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

Six Hit Songs From 1960s Yorkville

During this week in 1967, there were six songs with ties to the Yorkville music scene sitting in the Top 50 of the CHUM Chart. From the folk of Gordon Lightfoot to the psychedelic garage rock of The Ugly Ducklings to the summertime pop of The Mamas & The Papas. I wrote about them in my column for the Canadian Music Hall of Fame this week. And since I promised to start sharing links to my Toronto history-related writing over there, you can check it out and listen to the songs right here. I also talk a bit about the very start of Neil Young's career, which began during his time in Winnipeg: between going to high school in Pickering and playing the coffeehouses of Yorkville in a band with Rick "Super Freak" James.

Aunt Hetty, The Lovin' Spoonful and The Mamas & The Papas

Zal Yanovsky

Twenty years before she played Aunt Hetty on Road To Avonlea, Jackie Burroughs met Zal Yanovsky while he was living in a dryer in a laundromat at Dupont and St. George. "I met Zelman when I went in to do my laundry one day and he was asleep in one of the dryers," she once explained. "He looked like a deadbeat to me, with long hair, a bad complexion and green teeth."

Yanovksy had been born here, in Toronto, in the 1940s – the son of a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine who did political cartoons for old Communist magazines like The Canadian Tribune. And like a lot of Toronto's young socialist Jewish kids, Yanovsky went to Camp Naivelt in Brampton, famous for its leftist politics and the legendary folk musicians who came by to visit. The RCMP would hang out at the front entrance taking down license plate numbers while people like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs played guitar around the campfire. Plenty of campers came away inspired, teenagers singing old activist labour songs. That's how The Travellers got together — they're the guys who recorded the Canadian version of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land". And Sharon from Sharon, Lois and Bram went there too. (She has a story about watching Seeger sing a chain-gang song while he chopped wood, swinging the axe as percussion.)

And so, when Yanovsky was late for school at Downsview Collegiate one day and they wouldn't let him in, he just left and never came back. Instead, the sixteen year-old dropped out of school altogether and headed down to Yorkville, where he could make a bit of cash playing folk music in the smoke-filled Beatnik coffee houses that had recently begun to spring up in the neighbourhood's rundown Victorian homes. That's where he'd spend most of the next few years, as those blocks north of Bloor became home to one of the most vibrant artistic scenes of the 1960s.

He did leave town for a while, taking off to work on a kibbutz in Israel, but that didn't last very long. They kicked him out after he accidentally drove a bulldozer through a building. He spent a little time busking in Tel Aviv, and then returned to work as a waiter at the Purple Onion (a famous folk club at the corner of Avenue and Yorkville, where Buffy Saint-Marie would soon write "Universal Soldier") and play guitar at places like the Bohemian Embassy (a couple of blocks south of Bloor, where poets like Margaret Atwood and Gwendolyn Macewen had already gotten their starts and folk musicians like Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot would soon be singing their earliest songs). Yanovsky didn't make much money doing it though, so to help supplement his income, he stole milk bottles off front porches and turned them in for the deposit. Which, uh, didn't really make him all that much money either. And since he couldn't scrape together enough for rent, he ended up spending his nights sleeping in a dryer at a nearby coin laundry.

Jackie Burroughs in 1970

That's where Jackie Burroughs found him. She was in her early twenties back then, having moved here from England with her family when she was 12. They lived on the Island and then in Rosedale, wealthy enough to send their daughter to the super-exclusive-rich-girl-school Branksome Hall. By the time she walked into that fateful laundromat, she was studying literature at the nearby University of Toronto and had started getting into acting, appearing on stage in school productions at Hart House. And as unlikely as it might seem, she fell in love with that unkempt homeless guy she met sleeping in a dryer. She took him home to stay at her place. One day, they'd end up getting married.

