Friday afternoons in the mid-1960s had a special rhythm for me. While most of my high-school pals gathered in the corridors to plot their party plans for the weekend, I left class early to catch the Sheppard Avenue bus west from Agincourt. With my trumpet case in hand, about 5 o’clock I caught the southbound Yonge Street bus, then the subway from Eglinton to Bloor. And then I walked west on Yorkville Avenue into what everybody called “the Village.” There, just before Avenue Road, I climbed up a back-alley fire-scape staircase to a third-floor rehearsal studio.
“Hi, Donny,” I’d call out to my trumpet teacher Don Johnson.
“Come on in and warm up that horn,” he’d tell me.
It took me a few visits in 1965 to discover I had climbed to the top of a Yorkville landmark, and an even more important music mecca. Between reciting my trumpet scales and playing whatever tunes Johnson had had me rehearse that week – such as Yesterdays or Shadow of Your Smile – Donny explained that our upstairs rehearsal studio, after hours, was actually a small folk music club known as the Frozen Onion. Meanwhile, below our feet, he told me, was the famous Purple Onion Coffee House, called a coffee house because when it opened in 1960 it had no liquor licence. The Onion, Donny claimed, was the birthplace of the Yorkville folk scene.
“(The owners) charged $1 memberships and cover fees of $1.50 to $3,” reported the Toronto Star, for people to see such little-known artists as Ian and Sylvia Tyson, Carly Simon (who performed with her sister Lucy Simon) and the house band – none other than Luke (Gibson) and the Apostles.
In his book The History of Canadian Rock ’n’ Roll Bob Mersereau contends that singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie had just seen U.S. Army soldiers returning from Vietnam and soon after, at the Purple Onion, she sat down and composed her famous protest song Universal Soldier.
“If you remember the’60s,” Grace Slick or George Harrison is supposed to have quipped, “then you weren’t really there.”
Well, I travelled to the Village in the 1960s every Friday evening and then some, and I learned a lot. I learned first of all that I liked going there. I met the principals of the burgeoning Yorkville music scene – artists, managers, club impresarios and fans – and discovered that I wanted to write newspaper and magazine features about the musicians, the music and the lore.
“Bands that played there,” Mersereau wrote, “found local and sometimes national success in Yorkville.”
And those of us who covered the scene there – Peter Goddard, Wilder Penfield III, Martin Melhuish and Ritchie Yorke – all cut our teeth on pop-music writing by following up-and-coming artists we discovered there.
Like all music reviewers and feature writers we tried to meet the club managers who got us into the venues – the Onion, the Penny Farthing, Boris’s Red Gas Room and the Riverboat. Bernie Fiedler opened the Riverboat in 1964 and managed to attract almost ever major player on the folk music circuit.
I covered one of John Prine’s first appearances there and emerging star Kris Kristofferson, whom Fiedler billed as a “country folk artist” from Brownsville, Texas. I remember the night he played the Riverboat, Kristofferson complained on stage that he couldn’t pick a guitar very well. But otherwise he was pretty self-assured.
When I interviewed him in the tiny Green Room atop the club, he told me, “I’ll drink a shot of tequila. Then, you drink one and I’ll answer your questions.” I’m sure my reporting professor at Ryerson would’ve been horrified, but I agreed and got (I think) some memorable material for the Globe and Mail review.
For Prine and Kristofferson, stops at clubs in Toronto offered pin money between bigger gigs at the Troubadour in Los Angeles or the Bitter End in New York. For Canadians Yorkville was pivotal.
“Every nation has a capital, and for Canada’s music nation it was Yorkville Village,” Bob Mersereau wrote. “But the pattern was soon set: If you wanted to be a successful musician in Canada, you had to go to Yorkville, make a name for yourself, and then go to the States.”
To inspire me back in the ’60s, my trumpet teacher Don Johnson pointed out that the Purple Onion (downstairs from our rehearsal studio The Frozen Onion) had also once booked a duet called the Two Tones, featuring a relatively new folkie from Orillia, Ontario, named Gordon Lightfoot.
If I’d only tried harder at playing music in Yorkville, instead of reviewing music in Yorkville, imagine where my career might have taken me.