1982 (9 page)

Not surprisingly, the Siouxsie and the Banshees show was a particularly challenging affair. Murray and I were clearly the youngest kids there. In retrospect, we were probably the only kids there. Siouxsie and the Banshees had dark lighting and ripped clothing and everyone in the audience was crammed close to the stage and smoking. The Siouxsie and the Banshees drummer’s name was Budgie. It was cool to have a name like Budgie. Everything about Siouxsie and the Banshees was cool.

The last song Siouxsie played was called “Arabian Knights,” from their album
Juju
. It’s a goth-ish, New Romantic classic. It features a catchy chorus refrain that repeats the line “I heard a rumour.” Then, after Siouxsie sings about hearing a rumour a few times in each chorus, she refers to a girl and asks what has been done to her.

That night, Siouxsie had been onstage for only about forty-five minutes when she decided to end the show after that song. I wasn’t sure why. I concluded that playing for only forty-five minutes was what real New Wave artists with integrity did. But Siouxsie didn’t seem very happy with things. As I remember, while Siouxsie was walking offstage, she sneered into the microphone and said, “Yeah, I heard a rumour. I heard a rumour that we played here tonight. We didn’t. Fuck off!”

Siouxsie had screamed that last part into the mic. It seemed quite antagonistic. But a funny thing happened when Siouxsie told us all to fuck off. The crowd cheered in appreciation. I started to cheer, too, because all the older punks in their twenties were doing it. But it didn’t seem like a very nice sentiment. In fact, it seemed like the opposite of what you’re
supposed to do when you’re saying goodnight to an audience that’s paid hard-earned money to see you play.

We’d never thought of telling people to fuck off when we did our Wingnuts gig at the junior-high gym in Grade 8. And Dan Hill hadn’t told us to fuck off at his concert the year before. The Dan Hill. He had been onstage for at least seventy-five minutes longer than Siouxsie.

But Siouxsie was cool. And she wore a lot of eyeliner. I probably could’ve worn purple eyeliner to the Siouxsie and the Banshees gig and been accepted. Jane Decker wasn’t at the Siouxsie show. I imagined myself telling Jane Decker to fuck off when she pointed at my purple eyeliner in the hallway. Then I imagined the audience cheering. I was finding my crowd.

3

“I LOVE ROCK’N ROLL” – JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS

T
he prized concert to go to at the end of my Grade 9 year was the Police Picnic at the CNE Grandstand in downtown Toronto. The headliners of the Police Picnic were a band called the Police. You probably know the Police. You know them because they’ve got a formidable back catalogue of massive pop hits like “Every Breath You Take.” And you know them because they acrimoniously split up and after that only talked to each other through lawyers. And because the lead singer, Sting, became a big solo star and started saving rainforests. And because guitarist Andy Summers began taking interesting photographs. And you know them because Stewart Copeland is one of the best drummers ever. And because they reunited twenty years after they split up and did a heavily promoted world tour and charged $250 a ticket and then acrimoniously split up again. Now people say they only talk to each other through lawyers once more.

You probably know the Police for all of these reasons. But at the time, the Police were a ska/reggae/New Wave band
from the UK that had become alternative music sensations. They were not yet global megastars. They had just released their fourth album. The previous year, they’d started an annual multi-band show in Toronto called the Police Picnic. It would end up taking place for three summers in a row.

I had first learned about the Police when Jasmine Leung gave me their second album,
Reggatta de Blanc
, as a gift for my thirteenth birthday. It was a gift that would have a major impact on me. But I didn’t know that at the time. I really didn’t know much about the Police, either. But I pretended I did. I thanked Jasmine Leung the way you thank people when you’ve received something you really wanted. “No way! This is great!” That’s how I responded. I knew to say “This is great!” even though I wasn’t sure it was great. You see, beyond getting the sense that I should know who the Police were, and that this was a cool gift, it was important to act thankful and polite. I learned this from my mother.

My mother was always very polite. She would react with enthusiasm when she was the recipient of a gift or kind gesture regardless of what she actually thought. For instance, when we got a yearly Christmas basket of jams and biscuits from the Polish people next door, my mother would act surprised. It was strange that she acted surprised, given that the basket was an annual gift that we anticipated. But my mother said it was important to be polite.

