18 and Life
Chris Simnett
Published by Chris Simnett at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Chris Simnett
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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For Jason; both of them
The following is a true story. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. (Bon Scott, on AC/DC’s Ain’t No Fun Waitin’ Round To Be A Millionaire: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, 1976)
Prologue - Rob
Do you remember that scene in Spinal Tap when the band is lost behind the stage and keeps coming back to the janitor for directions?
They can hear the crowd screaming and stomping, but just can’t find the stage?
And then Derek Smalls, the bassist, yells “Hello Cleveland! Hel-lo Cleveland!”
Well, that was me last month.
First, I got locked outside the club where my band, Bag End, was playing.
After the band started playing the opening song and realized I wasn’t there, our manager and roadie, Vince, went to find me and discovered me pounding on the door to the backstage area.
After he let me in, I bounded up to my mike and yelled “Hello Squamish!, Hel-lo fucking Squa-MISH!”
Dead silence.
It was Pemberton.
The first empty beer bottle hit me in the right shin, just below the knee and the second one nailed me in the temple.
I saw stars as I crumpled to the ground.
I didn’t know it then, but that was to be the last time I would ever stand on stage with my band.
Chapter 1 - Rob
The genesis of Bag End goes back to 1985. It was the first day of school at University Hill Secondary in Vancouver, an artsy high school on the University of British Columbia campus.
I was the new kid, a dork, a geek who was really just starting school in grade 10.
Before that, me and my three brothers were home-schooled by my mom at our farm in Ladner. I only listened to classical music then, as I was forced by my parents to take piano lessons.
So to say I was scared shitless when I pushed through the doors of U-Hill and saw the purple mohawks, leather jackets and Doc Martens of the punks that inhabited the small school of just 300 kids from grades eight to 12, was a bit of an understatement. The kids were raggedy and loud and everything seemed so scary, but exciting at the same time.
The walls and lockers were painted with images of rock stars like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan and band logos; The Who, Doug and the Slugs, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Stones.
The school was built in the 1950s and was painted yellow with brown trim. There was a painting of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger holding a balloon next to one of the student entrances.
It wasn’t a very big school and it only had classes in two wings. The main hallway had the office opposite the library while a smaller hallway led to the auditorium and gymnasium.
The library cut into a large central courtyard that was open to the student parking lot at one end.
The surroundings felt Greek to me, but my first class was French.
It was about 10 to 8 in the morning when I walked into the classroom.
I was the first student through the doors. What a great start this was.
I felt like a bigger doofus than I’m sure I looked like in my black slacks, white shirt and thin black knitted tie.
I sat near the centre of the room at the end of a table.
I learned quickly that there are no desks at U-Hill, except in math class.
Rather, most of the teachers preferred the students sat at a series of tables and interacted with each other.
Also, all of the teachers insisted on being called by their first names.
Mickey was the French teacher and he was the second person in the room.
Mickey was clearly higher than a Vincee, if you know what I mean, and gayer than a football bat as he bounded, no, the word is flounced, into the room.
“He-looooo, I mean bon-jour,” he said as he flitted past.
Being a naive farm kid who had been home schooled for most of his life, I didn’t quite know what to make of Mickey.
“Hi,” I replied, not realizing until many years later — actually it was in our band van somewhere between Prince George and Chetwynd — that Mickey was a poofter.
“Holy shit!” I shouted, sitting up with a jerk at the very back of the van.
Ian was driving — that’s a whole other story, what a shitty driver — and he nearly put the van in a ditch.
“What the fuck?” he shouted, jerking the wheel hard to stay on the road.
“Mickey was gay,” I said.
“And . . . ,” Ian said.
“I just figured it out,” I said. “I mean, the guy bounced everywhere he went. He practically sang his lessons. The dude was playing for the wrong team.”
Ian and Scott started laughing.
“You just figured it out?” Ian said. “Just fucking figured it out? Fucking a year after he’s out of school and he figures it out. Shit. The whole school knew Mickey was a bum pirate and he and Reg were travelling the Hershey highway together.”
“Reg?” I practically screamed. “Reg?”
Scott, who didn’t know Mickey or Reg from Adam, chucked a half-eaten bag of chips at me from the front seat of the van and laughed.
Ian slapped the wheel with both hands and laughed. The van crossed the centre line and we were almost flattened by an onrushing semi.
“Will you fucking watch the road!” Scott said. “For fuck's sake, Rob might be a naive doofus, but you can’t fucking drive. Watch the damn road, man.”
Ian’s ears turned red and his knuckles went white as he gripped the wheel and steered the van back into the centre of the lane.
Ian was the next person to walk into the room.
A tall, skinny redheaded kid with glasses and zits, Ian walked with his shoulders hunched. When he sat down, he slouched in his seat, his long legs thrust out straight under the table. He sat about four seats away from me and didn't say anything.
The class began to fill up as eight o clock approached.
The room became a swirl of movement and noise as laughing and talking kids sauntered in. None of them sat near me, the new kid.
They all knew each other and were catching up on what they did over the summer.
No one paid me any mind.
A really tall guy wearing army fatigues was one of the last kids to walk in and he sat down next to me, flipping his black binder onto the desk before he fell into the chair.
The kid wore his dark hair in a buzz-cut and smelled slightly of must.
“Hey,” he said. “I'm Dave.”
I was slightly taken aback as he was the first person, besides Mickey, who spoke to me.
“I'm Rob,” I said.
He nodded.
Dave didn’t say anything for the rest of the class. He took some notes as Mickey rattled on about effeminate French verbs and when the class was over he put his pen in his left breast pocket, snapped his binder shut and slipped out of the room.
