1982 (34 page)

Bob spent most of his time sitting at the upright piano in 273. He would teach classes, lead the school orchestra, and
conduct the choir and the band from his perch at the piano. He was a very good piano player. But we’d also heard he had been a fine drummer as a student at Humber College. He seldom got behind the drum kit at Thornlea. On the only occasion I witnessed him picking up the sticks, it was clear he still had the chops. Bob was a jazz drummer in the Buddy Rich tradition. That meant he held his left drumstick in the cross-position on the snare drum. This was another reason Bob was cool.

It was positive being in the presence of Bob. He seemed to exist in a perennially jovial state. I only once saw Bob get angry and lose his temper. We were singing “Africa” by Toto in Vocal Group when I was in Grade 10, and one of the rhythmically challenged singers was tapping offbeat on the top of the piano while Bob was playing. I could see that Bob was getting angry at the tapping. Midway through “Africa,” Bob suddenly stopped playing and slammed the piano cover down over the keys.

“If you’re going to tap along, make sure you do it in time!” Bob was steaming mad. He didn’t even say “shoo-er.”

I’d never seen him like that. And it didn’t make sense that a normal person would become so bothered by a rhythmic transgression. That’s when I knew he was a real drummer. He was badass about rhythm. That’s when I knew Bob was one of us.

In November of 1981, I saw a posting outside the music room inviting students to join the Thornlea Vocal Group. The group comprised a small collection of the best singers from different grades at our school who would get together and work on songs to be performed at school assemblies. Bob was the leader of the group and the teacher in charge. I just assumed that no other secondary institution had an official vocal group
like ours. We were an arts school, after all. I later learned that in other places such groups were referred to as “glee clubs.” That never really made sense to me. Singers aren’t always filled with glee. They can be quite morose. But joining the morose club probably didn’t have the right ring to it. School board trustees and advisors would likely not want to hear about a morose club. So it was the Thornlea Vocal Group. That seemed like a much more appropriate name. And Vocal Group wasn’t easy to get into. Or rather, it was easy to get into, but it wasn’t easy to build up the guts to ask to be involved.

By December, I started attending Vocal Group practices in the music room. I’d been tentative about joining for fear I wasn’t good enough and had approached Bob for his advice after school one day. He was as encouraging as ever.

“Shoo-er … you’ll fit in just fine in Vocal Group … shoo-er,” Bob said. “Oh, you should do it. Shoo-er.”

I was one of the youngest and skinniest in the group, and I tried to sing quieter on some days so that no one would hear me. That way, I wouldn’t stand out. Most of them likely didn’t know I had been in the Wingnuts and sung “The Jean Genie” the year before. And none of them really knew I was the guy that did the announcements each morning.

Thornlea Vocal Group assembled for practice in the music room two or three times a week. There were about fifteen core members, and many of them were older blond girls who had perfect noses. Most blond girls with perfect noses want to be pop stars. At least, at some point they do. They assume that because they have blond hair and perfect noses they are more likely to become a star. This assumption is based on the fact that they actually are more likely to achieve stardom with
their perfect noses and blond hair. So they decide to focus on becoming celebrities. That was definitely true at Thornlea. Everyone took things quite seriously, and everyone also wanted to be a great singer, like Irene Cara from
Fame
. This may explain why we ended up doing a lot of songs popularized by Irene Cara from
Fame
.
Fame
was a movie that had become a TV show that had become a musical. It was about trying to achieve fame by singing and dancing. The message of
Fame
was that you had to work hard for fame, and that if you work hard you would get fame. Maybe. And also that working hard meant breaking into song and dance on the desks of your classroom at any random time.

In Vocal Group, the song “Out Here on My Own” from
Fame
had become one of the staples of our repertoire. I had taken a descending harmony at the chorus section of that ballad for my contribution in the group. It’s the part that features the lyrics about closing your eyes so you can be with that special someone. I closed my eyes when we sang that part to show I was serious. Serious singers often closed their eyes. I’d seen Bowie closing his eyes in the black-and-white video for the song “Wild Is the Wind.” Sometimes, closing your eyes and looking forlorn made the listener realize you meant what you were singing. So I closed my eyes often.