The Capetskis were the family who lived directly to the west of us on our suburban street in Thornhill. There was a hedge that ran between our houses, and my father and Mr. Capetski would take turns trimming it. Mr. and Mrs. Capetski had come to Canada from Switzerland many years earlier, but their
families were originally from Poland, so my father called them “the Polish people next door.” He called them this even though he knew their names. My father would often identify people this way. Perhaps he thought it was helpful. For instance, when I was in Grade 3, he called my best friend, Aris, “the Greek boy.” Or he would refer to the friendly lady who ran the Mac’s Milk store near us as “the good Chinese woman.” He didn’t seem to say these things in a derogatory way. I assumed it was just the way his generation identified others.

When my sister, Jila, and I got older and more sensitive to these things, we would question my father about his unnecessary need to take note of everyone’s race.

“Dad! Why are you pointing out that she’s Chinese? What is the relevance of the lady at Mac’s Milk being Chinese?”

My father never quite understood the problem.

“But she ees Chinese. You say she ees not Chinese? She ees!

You want me to say she ees Greek?”

The thing is, technically, my father’s answer was totally logical, even if we knew it was an excuse. This was a debate we would never win. In an interesting twist, sometimes my father referred to people from England in a more omnibus way as “
kharejee-ah
.” That’s the Farsi word for foreigners. This was an odd moniker for my dad to use for English immigrants, because we probably fit the profile of foreigners more closely than they did. And anyway, we had also come from England, although our background was Iranian, and my father proudly made a point of identifying himself as Canadian. But usually the labels were related to the country of origin. And so the Capetskis were “the Polish people next door.” They had two kids about the age of my sister and me.

My mother was very polite, and she demonstrated her politeness each year with the Polish people next door. Not that she had to try. It came naturally to her. My mother was very nice. The Polish people next door would deliver us our annual Christmas basket of jams and biscuits. They would do it in person. They would gather as a family on our porch and my mother would act surprised, because that was polite. Maybe they all came to the porch just to witness my mother’s ersatz surprised response.

“No way! This is great! We love these biscuits!”

My mother’s appreciation always sounded very genuine.

But some of the biscuits had orange bits in them, and no one in our family really liked those. My mother would subsequently bundle up the jams and biscuits in new wrapping paper and give them to our relatives who lived in Don Mills. I would later learn that this was called “re-gifting.” We didn’t tell the Polish people next door about the re-gifting. In fact, we would reciprocate with a Christmas basket for them as well. It never quite made sense that we were exchanging baskets of items we weren’t sure our neighbours liked instead of buying ourselves our own baskets full of things we knew we’d want. But it was nice to receive presents. Just like the present I got from Jasmine Leung. I didn’t re-gift my first Police album. It quickly became one of my favourites.

Reggatta de Blanc
had a blue-tinted cover photo featuring the three members of the Police looking cool. They also looked remarkably similar with their dyed-blond hair. It didn’t take me long to become a big fan of the Police. A year after Jasmine Leung gave me that album, I started a new band with Murray (ex–rhythm guitarist for the Wingnuts) and we did a cover of
“Roxanne” from the debut Police disc,
Outlandos d’Amour
. I was the singer in our new band and sometimes I also played drums. This group was much cooler than the other ensemble I was playing in, the Thornhill Community Band, led by the stern lead trombone player, Mr. Margison. Our new Grade 9 rock band with Murray was democratic. We were called Urban Transit. And amongst other material, we did Police songs.

Even at the age of fourteen, I was too much of a baritone to reach the high notes that Sting could hit. “Roxanne” probably wasn’t a very smart song for us to try to cover. But I had found a green army jacket at a second-hand store that looked like the one Sting wore. I had seen Sting wear it in a live concert video from Japan on
The NewMusic
. I figured that at the very least I looked like Sting when I sang “Roxanne.” One problem was that Sting had straight blond hair like Wendy and That Chris from across the street. He also had a small perky nose. It would have been very hard for me to actually be Sting.

I’ve constructed a point-form list of things I would’ve needed to do to become more like Sting when I was in Grade 9:

play bass

sing higher

dye hair blond and straighten blond hair

stay out of sun (become whiter)

wear green army jacket