B009HOTHPE EBOK (3 page)

It was probably around the age of twelve that I got seriously smitten with the idea that I myself might get involved in the music business. Music soon became an obsession with me; I was drawn to it like a bug to a bright light.

When I found out that I had a voice, that I could carry I tune, I started out in the great American tradition of impersonating contemporary stars, crooning idols like Perry Como, Frankie Laine, Sinatra, and Elvis Presley in his ballad mode.

I remember in 1956 the big kick was color television—Pat Boone was all over the place as well as Elvis Presley. “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Hound Dog,” and “Love Me Tender” were the songs I was singing. Guy Mitchell doing “Singing the Blues,” Frankie Lymon’s “Why Do Fools Fall in Love”—that is the stuff that I was listening to, along with Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and that crowd.

Different people, singing different styles, from Presley to country to rhythm and blues to doo-wop groups—it all fed into my brain. After doing that for a couple of years, I absorbed these styles and either subliminally or consciously incorporated them into my own. Once I started finding my way around the piano, what came out was not so much a copy of any one of them as a blend of all of them—which eventually turned into my own style. I think I acquired my vocal chops first, and then once my writing developed I could say, “Okay, here’s my stamp. Here’s the best I can do with that.” It was a case of constantly evolving, week by week, picking up whatever was happening, listening to the radio and generally being the prototypical fan, studying songs and imitating performers whenever I could.

When early rock ’n’ roll came along I could do that easy. I was very influenced and a big fan of all the music that was happening. Bill Haley and His Comets with “Rock Around the Clock”—at fourteen I could imitate them, no problem. I sang the songs of Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Pat Boone, and Perry Como. When rhythm and blues groups were the rage I could do them, too. Then along came the white R&B emulators like The Crew-Cuts and The Four Aces and The Rover Boys. Pat Boone would copy Little Richard, and there were other groups copying Little Willie John, The Moonglows, and so on.

I began to think, “Wow, what if I could perform covers of these songs; that would be cool! Next thought: “I should start a group!” I ran into a couple of kids from Fisher Park High School who sang—Gerry Barbeau and Ray Carriere—and we’d sit in my basement, learn the latest songs, and harmonize together. At that point we formed a vocal group called the Bobby Soxers. We’d hitchhike back and forth to colleges in twenty-below weather for twenty or thirty bucks. Then we got a gig in a traveling fair in the summer. Every city in Canada had one, with Ferris wheels and hot-dog stands. There was a big fair that summer of 1956, George Hamid’s World of Mirth Fair, with rides, shoot-the-balloons, corn on the cob, and cotton candy.

The fair traveled with a woman named Dixie Allen, who was partners with Hamid, the guy who owned the outfit, and she ran a cabaret as part of the fair called Club 18. It was in the midway, right next to the sideshow with all the freaks. Perfect! Club 18 was an attraction where they had “exotic dancers”—in other words, scantily dressed girls with pasties on their nipples wiggling suggestively, but in between, while the girls changed, they’d either have a musical act or a comedian. I talked Dixie Allen into hiring us. I told her we had this group the Bobby Soxers. “Why don’t you let us do all the current hits between the dancers? We’ll be great!” They gave us the job ’cause we were local kids. We did songs like “Happy Baby” by Bill Haley and His Comets, which was on the B-side of “Dim, Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere),” “Down by the Riverside” by The Four Lads, and “Young Love” by Sonny James. I used to do some Hank Williams stuff, too, like “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Jambalaya.” I’ve always liked country music. I think it’s the purest form of American music: great stories, very honest and basic. And when we weren’t performing I’d go sit on a crate and peel potatoes and onions to make a little extra pocket money.

That’s where I got my first chops: going on between exotic dancers. We were all too young to go into the main part of the club itself so I couldn’t flirt with the dancers. I used to hang out in the dressing room and dig holes in the walls with the pocket knife I carried around with me so I could ogle the girls getting undressed in their changing room. That was my cheap thrills at the amusement park.

We were pulling down $35 for the week’s work—which seemed like a fortune to us in those days. Then George Hamid forgot about me until I was proposed as the headline attraction at Hamid’s Steel Pier in Atlantic City a few years later in 1960. The price my manager Irvin Feld quoted to him was $3,500. Hamid exploded. “What do you mean $3,500? I had this guy for $35 with two other kids thrown in.”

