Toronto's Icy Waterfront in the Winter of 1911

Well, it's been one a hell of a crazy winter in Toronto this year. And while the rising temperatures make it  almost sort of kind of start to maybe feel like spring will actually happen at some point, they say there's more snow on the way first. I suppose we might be able to take at least a little bit of solace in the fact that Torontonians have been dealing with ice and snow for as long as there has been a Toronto. Here, for instance, is a frigid photograph from the Toronto Archives taken on our waterfront during the winter of 1911.

The Toronto Dreams Project Goes To The UK

It's been about three years since I started the Toronto Dreams Project. Since then, I've been leaving my fictional dreams about the history of the city in the public places where that history happened, so people can find the dreams and learn more about our city’s past. But Toronto’s history is also tied to places all over the world and I’d like to leave dreams in some of those places too. So I’m happy to announce that I’m taking the Toronto Dreams Project on the road to visit Toronto-related historical sites in the United Kingdom.

I need your help in order to make it possible. I've launched an Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign with a goal of raising $4000. If I do, I’ll be able to take the Dreams Project to visit sites all over the UK. I’ll leave multiple copies of more than a dozen different dreams in more than a dozen different cities, towns and villages in England and Scotland and Wales. I’ll visit big cities like London, Cardiff and Edinburgh and lesser-known spots like Dunkeswell, Budleigh Salterton and Clackmannanshire. If I fall short of raising the full amount, I’ll still try to leave as many dreams as possible in as any many places as possible.

On top of that, I’ll be using the tour as a chance to share the stories of how these places are connected to the history of Toronto. During the trip, you’ll be able to follow along as I share the stories here on my blog and on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. So, for example, you’ll get to hear about the hotel in London where Sir John A. Macdonald caught on fire during the negotiations over Confederation, about the psychiatric hospital where one of Toronto’s greatest artists had electroshock therapy, and about a chapel in the middle of the English countryside, which is officially part of the province of Ontario.

The campaign comes with some incentives, too. As a thank you to everyone who donates at least $20, I’ll send you your very own copy of one of the dreams that I leave in the UK. If you donate at least $50, I’ll send you 5. And if you donate $100, I’ll be so grateful that I’ll send you your own copy of every single one of the dreams that I leave on the UK tour.

Even if you can't contribute financially, you can support the Toronto Dreams Project's Indiegogo campaign by sharing the link on your Facebook page, or on Twitter or Instagram, or even just by telling your friends. I can't tell you how excited I am about this and every little bit helps. Thanks so mcuh!

You can contribute to the campaign on Indiegogo here.

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.

You Should See: The Last Pogo Jumps Again

Well, thank fuck: it seems as if people may finally be ready to start paying a bit more attention to the history of music in Toronto. It's about bloody time. Recently, there have been a whole series of popular projects exploring the city's music scenes from days gone by: from the sounds of 1960s Yorkville (Before The Gold Rush) to the rock and soul of the Yonge Street Strip (Yonge Street: Toronto Rock & Roll Stories) to 1970s Queen Street punk (Treat Me Like Dirt). Not to mention, *ahem*, the Toronto Historical Jukebox.

And now there's the epic, three-hour punk doc The Last Pogo Jumps Again. It's playing on the big screen this week for what may very well be the last time. You can catch it at the Royal tonight (Feb. 26 at 9pm) and on Sunday afternoon (March 2 at 4pm).

It's from Colin Brunton — the same filmmaker who was there to capture the legendary "Last Pogo" show at the Horseshoe back in 1978 — and Kire Paputts. But while the original was a concert film, this is a full-on exploration of the entire punk scene that flourished in Toronto during the late 1970s. In those years, our city was producing some of the very best punk rock in the entire world, with bands just as good as some of the ones getting famous in London and New York. The Last Pogo Jumps Again introduces you to many of them — The Viletones, The Diodes, Teenage Head, The Curse, The Ugly, The Scenics, The 'B' Girls, The Government, The Mods, The Demics, The Dishes... on and on and on — and to the people who helped build the scene. If you don't already know the music, the film makes for a jaw-dropping education. If you do, the footage and the anecdotes are essential viewing. Steven Leckie of The Viletones performs with blood streaming down his arms. The makers of the Pig Paper zine tell the story of stealing their first typewriter. The Curse wear bikinis made of tampons. There are brawls and drugs and police raids and outrage. And, through it all, a staggering burst of creativity.