I was out in the hall, walking to my next class, humanities, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“You new here?”
I turned around. It was the dorky looking bespectacled redhead.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Where did you go last year?”
“Nowhere, I was home-schooled.”
“Whoa, so have you ever been to school before, or is the first time?”
“I went for a few years in elementary, but I've been home-schooled since
grade four.”
“What’s that like? Pretty good I’d think. You get to goof off all day and watch TV and stuff.”
“Actually, it sucks. You’re stuck with your mom who makes you work all the time and won't let you even listen to the radio. Forget about TV.”
“Oh man, that sounds like it blows.”
Then he walked into the corner of a locker.
The kid put his hands to his face as he went down, first landing with a thump on his ass before rolling onto his right side in the fetal position.
“Are you OK?” I said, bending down to look at him.
“Fuck, I cut my face on that damn locker. Oh man that hurts.”
He sat up and slowly pulled his hands away from his face, revealing a small cut on his left cheek with some blood seeping out. There was blood on the palm of his left hand.
“It doesn’t look too bad, you should be all right,” I said.
“Fuck it hurts,” he said.
“Nice one Ian,” said a kid walking past in a green trench-coat and desert boots. “You gotta watch where you're going. You might kill someone one day.”
I ignored the kid.
“Fuck off, Toby,” said Ian.
“Lets go to the can and you can clean up before your next class. What is your next class?”
“Humanities.”
“Me too, come on.”
I grabbed the kid by the arm and pulled him to his feet. I pulled some paper towels out of the dispenser in the bathroom and handed them to him so he could wipe his face and hand and then went into one of the stalls and grabbed a fistful of toilet paper so he could blot the wound on his cheek.
We were the late for class and our teacher, Jenny, had already started the lesson.
“Welcome, boys,” she said. “Nice of you to join us.”
The class laughed.
“Ian walked into a locker and cut his face, again,” said the kid in the trench coat, Toby.
“I'm OK,” said Ian, not looking up.
It was a two-hour lesson with a five-minute intermission in the middle.
Ian and I stuck around the classroom during the break.
“I’m Ian,” he said, sticking out his right hand to shake.
“I'm Rob,” I said.
“Thanks for helping me. I’m a bit of a klutz, I always walk into things, trip over stuff and shit.”
“That's OK,” I said.
“So why are you here? Why’d you ditch the home-school thing?”
My parents split up and my dad moved out here. Me and my brothers were bored on the farm and decided to live with him and check out the city."
“So you live pretty close to U-Hill?”
“Yeah, just down the street, across University Boulevard.”
“Do you got video games?”
“Yeah, we got a Nintendo.”
“Awesome, do you think I could come over and play? The SUB’s got an arcade, but I don’t have any money.”
“Sure, we can go over there at lunch if you want, my dad won't be home, we’ll be able to play.”
For the next two weeks, me and Ian played video games.
Ian was a horrible video game player. My little brothers, Ted, Peter and Jim, and I kicked his ass at Super Mario Brothers and Commando every day.
But he kept coming back for more.
“Slap on the Commando! I wanna kill some kraut bastards!” Ian would yell as he walked through the sliding glass doors at the back of my house. “Lets spark up some vid!”
Chapter 2 - Ian
I’ll never forget meeting my friend Rob.
There he was, this tall, dorky kid, really quiet, even though he seemed really smart. The first time I laid eyes on him was back in French class at U-Hill.
I didn’t say anything to him in class — I was sitting across the room from him — but after the class ended I walked up and introduced myself. He had been home-schooled pretty much his whole life. There we were in Grade 10 and this was the first time he had ever been in school. That seemed a bit freaky. You could tell the kid was overwhelmed by the whole thing.
I kept talking to him every day. His dad was a realtor and they lived on the UBC campus, so I knew they had to be pretty rich. I figured they would have video games. I was never allowed to have video games when I was a kid. I always had to go over to my friends’ house and play them, or go to the arcade. I never had more than about 50 cents so I would play for like 10 minutes and that was it, unless I could find a game like 1942, which I could keep going on one quarter for about half-an-hour. I was disappointed if I had to play any other games because I was pretty crappy at them.
And, yep, sure enough, he had video games. So, every lunch hour we started going over to his house to play Nintendo. He had three younger brothers, Ted, Peter and Jim. They would come home from the elementary school down the road and we would play video games the whole hour before heading back to school. It was only about a five minute walk away.
Like I said, I was absolutely terrible at video games. I was terrible at everything except tennis.
I think the dream began the day I was born.
Actually, its genesis goes back to before I was even conceived. It grew into full-fledged ambition as I gestated. I’m sure the first time my dad saw me and held me in his arms he gazed down at his son and thought, “This kid can win Wimbledon.”
My dad grew up during the Second World War in the heart of the British midlands.
He was three years old when his dad went away to fight the Germans and nearly 10 when the old man returned.
He lived in fear of the unsynchronized sound of the German bomber engines as they buzzed overhead, bombs slung under their bellies ready to be dropped into the hell that was Britain in the early 1940s.
Dad lived with rationing, having to share one tea bag a day between his mother, two brothers and a sister. He spent his nights under the stairs or in the bathtub, huddled under a plywood board with his younger siblings while the bombs fell.
He spent his days playing soccer in the street in front of his house with rolled up socks for a ball and the smallest neighbourhood kids standing stock-still as goal-posts.
My dad spent much of his youth wondering about his own father.
