you might as well use it."

I owe my writing career in part to Neil Young. Back in 1986 when I was researching Shakin' All Over, a book on the exciting 1960s Winnipeg music scene, I was introduced by a mutual friend to Neil's irrepressible mother Edna "Rassy" Young. Rassy was in Winnipeg for a holiday, having driven on her own all the way from Florida where she had lived since the latter '60s. She and I met at the Tuxedo Salisbury House for what turned out to be an engaging two-hour conversation about her famous son and his time in Winnipeg. Rassy was delightfully irreverent as she described her unwavering support back then for her "Neiler" and pulled no punches in dissing her ex-husband Scott's biography, Neil and Me. "It's all daddy this and daddy that," she groused. At the end of our get-together, she said to me, "You should talk to Neil. Here's his home number. Give him a call."

How do you just pick up the phone and call someone of Neil Young's stature? And at his home no less, as opposed to going through a phalanx of managers and agents whose job it is to keep people like me away? Notoriously media-shy, Neil rarely deigns to be interviewed unless he has an album to promote and even then is cautiously selective about whom he will speak to.

I finally worked up the courage to call and was immediately put at ease by his response. "Oh hi John. I have your articles here. What's up?" Turns out a relative in Winnipeg had sent Neil the series of articles on Winnipeg bands, including The Squires, I had been writing for both local newspapers. The ice broken, we then chatted at length about his embryonic years toiling away on the Winnipeg community-club circuit and his dreams and hopes at the time. I asked him why so little had been written about this early yet significant period in his career. Even his father Scott's book had little to say about the five years Neil spent rockin' and rollin' in Winnipeg. His replied: "No one ever asked me."

‘Paradise’ lost

Opened in March 1983 in the former Main Spot Diner at 220 Main Street south, the Blue Note quickly became the place to go for late-night revellers, post-gig musicians of all stripes and local cultural cognoscenti. Operated by Helen Riddell, it was her son Curtis who became the face of the club. "Where else could you go at 2:30 in the morning?" asked Curtis Riddell. Licensed for 65 patrons, more often you'd find twice that number inside and an equal number outside waiting to get in. The club ran until 4 a.m. seven days a week. "We ran afoul of the liquor laws a few times," laughs Riddell.

Besides the cinnamon coffee (poured dramatically from great height by waiter Kevin Mutch) and homemade food, the attraction was the live music. "There was nothing like it in the city with a stage," notes former employee George West. While folksinger Jim Donahue was a mainstay, it was the impromptu jam sessions that became the Blue Note's calling card. Following their stadium concert in 1983, David Bowie's band showed up and jammed into the wee hours as did Rod Stewart's band, while Rod himself sat at a booth taking it all in. Guns 'n' Roses' Axl Rose and Slash hung out following their arena concert. Axl even sang Heartbreak Hotel. The Cowboy Junkies recorded a CBC radio set at the club. A drunken Long John Baldry sang Happy Birthday to MuchMusic VJ Monika Deol. Bluesman Johnny Winter loved hanging at the club and even gave Curtis's pregnant wife Petra his wife's special remedy, raspberry tea, to induce labour.

"A great memory for me," adds Riddell, "was the night Burton Cummings played for three hours, until 6:30 in the morning, singing all those great Guess Who songs." And who could ever forget Kevin Mutch wailing I Wanna Be Sedated. Stories of various hijinks are endless.

The open stage concept allowed for many surprises. "We had a lady come in and play this old Ukrainian instrument and she had everyone crying," chuckles Riddell. "The Dayglo Abortions showed up at 5 in the morning and played these songs about all this awful stuff until 6:30."

The Doc is in

Throughout junior and senior high school, my noon-hour routine involved going home for lunch and tuning in to CKRC 630 AM to listen to Doc Steen. Doc hosted the noon to 2 p.m. shift, and besides playing the best music he always kept me chuckling. "What was that, Charlie?"

Back then, radio broadcasters were larger-than-life personalities.

