B009HOTHPE EBOK (4 page)

Suddenly the piston rod goes right through the roof—
wham!
—and pieces of the car were falling all over the highway. There was an exit off the bridge right there and I managed to pull off onto it. Luckily, right near where the car had self-destructed, was a place called Café Champlain, a French restaurant on a little island under the bridge—its parking lot was a well-known lovers’ lane. I rolled the car off the highway, down the exit. It went down below the bridge, so I could just coast down there. It ended up on this little island in the middle of the bridge. And I just slid into a slot in lover’s lane—the car by now was smoking like a chimney. I’m sitting there going, “Goddamn, now what?” when suddenly I see the flashing red beacon in the rearview mirror. The cops! The RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, big guys. They piled me in their squad car. You’d think I’d be somewhat relieved, but all I could think about was what was going to happen when I got home. I knew that’s exactly where they were going to take me and what was waiting for me there. The police knocked on the front door of my house. Down the stairs came my poor mother, still thinking I’m asleep in my bed. She was standing there with me squeezed between two humongous cops, staring at me like she’d seen a ghost. She doesn’t even want to hear the story.

Dad beat the living Jesus out of me on my ass with a belt. They sent me to juvenile court; I stood there trembling in front of the judge, wondering why my dad had subjected me to this. Little did I know that Dad had cooked up a plan with my uncle Mike who was a lawyer and eventually became a Queen’s Counsel. Uncle Mike knew the judge and set the whole situation up to teach me a lesson. The sentence was going to be a serious one. I was to be sent to reform school. It scared the shit out of me.

After that my mom decided it was no use trying to make me stay home and go to bed early, so when I went to the clubs she’d go with me to make sure I kept out of trouble. She would go out with me on school nights and my dad would never know about it. But soon people began drifting into my dad’s restaurant late in the evening and telling him they had seen his son Paul singing at some club. “You what?” At first he got mad and gave Mom hell for letting me out on a school night. But that didn’t do any good, either.

I just kept going over to the Quebec side of the Ottawa River to perform at Glenlee Golf and Country Club. I’d cross over the bridge to Quebec and make $20, $30, $40 a night. I’d imitate Elvis doing “All Shook Up” with a guitar and the wiggle. I gained a lot of experience that way and got my wings as a performer. I was very much the ham doing impressions and all that. So you could say when it came time to go out on the road and promote my first record I didn’t exactly have to come out of any shell. I look at Elton John, The Beatles, people who have made it through the years. And they all put in about two to three thousand hours of experience before they made it. They really worked their asses off at little clubs, halls, gymnasiums. Those are the places where you find out what you are made of. You don’t make it right out of the box—nobody ever does. You really need all that experience before you become something—you’ve got to put in that mileage. The Beatles in Hamburg, doing six shows a day.

As a kid, I saw Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray at the clubs a lot. I loved to imitate Frankie Laine—that’s how I started out, impersonating these guys. Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine both had very distinctive voices which made them easy to do. My specialty was mimicking singers and actors. That’s why I was such a huge fan of Sammy Davis Jr.—a lot of his early work was impersonation. He’d do Tony Bennett, a lot of different singers and actors. He did uncanny imitations of Frankie Laine singing “Jezebel” or Billy Eckstine crooning, “It Isn’t Fair,” and so on and after I caught his act I started doing them, too. I wanted to be able to do it all.

Johnnie Ray was one of the first people I wanted to see when I went to the clubs—he was all the rage back then. I saw him first at the Desert Inn and Copacabana in New York City. You have to understand, this guy was like Sinatra in terms of his intensity. His presence on stage was magnetic. From the Copacabana to Vegas people queued up around the block to see him. His teenage following was huge. Screaming girls. He had a hearing aid, so he’d developed this very appealing style of singing with one hand up to his ear—it was very effective, people went nuts. I was a big fan of this guy; I had all his records, I used to do all of his songs.

His real name was Francesco Paolo LoVecchio, and he had been a huge star since the thirties with a big dance band, a big guy with a really long career—seventy-five years. But a performer’s life is an illusion and when the mask slips you get disenchanted. I went to see Frankie Laine one night at the Dunes Hotel in Vegas and the night I was there, he did some great songs: “Jezebel,” “That Lucky Old Sun (Just Rolls Around Heaven All Day),” “Georgia on My Mind,” and “That’s My Desire.” He had a riveting act and got a standing ovation. At the end of his show he leaned over, ringside, and this woman put her hand in his hair and his toupee came off in her hand. And I was going, “Wow! This is major, man. I just saw Frankie Laine lose his hair!”