But first, they'd end up living on different continents. Zal Yanovsky wasn't the only homeless musician haunting Yorkville in 1961. The scene was still brand new back then, but it was already beginning to attract artists and musicians from all over the country. One of them was Denny Doherty. He'd just moved here from the Maritimes with his folk band, The Halifax Three. And even though they'd signed a record deal, that didn't mean Doherty had a permanent address. "What – get a lease? Get a landlord?" he once scoffed. "No, man. We were gypsies. We were vagabonds. We slept wherever we could sleep." So it makes a weird kind of sense, I guess, that when The Halifax Three were looking for a new guitarist, they ended up asking Zal Yanovsky to join the group.

While Burroughs headed off to England to study acting and dance, honing the skills that would make her a Canadian icon, Yanovksy was back in North America, pursuing his music career with The Halifax Three. And holy shit was that career about to take off.

It happened through a bizarre series of drug-fueled events and chance encounters that began in the fall of 1963:

1. The Halifax Three got a spot on the Hootenanny USA tour and decided to stay on in the States afterward. Yanovsky and Doherty got a gig as the house band at a bar in Washington D.C., but that ended quickly — and badly — when Wavy Gravy came in one night with some pot. They knew the comedian, who would be the Master of Ceremonies at Woodstock a few years later, from their trips to New York, when they played coffee houses in Greenwich Village. But while Yanovsky and Doherty were used to getting high, their young drummer wasn't. He had a bad trip and ran home screaming something about how he was losing his mind, which meant that his large and angry father came looking for the guys who'd gotten him stoned. They decided that was probably a good time to leave town. They moved to New York City.

2. Wavy Gravy wasn't the only person they knew in Greenwich Village. When they got to NYC, they joined a band led by another friend of theirs — a kickass up-and-coming folksinger named Cass Elliot. At first, the group played fairly traditional folk music. But after watching The Beatles perform that legendary gig on The Ed Sullivan show, they renamed themselves The Mugwumps (a Naked Lunch reference) and went electric, mixing a bit folk with garage-rocking R&B. Every once in a while, a harmonica player would sit in with them too. His name was John Sebastian and he just happened to have the best drugs in the Village. They spent most of their time living together in a room at the ramshackle Albert Hotel, jamming and baking illegal brownies.

The Mugwumps

3. The Mugwumps kind of ruled, but they might have been a bit ahead of their time. This was, after all, a year before Bob Dylan went electric and even he got his ass booed by folk purists for doing it. The Mugwumps never really broke through, and sort of just stopped playing. Their bills piled up; soon, it looked like they might get kicked out of the hotel. But on that Hootenanny USA tour, Yanovsky and Doherty had befriended yet another band: The Journeymen. And now that group's guitarist and vocalist, a guy by the name of John Phillips, had just moved from California to the Village with his drop-fucking-dead-gorgeous-ex-model wife, Michelle. (They'd met a couple of years earlier, when he was 25 and married with kids and she was 16.) They were starting a new band, The New Journeymen, and their first gig was just a few days away, opening for Bill Cosby, and they needed another vocalist. When they asked Doherty to it, he had to stay up all weekend downing pharmaceuticals while he frantically learned the songs. But he did it. And the show went well. The Mugwumps had enough money to pay their rent and it looked like The New Journeymen were off to a pretty good start.

4. The night The New Journeymen dropped acid for the first time, there was a knock at the door. Michelle Phillips was the one who answered it — at the very same moment that the drugs started to kick in. She found Doherty's friend Cass Elliot from The Mugwumps standing on the other side of the door. "My life went from black and white to Technicolor," she once said about that moment. "There was Cass: this big, big girl wearing a pink Angora sweater, little white go-go boots and the longest false eyelashes you can imagine." The four of them — Denny Doherty, Cass Elliot, John and Michelle Phillips — all bonded that night during their first LSD trip, and after a blindfolded Michelle threw a dart at a map, they all ended up living together in a tent on a beach in the Virgin Islands.