In Thornlea Vocal Group, we also did the song “Fame” from the musical
Fame
. And we regularly worked through a version of a tune called “Higher and Higher” that Rita Coolidge had made popular in the late ’70s. We didn’t do any New Wave songs. I once brought in a song by the Cure, but Bob didn’t seem to think that was appropriate. Real singers didn’t do New Wave. Except for Bowie. But we didn’t do any Bowie.

Here is a short list of songs we performed in Thornlea Vocal Group in 1982:

“Fame” (from
Fame
)

“Out Here on My Own” (from
Fame
)

“What I Did for Love” (from
A Chorus Line
)

“Higher and Higher”

“I Sing the Body Electric” (from
Fame
)

As you can see, there was a lot of interest in singing songs from
Fame
.

The Thornlea Vocal Group’s gigs were limited to playing on the school grounds, at first. That changed in the spring of 1982. In March, we were told about the biggest show to be booked in Vocal Group history. Bob announced that we would be doing a concert at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre in mid-May. It was huge news. The concert was to be creatively called “The Thornlea Vocal Group in Concert at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre!”

The Harbourfront gig was scheduled to last about forty-five minutes and was open to the general public. It wasn’t clear why any member of the Toronto general public would want to make it a priority to see an amateur high school vocal group sing a forty-five-minute concert featuring various selections from
Fame
, but that didn’t matter. We knew this was a major show for us. And we knew there would be parents and other students in attendance. Bob suggested we would do seven songs from our Thornlea Vocal Group repertoire as an ensemble, plus a version of “Out Here on My Own” that would be led by Debbie Drew singing the Irene Cara solo bit at the
front. Debbie Drew was a fine young singer who was only in Grade 9 like me. She had been singing the solo part of the Irene Cara ballad since we’d started practising it. Everyone talked about how the Harbourfront concert was going to be Debbie Drew’s “big break.” No one really explained how performing for a few parents and peers would amount to a big break. But this was a public concert. That’s what was important. And finally, Bob also declared that he wanted the show to end with a co-ed duet as the finale. Bob revealed that he had recruited Kim Richardson to sing with us. This was another major coup.

Kim Richardson was too good for the Thornlea Vocal Group. I don’t mean she was pretentious. I mean she was really too talented to be wasting time with the rest of us. While she would graciously come and sing with us at some practices, she didn’t need to be there. Kim Richardson was a year or two older than me, and she was the best singer at Thornlea. She may have been the best singer in Canada. She may still be. Her mother is a famous jazz and theatre singer named Jackie Richardson. I would later become very close friends with Kim and know her mom as Auntie Jackie. Kim had a tremendous gift. She could’ve sung any kind of music she wanted. But Kim liked to rock.

Kim was a fan of Van Halen and had pictures of the band members all over her locker. Van Halen were a rock group that insisted on wearing tight spandex and leather outfits to go with their monster guitar and drum riffs. Van Halen usually looked ridiculous. Sometimes they wore bandanas over random parts of their skin-tight clothing. This never made any sense, but it was high fashion in the ’80s. These sartorial transgressions were balanced by the fact that Eddie Van Halen was a brilliant
rock guitarist. And the band undoubtedly had a facility for writing catchy rock-pop songs. Kim loved Van Halen. She dressed in leopard-print clothing and tight pants the way the Van Halen lead singer, David Lee Roth, did. Kim was tall and had really, really big breasts. When she wore her tight Van Halen T-shirts, her breasts were emphasized, and it was hard not to look at them, even though it was not right to be looking at them. Kim started a band with three of the better rock musicians from Grade 12 at Thornlea and they called themselves MARZ. The name consists of the first letter of each member’s last name.

Here is a tip for you about naming rock bands: Every band in the world thinks about naming themselves using the first letter of each member’s last name. It’s like a reflex. It’s the first thing most bands think of, because most bands are usually a bit stupid. But then very few bands actually do it, because it’s a bit stupid. The band can end up being called “GMALST” or something. That’s hard to market. But MARZ did it, and it sounded cool. Kim was the
R
and Paul Zammit was the
Z
. Paul was a Jewish kid with a giant Afro, and he was a meticulously good drummer. Everyone called him Zammit, which even sounded like the name of a good drummer. MARZ was the best band at Rock Nite at the Thornlea gymnasium. Hussein, the head of Rock Nite, was also a drummer, and he made sure to program MARZ to perform last, because he knew Kim and Zammit were the best.