"Deejay was a derogatory term to us," states former CKRC broadcaster Boyd Kozak. "Anyone can play a record. We were broadcasters and encouraged to be ourselves on air." Boyd met Doc when he signed on with CKRC in 1963. "He was just a happy, down-to-earth guy," he recalls. "This business has its share of egos, but Doc was genuine. There was nothing phoney about him."

Born and raised in Winnipeg, Irving 'Doc' Steen's academic goal was hijacked by a love for radio.

Those swinging singles

THE seven-inch, 45 rpm vinyl single arrived just in time for the rock ’n’ roll revolution that would transform popular music. Introduced by RCA Records in 1949 to replace the easily breakable shellac 78 rpm recordings, 45s had become the standard format for singles (one song per side) by the mid ’50s. A gold single was earned by selling one million 45s.

Vinyl 45s were conveniently portable, reasonably cheap compared to LPs (long players) or 78s, and durable (they were promoted as unbreakable).

“One day in 1958, I went in to The Bay to purchase With Your Love by Jack Scott,” recalls Warren Cosford. “The clerk behind the counter suggested I get the 45, saying they wouldn’t be making 78s much longer because they took up more space and were breakable.

He then took a 45 and dropped it on the ground and it didn’t break. I’d never do that with a 78. I was sold. Proudly, I brought my first 45 home and said, ‘Look Dad, these new 45s don’t break!’ And with that I bent it in half and it broke.” A further advantage was the ability to stack them up on a specially-designed spindle that you added to your record player that allowed you to play a half-dozen 45s in a row before reloading. Great for parties. You could buy a carrying case and lug your collection to friends’ houses.

The Kornstock revolution

While Winnipeg may be best known as a blue collar, meat-and-potatoes rock ’n’ roll city, we also have the distinction of producing some of Canada’s (and the world’s) best children’s entertainers. What is further surprising is that three of the finest were once all together in one group. In the mid 1970s, future Juno Award winners Fred Penner and Al Simmons, along with Bob “Sandwiches Are Beautiful” King and drummer Mike Klym, were collectively known as Kornstock. Together they rocked the pubs with laughter.

“We would sing Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer in July in a bar,” recalls Simmons. “Or Sesame Street songs. The more outrageous we could be, the better.”

“I was this folk guy on acoustic guitar,” says Penner, “and the stuff Al was doing was full-out bar band stuff but with Al’s unique level of insanity. I was in shock that this could actually work. Al was so outrageous. Who knew where it was going to go?”

Simmons’ career began rather inauspiciously. “I knew I wanted to be an entertainer, I just didn’t know what route to take. Growing up, my dad had an eclectic record collection and I seemed to lean toward Dean Martin and Homer & Jethro records.” By the early ’70s, with encouragement from Speed Walker, Gary MacLean and Len Andre, Al formed Out To Lunch.

Fab moment in time

While Beatles fans continue to bask in the afterglow of Paul McCartney's triumphant concert this past week, 49 years ago today all four of the Beatles stopped, albeit fleetingly, in our fair city.

That's right. At 2:05 p.m. on Aug. 18, 1964, the Fab Four first set their Beatle-booted feet in Canada at Winnipeg International Airport. They were greeted by some 1,000 screaming fans.

Intended as a routine 25-minute refuelling stop, word leaked out the Beatles were on board a flight from London to Los Angeles that day to begin their first full North American tour. "Around noon, I got a call from the public relations director for Air Canada who was a good friend of mine," recalled CJAY TV personality Bob Burns, host of the popular Teen Dance Party. " 'Get out to the airport for the interview of your life,' he told me."

Radio stations CKY and CKRC were also tipped off and announced the imminent arrival of Liverpool's most famous exports, resulting in a mass of teenagers descended on the airport. Traffic was blocked and the parking lot jammed. As the Pan American Lockheed Electra, dubbed "Jet Clipper Beatles," taxied to a halt, they unleashed a deafening roar. "We want the Beatles!" With no plans to disembark, Beatles manager Brian Epstein noticed the pandemonium on the observation deck and prevailed upon the lads to make a brief appearance. Dressed in suits and ties, all four emerged from the plane waving to the hysterical throng.

