Toronto's Small Piece of a Wonder of the Ancient World

You'll find him on the third floor of the Royal Ontario Museum. He's tucked away in a quiet, easy-to-miss corner far at the back of a room filled with artifacts from Asia and the Middle East. He's a big, snarling, golden lion on a field of blue brick. And once upon a time, he was part of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Two and a half thousand years ago, the ROM's lion sat at the heart of the city of Babylon.

Back then, Babylon was the greatest city in the world. It was home to 200,000 people — more than any other city on earth. It stood on the fertile banks of the Euphrates River, in a spot that's now part of Iraq (not far from Baghdad), but was then in the middle of a mighty empire that stretched all the way across the Middle East. The Babylonians ruled everything from the shores of the Mediterranean in the west to the Persian Gulf in the east. And their ruler was one of the most famous rulers in history: King Nebuchadnezzar II.

Nebuchadnezzar is best remembered for being in the Bible and for being a great warrior. He waged war against the pharaohs of Egypt. Captured and destroyed Jerusalem. Brought Tyre and the Phoenicians to their knees. Under his rule, Babylon flourished. And to celebrate his empire's wealth, he embarked on ambitious new construction projects, lavishing the city with some of the most famous landmarks in history. It was Nebuchadnezzar who finished building the giant tower in his city — thought to be the source of the story of the Tower of Babel. And it was Nebuchadnezzar who is said to have built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It's not entirely clear if they ever really existed, but that didn't stop them from being listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

And the gardens weren't the only Babylonian wonder on that list. The walls of the city were just as impressive. During his reign, Nebuchadnezzar made them even more so. In about 575 BC, he built a new entrance to the inner city — it was the most spectacular of them all.

The Ishtar Gate was a great double-gate the size of a fortress, towering nine storeys into the air above the citizens who passed through it into the inner city. It was built of bright blue brick; the technology required to make a glaze of that colour is so advanced that even today we're not entirely sure how they managed to pull it off. It was dedicated to Ishtar — the goddess of love, sex, fertility and war — and became the focal point for a yearly religious festival, as enormous statues of the gods were carried by huge crowds down the wide street toward the gate.

A small part of the Ishtar Gate

In fact, the street itself had been included in the construction of the gate. There were bright blue brick walls extending along either side of the processional way, decorated with golden flowers, dragons and bulls. Plus: lions. Lots of ferocious lions. The big cats were the symbol of Ishtar.

It wasn't until hundreds of years later that tourists from Ancient Greece began to travel around the Mediterranean making lists of the most amazing things they saw. They liked to call their lists "The Seven Wonders of the World" — an ancient version of a travel guide. And when they did, they made sure to visit Babylon. Many of the oldest versions of the list included the Ishtar Gate, or even all of the city's walls.

But by then, Babylon was in ruins. The empire had crumbed. It didn't last long after Nebuchadnezzar's death. Soon, the Persians swept in from the east and conquered the Babylonians. The great city fell into disrepair, doomed to be buried by the shifting sands. In time, history and legend were mixed and confused. More than two thousand years later, no one was sure if Babylon had ever really existed at all — or if it was just a wonderful myth.

It was in the early 1900s that the city was finally discovered again. It was a self-taught German archeologist who found it. He spent the next eighteen years digging at the site, uncovering the mysteries of the ancient metropolis. His most impressive find was the enormous blue gate. The ruins were dismantled; the bricks shipped to Germany where they were cleaned, catalogued and then reconstructed. The Ishtar Gate now stands in a museum in Berlin — at least, part of it does: not all of it could fit inside the building.

Many of the beasts who once stood watch over Babylon's processional way have now found new homes in museums around the world. There are dragons and bulls and lions in Istanbul, Copenhagen, Munich and Vienna, in Boston and Chicago and at Yale, at the Louvre and at the British Museum and at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

One of them even came to Canada. In 1937, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Royal Ontario Museum bought one of the lions from the State Museum in Berlin. He was shipped all the way across the ocean to a new home on Bloor Street. And so today, one of Nebuchadnezzar's snarling lions stands tucked away in a corner of the ROM, watching over Torontonians and tourists as they marvel at a tiny slice of one of the Wonders of the Ancient World — nearly ten thousand kilometers away from the ruins of the marvelous city that he once helped to guard.

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You can watch a whole documentary about Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon on YouTube here. And there's a short video about the Ishtar Gate here.

You can access the ROM's own webpage about the lion by scrolling down this search page here (for some reason, linking directly to the web doesn't work, sorry). You can learn a bit more about the gate from the Ancient History Encyclopedia here. And there's a bit more about the archaeologist who discovered the ruins here. And on Wikipedia here.

Saddam Hussein was convinced he was the reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar. He had his palace built on a spot overlooking the ruins of Babylon, and constructed a smaller copy of the Ishtar Gate which was going to be used as the entrance to a museum that never got built — the whole getting executed thing derailed his plans. His government had also asked that the Germans return to the Ishtar Gate to Iraq.