Oh, sure, it must have been awkward at times: Cass had a crush on Denny Doherty, who was having an affair with Michelle Phillips, while John wrote jealous songs about it and refused to let Cass into the band... or, at least, he refused for a while, until one day she got knocked unconscious by a falling pipe and woke up with a higher vocal range. By the time they ran out of money and the Governor finally kicked them off the island for their drug-addled beach escapades, Cass was in the band and they'd already written some of the most famous songs, well, ever. They were finally The Mamas & The Papas.

5. Meanwhile, back at the Albert Hotel in New York City, Zal Yanovsky had teamed up with that drug-dealing harmonica player John Sebastian, and a couple of other guys, to form their own new band. At first, they practiced in their room, but after guests complained about the racket, they were forced to rehearse their cheerful, upbeat pop tunes in the hotel's dingy basement, surrounded by puddles and cockroaches. That's where they perfected their first single, "Do You Believe In Magic?" They called themselves The Lovin' Spoonful.

The Lovin' Spoonful

Both bands blew up immediately. That summer, "Do You Believe In Magic?" was a top ten Billboard hit. By the end of November, so was "California Dreaming" by The Mamas & The Papas. Then came "Monday, Monday", "Summer In The City", "Dedicated To The One I Love". The AM radio airwaves of 1966 were filled with Doherty's soothing voice and Yanovsky's joyful guitar. A few years earlier, they'd been couch- and dryer-surfing their way through Yorkville. Now, they were HUGE.

By then, Jackie Burroughs was back from England. She'd spent a year there, at a theatre in a small northern town, before returning to the stage in Toronto and Winnipeg and then heading to New York. She studied acting with the Broadway legend Uta Hagen (who also taught Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, and a bunch of other famous people; she was Judy Garland's voice coach). And she studied dance with Martha Graham (who they call "the Picasso of Dance"; she got her own Google doodle last year) and Merce Cunningham (who worked with experimental musicians like John Cage; more recently with Radiohead and Sigur Ros and Sonic Youth). And while Burroughs was studying with all of them, she also re-kindled her relationship with Yanovsky, moving in with him at the Albert Hotel. A year later, they were married and their daughter Zoë was born.

But things kind of didn't really end well for The Lovin' Spoonful. That same year, Yanovsky was busted for pot possession. And since he was Canadian, the cops could threaten to deport him: he'd be banned from the U.S., they said, if he didn't tell them who his dealer was. So he told them. And that was pretty much it for him and the music world. Fans boycotted The Lovin' Spoonful; his fellow musicians ostracized him. Finally, he and Burroughs had to move back to Toronto and he quit playing in bands altogether. Their marriage, which had apparently always been rocky, got worse. Burroughs claims they called it quits in that very same laundromat — between "rinse" and "spin dry". After the divorce, Yanovsky settled down in Kingston with Zoë to run spend the second half of his life running the Chez Piggy restaurant and the Pan Chancho Bakery.

Now it was Jackie Burroughs making her mark on pop culture. She became a fixture in Yorkville at the artist-hangout-y Pilot Tavern, and on the stages of Toronto and the Stratford Festival, performing alongside theatrical giants like Maggie Smith, Peter O'Toole and Jessica Tandy. The Montreal Gazette called her "an actress of thunder and lightning on stage" and wrote thousands of words about her fiery determination and experimental flair. "Give her a law or a limit and she'll smash herself against it," they wrote. "[She] took a hammer to the safe values and social conventions of her Canadian upbringing". When the Star's drama critic didn't bother to see a play she liked, she stormed into his office and berated him for failing to support Canadian productions ("Nothing good will ever come out of Canada!" he screamed back) and then she publicly berated Canadian productions for their mediocrity. She lived off grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee and cigarettes. ("There's nothing like Kraft cheese and Wonder Bread," she claimed during an interview at the Russian Tea Room.) And she played with her fashion choices, too. ("It takes a lot of planning to put together a tacky outfit like this... I've sat down in streetcars and had people move away.") When she played a junkie on TV, she shot sugar water into her veins. And when the Festival Express came to town, she partied with the likes of Janis Joplin and The Band.