King of the coffeehouse

Any mention of the thriving coffeehouses in Winnipeg during the '60s and '70s always elicits one name: Jim Donahue. He was the kingpin on the local folk music scene.

"Jim set the standard for every other folk performer in town," notes younger brother, musician Dan Donahue. "He was bloody good. He sang well, played well and engaged people in a way that others didn't. He had integrity and a personality as an artist. He blew everyone away."

"Jim was a two-sided folk singer," reflects contemporary Bobby Stahr, "as he had a wealth of traditional music stored up in him as well as being one of the finest poet/singer/songwriters I ever heard. What made him such a major influence was his conviction when performing. You could feel the Civil War in the air when he played The Spoon River Anthology or the Highlands when he crooned Wild Mountain Thyme. He made movies in your mind."

As Loreena McKennitt states, "Jim was one of a handful of musicians in Winnipeg whom I admired greatly. A salt-of-the-earth and thoughtful musician and lyricist, I recall quite fondly enjoying his music in various coffeehouses or at the Winnipeg Folk Festival and benefited from his curiosity and his intellect in our various conversations."

House of ROCK

From the outside it appeared to be an unassuming three-storey Crescentwood home. Inside, however, music magic was being made. Between 1974 and 1981, Roade Recording Studios, located in a residential block at 887 Grosvenor Ave., was the spot for local rockers to record or just hang out. "There wasn't any other place that was hip to current music recording at the time," recalls founding partner and chief engineer Glenn Axford. "It was a cool place. Just about every rock band from that era came through our doors."

Axford had been operating his own recording business before partnering with CFRW deejay Bobby "Boom Boom" Branigan, aka Bill Rouse, in the early '70s to create a studio for recording radio ads. The two converted the second-floor apartment of Rouse's Grosvenor Avenue house into what was at the time a state-of-the-art, 16-track recording facility. The walls were lined with sheets of lead behind the Gyproc for soundproofing (Axford never received a noise complaint from neighbours), the control room was equipped with a top-of-the-line Neve recording console (similar to the console in the acclaimed Sound City documentary directed by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl), and the bedroom was turned into the studio proper.

"The vocal booth was literally a bedroom closet," says recording engineer Howard Rissin. "I felt so bad for anybody going in there to sing because there was no air in there. They would come out sweating." The lounge featured antique furniture, wood panelling, shag carpet and a Coca-Cola machine. "It was very '70s."

Opened in 1974, Roade quickly became a mecca for musicians. While commercial ads and jingles paid the bills, rock musicians found the ambiance appealing. "Even though it was small, it was an incredibly creative space," says Rissin. "There was so much music going on there all the time."

City’s music lore draws distant fans

Every summer, music fans — some from as far away as Germany — come to Winnipeg to get up close to this city’s incredible music lore. They want to see where musicians such as Neil Young, Terry Jacks, Bob Nolan, Crash Test Dummies, Oscar Brand, Lenny Breau, The Guess Who, BTO, Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman lived, played and developed their sound.

Not surprisingly, it’s the latter two who draw much of the interest, largely because they retain close emotional ties to Winnipeg. Even though they no longer reside here, Cummings and Bachman never fail to acknowledge their hometown.

Much of the visitors’ time is spent in the North End simply because this part of the city produced so many talented entertainers. One stop is at 152 Bannerman Avenue, Burton Cummings’ childhood home. Although born on Lansdowne, Burton and his mother, Rhoda, came to live in this house with his grandparents, the Kirkpatricks, around 1950. This is the spot where his music career began with piano lessons and where the songwriting partnership of Bachman & Cummings developed. It’s also where the Guess Who’s first million-selling single, These Eyes, was written. Many of the songs on the band’s first three RCA albums —  including No Time, another million-seller — were composed in the living room of this modest 1½ storey home.