UNESCO reported that the American occupation of Iraq caused "major damage" to the ruins of Babylon. You can learn more about that on the United Nations website here. Or even read the full report as a PDF here.    

Photo of the lion by Adam Bunch. Photo of the Ishtar Gate at the museum in Berlin via Flickr user "Rictor Norton & David Allen". 

How Toronto Helped Break Up The Beatles

At first, no one believed it was really happening. It sounded too good to be true. The Toronto Rock 'N' Rock Revival Show was going to be a massive, thirteen-hour spectacle in tribute to old-timey jukebox rock & roll. The line-up was going to feature some of the greatest rock stars that had ever lived: a mix, mostly, of old greats from the 1950s and up-and-coming young stars. Little Richard. Chuck Berry. Alice Cooper. Jerry Lee Lewis. Bo Diddley. Chicago. The Doors. Gene Vincent. Junior Walker & The All-Stars. But tickets for the festival hadn't been selling well at all. People in 1969 weren't really all that interested in rock & roll from the '50s. They were into psychedelic rock now; Woodstock had happened less than a month earlier. So it seemed pretty convenient when the rumour started: that John Lennon was going to show up with Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton and The Plastic Ono Band in tow.

Bullllllllllshit. No way they got one of The Beatles. John Lennon hadn't performed at a rock show in front of a big crowd in more than three years — not since The Beatles quit touring. When the rumour started, radio stations refused to believe it. And so did everyone else.

But then, in Detroit, a radio DJ got a hold of a recording of a phone conversation between the organizers of the festival and Yoko Ono's assistant: they were booking the plane tickets from London to Toronto. The DJ played the tape on the air and suddenly, at the very last minute, it seemed as if Lennon might actually be coming. People rushed to buy tickets. In just a few hours on the afternoon of the show, it went from a financial disaster to a sell out.

Still, the ticket holders didn't know the whole truth: even the organizers weren't completely sure Lennon would actually come. The Beatle woke up that morning at home in England, nearly six thousand kilometers away. He'd only known about the show for a couple of days, when he got a phone call from Toronto asking if he and Yoko would be willing to emcee the show. John would get to introduce Yoko to all the rock & roll heroes of his childhood and they would be able to use the show as a chance to promote peace. In fact, it would also become known as the Toronto Peace Festival. This was just a few months after they'd recorded "Give Peace a Chance" in a Montreal hotel room and just a few months before they launched their famous "War Is Over" billboard campaign. Lennon agreed. In fact, he didn't just promise to come, he promised to play.

It really was unbelievable. The Beatles were still the biggest band on Earth — just a month earlier, John, Paul, George and Ringo had finished recording Abbey Road, which would turn out to be one of the greatest albums of all-time. But the end was near. They weren't getting along like they used to: they bitched at each other in the studio, fought over the business of Apple Records, grumbled about the time Ono was spending in the studio. Lennon was looking for a new creative outlet. And the Toronto show would help give him one.

There was, however, a big problem: Lennon didn't have another band. He and Yoko had recorded together under the name "The Plastic Ono Band", but that wasn't a real band at all. It's just what they called anybody who happened to be playing with them. "YOU are the Plastic Ono Band" was their official slogan. That meant Lennon only had a couple of days to put together an entire new band from scratch.

Of course, John Lennon had an easier time finding musicians than most people would. He convinced Eric Clapton (who had played on The Beatles' White Album) to come play guitar. Klaus Voorman (who had been friends with The Beatles since their early Hamburg days and played bass in Manfred Mann) said he would come too. Drummer Alan White (who would later play in Yes) was the final piece: he agreed as soon as he realized it wasn't a prank call — that really was John Lennon on the other end of the phone.

But getting a few musicians together was one thing — actually getting on the plane and going through with his first gig in three years was another. They say Lennon was a nervous wreck. On the day of the show, John and Yoko didn't show up for the band's flight from Heathrow. The plane left for Toronto without The Plastic Ono Band on board.

That was a MAJOR problem for the festival organizers. And not just because of all the angry ticket holders they'd have on their hands if Lennon didn't show up. The promoters were much more worried about the angry biker gang they'd have on their hands.

You see, over the course of the 1960s, a biker gang called The Vagabonds had become a major force in the Toronto rock scene, doing their whole violence and drugs and horrifying misogyny and crime and riding motorcycles thing. They'd managed to sort of, um, "convince" the guys putting the show together that The Vagabonds should be allowed to escort John and Yoko from Pearson Airport (on the outskirts of the city) to Varsity Stadium (downtown, at Bloor & St. George). The Vagabonds arrived in force: 80 bikers, all of them excited to be the honour guard for one of the Beatles. They were not going to be happy if it fell through.