Then came Anne of Green Gables. She landed the role of Amelia Evans in the CBC adaptation of Lucy Maude Montgomery's book, which turned out to be one of the highest rated things to have ever been shown on Canadian television. After PBS picked it up, it won a freaking Emmy. And that was nothing compared to the series they followed it up with: Road To Avonlea. The show ran for seven seasons and was broadcast all over the world. It won four Emmys; was nominated for sixteen. And it drew guest appearances from some of the most respected actors around: Faye Dunaway, Michael York, Dianne Wiest, John Neville, Diana Rigg, Christopher Lloyd, Stockard Channing. Playing the eccentric Aunt Hetty to the young Sarah Polley's Sarah Stanley, Burroughs became an icon. She'd be a familiar face on Canadian stages and screens for the rest of her life.

She died here, in Toronto, in 2010. Zal Yanovksy had passed away eight years earlier. Denny Doherty a few years after that. They say even her death was an unconventional experiment. As her stomach cancer slowly killed her, Burroughs made the arrangements for her funeral, said her goodbyes, and surrounded herself with family and friends, facing it all head on. "I never knew it was possible to die so eloquently," Sarah Polley told the Globe and Mail, "breaking down boundaries and rules and storming the gates of experience..."

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I first stumbled across this through the laundromat story, which was in Before The Gold Rush by Nicholas Jennings, which is all about the music scene in Yorkville and on the Yonge Street strip in the '60s. You can buy it here or get it from the library here. Although if you want the Northern District branch copy, you'll have to wait until I'm done with it.

You're probably going to want to read the full Montreal Gazette profile of Jackie Burroughs from 1976, which you can check out here. It's FULL of stuff. (Like: "The other night when I went home in a cab and the taxi driver, who was really beautiful, asked if he could come up. At first I thought, what if he's an axe murderer? Then I thought, well, what the hell, and gave him my phone number.") There are a couple of obituaries with more about her here and here. And a review of a Stratford play she was in with Maggie Smith and Jessica Tandy here.

There's an interview with Michelle Phillips here. And John Phillips here. His post-The Mamas & The Papas legacy has also been rocky — one of his daughters has accused him of having an incestuous relationship with her. There's stuff on Wikipedia about that here. There's more about Denny Doherty here. And Mama Cass here. And Zal Yanovsky here. And the Albert Hotel here. And The Mamas & The Papas here and here.

A couple of years ago, there was an exhibit of work by Zal Yanovksy's Communist father — cartoons and a mural in tribute to Norman Bethune — which you can learn more about here.

I also stumbled over some Road To Avonlea trivia researching this. Like, that Dianne Wiest won an Emmy for a guest appearance on the show. And Faye Dunaway and Michael Yorke and Christopher Lloyd and Christopher Reeve and Stockard Channing all showed up in episodes. So did Ryan Gosling, before he became super-famous, but after he'd been a Mousekeeter and lived at Justin Timberlake's house. You can watch him on the show here.

The Mamas & The Papas wrote a song about how they got together, Creeque Alley. I'm embedding it and then "Do You Believe In Magic?":

You Should Read Making The Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s

Making The Scene

I just finished reading this, easily one of the best books about the '60s I've ever read – in Toronto or anywhere else. It takes a look at the legendary Yorkville scene during that decade, from its early days as a coffee-fueled hangout for Beatniks, through its height as an acid-fueled love-in during the summer of 1967, to its final days and its amphetamine-fueled death. The author, Stuart Henderson, mostly stays away from name-dropping all the famous writers, poets and musicians who emerged from the scene (although I won't: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, The Band, Gordon Lightfoot, Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, early versions of Steppenwolf and Buffalo Springfield... the list goes on and on...) and instead looks at the deeper currents and trends driving the culture of the neighbourhood and its not-so-rosy relationship with the rest of Toronto. It's an absolutely fascinating look at the young people who flocked to Yorkville  – not just hippies and Beatniks, but greasers and bikers and thousands of "weekenders" too – and the story of how they might have lost the battle for the neighbourhood they called home, but in many ways won the war for Toronto, changing our city forever.