When my grandfather came home from the war — after six years serving with the British Army and another year in Germany helping with the cleanup and rebuilding of the former enemy nation after World War II — he connected to my dad through tennis.
My dad took to the game quickly and soon found himself down at the local courts as often as he could, looking for people to play against.
He also learned how to play table tennis at the local community centre and quickly shot up the ranks in both sports.
He found early on that his dad had more time for him when he was successful on the court or at the table.
Like most dads, my dad wanted the best for me.
He didn’t want me to have to work for a living, but rather to achieve what his ability and generation wouldn’t allow him to do: play tennis professionally.
“Professional tennis players follow the sun,” he told me. “In the winter, they are in Australia and then they move to Europe in the spring. They’re in the States in the summer and fall and then they start all over.
“It never snows on the pro circuit.”
He gave me my first racquet when I was three. It was one of his old Dunlop Maxplys, warped from years of use and heavy as a brick in my tiny hands.
The leather grip was much to big for me to properly hold and the gut strings were frayed and the tension shot.
But I dragged that old racquet around with me the way some kids haul around a blanket.
When I was strong enough to lift it, I began hitting balls against the wall in our covered carport.
Sun or rain, winter or summer, I would go outside and bang balls, knocking the stucco off the side of the house.
My dad quickly bought me a junior-sized racquet that allowed me to hit forehands one-handed. He didn’t like my two-handed backhand, but put up with it as he knew I wasn’t strong enough to use a one-hander.
He started me off on the front lawn by softly tossing me balls to the forehand and backhand and getting me to hit them back.
He showed me technique in the living room, starting me off with the ready position, then drilling me on the backswing, footwork, forward stroke and follow-through.
When I could hit perfect air-forehands, backhands and volleys, he took me to the court where we played from the service-line for the better part of a year.
I wasn’t allowed to hit a sloppy ball. I had to be in the ready position, right hand gripping the racquet in a forehand grip, left hand on the throat, feet shoulder-width apart, lightly bouncing on the balls of my feet at all times.
He would call out the shot I was to hit and I would perform the required movements, returning the ball to him on the other side of the net.
He drilled the strokes into me so perfectly and so early that they quickly became second nature.
Hitting a tennis ball was as natural to me as walking by the time I was six years old.
At age seven I hit my first serve over the net from the baseline. I played my first tournament when I was nine.
I was well on my way by the time I was in Grade 10. I had to play tennis every day after school from four till eight as well as training with weights, running, practising constantly, the whole shebang.
But really, when you're 15 years old, what are you in to, other than girls, video games, music, shit like that?
I was a huge music fan. I discovered Def Leppard when I was in Grade 6. It was their Pyromania album that turned me on. That led to Twisted Sister, Ratt, all the ’80s metal stuff.
But let’s rewind a bit more.
My musical history began at the turntable of my parents’ old console stereo.
Remember those big wooden crates that looked like a hunk of furniture, with the lift-up lid and the turntable — the kind that you could stack something like 12 vinyl records on and they’d fall down one at a time so you could have, like, five hours of continuous music? The radio dial featured huge glass knobs that controlled a straight red needle to pass under honkin’ big AM numbers and tiny little FM numbers. The whole thing was so big that my mom, during her weekly top-to-bottom cleaning of the whole, entire house, would spend at least five minutes putting Lemon Pledge on it every Sunday.
They were state of the art in the ’60s, and that turntable is where I first heard the strains of Rolf Harris (now, he was funny), Johnny Horton (I liked The Battle of New Orleans and Sink the Bismarck), the Irish Rovers, ABBA and the Beatles.
For a couple of years, that was the only music I knew existed. The Unicorn Song. Abbey Road. North to Alaska, with Johnny Horton. ABBA's Greatest Hits.
I would sit in front of that stereo with the albums spread out around me and listen to music for an entire afternoon while gazing at the incredibly hot blond and brunette Swedish women airbrushed onto the cover of the ABBA record. Or, maybe I’d check out the liner notes to Abbey Road, the cover of which featured four hairy, freaky looking dudes crossing a street. One of them wasn’t even wearing shoes. You know, I never could figure that one out.
In school, I was your average geek, a kid with a comb-forward haircut that covered half of his ears who wore glasses and a retainer and didn’t know what anyone was talking about when they began conversations about “Glass Houses” or KISS.
Then, in Grade 5 things started to change.
Kids began carving strange symbols into the tops of their wooden desks — weird things like “ZOSO” and circles with feathers in them. They also began carving angular logos and words like Twisted Sister, Van Halen and Ratt when they were supposed to be doing long division.
They also started picking on me.
It was like a switch had been flipped.
One day I was just a nerdy kid, like all the other nerdy kids and the next I was a four-eyed pariah, a human abuse sponge for all of the suddenly cool jean jacket wearing, good music listening hipster 11 year olds in my Grade 6 class.
I had no idea why I was suddenly being called a “fag” and a “loser” by people whose houses I used to go over to after school to play Hot Wheels or Atari. Now those same people would rather spit at me and laugh in my face than fire up the Stompers or play street hockey.
It all came to a head one day when, after being called a “fag” for maybe the 20th time that morning, I asked why they were calling me that.
“You don't even know what Rock of Ages is,” my ex-best friend, Scott Moser, said.
“Yes I do,” I replied.
“What is it?” spat back Scott, sporting blond feathered hair and a jean jacket to my brown cords and blue velour shirt.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, the redness of shame making my face burn like a Jimi Hendrix guitar lick.