In the end, they say Eric Clapton saved the day. He got on the phone with Lennon and told him in no uncertain terms that if Eric Clapton had to be at the airport lugging around all his gear, so did John and Yoko. Lennon was finally convinced to go through with it. The band was going to be a few hours late, but the bikers were okay with that: they'd go pick up The Doors first and then make a second run. Meanwhile, The Plastic Ono Band finally got a chance to have their first ever rehearsal: on the plane, without amps or drums, struggling to hear themselves over the roar of the engines as they flew across the Atlantic on the way to their very first gig.

The Plastic Ono Band's first rehearsal

 

That wasn't the show's only last minute hiccup, either. Just a few days earlier, the promoters had managed to land another 1960s icon: D.A. Pennebaker. He was the greatest rock 'n' roll documentary filmmaker of, well, ever: the guy who had filmed Bob Dylan in Don't Look Back and made the wildly successful documentary about the Monterey Pop Festival. But there were some last minute money issues in Toronto. Pennebaker arrived at the stadium on the day of the show and started setting up his equipment — even watched as the first acts took to the stage — but he still didn't have permission to film anything. He watched helplessly as Bo Diddley — who was supposed to be one of the centrepieces of the film — began his set.

Finally, the permission came through. As Diddley came out for an encore, the cameras started rolling. So that's how Pennebaker's movie — Sweet Toronto — starts: with the sound of Bo Diddley's electric guitar playing the iconic chords from his massive, self-titled, 1955 hit. When you finally get a good look at Diddley on stage in the film, he's in a suit, guitar in hand, dancing under the hot sun with his backing band. He calls out the refrain and thousands upon thousands of people roar it back to him: "Heyyyyyyy Bo Diddley!" It's enough to give you chills. And the build up to that moment in the film is even more extraordinary: as those first chords repeat themselves over and over again, the footage cuts away to the airport, where John and Yoko and the rest of The Plastic Ono Band are arriving. They find a limousine waiting for them — along with the surprise of 80 enthusiastic bikers. As afternoon turns to dusk, The Vagabonds escort them down the 401 and into the heart of the city.

When they got to Varsity Stadium, John and Yoko headed into the dressing room; they had a few hours to wait before their turn on stage. Meanwhile, the other acts on the bill — egged on by the cameras of one of the most famous documentarians of all-time — were giving some of the most amazing performances of their entire careers.

Robert Christgau, "Dean of American Rock Critics", was there that day. And since he's one of the greatest rock writers ever, I'll defer to him:

Chuck Berry at Varsity Stadium

"The sun was fading... by the time Chuck Berry appeared. Berry is the best all-around showman in rock and roll. He is probably in his forties by now, nobody really knows, and duckwalking across the stage takes more out of him than it once did. But the cameras turned him on. Pennebaker was still contorting himself and shooting wild from the knees and belly, but Berry matched him twist for turn, and did three duckwalks, and mugged shamelessly for the cameras. In what several experienced Berry-watchers adjudged one of his finest shows ever, he stayed on for over an hour, finishing at twilight."

In fact, as the day wore on, it was clear the show was beginning to be a pretty big deal for all of the older performers. Just a decade earlier, they had been some of the biggest — and first — rock stars the world had ever seen. But now, at the end of the '60s, none of them was as popular as they had once been. Straight-up, hard-rocking rhythm and blues had been replaced by psychedelic jams. Rockers had been replaced by hippies. Now that Lennon and Pennebaker had turned the Toronto Peace Festival into something more than just a revival show, those old jukebox stars were taking full advantage. The crowd danced and laughed and sang along. It makes for remarkable footage in Sweet Toronto: those shaggy, long-haired kids of the late '60s, with their big sleeves and big hats, their vests and bare chests, smoking pot and blowing bubbles to old-timey rock & roll, shaking their hips, doing the twist, singing and clapping along to the songs that kids their age had been listening to more than a decade ago, their faces glowing. All smiles.

After darkness descended, Little Richard came out with his bouffant hair do and bright, tight, shiny, silverwhite pants, his shirt covered in mirrors. During "Good Golly Miss Molly," he leaped on top of the speakers, dancing like a disco ball, took his shoes and his necklaces off, and then hurled them all into the crowd. During "Jenny, Jenny" he stripped to the waist, bouncing, sweaty and frantic, twirling his shirt above his head before launching it out into the mass of the audience. "Long Tall Sally" was a blistering, bare-chested frenzy. He played "Tutti Frutti" twice in a row. "Rip It Up" three times. Christgau was blown away: "Little Richard, resplendent in mirrors and pompadour and with makeup covering not only his face but his neck, put on his usual orgy of self-adoration. He was magnificent." The Star called him "absolutely electrifying." The Montreal Gazette called him "rock and roll personified... You name it, he sang it — and it was all just as good live in a stadium filled with long hair and pot smoke as it was in a finished basement with white socks and smuggled beer." As Richard tore through his version of "Keep A-Knockin'," hippies made out on the grass. A Canadian flag waved above the crowd. By the end of the set, he had picked people out of the audience to dance on stage with him. "Ladies and gentlemen, you are looking at the true rock & roll!" he shouted. "The 1956 rock & roll!"