“I would come over to Burton’s house at eleven on Saturday mornings,” recalls Randy Bachman, “carrying my notebook filled with song ideas jotted down throughout the week. We would work at the piano in Burton’s front room, putting our ideas together crafting songs. At two in the afternoon, Granny Kirkpatrick would bring us cookies and 7-Up and we would be done by four, go outside and enjoy the sun, play our latest efforts on guitar, bid farewell to each other, and I would go home. A few hours later I would pick him up for the gig that night.”

The short-lived magic of Teen Fair

As the gates of the 2013 Red River Exhibition, celebrating its 61st year, close tonight, thousands of teenagers will have passed through over the 10-day run. Teens have always been a mainstay for the Ex.

Back in 1965 when the popular annual summer fair was held around the Winnipeg Blue Bombers football stadium behind Polo Park, Ex organizers created what was heralded as Canada's first ever Teen Fair. Situated in the east parking lot of the Arena, Teen Fair was the brainchild of Barney Shane and Al Blanc, two enterprising young local entrepreneurs who sought to tap into the burgeoning youth market at the height of Beatlemania and catch the excitement local live bands generated. They planned to take the concept national following its Winnipeg debut.

In a fenced-in circular area, some forty booths were set up offering various teen-oriented activities and promotions. Opening each day at noon, the real attractions were the three stages boasting non-stop live bands from 6 p.m. to midnight. Sponsored by radio station CKRC, IGA Foods, and Monarch Wear, whose locally-produced Tee Jay jeans were the hippest threads in town, the entertainment featured some of the city's top bands, including The Quid, Crescendos (shortly to leave Winnipeg for Liverpool), Shondels, Vaqueros, Pallbearers, and D.G.N. and the Unchained.

"It was a real thrill for us to be playing at the Ex," notes Ron Simenik of the Vaqueros. "As kids, we had all gone to the Ex." The format fostered a bit of competition between the groups. "It was a strange situation because they had bands facing each other and it felt like a battle of the bands," laughs Crescendos drummer Vance Masters. "It was fast-paced because while one band was playing, the other would be setting up. There were lots of kids and everyone was having fun." A dance area was designated in front of each stage as teens boogalooed to the beat. "We played all the wild tunes right away," recalls Simenik. "Kids were dancing all over the place."

Your one-stop hippie shop

Unquestionably one of the hippest shops in Winnipeg in the 1970s was Autumn Stone. Named for a Small Faces album and located at 304 Kennedy Street, north of Portage Avenue, the Autumn Stone was your all-purpose one-stop hippie shopping experience. "We were one of the first places in the city to sell used records along with new records," notes co-owner Andy Mellen. "Plus we weren't just a record store. We had all the head-shop stuff, hip comics and a leather shop. All these things added to the attraction. You could come down and get your smoking needs, hear some great music, check out the comics and get a leather vest made."

What made the shop so cool? "The people who ran it," Andy insists. "We were a good reflection of the times. And the store didn't look like your typical record store; the funky atmosphere, the tapestries, the old wood."

Just listen to the tributes:

Manitoba’s Summer of Love

If 1967 was San Francisco's fabled Summer of Love, Manitoba's own version of hippie peace, love and music took place in 1970.

That summer, Manitoba's Centennial year, our fair province virtually hummed to the beat of numerous rock festivals and communal happenings.

It all began on the May 24 long weekend with the Niverville Pop Festival, staged in a farmer's field near the rural community 25 kilometres south of Winnipeg. The event was the brainchild of several local musicians with the goal of raising money to buy an oxygenator for teenager Lynn Derksen who had suffered a serious injury during a hayride. Tickets were $1, with more than a dozen local bands offering their services for free.

Organizers anticipated an attendance of 5,000; twice as many showed up. What began as a sun-filled, fun-filled day of music and hippie ambiance turned into a mud bath of epic proportions once the clouds opened up -- giving rise to a now-legendary experience.