In his last act of friendship towards me, Scott Moser did me a huge favour that day. While he was a dick to me for the rest of my elementary school career (mercifully, I would end up in a high school far, far away), he surreptitiously passed me his cassette copy of Def Leppard’s “Pyromania.”
I can honestly say that tape changed my life.
Even before the first chords of “Rock Rock (till you drop)” the album’s opening track, had died out, I was a Def Leppard fan.
After the second song on the second side, I could honestly say I knew what “Rock of Ages” was.
Even though my first taste of hard rock had been Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”, the first tape I ever owned, it was nothing compared to the hook-laden, riff-heavy, Mutt Lange-gloss of “Pyromania.”
I became obsessed with every song, playing the tape over and over for a year. My collection, which was a grand total of two albums, was effectively cut in half as “Eye of the Tiger” gathered dust in a drawer in my bedroom. I even bought the guitar tab book for the album, not because I played the guitar, but because I wanted to know the lyrics. I continued along in my Pyromania-only universe for the better part of a year until another life-changing event hit me between the eyes: I discovered the Columbia House Music Club.
I think it was a promotional flyer for the club that first fluttered out of a magazine to slap me upside the head. All I could see was row upon row of album covers, albums that I thought could help me expand my “Pyromania” horizons.
I was right.
I scanned the flyer and discovered that I could have 10 albums for one cent!
I could also buy an 11th album for $4.99 and then I only had to purchase six more albums in the next three years at regular club prices! What a deal!
The problem was I didn’t know 10 albums that I wanted to buy.
Checking out the flyer more closely, I hit the jackpot.
There was a section that grouped artists according to musical genre. Under the heading of “Hard Rock” I found, listed first, Def Leppard. Bingo.
Other bands listed were the Police, Judas Priest, Styx and Billy Squier.
Of course, I filled out my order picking albums only by these bands.
I got the first two Def Leppard albums (“On Through the Night” and “High 'n Dry”), Billy Squier’s “Emotions in Motion” everything by the Police, “Killroy was Here” by Styx, and a curious little album by a band named Judas Priest, called Defenders of the Faith.
I eagerly ripped open my little box of musical gold when it came in the mail a few weeks later, and immediately put the Def Leppard albums into my Walkman.
As the weeks went by I worked my way through the Squier and the Police, and I must have listened to the song “Mr. Roboto” by Styx 500 times. As for the Priest album, it has the strangest cover, with a fanged and snarling, blue, red and yellow mechanized monster that just looked a bit too menacing for my 12-year-old psyche to handle.
When I did unwrap the plastic, opening up the case to slide out the cassette, I remember being struck by the fact that it was rewound to the start of side two.
Walking from school to tennis practice one afternoon, I finally slipped the tape into my Walkman and pressed play. The ominous bass tones at the introduction to “Love Bites” were the first notes I would hear from Judas Priest.
Then Rob Halford’s voice kicked in, angry and edgy.
“When you feel safe...” then came a violent burst of distorted guitar.
“When you feel warm...” another guitar assault.
I was liking this.
“That’s when I rise/That’s when I crawl/gliding on mist/Hardly a sound/Bringing the kiss/Evil’s abound/In the dead of night/Love bites/Love bites.”
Somehow that simple, odious bass line, Halford’s evil-incarnate voice and those scythe-like E chords stabbed out by guitarists Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing changed something inside me.
It made me feel excited and energized all at once. It made me feel tough, aggressive — cool.
Def who?
In the next few days I checked my next Columbia House flyer for more Judas Priest releases, but couldn’t find any, so I figured Defenders of the Faith was their one and only album.
The next time I was in a record store — A & A Records and Tapes in the Coquitlam Centre mall in suburban Vancouver — I went immediately to the J section. Just in case....
To my delight, there were three Judas Priest tapes there, and only one of them was Defenders of the Faith. I had a choice between “Hell Bent For Leather” or “British Steel” (I only had enough money for one album). I went with British Steel because I loved it's cover art. Yeah, the hand holding the razor blade on Steel beat out the bloody biker goggles on Leather.
By grade 9 I discovered AC/DC and Metallica and Iron Maiden and from then on, something changed inside of me. I wanted to rock.
One day, about three weeks into Grade 10, I was sitting at Rob’s house at lunchtime playing video games and I was getting my ass-kicked by 12-year-old Ted at Commando and I just blurted it out — “let's start a band.”
Rob looked at me like . . . “where did this come from?”
I had talked to him before about heavy metal, even getting him into Iron Maiden — in particular the song Alexander the Great off the band’s Somewhere in Time album.
I sold him on the idea that this was intelligent stuff, a history lesson imparted by the band to their fans using the heavy metal medium. Rob knew his dad was going to flip out when he found out he was listening to metal — so he kinda couched it in the higher learning argument. How can you go wrong with lyrics like “By the Agean Sea/In 334 B.C./He utterly beat the armies of Persia.”
We never knew any of that crap until we heard Bruce Dickinson wail about it for seven minutes in Alexander the Great.
Then I got him into the Maiden song Rime of the Ancient Mariner. For me, that was my introduction to Coleridge and the world of 18th and 19th Century English poetry.
“Whoa, it's not just tits and ass with these dudes, you know?” Rob said.
“Lets go and smoke a doob and party down and shoot some drugs and fuck some chicks.” That this was not. This was great stuff. Within a week of meeting Rob I had gotten him hooked on Iron Maiden.
So when I said “Let's start a band,” he was like “I didn’t know you played an instrument.”
“I don't.”
“Well . . ., how’re we gonna start a band?”
“Why don’t we just start playing?”
He was like, “What about your tennis?”