Some critics point to that day as the moment the 1950s became cool again. After appearing on stage in Toronto, the old jukebox stars, some of whom were having trouble getting gigs, started being asked to tour again. Soon, Little Richard was back on the charts; he was featured on albums by young bands like Canned Heat and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Bo Diddley was opening for groups like The Clash as late as 1979. Jerry Lee Lewis found himself back on the charts, too. And so did Chuck Berry. In fact, he would get his first ever #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972. Today, 45 years after the Toronto Rock 'N' Roll Revival Show, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis are all still touring.

And while the festival was reliving the 1950s, it was also heralding the very beginning of the 1970s.

Alice Cooper played that night too. He wasn't a big name at that point, but the Toronto Peace Festival would prove to be his most famous performance ever. His band appeared in makeup, long hair, leather and ripped stockings, playing their strange, theatrical prog-rock. At the climax of the set, they hurled themselves around the stage, tearing apart the gear, as their instruments screeched and moaned. Cooper kicked a football out into the audience, smashed a watermelon with a hammer and then heaved it, too, out into the crowd. The band broke open a few pillows, filling the air with feathers, and used big tanks of CO2 to blow them out over the audience. And then, well...

Nobody seems to be entirely sure where the chicken came from. Cooper claims that an audience member threw it on stage. Other people say the band brought it with them. Either way, you can see what happened next in Pennebaker's footage of the show: Cooper picked up a live chicken from the stage and launched it out into the crowd. "I figured: it's a bird," he explained in an interview decades later. "I'm from Detroit, I don't know, a chicken's got wings, it'll fly — and I threw it back in the audience figuring it would just fly away. Well, it went into the audience and the audience tore it to pieces."

Alice Cooper's "Chicken Incident"

By the time the newspapers hit stands the next day, some headlines were claiming that Cooper bit the head off the chicken himself and drank its blood. In the morning, he'd get a call from Frank Zappa asking him if it was true. When Cooper explained what had happened, Zappa told him, "Well, whatever you do, don't tell anyone you didn't do it." It is still, to this day, one of the most infamous stories in all of rock & roll history. Alice Cooper's "Chicken Incident" is hailed by many critics as the birth of shock rock.

Meanwhile, John and Yoko and The Plastic Ono Band had been backstage during all of this, waiting for their turn to perform. The tension was eating away at Lennon. It had been so long since he played a real show — and his first time back was going to be in front of some of his biggest musical heroes. "I threw up for hours before I went on," he admitted. (Eric Clapton later suggested that may have had something to do with all the coke Lennon was snorting.)

Finally, at midnight, it was time. The emcee for the night was Kim Fowley — a super-famous radio DJ from Los Angeles — who had an idea he thought might help to calm the Beatle's nerves. He had the stadium lights lowered, so that it was completely dark. And then he asked the crowd to light their matches. As Lennon, all long hair and shaggy beard in a white suit, stepped out onto the stage, he was greeted by a sea of flickering light. Thousands of tiny flames glowed all around the stadium. "It was fantastic," he remembered later. "The lights were just going down. This was the first time I ever heard about this — I'd never seen it anywhere else — I think it was the first time it happened."

He was still nervous, though. "We're just going to do numbers we know," he told the crowd, "you know, because we've never played together before." And then The Plastic Ono Band launched into "Blue Suede Shoes". It was big rock classics like that at the beginning of the set: the songs the band members had heard their heroes sing back when they were young — some of those heroes, the same ones who were now watching from backstage. They were the kind of songs that made Lennon want to start The Beatles in the first place. The kind of songs they started out playing in their earliest days, at the smoke-filled Cavern in Liverpool and in the rough nightclubs of Hamburg in the early 1960s. Back when it was all still fun; before everything got complicated.

It was an emotional moment. Watching from backstage, Gene Vincent had tears streaming down his cheeks. He'd first met Lennon and The Beatles back in those Hamburg days, when the Fab Four were still just starting out and Vincent was already a star thanks to "Be-Bop-A-Lula". The first record Paul McCartney ever bought was a Gene Vincent record. And as The Plastic Ono Band played those old hits, The Beatles road manger noticed the rock & roller crying. "It's marvelous," Vincent told him. "It's fantastic, man." After the show, Lennon says Vincent came up to him. "John, remember Hamburg, remember all that scene?"

John Lennon at the Toronto Peace Festival

But The Plastic Ono Band's set was as much about the future as it was about the past. The experimentation and collaboration which would define Lennon's solo career were on full display. Near the end of "Blue Suede Shoes", Yoko came out, climbed into a white bag and sat down on the stage next to John. At the end of "Money (That's What I Want)", she climbed out and handed him the lyrics. When they started into "Yer Blues", Yoko began to wail into a microphone. "It sounded as if she was crying, like a child, in fear," the Globe and Mail wrote. After a stirring, sing-along rendition of "Give Peace A Chance" — the first big public performance of Lennon's first solo song — the entire second half of the set was centered around Ono's experimental sound-making. "Yoko's going to do her thing all over you," Lennon announced. Then she began to sing the bizarre noises of "Don't Worry Kyoko (Mommy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)".