But the documentary doesn't stop there. While the greatest punk bands from the scenes in London and New York landed major records deals, toured the world, got rich and had long careers, pretty much none of the bands in Toronto ever found that kind of financial success. The few who did make it onto major labels either got screwed over or screwed it up. And those were a very lucky few: the record industry — and many fans — just didn't take Canadian music seriously. The Last Pogo Jumps Again explores the consequences: the film's present-day interviews with the aging punks don't just look back on the scene, but also show what's happened to some of them in the 35 years since. You follow The Viletones' Freddie Pompeii as he picks up his methadone. You watch the late Frankie Venom of Teenage Head nodding off during a radio interview. In one scene, Leckie picks a fight in a coffee shop. In another, he's not even sure where he is.

Today, bands from Toronto are among the most famous bands in the world. And they aren't forced to leave the city in order to make it big. (Hell, I saw members of Broken Social Scene and The Hidden Cameras at a gig in a small club just last night.) The punks of the late 1970s don't get to enjoy it, but they helped make it happen: by staying in our city, by fighting for their rightful place in our culture, by influencing the generations who would follow. It's not an exaggeration to say they changed Toronto. And that, I think, is important to remember. The Last Pogo Jumps Again is a very good place to start.

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Again, the film is screening at the Royal tonight (Feb. 26 at 9pm) and on Sunday afternoon (March 2 at 4pm). A DVD release is planned for the summer. The official website is here.

If you want to listen to some of the bands, I've linked all those band names above with stuff on YouTube.

Find more about the history of music in Toronto on my Toronto Historical Jukebox. 

Follow Colin Brunton on Twitter here and Kire Paputts here.

Dream 07 "The Lake Sturgeon" (Ernest Hemingway, 1923)

As Hadley lay awake beside him, desperately pregnant and uncomfortable, Ernest Hemingway dreamed that it was raining. It had been raining for days, coming down in vast, endless torrents. It hammered at the treetops and at the ground and at the tiles of the roofs in a steady, wet roar.

It rained so hard for so long that Castle Frank Brook swelled and broke its banks. It climbed up the sides of the valley, swamped muddy Bathurst Street and rose higher still. Soon it was spilling in through the open window and lapping up against the edges of their bed.

With the flood came great fish that swam up from the lake. They glided by through the murky water; an enormous old sturgeon circled the dresser and chairs, eyeing Hemingway with an ancient gaze. It seemed as if at any moment, the beast would speak, tell forgotten stories, tales of Huron and Iroquois and of mammoths and wolves. But instead, it opened its jaws, swam toward the bed and swallowed it whole: the sheets, the mattress, the headboard, and Hemingway and Hadley with them, all tumbling down into a dark, fishy abyss.

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Explore more Toronto Dreams Project postcards here.

A Snowy Horse on Cherry Street in 1909 (Plus: Termites & Streetcars!)

This year's rather wintry winter weather inspired me to spend some time searching online through winter photos on the Toronto Archives website over the holidays. Here's one of my favourites. It's a shot of a horse ploughing along Cherry Street during the winter of 1909.

I have very little else to say about it, but here's a fun fact thanks to Wikipedia and The Canadian Entomologist: Cherry Street was the site of the very first termite infestation in the history of Ontario. They probably arrived from the United States and first made their presence known on a dock along the southern stretch of Cherry — the part that's now in the Portlands. I suspect that's the bit of the street where this photo was taken, too. Though, the termites didn't arrive until 30 years later.

Cherry Street is currently in the process of getting its own tiny streetcar line as part of the development of the waterfront. It'll be three stops long and run along its own separated lanes through the heart of the Canary District (the new neighbourhood being built north of the Portlands, next to the already-open Corktown Common, which will start out as the Athletes Village for the Pan Am Games). Hopefully, when the Portlands are developed the Cherry streetcar will run further south, too.

