‘The Canadian Invasion’ by David Perlmutter

JOHN LEMON:

The weirdest part about it all was that we were so popular, eh? 

The thing is, none of us meant to become stars. We were just after playin’ some rock and roll, and trying to make a living at it, eh?

And me, I probably needed the companionship more than the others, given how I was raised up.

You see Toronto on a map, it don’t look like that big a place, but it’s right big enough to disappear in and never come out. I got brought up in Etobicoke, which is as far out as you can get and still be in the city. It wasn’t the greatest thing, what with my mother out in the psych ward downtown — she went nuts when I was little and never got better — and only my aunt to raise me. So I grew up finding only two things exciting me: the hockey games on the radio on Saturday (naturally, I was always for the Leafs); and then, when I was in my teens, this new-fangled rock and roll came on the scene. None of the local stations would play it at the start, ’cause Toronto was such a conservative place, but I could get a good signal on my transistor to the American stations that did play it, out in Buffalo and Detroit. Sometimes, on a clear night, I could get WINS from New York City and hear Alan Freed’s show. That guy forgot more about rock than most people knew, and it really turned me on.

Next thing you know, I got a guitar and learned how to play, and then I started hanging out on what passed for a music scene on Yonge Street in those days. And that’s how I ended up starting what eventually became the Beevers…

PAUL MCADAM:

Back at that time, Montreal was kind of a divided place, even more than it is now. The French people lived in their neighbourhoods, and Westmount, which is where I lived, was all rich English people. Mount Royal, in the centre of the island, was the divider. Nobody told me outright you couldn’t go visit the French folks, but you were sort of looked down upon if you were an English person who did.

Not that I cared.

I’d always been into music, since my dad had a sideline playing in a brass band when he wasn’t holding down a day job. And, with us being alone at home together, with Mom dead and gone, there was a lot of impetus to do something exciting with my life. That was when, after playing guitar for a while, I started taking it more seriously.

Montreal, back then, was really the entertainment capital of Canada — Toronto was squaresville in comparison — so a lot of big acts came to play the clubs downtown. I could never afford to get in those places, but the English-language radio stations would play their records to promote the gigs. And we were close enough to the American border that we could pick up their radio signals with no trouble at all. Occasionally I might tune in to the local French stations because their music was so spirited you could dance to it without understanding the language. That was the kind of stuff I was trying to copy when I wrote a lot of the bilingual stuff the Beevers cut.