Some didn't respond well to Ono's avant-garde howling. One fan told Mojo Magazine, "People were polite. They were bewildered, but everybody knew she was an artist, she'd taken photographs of bums and things like that. We figured whatever she was doing, eventually it would end. But it didn't fuckin end." Ronnie Hawkins was there that night, too; he remembered people being a little less polite. "As hip as everyone there tried to be," he says, "Yoko was too much. 'Get the fuck off the stage,' people started to scream." Some people booed. The Star called it "excruciating... a finger nail scratching over a blackboard."

But Lennon claimed he didn't hear any of that. And Ono won some rave reviews. The Montreal Gazette called her performance "extraordinary... full of real emotion... the stunning effect of Yoko's soaring cries [were] like worlds colliding or the universe blowing apart..." The entire set was recorded and released as an album called Live Peace In Toronto 1969. It broke the Top 10 on the Billboard chart and went gold. In Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus called it, "more fun than anything [Lennon]'s done in a long while, with a great deal more vitality than Abbey Road, in fact."

The set ended with the haunting shrieks of Ono's "John, John, Let's Hope For Peace." As the song came to a close, Lennon leaned his guitar up against an amp, screaming feedback while Clapton coaxed strange noises from his own instrument. They left Yoko on stage, squawking like a bird into the Bloor Street night.

Lennon was thrilled with the way things had gone. "I can't remember when I had such a good time," he said later. "It gave me a great feeling, a feeling I haven't had for a long time." He'd been nervous and uncertain about the next stage in his life. But the show in Toronto had given him confidence. Now, he knew for sure he wanted to return to the stage. And it wouldn't be with the band he'd been part of since he was 15 years old. No less of an authority than Ringo Starr cites the Toronto Peace Festival as the turning point: John Lennon was going to leave The Beatles.

Fans at the Toronto Peace Festival

So the final seeds had already been sown by the time the last act of the Rock 'N' Roll Revival Show finally took the stage. The Doors were past their peak, too. Jim Morrison had less than two years left to live. He was already awaiting trial for indecent exposure charges; in a few weeks, he'd be arrested again for being a drunken mess on an airplane. He was run down, ravaged by alcoholism. He'd grown a beard, gained weight; one fan remembers the sound of his knees cracking as he moved around the stage that night.

But the band played a mesmerizing set. "When The Music's Over." "Break On Through." "Light My Fire." In the Toronto Daily Star, Jack Batten gushed, "Jim Morrison has so much presence, so much electricity, that he makes his rock contemporaries resemble a collection of wax dummies..." Peter Goddard agreed in the Toronto Telegram: "With [Morrison] there was a sense of melodramatic theatrics, of sensuality and poetry, of sheer power belching electronically... With an icily sleepy stare and a slow amble, he was a force to be reckoned with..."

Before long, there was only one song left to go. As Ray Manzarek's keyboards hummed darkly, the tambourine shook and the bass plucked away. Morrison leaned into the microphone, remembering how his own life had been changed by rock & roll. He shared his memories with the audience between languid, drugged-out pauses. "You know, I can remember when I was... in about the seventh or eighth grade... I can remember when rock & roll first came on the scene... it burst open whole new strange catacombs of wisdom... And that's why for me this evening it's been... really a great honour... to perform on the same stage... with so many illustrious musical geniuses."

And then, Jim Morrison began to sing. It was the only song you could imagine ending the festival with. The only song you could imagine ending the decade with, really:

"This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend, the end. Of our elaborate plans, the end. Of everything that stands, the end..."

It was nearly two in the morning by the time the Toronto Rock 'N' Roll Revival Show finally came to an end. In the thirteen hours since the first act took the stage at Varsity Stadium, a lot of things had changed. The '50s had been revived. The biggest band of the '60s had entered their final days. Shock rock had been born. And so, too, maybe, had the tradition of an audience lifting their matches and lighters — and someday their smartphones — into the air. It's no wonder Rolling Stone once called the Toronto Peace Festival the second most important event in the history of rock & roll. 

A week later, John Lennon told The Beatles he was done. The greatest band of all-time was breaking up. The 1960s were over. The 1970s were ready to begin.
 

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More of The Plastic Ono Band at the Toronto Rock 'N' Roll Revival Show: the entire set.




More Little Richard at the Toronto Rock 'N' Roll Revival Show: "Lucille", "Tutti Frutti", "Rip It Up", "Keep A-Knockin'", "Hound Dog", "Jenny Jenny", "Long Tall Sally".




More Jerry Lee Lewis at the Toronto Rock 'N' Roll Revival Show: "Hound Dog", "Mean Woman Blues", "Don't Be Cruel", "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On", "Mystery Train", "Jailhouse Rock".