Other than my wild dreams of fame, I was a fairly average Ottawa kid. As a teenager I was smaller than my classmates and overweight. I went to Fisher Park High School, and even though I played on the local hockey team, I knew by age fourteen that I wasn’t going to go any further. Unlike my uncles, Louie and Johnny, who continued to play hockey, I became a cheerleader. I was an avid hockey fan—still am. Later on, after I’d had a few hits I’d get to go out on the ice with all the hockey players in Detroit to do the warm-ups—Gordie Howe, Sid Abel, and those guys. Gordie Howe was with the Detroit Red Wings; he was Wayne Gretzky’s idol. Up in Montreal I hung out with Wayne and his girlfriend before it all hit for him. I’ve got the pictures! I saw him go through his whole transition from local hero to international idol. I still see him from time to time. I love hockey, it’s a far more interesting game than football. With football, there’s basically only twelve minutes of action when you clock it, out of the whole game. With hockey, these guys are on the move every minute—they have to be, they’re on skates! Hockey became such a passion for me that ultimately I got involved in buying the Ottawa Senators. But I obviously wasn’t cut out to be a hockey player.

Hockey players from the East Coast used to go to Lake Tahoe to practice, and one time in the ’70s while I was working at Harrah’s—Bill Harrah’s place, big gaming mogul, up in Lake Tahoe—I got a call from the bellman saying, “I have members of a hockey team in the lobby, and they want to talk to you.”

“How many?”

“Forty people.”

“Who?”

Turned out to be the Montreal Canadiens. They did all their practicing up in Lake Tahoe, while on the West Coast run of games. I got them all tickets and brought them to the show.

Initially I thought I’d pursue a career in journalism and from ages thirteen thru fifteen, took typing and studied English literature. I ran around and did odd errands at the
Ottawa Citizen,
wrote some short stories, and won some awards for my poems and stories in school. My next plan was to lift lines from Shakespeare and make them into song lyrics. All this sounds industrious and precocious but I wasn’t exactly a model citizen, not at all. I had my share of run-ins; you know, tearing down lilac trees, running away from home. My dad was the disciplinarian of the family—not that it did him that much good. I was headstrong and hell-bent on following my own crazy schemes. But I could always count on Mom—she was always there to make excuses for me when I’d do something wild.

Dad worked long hours at his restaurant, the Locanda, until midnight or one o’clock in the morning—that’s life in the restaurant business—so Mom was the core of the family. She spent endless hours with me and encouraged even my wildest daydreams. If my dad was the practical, sensible one—“Paul, you’re going to need to get a real job, you need to start thinking about creating a foundation for your career”—my mom was the one who believed in my fantasies, however far-fetched they seemed. She understood that the more unlikely your dreams are the more fiercely you have to pursue them. The idea of becoming a pop singer back in the mid-fifties was a truly fantastic thing to aspire to—it was literally like building a castle on air. A singer was a voice on the radio, on a record. Who knew how it even got there—and singers in clubs, where did they come from? What did they tell their parents?

My mom was the one who knew how much I loved music and understood that my dreams were my most valuable asset. My dad was far more cautious. He mostly heard my stories secondhand, and naturally was skeptical about my outlandish ambitions. You have to remember the era we’re talking about. In the mid-fifties, even the thought of making a career in pop music was a very long shot. Today every other kid wants to be a rock star; back then it was pure fantasy. There was no precedent for it. Today with hugely popular shows like
American Idol
and
The Voice
, parents start grooming their kids at three to be performers. There are courses in producing, engineering records—you can even take a course in how to be a road manager. Who even knew these things existed? Now parents see the money, the celebrity involved, and even if becoming a pop star is as remote a possibility as winning the lottery, parents take the possibility seriously. The thought that their kid might get the chance to become famous, get a record contract, be a star, and be rich and famous is worth all the risk. As it was, pop music barely existed back then and as a career it was a pure cloud cuckooland. My dad’s attitude was pretty typical, more like “You’ve gotta be kidding!”