Duncan Wilson: GUITAR HERO

Duncan Wilson was my first guitar hero. While George Harrison, Brian Jones, Jeff Beck and Zal Yanovsky were my vinyl heroes, Duncan was the first real live guitar player I admired.

I first saw him playing in the halls of Grant Park High School in late 1964. He was playing a red Harmony Rocket guitar with a group of school mates under the name T.C. & The Provincials. I was mesmerized by this guy in black horn-rim glasses a couple of years my senior who was already a gifted guitar player while I was still randomly plunking away. I wanted to be Duncan Wilson.

Although we lived on opposites sides of the Grant Park Shopping Centre (consisting at the time of Clark's and a Dominion store), I would turn up my Harmony amp in my basement in the ridiculously naive hope that Duncan might be walking by and ask me to join his band.

By 1966 Duncan and ex-Provincial Garth Nosworthy were in The Mongrels playing community clubs and school sock hops throughout the city and beyond. Through a few lineup changes over the years, Duncan remained the heart and soul of the group.

Our own JANIS JOPLIN

BY 1971, Fort Rouge-born singer extraordinaire Dianne Heatherington was the undisputed queen of the Winnipeg pub scene -- our very own Janis Joplin. A dynamic performer with few peers, she was a larger-than-life personality equally capable of gut-wrenching emotion or joyous rapture.

In September 1970, the drinking age was lowered to 18 and the entire social scene shifted from the community clubs to the pubs transforming once staid beverage rooms into wild party scenes. Bands like Katerpillar, Black Cat, The Tweedle Band, Vicious Circle (with Blair & Gary MacLean), Out To Lunch (featuring Al Simmons), Persecution, Granny, Fabulous George & the Zodiacs and Next had the Plaza, City Centre, Voyageur, Maryland, St. Vital Hotel, Windsorian and other popular pubs jumping night after night. But the kingpins were always Dianne Heatherington and the Merry-Go-Round.

Encouraged by her church choir master to pursue professional work, Dianne began singing for the CBC in the mid '60s, appearing on several local productions including Let's Go.

"We didn't have a colour TV so we had to go out and rent a hotel room to watch it in colour," recalls her brother Ken. She caught her first break with The Electric Banana before recruiting some of the city's top players to form the Merry-Go-Round. Together they set out to conquer the pubs.

Mother of an icon

Before Neil Young was, well, Neil Young, his mother was already a local celebrity. Appearing weekly on our television screens, Rassy Ragland was a panelist on the popular CJAY quiz show Twenty Questions. You might remember her. She was the one with the dry wit and coffee-grinder voice.

Much has been made of Neil's famous father, writer/broadcaster Scott Young, but Rassy had her own notoriety at a time when Neil and his father were estranged by distance and divorce. She and youngest son Neil moved to Winnipeg in August 1960. It would be Rassy who encouraged and supported her son's musical aspirations.

Edna "Rassy" Ragland Young was able to slip comfortably into the Winnipeg social scene (she had lived here as a child and had family in the city). She enjoyed curling in winter at the Granite Curling Club and golfing at the Niakwa Golf and Country Club during the summer. An avid tennis player, she was often on the courts at the Winnipeg Canoe Club.

Rassy Young was a truly unique character. "She was absolutely herself and I enjoyed her immensely," recalled friend Nola Halter. "She was so funny, marvellously witty and very zany. She had a little blue English car which she drove in the wrong gear, in the wrong speed, in the middle of two lanes, swearing her head off at all these other drivers who got in her way. The road was hers."

Manitoba’s greatest musician

Recently a friend asked me who I regarded as the greatest or most significant musician/singer to come from Manitoba. That's not easy when you consider the illustrious roster of talent our province has produced. Manitoba artists, those either born or getting their start here, account for well in excess of 100 million records sold worldwide. Indeed, while Manitoba accounts for roughly 2.5 per cent of Canada's population, the CBC stated last year that some 12 per cent of all working musicians in Canada claim Manitoba as home.

