Memories of Montreal Part 1.

Union St., 1977 (photo: Protogenes the First)

 T his snowstorm has inexplicably brought back memories I have of Montreal back in 1977, and I thought I'd share some of them with you (the ones still remaining among my brain cells, that is).
I moved to Montreal from Senegal, Africa, arriving on July 4, 1976. I believe the Montreal Olympics were happening at the time . . . I'm not sure.

Montreal was very cool to a 19-year old. I thought of it as London, New York and Paris, all in one city. I had lived in Manhattan, gone to school near London, and never been to Paris, but somehow that was the impression I formed.

Back then I think Jean Drapeau was the mayor, though as usual, the brain cells don't cooperate. I could Google these things, but  prefer to rely on my hazy memory.

Since it was summer, and I hadn't seen snow in about five years, I had no idea what winter was going to be like, but I just remember all the "You'll be sorrrry!!!" chuckles that I elicited from any locals when I mentioned I'd never been in a Canadian winter before.

But the summer was amazing -- I'd lived in New York for three years about five years previously and I remembered hating everything about New York's climate: it was so horrifically muggy in the summer, and the winters were always a mishmash, something I was reminded of when I lived in Osaka for five years in 1988-93. By this I mean that they're both cities that live in a zone in which winter never can decide what to do -- it gets cold enough often enough to be really annoying, but then it hardly ever really snows, and if it does it never sticks. It rains a lot at around 4 degrees Celsius and that is, to put it mildly, extremely annoying. The summers were the same. Hot and sticky most of the time.

Montreal was different. Sure, you'd get the occasional 33-degree day, but most of the time, it sailed at around 25 . . . and non-humid to boot.

Me, circa 1977, in London, England,  trying for that Trudeau look

I think 1976 must have been an excellent summer because I remember being really happy about my new home. Everything about Montreal was cool. (I still think so). Even just saying the name of the city was cool, especially to friends left behind in California or Africa. Wow. No one knew anything at all about Montreal, except that it was in Canada, that they spoke a lot of French here, and Pierre Trudeau was REALLY cool, so it had to be cool.

I thought so too, except I was living it. I remember hopping the 65 down Cote-des-Neiges to Sherbrooke and then finding some sidewalk café and drinking coffee on a perfect day, watching the people go by and just being mesmerized at how mellow everything was, how smart everyone seemed to be, how elegant and friendly yet not pushy and brash like Americans. How it was completely normal for them to just babble in English or French or both, or how the switched automatically if they thought you couldn't speak French. Luckily, I spoke excellent French. I'd been learning it with the Belgians, first, in what had recently been the Belgian Congo, and then the French, in Senegal. I just didn't speak Quebecois. I couldn't understand a word they were saying.

But that made it even cooler. St. Laurent was incredible. I'd just been reading The Main, by Trevanian, and it was exactly like he described it (if you live in Montreal and have never read The Main, do so immediately. If you read it before you read any more of my reminiscences, you can skip this post, because The Main describes Montreal in 1977 just about down to the é in Montréal.)

The summer just shot by. I lived in a penthouse in a large apartment tower complex right next to St. Joseph's Oratory. In fact, the Oratory was the only thing you could see through the large glass doors, it was so close.

Vanier Ste. Croix, just as I remember it . . .

I began going to CEGEP. That's junior college, to the uninformed. I think I needed enough credits to be able to get into art college in California, which was my goal at the time. I went to Vanier College, which at the time had two campuses, one on Decarie near where the Snowdon métro is now, and one in Ville St. Laurent at Ste. Croix, where I believe it still is.

So I would hop the 119 down Decarie and go up Graham and Laird and learn German at Ste. Croix and then come home and smoke cigarette after cigarette, play guitar with my brother, and maybe drink scotch when the sun came down.

(Yesterday's snowstorm,  from my window in this room)

The winter that year was quite brutal, I think, as winters go. I loved every moment of it. One evening I was coming home from school after dark and there was a blizzard raging. I was in between buildings in the apartment complex, in their large plaza, and I could barely see my hand in front of my face! The wind was howling and I began to actually worry that I might get lost, wandering between the buildings until I dropped from hypothermia.

That did not happen. (As I type, I look though my widow and see the very same buildings I am writing about; they're just across the street from me).

Concert at a college in a band in Senegal,  Africa, 1975

That winter I did what I always did in a new city: I joined a band. I answered a Montreal Star classified for a bass player for a rock band, and that's when I met George, the crazy-handsome Greek lead singer from Montreal North and Adrian, an equally crazy Scottish transplant who lived in Cartierville and drank much, much more than me -- that was one of the reasons I joined the band.

We were White Lightning, and we played just about everywhere. We played very, very loud, mainly covers of Led Zeppelin or Queen or the Stones or the Beatles, and we played at strip clubs, bars, high schools (John XXIII, Baron Byng, to name a couple) and remote hotel bars in the Laurentians (the Commons, in Morin Heights).

We'd drive up to the Laurentians in blizzards, sipping scotch out of a hip flask, and spend wild weekends playing three-hour sets to packed houses. No one ever told us to turn it down.

Yes, we jammed right here . . .

1977 was a wild year for me. Montreal was an incredible place to be. Ste. Catherine St. was incredible. My mother used to take us downtown to go shopping at Simpson's or Eaton's. I jammed with some people who worked at the Sun Life Building, in the Sun Life Building. We hauled the drum set and all our amps up in the Sun Life Building's elevators after office hours and set up in someone's cavernous office and played Steely Dan and Santana without a single raised eyebrow, anywhere.

(To be continued)