Down At Fraggle Rock... In Yorkville — The Muppets Take Toronto

Jim Henson, Fraggles & Doozers

It all started in 1981 at the Hyde Park Hotel in London, England. Jim Henson was there with some of his writers and puppeteers. For the last five extraordinary years, The Muppet Show had been filmed in a nearby studio, but now it was coming to an end. Henson wanted to brainstorm ideas for a new children's television series. This one was going be even more ambitious. Years later, one of the puppeteers remembered the moment it all began: "Jim walked into the room and said, ‘I want to do a show that will change the world and end war.'" That's how Fraggle Rock started.

For three straight days Henson and his team worked on the concept for the show, which would continue to evolve over the next few months. Fraggle Rock would be about peace and understanding; it would teach children that everyone has a different perspective, that even the scariest monsters have thoughts and feelings of their own. Colourful Muppets living in an underground world would see that their lives were connected to the lives of others — whether it was the huge and terrifying Gorgs, the tiny construction worker Doozers, or the humans of "Outer Space."

"By seeing how the various groups in the world of Fraggle Rock learn to deal with their differences," Henson explained, "perhaps we can learn a little bit about how to deal with ours."

It was a message that was urgently needed in those Cold War years, particularly since the Reagan White House had just deregulated children's television, prompting a flood of violent programming meant to sell action figures (stuff like G.I. Joe, He-Man and Transformers). And Fraggle Rock wasn't just going to be for kids in North America, either. It was going to be one of the very first international co-productions — specifically structured to connect with the lives of children all over the world. In the United States and Canada, the hole in the wall that led to Fraggle Rock would be found in the workshop of an inventor. In England, it was in a lighthouse. In France, a bakery. Over the course of the next few years, the show would be broadcast in more than 90 countries and translated into 13 different languages. Henson's message of peace and understanding would have a truly global audience.

And so, they decided to film Fraggle Rock in one of the most multicultural cities on earth: Toronto. "Given the show's commitment to interdependence and a global consciousness," one of the producers later said, "I can't imagine it being filmed anywhere else."

"When we came up with the idea of doing it in Canada we all just loved it," Henson once agreed. "It seems right for the program."

Yorkville in 1966 (via)

By that point, Henson already had a long history in Canada; he'd been shooting in Toronto since the 1960s. Usually, he'd use the Robert Lawrence Studios in Yorkville; that's where he filmed Muppet specials like Hey, Cinderella!, The Frog Prince and Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas. When he first came to Yorkville, the neighbourhood was still ground zero for Canadian '60s counterculture, filled with hippies, greasers and weekenders and some of the country's best poetry, folk music and rock & roll. The scene didn't last long — by the early 1970s, the City had teamed up with developers to replace the hippies with fancy boutiques and restaurants — but through it all, the TV studio survived. And Henson kept using it.

So that's where they filmed Fraggle Rock. The caverns of the Fraggles and the Doozers, the castle of the Gorgs, and the hole in the wall of Doc's workshop were all built on Yorkville Avenue — just east of Bay, one block north of Bloor. The neighbourhood that had once been home to the likes of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and William Gibson was now home to a whole other kind of eccentric Bohemian peacenik: The Muppets.

For the next four years, some of the Muppets' greatest performers were hard at work in Toronto trying to make a puppet show so awesome it would change the world.

Three of the Fraggle puppeteers were relative newcomers to the Muppet family. Kathryn Mullen, who performed as Mokey Fraggle, had most notably been responsible for Kira the Gelfling in The Dark Crystal — and had assisted Franz Oz with Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. Karen Prell, who was doing Red Fraggle, had played some minor roles on Sesame Street. Steve Whitmire, who did Wembley Fraggle, had worked on The Muppet Show, mostly taking on minor characters like Rizzo The Rat.