You can buy Making The Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s here or get it from our kickass library system here.

William Gibson & The Summer of Love

The Summer of 1967. The Summer of Love. The whole hippie thing is at its height and Yorkville has become one of the biggest hubs for sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll on the continent. Just ten years ago, the first Beatnik coffee shops opened in what was then a quiet, residential neighbourhood – full of rundown Victorian homes, a few art galleries and upscale boutiques. Now, the coffee houses are everywhere, more opening and closing all the time – patios out front; poetry, folk music, go-go dancers, and rock 'n' roll inside. The Penny Farthing even has a pool on its roof. Streets like Cumberland and Yorkville, Hazelton and Scollard overflow with hippies, greasers, and bikers. And it all just keeps getting bigger and busier.

Shaggy-haired kids from all over Canada are hitchhiking across the country, thumbs pointed squarely at those few blocks north of Bloor, between Bay and Avenue Road – those same few blocks that have already been home to a shitload of super-cool people over the last ten years: folk singers like Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot; poets like Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, Milton Acorn and Gwendolyn Macewen; rock stars like Neil Young and The Band, the beginnings of Steppenwolf and Buffalo Springfield and Blood, Sweat and Tears. Hell, even Rick James.

It's not just Canadian kids. Americans have been flocking to Yorkville, too. Some of them come for the scene — for the drugs and music and art and free love — and some for the chance to escape the Draft and the war in Vietnam.

William Gibson came for both reasons. He'd grown up in rural Virginia reading science fiction and the Beats — Ginsberg and Kerouac, but especially William S. Burroughs. One day, they would help influence him to become one of the most celebrated science fiction authors of all-time. But first, they helped influence him to drop out of high school. And with the Draft in full swing, he figured it might be a good idea to convince the authorities that he wasn't really cut out for a stint in the Armed Forces.

"I told them that my one ambition in life was to take every mind-altering substance that existed on the face of the planet," he remembered later. "I just went in and babbled about wanting to be like William Burroughs. And that seemed to do the trick... I went home and bought a bus ticket to Toronto. But I don't like to take too much credit for that having been a political act... It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippie girls and have lots of hashish than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the North Vietnamese people under U.S. imperialism – much more to do with hippie girls and hashish."

Yorkville, 1967

Yorkville had a lot of both.

Apparently, Gibson plunged right in, smoking pot and hash, dropping acid and doing pretty much everything else he could get his hands on. He knew better than to do heroin – thanks to reading Burroughs – but other than that: "The opiates aside, I tried whatever was going. I sort of prided myself on it."

He wasn't alone. That very summer, just a couple of blocks away at the University of Toronto, Yorkville's hippies organized something of a multimedia conference on the benefits of dropping acid. "Perception '67" they called it. Allen Ginsberg came. (He even had breakfast with Marshall McLuhan.) So did one of the Merry Pranksters. Timothy Leary would have been there too, but the government wouldn't let him into the country. And as amazing as the popularity of LSD was, it was nothing compared to pot. Yorkville was awash in marijuana smoke.

Money, on the other hand, was a bit harder to find. There were thousands of kids in the village that summer, especially on the weekends when "weekenders" flooded in from suburbs like Forest Hill. But there were only so many jobs and places to crash. "For a couple of weeks I was essentially homeless," Gibson later told the BBC, "although it was such a delightful, floating, pleasant period that it now seems strange to me to think that I was in fact homeless."

Luckily for him, at least one young entrepreneur saw the popularity of drugs in Yorkville as a new kind of business opportunity. The world's first head shop had opened in San Francisco the year before, followed by one in New York City a few months later. Now, Toronto had a head shop of our own — with an incredibly nerdy name to go along with it: Gandalf's. The store sold pipes and bongs and rolling papers and all sorts of other drug-related paraphernalia. The CBC called it, "A dope fiend's idea of a dream come true." And it seems that at the same time Gibson was looking for a way to pay rent, Gandalf's was looking for a manager. He got the job. And that's how he bankrolled a summer spent living, as he puts it, "in various wonderful sorts of sin".