While names like Neil Young, The Guess Who, BTO, Loreena McKennitt, Terry Jacks, Daniel Lavoie, and Lenny Breau immediately spring to mind, my answer surprised him: Bob Nolan. Bob is acknowledged as one of the greatest American songwriters. Few know of his Winnipeg roots.

Born Clarence Robert Nobles on April 13, 1908, the boy who would grow up to become Bob Nolan lived at 53 Lansdowne Ave., in the North End. His father, Harry, worked as a tailor while his Irish immigrant mother, Flora, was employed by the Manitoba Government Telephone Company (later Manitoba Telephone System).

The Nobles lived hand to mouth, moving frequently. When Clarence was eight, his father abandoned the family and moved to Arizona. After spending time with his paternal relatives in New Brunswick (long erroneously credited as his birthplace) and Boston, Bob joined his father in Tucson in 1921, where his name was changed to Nolan (Harry joined the U.S. army under that name in 1917). Bob later reversed his given names to Robert Clarence Nolan.

Where hanging out was hot

The unassuming single-storey storefront at the corner of Ellesmere Avenue and St. Mary's Road in St. Vital, currently home to The Tackle Box, may not look like it now, but in the 1960s it was a swinging hotspot.

Opened in early 1965, The Twilight Zone club at 539 St. Mary's Rd. was a mecca for local teens who came to hear live rock 'n' roll music seven days a week.

Owner Dick Roberts, a retired farmer, was seeking to create a safe haven where teens could hang out all evening. "The kids should have a place they can call their own," he stated in an August 1965 Winnipeg Free Press story. "Restaurants don't welcome kids sitting around for hours over a soft drink. This gets them off the streets and parents know where they are. I like the kids and want to do something for them."

As frequent patron Judy Edwards noted, Roberts "never lets anything get out of hand. We can have fun." Entering the club with its blue walls and red and white checkered tablecloths, teens were issued a time card and charged 20 cents per half hour plus any food or beverages.

Introduction to the blues

The British electric blues sound came to Winnipeg on Thursday, March 6, 1969 when the granddaddy of the U.K. blues boom, John Mayall, brought his Bluesbreakers to the University of Manitoba's UMSU gym for a sold out concert. But that concert almost didn't happen.

Mayall was the real deal -- a guy steadfastly dedicated to preserving the American blues idiom for younger audiences. His various Bluesbreakers lineups had included the likes of guitarist extraordinaire Eric Clapton. Mayall's revolving door of personnel spawned blues purveyors like Cream, Fleetwood Mac, Free, and Coliseum.

When Clapton joined up with Mayall, from the Yardbirds, in 1965, it elevated both to the blues frontlines. Their 1966 album, known as the Beano album for its cover photo of the band with Clapton reading a Beano comic book, was groundbreaking.

When Clapton bolted that year to form Cream, Mayall recruited Peter Green, an equally skilled blues practitioner, to carry the blues banner. Green left Mayall in 1967 to assemble Fleetwood Mac and the stalwart bandleader once again pulled out a plum, discovering 17-year-old Hertfordshire whiz kid Mick Taylor.

London calling

On Monday, Feb. 20, 1967, family, friends and fans of Winnipeg's Guess Who assembled at Winnipeg International Airport to give the band a rousing send off. Various media were also present to document the moment our local heroes flew off to London, England, to become international stars. "There's a million in bread if we play the gig right," boasted Burton Cummings to a Winnipeg Tribune reporter. Expectations ran high that the quartet was about to hit the big time.

A few weeks earlier, the band's single, His Girl, licensed to King Records in the U.K., had made it to No. 45 on the coveted U.K. pop charts. Elated, manager Bob Burns wasted little time in capitalizing on a potential breakthrough there and entered into discussions with King Records executives to take the group overseas.

The band had good reason to be suspicious of King Records owner Rita King and her business partner, Philip Solomon. Solomon had been manager of Belfast band Them, whose lead singer and songwriter, Van Morrison, insists robbed the group of any money earned. It took Morrison years to extricate himself from Solomon's one-sided contracts. Nonetheless, the two executives painted a rosy picture for the Canadian group.