The three other puppeteers performing major roles on Fraggle Rock were already responsible for some of the popular Muppet characters ever:

Dave Goelz was the human behind Boober Fraggle and Uncle Traveling Matt. Before that, he was The Great Gonzo and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew on The Muppet Show, along with Zoot, the saxophonist from The Electric Mayhem band. He got an apartment in Yorkville just a couple of blocks from the studio (on Hazelton Avenue). His first adventure with Uncle Traveling Matt was filmed right outside the studio (on Scadding Avenue). Many of his adventures took place in Toronto, along with locations all over the world. At one point, he claims the CN Tower — "The ultimate Doozer construction. It looked absolutely delicious, but it tasted terrible." — in the name of Fragglekind.

Richard Hunt had been responsible for Beaker, Scooter, Sweetums and the heckling old Statler on The Muppet Show, as well as Janice from The Electric Mayhem band. On Fraggle Rock, he was one of two people tackling the role of Junior Gorg — the huge Gorg puppet was so complicated that two people were needed to operate it at all times. While Hunt was in town, he stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel just down the street (at the corner of Yorkville Avenue & Avenue Road).
 

Jerry Nelson & Gobo

Jerry Nelson was the human behind the star of Fraggle Rock — Gobo Fraggle — as well as Pa Gorg and Marjory The Trash Heap. On Sesame Street, he was The Count and the original Snuffleupagus. On The Muppet Show, he was Lew Zealand, Robin The Frog, Camilla The Chicken and Sgt. Floyd Pepper of The Electric Mayhem band. In honour of Canada, he gave Gobo a distinctly Canadian accent, complete with plenty of "eh"s. During his years in Toronto, he seems to have developed a particular fondest for The Pilot Tavern (on Cumberland near Yonge). "Jerry would often hold court at The Pilot with cast and crew members at the end of a busy week shooting the show," Prell (Red) later remembered, "regaling all assembled with songs, stories and jokes in a range of hilarious voices until the late hours."

Many of those members of the cast and crew were Torontonians. Some of them worked for the CBC. (Canada's public broadcaster was co-producing the show with ITV and HBO; it was one of the American cable network's very first original series.) Others were local writers, artists and musicians.

The producers had a particularly challenging task in finding someone to write the music for the show — the songs were going to be an incredibly important part of Fraggle Rock. Hundreds of Canadian musicians submitted their children's music. Jerry Juhl, who had been the head writer on The Muppet Show was taking on the same role with Fraggle Rock. His desk was piled high with hundreds of cassette tapes.

"I listened to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of songs that were children's songs," he later remembered, "[but] we were looking for Fraggle songs... And one morning the alarm went off in my hotel room, and I got up, and before even going in to brush my teeth I picked up a cassette... shoved it into the machine... And I just remember walking back into the bedroom, frozen, because for the first time there was Fraggle music. It was so different."

The song was by Philip Balsam and Dennis Lee.

By then, Lee was already a famous Canadian poet. His children's book, Alligator Pie, became an instant classic when it was published in 1974. He'd co-founded the House of Anansi Press, played an important role in the experimental education at Rochdale College, and would go on to become Toronto's first ever Poet Laureate. He and Balsam were writing songs for fun; Balsam composed the music and Lee wrote the lyrics. But it was just a hobby. They hadn't even submitted the cassette for consideration; a CBC executive gave it to Juhl. When the Fraggle Rock writer offered them the job, he says Lee tried to talk him out of it. But Juhl was convinced the mix of innocence and wisdom was a perfect fit for the show. He wouldn't take no for an answer.

Dennis Lee (via)

It was the beginning of an unbelievably productive period for the songwriting pair. Almost every single one of the 96 episodes of Fraggle Rock featured multiple songs. Balsam and Lee wrote almost all of them — an average of more than one song every week for more than four straight years. And they were good, too. "I can't remember ever rejecting a song," Juhl recalled years later. The Fraggle Rock theme song even became a Top 40 hit in the UK.