Of course, all this drug-use and sex and long hair attracted plenty of media attention. The newspapers and television crews had been fascinated by Yorkville since the early '60s — spending most of their time freaking out over the supposed corruption of youth, but also trying to figure out exactly what in the hell all these kids thought they were doing. And so, in September of 1967, the CBC sent a crew into the neighbourhood to interview some hippies.

By an awesome stroke of historical luck, they happened to find William Gibson.

William Gibson in Yorkville, 1967

The video of their news report is posted online in the CBC archives. (I'll link below.) Gibson — in the slow, lazy voice of someone who seems to be stoned off their ass — rambles on about hippie philosophy, free love and the counterculture while he wanders around the neighbourhood. The CBC's narrator, Knowlton Nash, holds him up as a prime example: "a real hippie".

But in truth, by then, Gibson was sick of the whole scene. And with the summer winding down, he was just looking to get enough cash together to be able to move on. So, he says when the CBC showed up offering $500 for an interview, he was happy to lie through his teeth. "[N]othing I'm saying there, at such painful length, is even remotely genuine," he wrote a few years ago. "I'm thoroughly fed up... and want nothing more than a ticket out."

He got it. For the next few years, he'd move around – even go to Woodstock – before returning to Toronto for a while. It was here that he met and married his wife, but they eventually settled in Vancouver. That's where he went to university, got into punk, and started writing the science fiction that would make him famous. They say that not only did he coin the term "cyberspace", but that it's because of him we talk about stuff like "surfing" and "neural implants" too. His 1984 novel, Neuromancer, is still a mainstay of first year syllabuseses. In 1999, the Guardian called him "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades".

By the time he left Yorkville, the scene had already peaked. As bikers and harder drugs became bigger problems and a few cases of hepatitis sparked a media frenzy, the authorities – who had long been calling the scene a "cancer" and "a festering sore in the middle of the city" – seized their opportunity to drive the kids out of the village. The counterculture spread across downtown Toronto, to Kensington Market and Queen West and just down Bloor Street to Rochdale College (until the government shut that down too). Meanwhile, Yorkville was turned into the super-rich-person shopping district it is today. When Gibson came back for a visit a couple of months ago, the Globe and Mail was there. “It’s as though they tore down St. Mark’s Place and built the Trump Tower,” he told them. “My Bohemia is gone.”

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If you're willing to suffer through the two ads per video our national public broadcaster makes you watch you in order to see anything in their archives, can check out the CBC's footage of William Gibson, complete with a couple of other interviews and footage of a women freaking out on a bad trip here — and there's another whole video about Gandalf's here. 

I first learned the nugget of this story thanks to "Making The Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s" by Stuart Henderson. It's easily one of the best books about the '60s I've ever read. You can buy it here or get it from the library here.

There's a feature-length NFB documentary about Yorkville's young people, which, because the NFB fucking rules, you can watch online for free here. York University has a neat virtual exhibit of Yorkville photos from the '60s here. And there's an archive of Toronto Star photos of the neighbourhood here. There's a nice rundown of Yorkville clubs and coffee houses, here, written by Nicholas Jennings, who wrote THE book about Yorkville's music, Before The Gold Rush.

Read that Globe article about William Gibson here. Listen to the BBC interview here. There's another interview I drew from here. And a book about him on Google books here. There also a biographical documentary about him, No Maps For These Territories.

Finally, Gibson has written about Yorkville himself on his blog. You can check out it here. And I will now proceed to quote a bunch of excepts from it and from the stuff he says in No Maps For These Territories.

ON KEANU REEVES AND THE DEATH OF YORKVILLE:

"When I first met Keanu Reeves, and we found ourselves talking about Toronto, he told me that he had played, as a child, in the excavation for the Four Seasons Hotel, on Yorkville Avenue. I was long gone to Vancouver, by then, but had been shocked, on subsequent visits, by the truly remarkable ferocity with which the ambient zone I remembered had been malled over. In retrospect, this had everything to do with Yorkville "Village" having been, in the first place, a developers' simulacrum of the West Village, briefly invaded, in my day, by a social simulacrum of the East Village.