“Fuck the tennis, I’m sick and tired of tennis, I don’t wanna play tennis.”
He said, “What about your dad?”
“Oh, fuck my dad, he’s just gonna flip out.”
“Well who’s gonna be in the band?”
“You, me and Dave.”
“Does Dave even play an instrument?”
“I don’t know, why don’t we just try and find out, get together and maybe we can learn together.”
My parents split up when I was in Grade 9 and I went to live with my dad. My whole life with him was tennis.
We were living in Richmond and I was going to U-Hill. I would have to take a bus out of Richmond down Granville Street to Granville and Broadway and then I would have to take the Number 10 in from Broadway to UBC. Sometimes I could get off at Granville and 25th and take the King Edward bus in to UBC.
I did that for pretty much all of Grade 9. Then in Grade 10 I got sick and tired of it. I did not want to play tennis anymore. That was it. I was done.
One day, just before the beginning of October when we were supposed to start practice, I told my dad I was quitting.
He flipped out, hollering: “You're throwing your life away! I can’t believe you’re doing this! You’re not thinking! Those goddamn friends of yours!”
Shit like that.
He pushed me out into the hall of our apartment building. I stood there and I could hear crashing around in the apartment. A few minutes later the door opened and a duffel bag came flying out. It hit me right in the chest and face, knocking me back. The bag fell at my feet. I reached down to pick it up and it felt heavy. I unzipped it and it was full of my clothes, just shoved in there. The door slammed again, then opened up a crack. “And don’t come back,” yelled my father, “until you’ve changed your mind.”
So I was out on the old streets, as they say. I took the elevator downstairs to the lobby and out the door, into the pouring rain. It was about nine o clock at night, early October and it was getting dark. It wasn’t that cold, but it was wet and I had about 10 blocks to walk to the 7-11 where I knew there was a pay phone. When I got there I dug into my sopping pocket for a quarter, popped it in and called my mom who lived in Coquitlam. I told her that dad had kicked me out and I had nowhere to go.
I hung around the 7-11 for the better part of an hour. She drove out picked me up, took me back to Coquitlam and made me go to school the next day!
It only took about half an hour to get from U-Hill from Richmond on two busses. It took more than an hour to get to U-Hill from Coquitlam on three busses.
For an eight o clock class I’d have to get up before six in the morning because I had to be at the bus stop by quarter to seven at the latest. I would have to catch the 6:45 160 Barnet. I would take the bus all the way down the Barnet Highway, along the Burrard Inlet, to Hastings Street, through Burnaby and to the Kootenay Loop, which is not in the greatest part of Vancouver.
The Kootenay Loop is all chain-link fence and broken concrete. It’s set on a hill, just near the top of where Hastings Street begins it’s descent into hell, by which I mean the downtown eastside.
A few dilapidated, grafitti-riddled shelters provide some protection from the wind and rain while the only green is some weeds poking through cracks and shiny, wet loogies hocked onto the ground.
I would get off the 160 there. Then I would have to transfer to either the Granville bus or the UBC bus.
If I was lucky, I would hook up with the UBC bus which took the same route as the Granville bus, except it would continue out of the downtown, up to Broadway and all the way to Alma, eventually dropping me off right in front of U-Hill.
If I was unlucky I would have to take the bus right down to Granville Street. I would have to get off that bus and wait around in huge crowds of hippies and office workers and homeless people and junkies, it was just a huge milieu of all different people at 7:30 in the morning, downtown Vancouver, and then I would have to get on the Number 10 UBC bus, which would take me to right out in front of U-Hill school.
Vancouver and the south-west corner of British Columbia isn’t like the rest of Canada.
It’s called Lotus Land by the inhabitants of most of the country, a land that is ravaged by cold and snow from early November until mid-April.
In Vancouver, it hardly snows. Instead it rains. A lot.
Rain in Vancouver, especially from October until at least June, is as certain as Marshall amplifiers and heavy metal.
It’s not uncommon for a fortnight to go by without the rain stopping. Also, the sun rarely shines. As beautiful as the city can be, with the mountains hard up against its northern edge and the ocean to the west, it can also be a steely grey, wet, dark, depressing place.
The city’s transit system can also be depressing.
Before the introduction of SkyTrain in the mid-1980s, it was busses only.
Out in Coquitlam, once on the eastern edge of the Vancouver suburbs, but now virtually in the centre of the city due to urban sprawl, SkyTrain has never appeared. It’s still busses and only busses for hundreds of thousands of commuters travelling the 30 kilometres to work in the downtown core.
Because of the cold, damp conditions outside and the huge numbers of warm, wet bodies that squeeze onto every bus, condensation rules the day.
The insides of all the bus windows are coated with it and desperate commuters open the windows as much as they can so they are allowed to breathe fresh air. All that does is lower the temperature inside the bus to arctic levels while whipping icy little droplets of water onto the faces of fellow passengers lucky enough to find a seat on the crowded, steamy wheels of hell.
For me, it was good thing the windows were covered in condensation because, while inside the bus was wet and uncomfortable, the scene along Hastings Street heading into downtown was worse.
Hastings Street runs from Burnaby in the east all the way into the centre of the city. Its route cuts right through the heart of the downtown eastside, the poorest neighbourhood in Canada.
That this urban blight of boarded up shops, flophouse hotels and seedy bars is in Vancouver, mere blocks from the upscale strip that is Robson Street, is a tad ironic.
Here is the nicest city in Canada, a city, that, when the sun shines, is one of the prettiest in the world, with the worst slum north of the 49th parallel.