On occasion, Balsam would team up to write a song with another Torontonian poet: bpNichol. Most of Nichol's work was breathtakingly experimental: he was best-known for his visual concrete poetry and his performances of sound poems as a member of The Four Horsemen. But he became one of the main writers on Fraggle Rock, penning scripts along with a team that included several award-winning Canadian novelists, playwrights and screenwriters. They'd go on to work on everything from Sharon, Lois & Bram's Elephant Show to Street Legal to Little Mosque on the Prairie. "It wasn't the kind of staff that you would normally think would be assembled for a children's television show," Juhl admitted, "Because we, in fact, weren't thinking of ourselves as a children's television show. We were trying not to label ourselves... we were looking for really interesting people..."

Henson would also personally work on some episodes of Fraggle Rock. He directed several himself and performed a couple of relatively small recurring roles (Convincing John and Cantus The Minstrel). But for the most part, he spent the early 1980s focused on making and promoting his new movies: The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and The Muppets Take Manhattan. And so, Fraggle Rock became the very first Muppet production that he didn't personally oversee on a day-to-day basis. Instead of spending all of his time in Toronto, Henson trusted the show to the all-star team he'd put together.

"I think we all felt a sense of pride about that," Nelson (Gobo) said. And the cast and crew took it to heart. Making the show was a process that took all seven days of the week; some of those days lasted long into the night. But by all accounts, it was incredible fun. Creativity ruled. Collaboration was everywhere: in the writers' room, in the songwriting, in the design of the sets and the characters, in the way two puppeteers were needed to bring many of the characters to life. In fact, a piece in The Awl recently suggested that Fraggle Rock provides the template for "the ideal creative workplace." In articles and in interviews and on blogs, one after another after another, members of the cast and crew remember Fraggle Rock as the best job they ever had.

"We shared the values of the show, as you may expect," producer Larry Mirkin recalled, "but we also shared the same values in how you go about creating a show... There was never an argument on the set. We all just believed that in order to make the show, we were going to make it by means of this joyful process."

Uncle Traveling Matt & The CN Tower

That joy is easy to sense when you're watching the show. It helped to make the series an unqualified success. A generation of children all over the world was raised on Fraggle Rock — and on its message of peace and understanding. Since then, it has continued to air in syndication, inspired a spin-off animated series and a new CGI show about Doozers; a Fraggle Rock movie has long been in the works. Decades later, it's still revered as one of the greatest children's television shows of all-time: "a high-water mark for children's television"; "unrelentingly smart"; "exquisitely crafted... unrivaled in terms of craftsmanship and character development."

It was still breaking new ground years after the final episode aired: in 1989, Fraggle Rock became the very first North American television series to be shown in the Soviet Union. Within months, the Iron Curtain had crumbled. "We always joke that Fraggle Rock led to the end of the Cold War," a Henson archivist later said. "By the end of the year, as the show's lessons of tolerance and understanding wafted through the airwaves, the Berlin Wall came down."

By then, the show was over. But Henson's relationship with Toronto continued throughout the 1980s — both during and after Fraggle Rock. Before his death in 1990, he returned to Yorkville over and over again, filming Muppet specials like The Muppets – A Celebration of 30 Years, The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show ("she gets caught up in a love triangle involving George Hamilton and John Ritter") and the pilot episode of The Jim Henson Hour.

The cast and crew who worked in Toronto during those years also continued to play an enormous role in the world of The Muppets beyond Fraggle Rock. When Henson was making Labyrinth, he had Dennis Lee write the first draft of the film's story. Four of the five main Fraggle puppeteers would all perform characters in the movie. And all five were there on the sad occasion of Henson's funeral, performing in character as part of a musical tribute in his memory. Goelz (Boober) and Whitmire (Wembley) would go on to star in The Muppet's Christmas Carol as Gonzo and Rizzo The Rat. Whitmire had only been in his early 20s when took on the role of Wembley Fraggle, worried that his career had already peaked; today, he's Kermit The Frog.