"As the tide of "weekend hippies" washed back out, many of the more organizationally-inclined habitues were sucked up into the astonishingly Ballardian (as in HIGHRISE, it seemed to me) tower of Rochdale College. 

"The genuine ambients swam down into the twisty, virtually ungentrifiable streets of Kensington Market instead, and away from the Cronenbergian, acid-totalitarian creepiness of Rochdale, and I've regarded Toronto, ever since, as a city somehow uniquely blind to its own psychogeography."

ON THE OTHER DRAFT DODGERS:

"When I got to Toronto I actually – to my chagrin somewhat – I found that I really really couldn't handle hanging out with the American draft dodgers. There was too much clinical depression, there was too much suicide, there was too much hard core substance abuse. They were a traumatized lot, those boys, and I just felt like I – you know, I felt frivolous."

ON THE END OF THE "STRAIGHT WORLD" AND THE ROLE OF DRUGS:

"Most of the people – I suppose really everyone that I counted as a close friend – seemed to harbour the unspoken assumption that everything that had gone before us was ending. It was really a very millennial time – far more millennial than this last year of the century. [What did you think was ending?] The straight world. I think that's what I would have told you at the time. But the straight world didn't end. The straight world and the other world bled into one another and produced the world that we live in today. Drugs were absolutely central to that experience, but they weren't essential. They weren't actually essential to it. I only know that in retrospect. At the time I'm sure I would have said that they were – you know, ingesting the right chemical was absolutely essential to the experience. But in retrospect, no, it's simply a matter of being there and being somewhat open to possibilities... Recreational drugs are essentially a wank. And a wank is okay, but you really should know that it's just a wank. And I think that's what we didn't know – to use the generational "we" – and what some of us still don't know."

The Most Hard-Rocking City Of Its Time

Bobbi Lee Justice and the Scepters

It all started in the '50s with the Beatniks. Their scene was centered around Yonge and Gerrard, but they also headed north, across Bloor and into Yorkville, where old Victorian homes were converted into smoke-filled coffee houses and poetry clubs. Then, as the '50s gave way to the '60s, the Beats gave way to the folkies and a new generation took over the Beats' clubs and added their own. Before long, there were dozens of venues all within a few short blocks. You could head south to watch poets like Margaret Atwood and Gwendolyn MacEwen reading at the Bohemian Embassy, walk a few blocks north across Bloor to the Riverboat and catch a Gordon Lightfoot set, then head down the street to the Penny Farthing where Joni Mitchell worked as a waitress when she wasn't playing upstairs.

But there was more than just folk music and poetry. Those were also the years when early rock 'n' roll and soul were taking over the airwaves. And in many of those same Yorkville clubs—along with a string of venues stretching down Yonge Street all the way to King—there were countless bands playing raw, British Invasion- and soul-inspired R&B. They were loud and electric, armed with Hammond organs and New Orleans-style drumming, shrieking and moaning through sets peppered with Motown-ish choreography and matching, three-button suits.

The rock scene had apparently started around the time when Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks moved here from the States in 1958. They were from Arkansas originally, but when Hawkins toured Canada he realized that no one else was playing their brand of music here yet, so they came north. And as one Hawk after another eventually headed home to the US, he hired new, Canadian musicians to replace them. The Hawks—particularly their new guitarist, Robbie Robertson—helped not only to inspire Toronto's teenagers to pick up their own instruments and head downtown, but to establish the city as a mecca for other aspiring musicians from across the continent. Within a few years, there would be so many that people started referring to "The Toronto Sound". Bruce Palmer, who played here before helping to found Buffalo Springfield, called it "the most hard-rocking city of its time".

