I must be one of the few people who actually has proof that I saw the Beatles’ first performance in North America. With most others, if they say they remember sitting in front of the TV set on that Feb. 9, 1964, Sunday evening and watching the history-making debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, you have to believe them.
For those of the baby boom generation there’s really only one other event from childhood they take as much pride remembering where they were – the assassination of U.S. President John Kennedy a few months earlier on Nov. 22.
In the case of the Beatles, I have a very clear picture of the scene. It was in the Raymes’ family room just after a sumptuous Sunday dinner. The proof comes in the form of an enthusiastic comment in my letter home the next day.
`Mum, did you see The Beatles on Ed Sullivan last night? If not you should watch next week. They sure are a popular group now. They are supposed to have had as much publicity as Elvis Presley had when he started his career.'
The only reason I wasn’t in church that night was because it was the weekend of our three-day mid-term break. Who can say if fate had a hand in the timing but it was an event that had an enormous impact on my life.
The drive and infectious nature of the Beatles’ music as epitomized by songs like She Loves You made me want to learn to play the guitar and sing just like them. That fall I was spending more of my free time teaching myself chords on the guitar I’d received for my birthday two years earlier.
A month after the Ed Sullivan show my mother sent me a Beatles magazine that contained the music and chords for some of the songs. I could now learn Beatles songs. I also started paying more attention to what a Grade 11 student was playing during the before-bed jam sessions. Geoff Tipping owned an electric guitar and was also learning some of the tunes.
In the 15-minute interval before lights out a crowd would often gather in Tipping’s dorm and belt out at eardrum-shattering levels many of the songs then on the hit parade. Often attending those sessions was Dick Van Middlesworth, a Grade 8 student who was also learning the guitar. The two of us soon realized we had a common interest that was not being advanced by those raucous sessions in the Grade 11 dorm. And so we began meeting during the same time period in the quieter confines of either his or my dorm.
He had a round-holed, easy-to-play folk guitar while I played a western-style guitar that was a bear to play because of its warped neck. We soon were piecing together the gentler Beatle ballads like And I Love Her, P.S. I Love You, and All My Loving and trying to master their vocal harmonies.
Our collaboration turned serious the next September when we recruited Grade 11 student Tom Carson, an accordion player, and began practicing together on the 3rd floor of the stone building on Saturday evening while the rest of the school watched a movie in the dining room.
During the holidays when we had access to a record player, Van Middlesworth and I would spend hours copying down words and trying to figure out what chords they were playing. We found that any songbooks we bought were unsatisfying because the songs tended to be set in another key. For some reason, F, Bb, and Eb were favorites of the songbook publishers but awkward for the guitar and not what the Beatles were playing. Many a Saturday night was spent getting the chords right.
We started calling ourselves the Saints around the time Van Middlesworth bought an electric guitar from Eaton’s. However, it was another year before we actually performed as a band. The opportunity was provided by a new Saturday night program instituted by the headmaster called the Order of Good Cheer.
As winter set in each Mr. Wiens had noticed that school morale seemed to decline. His solution was to steal an idea from a community that faced a similar problem nearly 400 years earlier in early Canada. To boost the sagging morale of the settlers at Port Royale in Nova Scotia Samuel de Champlain established the L’Ordre de Bon-Temps.
On a rotating basis, each of the settlement leaders was named Grand Master and it was his responsibility to cater to the needs of the colony for that day. Needless to say, the Grand Masters soon got caught up in a fierce competition of one-upmanship. As historian Francis Parkman writes Pioneers of France in the New World:
'Thus did Poutrincourt's table groan beneath all the luxuries of the winter's forest, the flesh of moose, caribou, and deer, beaver, otter, and the hare, bears and wild cats; with ducks, geese and grouse and plover; sturgeon, too, and trout and fish innumerable...'
No longer would the responsibility for feeding the student body be limited to those who normally assisted the cook, Saturday being Charlie Race’s one night off. In the future, that responsibility would be extended to different groups of students on a rotating basis. That group would also be responsible for providing a program of after-dinner entertainment.
The menus immediately became more ambitious, but of course, overcooked food is still over-cooked food whether it was hot dogs and sauerkraut or glazed ham and sweet potatoes. The one area in which the Saturday night cooking committees excelled was dessert. Quantity was always the best strategy for keeping everyone happy. It also put everyone in an appreciative mood for the program that was to follow.