On the days the sun was out and I could look out of the bus windows I saw drunks staggering, junkies shooting up and hookers trawling along the edges of Hastings and bums sleeping on benches in Victory Square just as the street hooked to the right and headed into the core of the city.
I usually found a seat on the bus as I was one of the first ones on, both in Coquitlam and at the Kootenay Loop. Even though I was only in high school and fit from hours of tennis every day, I usually kept my seat as the bus filled up with women and the elderly; it was just too miserable to stand. You could curl up on a seat and pull your jacket up around your ears, plug your headphones into your ears and turn up the Walkman to try and blot out as much of the ride as possible.
When you stood however, you could feel the cold wind whipping at your face and up your pant legs and down inside your jacket and under your armpits.
Also, you had to hold on to a cold metal pole that usually was wet from condensation or snot or spit.
I liked to sit whenever I got the chance and stay seated until it was my stop.
Chapter 3 - Rob
I thought a band was an interesting idea.
I could play piano, but I hated it. It was something my dad wanted me to do.
I didn’t mind listening to classical music. In fact, the only music I listened to before I met Ian was the classics, Bach, Handel, Schubert, Mozart, Paganinni and Chopin.
But I hated practising the piano, running through scales, making sure I was perfectly in time with the metronome.
Ian opened my ears to heavy metal.
As soon as he played Iron Maiden to me for the first time, I heard the great composers.
The melody, the dual harmony leads and the power of it all, the volume and the intensity, brought all the best elements of classical music and made it exciting.
My dad would hate it.
I knew that I was going to play guitar in our band. And sing.
I was the only guy who could read music and I figured if I could play piano, I could play guitar. How hard could it be?
“It’s gonna be a piece of cake,” Ian said. “How hard can it be. Look at the goofs in Motley Crue. They’re just a bunch of drug-addled no-minds. They can do it. How about Ozzy? The dude took acid every day for five years.
“If those idiots can do it, why can’t we.”
Why can’t we indeed, I thought.
Ian must of seen something in my body language because he got really excited.
“Yeah!” said Ian, punching the air. “I’m the guitarist!”
“No you’re not,” I said. “From what I’ve heard, the guitar is the most important instrument in a heavy metal band and I’m the only one with any musical training, so I’m playing the guitar. You should play the bass. Dave will be on drums. He’s a steady kind of guy, probably will be good at keeping the beat.”
Ian always got a little too excited about things. He was the first to champion an idea and would talk a mile a minute about how great it was going to be.
He started spouting off about all the tunes we were going to learn and how long it would take us to before we were ready to play our first gig.
I thought we would never get to the gig stage. Bashing around in my basement, butchering Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Kiss, Motley Crue, Black Sabbath and AC/DC songs is about as far as I thought we would ever get.
I was wrong.
Chapter 4 - Dave
I read the Lord of the Rings for the first time when I was 10. My dad was an aerospace engineer who was into hiking, camping, kayaking and rock climbing and he emigrated to Canada from England so he could do more of all four. He read me The Hobbit as a bedtime story before I was old enough to read.
As soon as I could read I ploughed through the Chronicles of Narnia series and then tackled the Lord of the Rings.
Those books changed my life. I make a point of reading the trilogy once a year, always in the fall, when school starts. They seem like fall books to me. The falling leaves and ever-more crisp days, frosty nights and the first fires in the hearth just bring out the romance of Tolkien for me.
Of course, I love the story. It’s the ultimate tale. Everything since that book is based on that book.
I had never heard much heavy metal before I met Ian. That kid is absolutely obsessed with it, to the point that he has blinders on. When I listened to music, which wasn’t all that often, it was mostly British prog-rock, Yes, Genesis and lately, the Telegraph Road album by Dire Straits.
When I heard Iron Maiden and Judas Priest for the first time I thought, “Tolkien.”
Those guys aren’t very original, they’re just ripping off Tolkien. Like everybody, I guess.
Chapter 5 - Ian
“What are we gonna call ourselves,” I asked Rob and Dave as we ate our lunch in the courtyard on a surprisingly warm early October day.
I had known Dave for more than a year, met him on the first day of Grade 9, but the three of us had only really known each other for 30 days.
In the entire time I had known the guy, I had never heard him talk about, listen to or even profess a liking for music.
All the dude seemed to care about was all things military and science fiction.
It was tough to really know him because he didn’t say much.
He was tall, around six-three in Grade 10, at least four or five inches taller than me and Rob and he wore his dark hair in a buzz-cut. He had thick, plastic glasses clamped onto his head with a wide neoprene band. He always wore the same grey wool pants, black boots and grey German army tunic.
Always. Every day.
Dave did not care what he looked like or what people thought about him.
He was very smart, you could tell just by hanging around him. He was always reading something, writing something or fixing something.
He reluctantly agreed to be our drummer but warned us he knew nothing about the instrument.
“How hard can it be?” I asked him. “Just take the sticks and whack the drums. If Tommy Lee can do it, I’m sure you can. You’re not a whacked-out nut job like him. You’re a nut job, just not whacked out, ha ha. Don’t take as many drugs, either.”
“Who’s Tommy Lee?” Dave asked, punching me in the shoulder, middle knuckle out so it hurt like a bitch.
“Fuck, man, that hurts,” I said, trying to sound tough, but instead coming off as whiny.
“A drug-addled, tatted-up goof who looks like a chick,” Rob said. “Don’t fucking whine, Ian, you sound like a girl.”
“Oh,” Dave replied, a look of bewilderment on his face.
“So, what are we gonna call ourselves,” I asked again, pouting slightly. “How about Fuck You,” I laughed.