The Ugly Ducklings. The Paupers. Jackie Shane. Bobbi Lee and the Specters. John and Lee and Checkmates. Dianne Brooks. Grant Smith and the Power. Jack London and the Sparrows. They had legions of fans, lots of groupies, and more than enough drugs to, well, fuel a counterculture. One Toronto band after another climbed its way to the top of the CHUM charts. The "Toronto Sound Show" filled Maple Leaf Gardens for 14 straight hours. And the world's biggest labels and managers showed up, trolling clubs like the Mynah Bird (next door to the Penny Farthing, at 114 Yorkville Ave.) and Friar's Tavern (at Yonge and Dundas, in the building that now houses the Hard Rock Cafe) looking for bands to sign.

And they liked what they found. The Mynah Birds (the house band for the club of the same name) signed to Motown Records. The Ugly Ducklings opened for the Rolling Stones. Later they would land a spot on the legendary Nuggets compilation. The Paupers played the Monterey Pop festival and got picked up by the same manager as Bob Dylan. In fact, you could argue the Yorkville scene was too successful for its own good. One after the other, most of the biggest names in Toronto headed to the States, where they would go on to become some of the most famous musicians in the world. The Hawks started playing with Bob Dylan and became The Band. The Mynah Birds broke up and two of them, Neil Young and Bruce Palmer, headed out to California to start Buffalo Springfield. Their singer, Rick James, ended up in L.A., launching his solo career and recording "Super Freak". Jack London and the Sparrows went to New York and changed their name to Steppenwolf. David Clayton Thomas headed there too, and started Blood, Sweat and Tears.

Meanwhile, back home, the evolution of Yorkville was mirroring the gradual decline of hippie culture in general. The Toronto Sound was evolving from R&B and soul into folk-rock and funk, and the authorities were actively trying to—in their words—"eradicate" the culture. It seems that the scene peaked in the summer of '67 and started going downhill from there. The drugs got harder and biker gangs showed up. Syl Apps, a former Maple Leaf turned hippie-hating Conservative MPP, called Yorkville "a festering sore on the face of the city". The police parked a paddywagon at the corner of Yorkville Avenue and Hazelton every weekend. And they enforced a 10pm curfew for anyone under the age of 18. Then, when a few cases of hepatitis cropped up, the public panicked. Residents fled the neighbourhood, police refused to walk their beats and the Star started throwing around words like "epidemic". There were only ever 32 cases, almost all of them in people who shared needles. But it didn't matter. Developers were brought in to demolish the clubs and build upscale apartment buildings in their place. Protests ended in beatings and arrests. And when the scene was driven out of Yorkville and down Bloor into Rochdale College, the authorities followed them, shutting the school down, and then literally dragging the last few stubborn hippies out the building, welding the door shut behind them.

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I'm going to have to write more posts about some other Yorkville stories soon. Like about when Joni Mitchell gave her daughter up for adoption. Or how Neil Young and Rick James started the Mynah Birds. Or how Bob Dylan discovered the Band. And I've already written a post about Rochdale College, which you can read here.

The Star has a bunch of good photos of Yorkville in the '60s here. And there's a great one of the Penny Farthing (where Joni Mitchell worked and played) here. Plus a couple of John and Lee and the Checkmates here and here. Spacing's got a nice write up on the death of Yorkville here. You can read about how the Paupers eventually fell apart here. The CBC has got a cool video about all those hippies here and there's an NFB video here.

Below, I'll post a video of John and Lee and the Checkmates playing their version of the Jr. Walker and the All-Stars' hit, "Shotgun", at Friar's Tavern. But there are a whole slew of songs on YouTube that, if you like early R&B and soul at all, you should definitely check out, so I've made a playlist of some of my favourites, which you can listen to here.


Update: In the comments section, Dacks has posted a link to a fascinating Radio 2 doc bout Jackie Shane. It's an hour-long and you can listen to it here, which you should, not just because it fills in some of the history of the clubs on Yonge, but because Shane—who was a cross-dressing soul singer who came up here from the States in the '60s—has a pretty amazing story.