After more than a year of jam sessions, the Saints were more than ready to perform for the Order of Good Cheer. When it came to selecting the songs we realized that as much as we loved the Beatles songs most of them we’d never learned in their entirety. There always seemed to be a few chords, especially in the rockers, we couldn’t figure out. As a result, we ended up choosing a couple of easy Beatle ballads and for our rock ‘n roll numbers we turned to the two most popular three-chord rockers on the radio, House of the Rising Sun by the Animals, and Gloria by Them.
It may not have been the Ed Sullivan Show, but the Saints played that brief moment in the limelight to the hilt. By now we were a group of five and had acquired drummer Mel Jarvis, who kept beat on a small snare drum, and a third guitarist named Sandy Goodall. We’d all seen enough pictures of the Beatles and other rock groups to know the drummer always sits behind on a raised platform.
A stage for the Saints was of course out of the question, the dining room being not much bigger than a large classroom, but our drummer, we decided, had to be elevated. And so with great fanfare on the night of the show the group’s “roadies” began folding up tables and evicting diners from the heavy wooden benches they were sitting on even before they had finished dessert.
With the benches, we assembled a small dais against the end wall. Our drummer now had a proper perch and the band’s lone amplifier, a tiny 1 1/2 foot high box which both Van Middlesworth’s and my guitar were plugged into, was set up at the edge of the stage. And then we all disappeared to make our grand entrance.
Our costumes required considerable ingenuity. How could we make drab, school-issue clothing look hip? The answer was through an unusual and slightly uncomfortable combination of shirts and sweaters. The school’s Pitch-Rider blue jeans were fashionable enough so we didn’t mind wearing them as they were. Our black turtleneck sweaters became a passable dickey when the collars were turned in to hide the yellow stripe around the top. And over the sweater, we wore our blue, school-issue shirts. There was nothing we could do about our hair, of course, because Steve the school barber had removed everything except a tuft at the front.
Our entrance that night through the fire door didn’t quite have the “in from the wings” impact we’d hoped, but the room did quieten remarkably quickly for a Saturday night. Then when someone yelled “How about a big welcome for the Saints” the room erupted with a deafening roar of table-pounding. Except, of course, it got out of hand and several Melmac cups half full of juice were soon bounced over the edge as were other tableware. Mr. Wiens finally had to call for silence but by then we were ready.
We hit them with the screamer Gloria right off the top knowing it would make an impact. I remember being quite pleased with our “G-L-O-R-I-A” chant on the chorus. It almost sounded professional.
That, unfortunately, was not the case with the execution of the double-time rhythm that accompanied This Boy. Van Middlesworth had it down pat but Goodall and I were not with him and the pretty John Lennon ballad seemed to drag almost as much as our next number P.S. I Love You. However, I had no worries about House of the Rising Sun because Van Middlesworth always provided near-flawless flat-picking on his electric for that number.
And in a flash, our public debut was over. We left the hall amid thunderous applause and no doubt the legs under a couple more tables buckled under the commotion. As I was leaving I heard a voice call out from the kitchen door. It was Mike Maunder, one of the school’s junior masters.
“Sir,” I replied.
“That sounded pretty good,” he volunteered.
That was a compliment of some significance since he had just spent the previous year as a booking agent for a dozen or so Winnipeg folk groups.
“Thanks,” I replied. “I thought we were a bit off on the slow numbers.”
“One suggestion,” he added. “Why don’t you try playing your guitar without the pick-up. It’ll give it a better sound. If you like I’ll tape one of your practices and you can see what I mean.”
I wasn’t exactly crestfallen but it was the kind of thing my piano teacher mother would say and I would probably ignore. Playing with a pick-up through Van Middlesworth’s amplifier was as close as I was going to come to sounding like it did on the records. But coming from Mr. Maunder was different.
True to his word the next Saturday night he sat in on our jam session and made a tape. We recorded a couple of songs, first with my guitar plugged into the amp, then by itself. He had no trouble proving his point. My guitar went from sounding tinny and unattractive to sounding resonant and I ditched the pick-up.
After Christmas a junior boy arrived back with an electric guitar he could barely play so I quickly appointed myself its unofficial custodian. Those sessions with Jim Dann’s guitar were close as I ever came to living my rock ‘n’ roll fantasy. By Easter, I’d moved on to copying the lush acoustic sound of Simon and Garfunkel and little use for electric instruments. And the Saints faded into history.