"We borrowed enough money for airfare, fancy new stage clothes from the Stag Shop, new equipment from Garnet, all totally financed," recalls Randy Bachman. "It cost a fortune to ship our gear over, but we figured we were about to hit the big time. We thought we were going to be the next Beatles."

Understanding Beatles albums makes for A Hard Day’s Night

This Saturday, Feb. 9, marks the 49th anniversary of the Beatles' debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. An estimated 73 million Americans along with several million Canadians tuned in that Sunday evening to witness the Fab Four take North America by storm. Beatlemania and the British Invasion arrived on our shores. The stampede to your local record store the following day was unprecedented. Demand for Beatle records was insatiable. By April 4, 1964, the Beatles made history as the only act ever to monopolize the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart's top five positions based on sales figures.

Unlike in the United States, where Capitol Records rejected the first four Beatles singles (Love Me Do, Please Please Me, From Me To You and She Loves You), Capitol Records Canada jumped on the bandwagon as early as February 1963 with the release of Love Me Do followed by the other three singles, all of which topped the U.K. charts that same year. By the time the American label finally took the plunge and released I Want To Hold Your Hand at the end of December 1963, it was already a chart hit across Canada.

So, after all these years you've finally decided to upgrade your Beatles collection from those well-worn vinyl albums to digital CDs. You pull out the original albums in order of release and prepare to replace them with their CD equivalent only to discover that the CDs are all based on the original 14-track British albums (North American albums averaged 11 tracks). Beatlemania -- With The Beatles, released in Canada in November 1963, three months before the Sullivan appearance, matches the original U.K. release track for track. So far, so good. After that, however, things get a little frustrating. In February 1964, Capitol Canada rushed out Twist and Shout. The album was a big seller offering tracks not included on Beatlemania. In reality, these tracks were anywhere from six to 10 months old, many dating from the band's U.K. debut album Please Please Me, which had not been released in Canada. The inclusion of She Loves You, Please Please Me and From Me To You, three songs then on the U.S. charts as re-released singles, was the icing on the cake. However, Twist and Shout was an anomaly in the Fab Four canon. There was no equivalent U.K. or U.S. album, therefore no matching CD.

Three months later Capitol Canada released the Long Tall Sally album, another hot seller and home-grown anomaly. While boasting a similar cover to the American Second Album, its tracks varied considerably. In reality, Long Tall Sally was a compilation of singles (I Want To Hold Your Hand making its first appearance on an album here), B-sides, EPs and left over album tracks. If you wanted your party to really jump, all you had to do was put on Twist and Shout followed by Long Tall Sally. Both albums were the brainchild of Capitol Canada employee Paul White, an early Beatles booster.

Goodbye, Paddlewheel

This Thursday, the Paddlewheel restaurant at the Bay’s flagship downtown store will close its doors for good. With it will go decades of memories and a piece of Winnipeg history.

Opened October 29, 1954 as The Paddle Wheel Buffet, the sixth-floor restaurant with its riverboat and prairie landscape motif (which hardly changed), complete with spinning paddlewheel and wishing well, quickly became a popular lunch spot for shoppers. Unescorted ladies could sit in the Crinoline Court surrounded by a picket fence while the glassed-in elevated riverboat was for several years a gentlemen-only club. The majority of patrons simply took a table in the main dining room.

For many of us, our initial Paddlewheel experience was likely dessert glasses filled with Jello (with a dollop of whipping cream) or vanilla ice cream on a shopping break with parents.

“When I was young, I loved to go with Mom to the Paddlewheel at the end of shopping or after going to a movie,” Lenore Clemens remembers. “It was a big treat to stop there before taking the bus home. I loved the magical paddlewheel and always wanted to make a wish in it.”

Abandoned acoustic guitar reveals sad story of a Winnipeg rock dreamer who was left behind

Rock 'n' roll iconoclast Neil Young never fails to acknowledge Winnipeg as the place where he took his first musical steps with several local bands, most notable of those being The Squires. He still holds a great affinity for that band. However, what distinguished Young from his bandmates and contemporaries was his singular focus on making music his life.