Johnnie Ray was very close to a woman named Dorothy Kilgallen, a huge columnist, the biggest there was. She was on the TV show,
What’s My Line?
She and Ray had some kind of an affair. There was something going on between them—what nobody quite knew because he was gay. So that was odd, too. Sometimes I’d meet these guys at my father’s restaurant and sometimes they’d come to my home, and that’s where I really dug information out of them.

The Platters, The Four Aces, The Four Lads, The Rover Boys, and Tony Bennett were a few of the performers I met at my dad’s restaurant or later in the Gatineau Club or the Chaudière Rose Room. I would always wrangle my way backstage, using some outrageous story. I’d ask them a hundred questions about show business. I was fearless. I’d buttonhole stars like Tony Bennett or Buddy Greco, who had a bunch of swing albums out, and ask them for advice on how to make the big time. They’d always give me something, like “Your first talent isn’t going to be singing, kid, it’s going to be taking rejection—just don’t let it get you down.” Or they’d say something witty (“It’s just vaudeville, kid, unless you get lucky and offend someone, and then it’s art.”). So I’d go away with a glow, thinking I’d just made contact with the guys who made the magic and learned one or two of their tricks.

The summer I was fourteen I went on a vacation with my parents down to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where we visited a friend of my dad’s. He was a fisherman with lobster traps, but the important thing about him—from my point of view—was he knew a guy who had a nightclub: Johnny’s Club it was called, a little local place where they held amateur contests where you could go and sing. Anyone could perform there—once. When the guy saw me do my act, he flipped. He took me right into the hotel dining room and had me put on my routine. I sang with the band and the guests started to throw money on the stage. By the time we left, I had about $38 in my pockets from tips. People threw everything from pennies to five-dollar bills on the stage. After that episode, even my dad was starting to get sold on my crazy ideas.

Meanwhile, back home, our gigs with the Bobby Soxers got few and far between. We did a couple of songs on the radio, and then it just started to get tough, what with schooling and so on and eventually I decided to go out on my own.

I sang in church, I did some choir singing at Fisher Park High School, anything I could do to keep me ambitious about singing. That was my passion. School was okay, I got good grades when I wanted to, but there was this burning and yearning in me to perform—whatever that thing is that drives you on. Wherever I could sing in any fashion, or get my arms around a little more experience I would do it.

I continued to make appearances at local clubs and the occasional local TV program. I’d pick up $10 or $15 a night for doing impressions of Elvis, Frankie Laine, or Johnnie Ray. Later that year I won an amateur contest, which brought me a week’s engagement and a chance to mingle with more seasoned entertainers.

I’m still in school, meanwhile, doing odd jobs at the
Ottawa Citizen.
The editor, Thomas Finn, told me I should study shorthand at school so I could take detailed notes fast when I went out on an assignment. The class consisted of me, forty girls, and a friend of mine, Fred Tommy, who came from a big skiing family—they’d won Olympic medals. But my mind was obviously elsewhere because I couldn’t concentrate and after a couple of weeks I got thrown out of shorthand class. I was upset at first, but then I realized I wasn’t ever going to have a chance to use shorthand.

Actually, getting thrown out of shorthand class was one of the best things that happened to me. I started taking music lessons in school—I studied drums, trumpet, and music theory, but I wanted more music instruction and so I asked my mother if she could find someone I could take music lessons with. As it happened a Mrs. Winnifred Rees lived right around the corner. She had amazingly curly hair and was very, very English and terribly proper. We’d have tea and I’d sit and practice my scales, and then, when I saw her attention drift, I’d slip into playing a modified boogie-woogie on the piano, a sort of
oom-boom-boom boom bamalam,
swinging into rock ’n’ roll beat. That would wake her right up. She’d say, “No, no, no, no, no, Paul, we’ll have none of that.” With Mrs. Rees it was strictly classical music: Beethoven, Chopin, and Brahms.