More Chuck Berry at the Toronto Rock 'N' Roll Revival Show: the entire set.

 You can listen to the bootleg recording of the full Doors set on YouTube here. You can watch Alice Cooper's interview about the chicken incident here. And some poor-quality footage of the set here.

You can buy the Sweet Toronto film here. A couple of other documentaries were made from Pennebaker's footage, too. You can buy Little Richard: Live At The Toronto Peace Festival 1969 here, and Chuck Berry: Live At The Toronto Peace Festival 1969 here (or borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here). You can also buy The Plastic Ono Band's 1969 Live Peace In Toronto album here.

You can read the full review of the show from Robert Christgau here. And Greil Marcus' Rolling Stone review of The Plastic Ono Band's live album from 1970 here. You can also read the full reviews from the Star, Telegram and Gazette thanks to Flickr user TheWizardofAz.

Over at blogTO, Chris Bateman has a post about the festival called "That Time Toronto Saved Rock & Roll".

I got some of the info about the cocaine, Yoko Ono, and Little Richard from the You And What Army blog here. The bit about Rolling Stone calling it the second most important event in rock & roll history came from the Globe and Mail here. Some of the quotes about The Plastic Ono Band set were found thanks to the research by John Whelan for the Ottawa Beatles Site here. You can read more about Little Richard's set on JamBands.com here. Writer Reid Dickie shared his memories of the show on his own site here. The screencap the chicken incident came from here. The screencap of Chuck Berry from here. And of John Lennon from here. The photo of the crowd was found thanks to a post by thecharioteer on UrbanToronto here.

Watching Pennebaker's footage, you can see the Royal Conservatory of Music in the distance. It's right next door to Varsity Stadium and, of course, plays it's own important role in the history of Canadian music. According to Wikipedia, former students include Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Gordon Lightfoot, Bruce Cockburn, Randy Bachman (The Guess Who), Emily Haines (Metric), Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy), Richard Reed Perry (Arcade Fire, Belle Orchestre), Tegan and Sara, Sara Slean, Rob Baker (Tragically Hip), Diana Krall, Sarah McLachlan, Shania Twain, Loreena McKennitt, Paul Schaffer, R. Murray Schafer, producer David Foster, Robert Goulet, Jeff Healey, Amanda Marshall and Chantal Kreviazuk. Feist is an Honourary Fellow.

Morley Callaghan on Winter & The Canadian Heart

The first post I ever wrote on this blog was about the Torontonian writer Morley Callaghan (and the time he punched Ernest Hemingway right in the face). I've come back to him from time to time. Earlier this week, I was listening to a CBC "Rewind" podcast about his life, which you can stream online here. It features an old interview he did with Michael Enright in November of 1974, which included a little snippet about Callaghan's love of Canadian winters. He was famous for it — and for his daily walks through Rosedale with his dog. (In fact, that's the subject of what I suspect is the most beautifully sad plaque in Toronto.)

Since this year's winter has finally just arrived, I thought I'd share a snippet of his thoughts (complete, unfortunately, with his dated pronoun usage):

"The other thing about winter is... that on a winter night, if it's not too cold — now I'm not pretending to be a lover of those harsh winter winds — but on a lovely winter night when there is snow and when there is sort of unbroken snow, I love the cities. I love the cities when they're absolutely snow-covered and there's a kind of unearthly winter calm about them. And I feel a curious sense of peace and ease with myself and you can walk... and it's great, you know, when you yourself can break the snow. And somehow or other you get a sense of well-being in that kind of weather that you don't get in the hot summer...

"The winter is in the Canadian. It's in his heart. It's in his imagination, even when he grouses about it and damns it and so on."

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That photo, amazingly, is Bloor Street West in the winter of 1910. Right near High Park. (Which I found via the Toronto Archives.)

Lee's Palace Before It Was Lee's Palace

So that's what Lee's Palace looked like when it first opened, nearly 100 years ago. It was the spring of 1919 — the first few months after the end of the First World War. It was a silent movie theatre back then, the Allen's Bloor Theatre, part of one of Canada's very earliest cinema chains. The Allen brothers had started with one "theatorium" in Brantford and spread all over the country — they had a whole string of theatres in Toronto, including one on the Danforth which we now call the Danforth Music Hall.

The same guy designed all of the Allen cinemas in T.O.: theatre architect C. Howard Crane, who was about to become one of Detroit's greatest architects during that city's golden age. He designed some of Motown's most famous buildings during those booming years of the 1920s, when the city was being built in Art Deco splendour thanks to the dawn of automobile. He's responsible for the Fox Theatre, the Opera House, the Orchestra Hall, the Fillmore, the United Artists Theatre, the old Red Wings stadium... The list goes on. Plus other masterpieces in places like Columbus (the LeVeque Tower) and St. Louis (another Fox Theatre) and London (Earls Court).