My dad came around eventually. What else could he do? He saw nothing could stop me—not reason, not common sense, not fear of the poorhouse. He started letting me go to see shows, even letting me bring performers back from the clubs or he’d cook a meal for them at his restaurant. Even then I’m sure he was still very dubious; he probably thought it was a phase I was going through and that I’d grow out of it. But whatever they thought, both my parents could see I had the personality of a performer. And then they saw me starting to write songs, although they didn’t quite know what all that meant, either. As time went on, they felt, “We gotta get him to somebody who knows about this stuff. We have to find out what to do with him ’cause he’s driving us nuts.”

Out in the world, Dad was a very even-keeled kind of guy. He would always take the high road, always very diplomatic, to the point where people in Ottawa wanted him to run for mayor. Everybody loved Andy, everyone went to him for advice about business, social issues. He was just very methodical and stable; maybe I got a little of that from him. Just a little—but enough to save me from going crazy when fame and money could easily have gone to my head in my early days. His level-headedness was just the right ballast to offset my wild impetuous side.

My mother worked at Sears Roebuck, so she had her own money and out of that paid for my piano lessons and gave me money to buy my records. My father, of course, was taking care of the restaurant ’til all hours. We were a modest family, but as we prospered we moved from downtown above a coffee shop that my dad owned when I was a baby to a house on Bayswater Avenue, then ultimately out to Clearview Avenue, where I had a piano in the basement.

As a kid I had a bunch of different jobs. I was a caddy, I worked at my dad’s restaurant in the kitchen, peeled potatoes, carrots, stuff like that, and I had a paper route. I was keeping about four, five, six bucks a week. I’d spend a couple of dollars on a movie and popcorn, I’d buy my comic books. You could do a lot with a buck or two in those days. I always was taught that you had to get a job and I realized early in life that work was important.

By thirteen, I’d become a regular at nightclubs in the Gatineau region across the Ottawa River in Quebec. You could buy booze there. There was nothing like that on the Ontario side. Montreal was the cultural capital of Quebec—it was a sophisticated town compared to Ottawa or Toronto. Montreal was the closest thing to an urbane European city on the North American continent. It was the Paris of North America.

I was underage and wasn’t allowed in the main part of the Gatineau club, so I’d go up and hide in the light booth. From there I could look down and catch the different acts. I even entered talent contests, anything to further my career. One of the more outrageous things I did was to take my mother’s car without her knowing to a club across the river from Ottawa. I was about fourteen at the time and desperately wanted to get over across the Champlain Bridge to the French side. Over in Quebec there was liquor, the clubs were a bit racier and what have you—which was always more fun, but this particular night I had a very specific reason for going there. I wanted like hell to take part in this contest I knew was going on at the Glenlee Club. I just had to get to that contest; I really needed the prize money: forty or fifty bucks and all you could eat. My mother had an Austin Healey, and knowing this was the key to my making it to the contest. I practiced driving it in the little lane by the house, not letting my mother know what I was up to. I was an odd combination of being reckless and calculating. Even then I was premeditated in my recklessness. I knew she always went to bed early … after she did her crossword puzzle. So I bided my time, and after she drifted off, I snuck into the Austin Healey.

I backed the car out, which wasn’t that easy. This was the first time I’d taken it farther than the driveway. The Champlain Bridge was about two, three miles from our house. The first time I crossed it with ease. But as soon as I got a few more miles from home, I was hit by a blinding snowstorm. By this time I was so far away I didn’t even consider going back. I made it to the club okay and won—that was the easy part. When I started back a couple of hours later, the storm was a lot more intense. By now the roads were icy and slippery and the little sports car was sliding all over the road. Worse, visibility was almost nil. I could hardly see a few feet in front of me and of course I could barely drive the Austin Healey. Man, was I gonna catch it! Did I mention it was a stick shift? The car had gears and just when you’d think you had the knack,
crunch
! The storm wasn’t helping; I couldn’t get the car into second or third, so … I had to go all the way home in first. Well, as close to home as I got, anyway. There I am, right in the middle of the Champlain Bridge and the car starts to shake like an old washing machine. I was so scared of my parents by that point that I forgot to be scared for my life.