I spent a lot of time with Mrs. Rees, starting with the scales and the classical music and all that stuff, which I actually found to be okay, although it was pretty boring at times, especially after I got seriously into the pop music I was hearing on the radio. As someone once said, sending a child to piano lessons to become a better pianist is like sending a kid to the Colosseum to become a better Christian. I’m impatient in general, so naturally I wanted to get cooking once I found my chops and soon I started just banging away, trying out different rhythms and tunes. I learned to pick out melodies on the piano and the guitar. Many of the melodies I began tinkering with on the piano I adapted from old Middle Eastern music my parents put me in contact with. I’d hear these melodies in church, at festivals, and on records around the house. I’d just got into that minor key mode, and once I realized I could actually write songs myself, I began by applying minor key melodies to rhyming schemes I’d found in the works of Shakespeare. That’s when it got really exciting: I started doing my own stuff.

Mrs. Rees would say, “Come back next week” and I’d think, “Ohhhh, God, how many weeks do I have to do this?” At one point I thought of going to Juilliard, but it probably wouldn’t have worked out—I couldn’t even get through Mrs. Rees’s lessons! Anyway, soon enough my hit record mania got in the way. It was “Roll over Beethoven, tell Tchaikovsky the news…” and that was the end of my music lessons. I wish I’d gone on, though, so that I could have played better, had a better grasp of it all. But I’ve noticed a curious thing. Most singers today are stylists and, aside from the guitar wizards, not many of them are that accomplished as musicians. Conversely, virtuoso musicians and most great arrangers do not make good songwriters. They’re too complicated, they don’t write for the masses. The secret to song writing is simplicity. You should be able to play the melody using only one finger; that’s a hit, you just bang it out with one finger.

My basement was the place: piano up against the north wall and me banging away and writing and writing and writing and making notes and memorizing and more memorizing. I sang all my early songs to my mother first. After work she’d hear me banging on the piano and come down every now and then and sit next to me and ask me, “What are you writing?” I’d sing her “You Are My Destiny” and “Don’t Gamble with Love” and tell her, “Mom, this is for you, I wrote these for you.” She would be incredibly touched, a glow would come over her face and tears would stream down her face out of happiness. She was so thrilled with my writing, that all her faith in me—like protecting me from my dad and buying me records—had come to fruition. When she heard those songs she was so moved, she could see it was all worth it, she could see my dreams were coming true, and she was overcome with joy and pride in me.

While taking piano lessons and getting the sense that I wanted to write songs, I was still going to high school, of course, and taking a lot of compulsory general education classes. This meant I was reading books, lots of books. I had a report due on a book I read that summer called
Prester John,
written by John Buchan, who had been the ex-governor general of Canada and was a famous novelist (he wrote
The Thirty-Nine Steps,
among a lot of other books). The town in which the book’s story took place was called Blaauwildebeestefontein—it’s a place in Africa that really exists. I was fascinated with the name. I guess I’d been building up to gradually writing a song, playing piano, setting my poems to music, and suddenly I found myself writing “Blau Wilde De Veest Fontaine,” which was really my first legitimate song, a lead sheet, my first here-I-come-world song.

The important thing for me at that time, coming from a small town, was that I felt very frustrated, and I knew that I would go on being that way until I could get things in focus. My daydream goal was to have a glamorous lifestyle, and to realize everything that was not affordable to me in Ottawa. Canada was in the shadow of the United States, where everything was happening—and what was happening in music was R&B. What you have to understand was that the ’50s was the preface to rock ’n’ roll music. I was listening to Chuck Berry, Fats Domino. Country music had not really come out of Nashville yet and R&B remained the foundation of pop music until it was “white-ified” by those of us who took from it and gave it to the masses. What we were all listening to was R&B. The sanitized rock ’n’ roll I and the other white singers were creating was far more acceptable, because there’d been a lot of controversy about rock ’n’ roll and its so-called crude rhythms. We listened to Elvis Presley in high school, and his music had its roots in R&B, and country music. I remember being impressed by Elvis, but when you’re as young as I was, with my background, I just didn’t have the means or opportunity to do what Elvis did, which was go record your own songs in a little studio in Memphis. On the other hand, curiosity was something I had plenty of, along with a burning desire to get to New York whatever it took. I guess I did have a huge dose of crazy optimism, too, because most people don’t actually think they’re going to win a contest and go see New York City from collecting soup-can labels! And yet, that’s what happened to me.