“No, that’s too ordinary,” said Rob. “We should call ourselves Suck My Dick.”
I’m a lot of things, but quick on the uptake ain’t one of them. I didn’t get his sarcasm right away.
“That’s too graphic, don’t you think?” I said. “It might turn some people off before they even hear us.”
“You idiot,” Rob said. “I was joking. Fuck You is stupid name. I can’t believe you thought Suck My Dick was serious.”
Dave just laughed.
“Might turn them off before they hear our music,” he said. “Shit, I might get turned off having to listen to us play, and I’ll be playing. This isn’t gonna be good, I can tell.”
“Fuck you,” I said to Dave. “We are gonna rock. We are gonna kick ass and take names. We are gonna change the face of heavy metal forever.”
I had big dreams.
I’m a bit of a compulsive person. OK, I’m a lot of a compulsive person. Once I got an idea, it’s all I thought about. I got a burning sensation in my solar plexus from the anticipation of wanting to get on with my idea.
Right then all I could think about was our band, what we were going to call it and when we would start jamming.
I wanted our first gig to be yesterday. I wanted our first album to be huge.
I wanted Dave and Rob to have the same passion for this that I did.
“Bag End,” Dave said.
“What?” I replied, eyebrows arching.
“Bag End, that’s the name of our band.
“What the fuck is a bag end?” I asked.
“It’s where Frodo and Bilbo lived.”
“Who?” I asked. “What the hell are you talking about? I’m dying here and you’re telling me bloody riddles.”
“Haven’t you ever read Lord of the Rings?” Dave asked.
“Lord of the what? No.” I said.
“It’s a great book, you’re missing out,” said Dave, who looked hurt. “It’s about these little guys called Hobbits that try and get rid of this ring that has all these evil powers. You really should read it, it’s awesome. The hero, Frodo, lived in Bag End. We should call our band that.”
“Hmmm,” Rob said. “Lord of the Rings is pretty heavy shit and heavy metal definitely is heavy. I think that could work. Maybe we’ve found a niche for ourselves.”
“What’s a niche?” I asked.
“You know, like our own schtick, something that no other rock or metal band is doing.”
“You mean, we haven’t even started and we’re already unique?”
“Yeah, we’ll be the first metal band to focus on Lord of the Rings, swords and sorcery, dragons and kings, fantasy. All that shit.”
Chapter 6 - Rob
But first we had to learn to play.
I had my dad’s platinum Visa card and a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta Carat. It was gold with black trim. It had cloth seats, but, nothing’s perfect, ya know?
We needed some gear, but didn’t know what to get.
Our research (this is before the Internet, people) began at Long & McQuade on Granville Street.
The three of us walked in looking like Larry, Army and Dork and kinda loitered around where all the guitars were hanging on the walls.
It wasn’t long before the sales dude sauntered over with a slight smirk.
“What can I do for you boys,” he said.
I suddenly got very conscious of the fact that there were more spots on our collective faces than the sky on a clear winter night.
“Uh, we need some gear for our band,” I said.
“What kind of gear, guitars, amps, we have a large selection of both.”
“Um, we need everything, drums, a guitar, a bass and amps,” I said. “A mike, too.”
Good thing my dad is rich because we gave his Visa a pretty vigourous workout.
I got a Fender Stratocaster, Olympic White, and a Marshall JCM 800 head and a 4X12 cabinet. I got Ian a blue Fender P-Bass and a Traynor Amp. I also picked up a Premier drum Vince, in black mother of pearl for Dave.
The salesman was thrilled with our business, but you could tell he was a serious musician type who was choked that three rich kids were buying all this top gear without any clue of how to use it.
You knew he was thinking how unfair life was that he had to sell these three idiots all this stuff that he and his band would die for. He was probably playing some beat up old Fender through a Princeton amp and you knew he knew that he could make that sound better than anything we would ever do, no matter what gear we had.
Ian and Dave were clueless. Ian didn’t even know a bass had four strings and a guitar had six until we were inside the store. Dave didn’t know a drum Vince from a bongo.
At least I knew what a good instrument looked like, and how it should feel in your hands.
The Strat felt real good. I liked the way it sounded, too. As soon as I plugged it in to the Marshall and turned the volume past three, Ian got all excited.
I hit an E chord, the only chord I knew.
“Dude! That’s the sound Priest have on their Screaming For Vengeance album,” he bubbled. “You gotta get that. It’s so sweet.”
The stuff barely fit in the Jetta. The drums made it into the trunk while Ian was wedged between the amps and my Strat in the back seat and Dave had to straddle the bass in the front seat.
The Jetta was a serious low-rider on the ride home.
My dad freaked.
It took him a couple of days to figure out what we were doing. He was a high-powered real estate agent and was rarely home. He had some skanky girlfriend named Shelley who he had set up in some apartment downtown and he would go there to fuck her instead of coming home.
So I had to take care of Peter, JIm and Ted in the house at UBC. My mom would come over from the farm from time to time and cook some food and clean the place up, but mostly it was just the four of us, and Ian, who was always over now that he didn’t have any tennis practice to go to.
My dad came home late one night and went downstairs to put some clothes in the laundry.
When he lost it, at first I thought it was because he found all of the paper and shit inside the dryer from when Ted lit of a stick of firecrackers inside the appliance.
It made a great fucking noise and we laughed our asses off as the smoke began to pour out of the dryer. It wasn’t so funny when we looked inside and found mounds and mounds of shredded paper from the firecrackers. It smelled pretty bad, too.