The Allen's Theatre chain would eventually be swallowed up by the Famous Players monopoly (who also owned the cinema across the street, which we now call the Bloor). It would carry on as a movie threatre until the 1950s before it was finally shut down. For the next three decades, it would be home to a series of nightclubs and restaurants — including the burlesque show of the Blue Orchid — and, according to the Lee's website, at one point a bank.

It was in 1985 that it finally became the Lee's Palace that we know today. The first two acts were Handsome Ned and Blue Rodeo. Since then, it's played host to some of the most awesome bands from Toronto and around the world — including the first local appearances by Nirvana, Blur, Oasis and the Smashing Pumpkins.

Oh and Sex Bomb-omb. Lee's Palace is where Scott Pilgrim defeated the third of the Evil Exes.

Allen's Bloor Theatre, 1921

Allen's Bloor Theatre, 1919

 

A bunch of this info comes via Silent Toronto, which has plenty more about the Allen's Bloor Theatre and Toronto's cinematic history here.

Another one of the surviving Allen's Theatres is on the west end of Parkdale, now home to the Queen West Antique Centre.

Bloor & St. George in 1892

Here's the Gooderham Mansion at Bloor & St. George in 1892, where George Gooderham (the whiskey-making millionaire distillery guy) lived. After he died, it turned into the swanky York Club in 1909 and it's still there today — behind that red brick wall across from Varsity Stadium.

Bloor & High Park Looked Like Countryside Back in 1914

Jesus. I mean, by now I should be used to seeing photos of places just outside the city core looking like the middle of the freaking countryside in the early 1900s, but it still gets me every time. This one is Bloor Street at High Park. (I think we're looking east? With the park on the right? That's what the internet faintly whispers, anyway.)

Hmm. I don't have much to say other than that. I can tell you that Bloor Street was named after Joseph Bloor, a brewer who founded the village of Yorkville. He was also one scary-looking motherfucker. And I can tell you that by this point, High Park had already been High Park for about 20 years. The land had belonged to a fellow by the name of John Howard. He's hailed as Toronto's first serious architect: he built the old "lunatic asylum" on Queen West, the old bank building at Yonge and Wellington (which is the Irish Embassy pub now), the row of buildings along King East just west of Church (Victoria Row, which includes the Albany Club, a Conservative Party hangout I'm working on a post about) and, of course, Colborne Lodge, which is where he and his family lived in High Park. As I mentioned in a previous post, he gave the land as a gift to the city in 1876 to be used as a public park on the condition that his family would still get to live there, that the city would keep the park's name, and that no one would ever be allowed to drink alcohol on the grounds. (Sorry dude.) He was also an amateur painter. You come across his artwork all the time when you're digging around into the early history of the city.

Alright! That's all I've got!

Bloor & Spadina Was Pretty Beautiful Back in 1933 (Featuring Old-Timey Streetcars)

This is Bloor Street, just west of Spadina, in the summer of 1933. By then, it already been about 50 years since the Annex was annexed into the city of Toronto. But the growth hadn't stopped there, of course. By the time the 1920s rolled around, the city had begun to swallow up villages and neighbourhoods even further north, spreading up the escarpment into places like Moore Park and Forest Hill, and west too, through Parkdale. That's when we decided that our transportation system should be amalgamated as well: the TTC was officially born and a brand new fleet of streetcars hit the roads of Toronto.

You can see them here in the middle of the photo. They're called Peter Witt streetcars, named after the guy from Cleveland who designed them in the early 1900s. We had a few hundred of them, which apparently makes us one of their best-known homes, but they also appeared in cities all over North America and Europe: New York, Chicago, Detroit, Mexico City, Madrid, Naples, Milan... The TTC used them for about forty years, finally taking the last ones out of commission in the '60s, but in Milan, they are still about two hundred Peter Witt streetcars gliding through the streets, painted bright orange. A few of them have even made their way from Milan to the United States, where they grace the hills of San Francisco.

I found this photo on the Toronto Archives Flickr page (which rules). They've got an entire set dedicated to the Peter Witts. I'll post a few of my other favourites below and you can check out the full set here, read more about the streetcars on Transit Toronto here or in Agatha Barc's blogTO post here. You can also watch a little video of one of the streetcars in action here from the Halton County Radial Railway Museum, where they've got one you can ride.

The Peter Witts ran on different tracks from the ones we had before

 

The Vertical Haight-Ashbury

Rochdale College back in the day

Toronto, I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn, has historically been a pretty conservative place. It stretches back to our earliest days as a fiercely Protestant, fiercely British colony. In the 1830s, Anna Jameson, a writer and wife of the Attorney-General, was already complaining about the city's "cold, narrow minds", "confined ideas" and "by-gone prejudices". And when Hemingway lived here in the '20s, the city's Protestant reserve annoyed him enough that he told Ezra Pound that Canada was a "fistulated asshole". Even Marshall McLuhan came to the University of Toronto in part because he thought the city was small-minded and resistant to new ideas—and that would give him an intellectual challenge.