"At that point, there really wasn't anything more important in my life than playing music," he muses. "And it's obvious when you look back at my early years, that's what I was like. I was so driven to make it. I had to leave a lot of friends behind to get where I am now, especially in the beginning."

One such friend was drummer Bill Edmondson. Being abandoned by Young haunted him the rest of his life.

In the fall of 2011, I received an email from Adrien Sala, looking for information on the late Bill Edmondson. His friend, Matt Weinstein, had come across an acoustic guitar in a gig bag abandoned in a West End back alley a year earlier.

A secret cave of wonders

When we reach a certain age, whether facing the reality of our own mortality or looking for familiar names and faces, we start reading the obituaries in the newspapers.

But I confess I missed this one at the time. Posted on March 17, 2012 was a short obituary notice in the Winnipeg Free Press for Richard Zurba, age 88, who passed away following a brief battle with cancer. Unbeknownst to the late Mr. Zurba, our lives were inextricably bound together.

He is a part of my youth and my lifelong obsession with music — me a pimply, Beatlehaired teenage rock ’n’ roller and he a distinguished looking middle-aged gentleman with a passion for jazz.

It was in Mr. Zurba’s tiny north Portage Avenue shop, The Record Room, tucked inconspicuously next to the Rialto (later the somewhat notorious Downtown) Theatre between Edmonton and Carlton streets, that I made many musical discoveries. And Mr. Zurba was often my guide, his musical tastes in the albums he stocked unintentionally shaping my own to this day.

Magical music tour

In 1964, the British Invasion brought the exhilarating sounds of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and all their Merseybeat contemporaries to North American shores. In May 2009, 15 intrepid rock ’n’ roll enthusiasts, most from Winnipeg, some from as far away as Texas, invaded Britain’s shores on the first UK British Invasion Rock ’n’ Roll History Tour.

Organized by Carlson-Wagonlit Travel, the nine-day tour included stops in London and Liverpool offering plenty of hard days nights (and days) of fun and music history. In recent years the UK has come to recognize the enormous tourist potential their colourful musical history offers. A number of individual tours can be found but this was the first all-encompassing package dedicated to the British Invasion.

After checking in at the luxurious Royal Lancaster Hotel in Lancaster Gate across from Hyde Park and a quick pub lunch at The Swan, we were off to Sloane Square to meet our guide, renowned Beatles expert Richard Porter, for the Chelsea Rock Walk. The three-hour tour through the trendy neighbourhood included the Cheyne Walk homes of Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, King's Road, Eric Clapton's '60s Chelsea flat as well as his current London home (he was in residence playing a concert series at the Royal Albert Hall), the dingy Edith Grove flat where the Rolling Stones began, Mary Quant's original Mod boutique and Sex Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren's shop, the infamous Chelsea Drug Store (immortalized in You Can't Always Get What You Want), and the studios where Pink Floyd recorded their first singles and where the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album cover was assembled and photographed.

The day ended with dinner at Rolling Stone Bill Wyman's Sticky Fingers restaurant in Kensington where the walls are covered in rare Stones memorabilia.

Crescendos members catch up with Badfinger rocker at city casino

Rock 'n' roll never forgets.

For two Winnipeg musicians, the lyrics to Bob Seger's classic rock anthem rang true last month at the Club Regent casino. After 42 years, Glenn MacRae and Vance Masters reunited with an old mate from Liverpool who went on to live the rock 'n' roll fantasy.

In August 1965, Winnipeg quartet The Crescendos -- MacRae, Masters, Terry Loeb and Dennis Penner -- dared to live the dream of countless young musicians across North America by pulling up stakes for the rock 'n' roll mecca of Liverpool.

"We had seen the Beatles movies and the Ferry Cross The Mersey movie and figured that's where it was at," says MacRae. Arriving by boat in the middle of the night, the four excited young men cooled their heels until the immigration office opened.