But no, my dad didn’t care about the dryer, he didn’t even get that far. I think he was halfway down the stairs when he saw the drums. Then, when he got to the bottom he saw the amps and guitars and wigged out.
From what I could gather, through all of the yelling, he was he wasn’t so upset about the money I had spent on the gear — close to seven grand – as he was pissed about the spirit of the purchases.
“Rock and roll music is evil,” he said over and over. “It corrupts your mind, poisons your soul and will only result in drugs, despair and death.”
The dude isn’t even religious, so I was trying to figure out what his problem was.
“Dad,” I said. “You’re never here, so the music won’t bug you. We won’t play when you’re here. I hate the fucking piano and I’m not playing it any more and I’m starting up a rock band with Ian and Dave.
“It will keep us out of trouble. Instead of hanging around the arcade and being influenced by the university kids, who are into drugs and sex and all that stuff, we’ll be here, in the basement, practising.”
He was worried about our hearing and thought that we’d all be deaf within a couple of weeks of playing with our amps on 11.
“Dad, I’m not stupid,” I said. “We’re not going to fuck up our hearing.”
My dad wasn’t convinced. He was standing there, framed in the doorway of my bedroom while I lay on my bed with a Superman comic book. I looked at him, my dad, although he wasn’t really a father. He spent so much time at his work and with his bitch girlfriend that my brothers and I hardly knew him.
He was all about making money, that’s how he justified the long hours. Money, money, money.
Sure, it was nice to have the platinum Visa card and be able to use it, no questions asked. It was nice to have the Jetta, even if the interior wasn’t leather. I got that sucker the same day I passed my drivers test.
I had pretty much anything I wanted, cars, video games, nice clothes. But I really didn’t have a dad.
He was up and out of the house before we got up in the morning and most nights he didn’t even come home from the apartment where he’d stashed Shelley.
In between he just worked.
He was a realtor who didn’t just sell houses. He owned four offices across Vancouver and spent most of his time driving between them in his Mercedes.
I felt the anger rising in me as I put the comic book down.
I got up off the bed and walked toward him.
I was seeing red. All I could think about was how come I was taking care of my three brothers, getting them up in the morning, making sure they ate breakfast and made it to school on time while he was out working and screwing his little slut girlfriend.
He promised us that if we left the farm that he would spend time with us.
After he split with our mom, who is a total other story altogether, we never saw him. He just took off and started working. At least that’ s what he told us.
We were too young to figure out that he was spending a lot of his time, especially on the weekends, with women.
My mom kept going on about how he was screwing around, but my brothers and I were so naive, we didn’t put it all together.
We moved in with him when I was 16, just starting Grade 10. Peter was 14, in Grade 9 at U-Hill while Jim was 12 and Ted was 10. They both went to U-Hill Elementary, just down the street from our house, the other direction from the high school.
“How dare you tell me what to do,” I said. “You don’t care about me, all you care about is your precious money and the little sluts you like to screw.
“I’m going to be in this band, I’m going to lead this band and it doesn’t matter what happens with it, I’m going to do it and I’m going to have fun doing it and I don’t give a damn what you say or what you think about it.”
As usual, my dad didn’t say anything. He just looked bewildered. I don’t think he ever knew how to deal with any of his kids and just thought he gave them money and things that would be enough.
He backed out of the doorway and I slammed the door behind him and flopped back onto my bed. I tried to read the comic, but I couldn’t concentrate so I threw it onto the floor.
I heard his car spark up, back out of the driveway and slowly go quieter as it sped off down the road.
Chapter 7 - Ian
Man, the whole thing with Rob’s dad really fucked him up.
He was always this happy, sorta nerdy guy but after he freaked out on his dad he became way more serious. I used to joke with him that he was 16 going on 35.
He didn’t think that was very funny.
I got the sense that what he wanted more than anything was for his dad to spend time with him.
I certainly knew how that felt.
For the longest time, I thought my dad loved me. I mean, I know he did — still does — but really his love was wrapped up in a tennis bag.
Rob’s dad, I think was as emotionally crippled as my dad.
I remember when I was in Grade 9 and had my first date. I took this cute girl named Charlotte Adams to the movie Iron Eagle at the Capitol 6 theatre in downtown Vancouver.
I was flirting with Charlotte weeks before I got the nerve to ask her out and she answered yes before I could get the whole question out. Her friend, Selena, had told me that Charlotte liked me and wanted me to ask her out at least five times in the previous two weeks, but I was too scared and too dumb to make the move.
I waited until the very last minute to break the news to my dad that I was going on a date. We were driving home from tennis practice one night. It was pissing rain and dark as we lurched along in Friday night traffic along 12th Avenue in Vancouver.
The heater in my dad’s second-hand purple 1972 Toyota Corolla had crapped out around ’79 and the windshield wipers decided to stop working regularly around the same time.
The interior was kind of an off-white vinyl and the bucket seats were ripped. I had to wear my big winter jacket, tuque and gloves when I was in that car and my dad made me wipe off the inside of the front window with my scarf just so he could see the road because the defroster didn’t work and the windows would fog up.
I was reaching over top of the steering wheel, stretching out my left arm to wipe off the window so my dad could see, while at the same time trying to keep my head and torso out of his line of vision, when I dropped the bomb.
“Can you take me and a girl downtown tomorrow night?”
“Sure,” he said. “Going on a date, are you?”
I was expecting some kind of big production, at least the third degree about who the girl was and what movie I planned on taking her to.
Instead I got immediate acceptance. It was almost like he was relieved that I had finally asked a girl to go on a date with me.