But by the late '60s and early '70s that had started to change. McLuhan had his own centre at U of T. Jane Jacobs had arrived and helped to kill the Spadina Expressway. Urban advocates like David Crombie and John Sewell were being elected to city council—soon they'd be winning mayor's races, too. And a few block west of hippie-filled Yorkville there was Rochdale College.

Today, you might know it as the ugly concrete apartment building beside the Bata Shoe Museum (on the south side of Bloor just east of Spadina), but Rochdale started out life in 1968 as a radical experiment in post-secondary education. There would be no tuition, no traditional classrooms or professors. Students would plan and organize their own courses; if someone was interested in learning about something, they'd find some other students who shared their interest and maybe recruit "resource persons" to lend their expertise. They would work together to form the college's policy and administration, with each student sharing an equal vote. Even the building itself was designed with those collective principals in mind, centered around communal living spaces they called "ashrams". And out front went the "Unknown Student" statue, erected, it would seem, as a monument to all those made to suffer at the hands of a traditional education.

Over the next seven years, Rochdale became a crucible for Toronto's quickly growing arts scene. Coach House Books, House of Anansi Press and Theatre Passe Muraille were all either founded at Rochdale or strongly involved in the college during their early years. And between them, they would g on to help support a generation of Toronto's writers—Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Timothy Findley, bp nicol, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Gwendolyn MacEwen—and are still at it today, publishing the Christian Böks, Sheila Hetis, Michael Winters and Zoe Whittalls of the world. This Magazine was at Rochdale, too. And so was Dennis Lee, who would go on to become Toronto's first poet laureate, write Alligator Pie and co-write Labyrinth and the songs for Fraggle Rock. Science-fiction author Judith Merril was there. And so was Reg Hartt, showing films at Rochdale years before he started the Cineforum out of his house on Bathurst. And as if that weren't enough, the Hassle Free Clinic started there, too.

Of course, Rochdale also had its problems. A construction strike had delayed the college's opening, forcing them to take in non-Rochdale students who weren't interested in an experimental education. Meanwhile in Yorkville, the government was actively working to—in the words of hockey-hero-turned-Conservative-politician Syl Apps—"eradicate" the hippie culture from the neighbourhood. Lots of the people driven out by new, upscale development and baton-wielding cops just moved the few blocks to Rochdale. The building, originally designed to house 840 students became home to thousands—even more people who didn't care about the college's goals.

How big a problem that was depends on who you ask. Most people tell the Rochdale story in the format of the cautionary hippie tale: idealism + drugs + time = tragedy. The college's open door policy made it easy for biker gangs and hard drugs to move in. The halls teemed with tripping young people. There were overdoses and a few people jumped or fell or were pushed from windows. Lots of people were appalled. Ontario's Minister of Housing wasn't even sure they'd be able to sell the building if they wanted to. "I think you'd have to send in the men in white coats and butterfly nets and clean the joint out before anybody could make an offer on it," he said. The press started calling Rochdale "the vertical Haight-Ashbury" and "North America's largest drug distribution warehouse".

Not surprisingly, some former Rochdale residents tend to tell the story a little differently. They suggest that having a few overdoses and suicides over the years wasn't exactly rare for a downtown apartment building. And that the college was a beacon for distressed youth—many more of whom might have killed themselves if they hadn't found a welcoming home. The speed and harder drugs were a problem; softer drug use at Rochdale had always been open, abundant and, for the most part, peaceful. Even the federal government's own Le Dain Commission, looking into recreational drug-use, had studied the college as part of its process and eventually recommended the legalization of marijuana.

Still, by 1975 the authorities decided it was time to end the experiment. Police stormed the building, literally carrying the last few stubborn students out of the college and welding the doors shut behind them. The government renamed the building after a senator, turned it into an old folks home and, just in case the elderly had any revolutionary plans of their own, promised to "carefully screen tenants to keep any possible problems out."

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Heck, I suppose you can even add the Toronto Dreams Project to the list of artistic endeavors that owe some kind of vague, indirect debt to Rochdale, since at least a couple of my more inspiring professors were Coach House authors. There are great photos of life at Rochdale here and here and here and here and here and there's a copy of the 1969 curriculum here. (Some of which are from the college's online museum.) On YouTube, you can watch most of Ron Mann's Dream Tower documentary about the college, but the first part has no sound, so I'm just going to link straight to the second part.

BlogTO has also written a couple of articles about the college, which are especially worth checking out because of the comment sections; they've spontaneously become a place for former Rochdale students to reconnect and reminisce. My favourite excerpt comes courtesy of Reg Hartt himself:

In Hollywood a police officer who stopped me, when finding out I was from Toronto, asked what I had done there.

"I showed films at Rochdale College," I told him.

"Do you mean Canada's Communist Training Center," he asked.

Right there I knew that if the Hollywood police knew about Rochdale it had to be the hippest place on earth.

This post is related to dream 11 Feeding The Annex Dennis Lee, 1974