So, it wasn't really the end when Fraggle Rock finally stopped filming in 1986, but it was still a bittersweet moment. Henson wanted to end the show while it was still at the height of its power. The night after the final day on set, the cast and crew gathered for a wrap party a few blocks from the studio — at the Sutton Place Hotel at the corner of Bay & Wellesley (it's being turned into the Britt Condos now). That night, the show ended the same way it had always been made: with joy and creativity. The invitation to the party was covered in Doozers. A video showed what the Fraggles were going to do now — Red signed a contract to play hockey for the Leafs. Balsam and Lee wrote a new version of one of their songs, turning it into a farewell to the show sung by the Fraggles and their puppeteers. The crowd rose to its feet in applause and sang along.

Jim Henson gave a speech that night. At first, he joked around, did his Convincing John voice, had to wait for the whoops of laughter to die down. But the room grew quiet as he began to reminisce about his years in Yorkville and the work they'd done there. "This whole project of Fraggle has been a joy from the beginning," he said. "It's fun when you start out trying to do something that makes a positive statement... I think the body of work of Fraggle Rock is something that's going to stay around. And I think it's something we're all going to be proud of for a long time. And I think that's... that's really nice."

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Photo of Yorkville in 1966 via York University's Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections here. Photo of Dennis Lee via the Canadian Enyclopedia here (a promotional image by Susan Perly for Macmillan of Canada).

Read my post about the Torontonian roots of another children's show with a deep commitment to peace and understanding — Doctor Who — here.  And William Gibson's time in Yorkville during the 1960s here.

You can watch the entire first episode of Fraggle Rock on YouTube here. And the second one here. A video of Henson's speech at the wrap party is here. His interview with the CBC from just after they announced Fraggle Rock would be shot in Toronto is here. You can watch the British opening to the show here and the German opening here. There's also a great 1987 documentary which goes behind the scenes of the show. And the DVDs have excellent interviews with some of the writers, producers and puppeteers. You can watch a Muppet tribute to Canada here. The speech Frank Oz gave at Henson's funeral is here. The musical tribute at the funeral, performed by Fraggle Rockers Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz and Steve Whitmire, along with Oz and Kevin Clash (Elmo), is here.

Ben Folds made a new music video featuring Fraggles, Rob Corddy and Anna Kendrick just a couple of years ago. You can watch it on YouTube here. Anna Kendrick's "Boy Gorg" t-shit is pretty much the best thing ever.

The Awl writes about Fraggle Rock as the ideal creative workplace here. Al-Jazeera writes about how the show taught children about peace and understanding here. The AV Club writes about how the show taught children about society and community here. TIME Magazine shares "10 Things You Didn't Know About Fraggle Rock" here.

You can read excerpts from the relatively new Jim Henson biography on Google Books here, buy it on Amazon here, or borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here. The Henson archives shares stories about the brief entries in Henson's diary, The Red Book, here. (It's full of information about his ties to Toronto, like here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.)

There's a Fraggle Rock-oriented Google Map of Yorkville put together by an American Muppet blogger, Jessica Max Stein, based on a walking tour by the show's former producer, Lawrence Mirkin, here. The tip about the location of Uncle Traveling Matt's first adventure in Yorkville comes from a message board here. The owner of those buildings, which are listed for a heritage designation, is apparently planning on tearing them down (if they haven't been already). You can watch that first Uncle Traveling Matt adventure on YouTube here. And there's a behind-the-scenes photo of Goelz performing as Uncle Traveling Matt that day here.

Steve Whitmire shares some of his memories of Fraggle Rock here. Karen Prell shared her memories of working with Jerry Nelson after he passed away in 2012 on her site here. Another Fraggle Rock puppeteer, Robo Mills, did the same on his site here. (He's still in Toronto and tweets from here.) Crew member and director Wayne Moss talks about the show's seven-day working schedule here. Michael K. Frith, who designed the characters, talks about that process on YouTube here. 

You can read more about the deregulation of children's television by the Reagan administration here and here. A famous quote from Mark Fowler, Reagan's head of the FCC, goes like this: "It's time to move away from thinking of broadcasters as trustees and time to treat them the way that everyone else in this society does, that is, as a business. Television is just another appliance. It's a toaster with pictures."

This is post replaces an earlier, much shorter one, in which I mistakenly believed that Fraggle Rock was filmed in the CBC Studios on Jarvis Street.

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