I read the news today.

Dakota Apartments, New York, scene of Lennon's death

David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

 Tuesday, December 9, 1980 - Don Harron started Morningside with the words "I read the news today, oh boy."

John Lennon had just been shot dead the evening before.

1979

 Mississauga, IndEC. It was an alternative school. I didn't really go much and never finished. It was, as I recall, in portables near the corner of Hurontario and Dundas

Bob Marley and the Wailers / Tower of Power

 

June 10, 1978 Montreal Forum - Tower of Power was a funk band, very different from Reggae but put on a great show - lead sax dancing in a tailored suit. The audience was split between non Rasta Jamaicans and other Caribbean people in suits and dresses (it was the 70s and people dressed to go out in the evenings) and dreadlocked Rastas.

Both bands were great but the Forum had a lot of exposed concrete and steel surfaces that echoed terribly.

The I-Threes were the three female singers that accompanied the band. They could stretch their rhythmic movements over many bars of music. 

Some of  the audience threw manuscripts onto the stage. When the Wailers broke into Exodus, banners unfurled with pictures of people who I guess were important to him. Maybe Marcus Garvey?

1977

Toronto, tried to get into Harbord Collegiate, couldn't, decided to return home. I remember going to an evening of storytelling by a native. One funny story he told was a elderly native man who was trying to ride a bicycle from far away to Toronto. A young man in a sports car passes by and offers to tie a rope to the bicycle so he could tow him, and the native agrees but reminds him not to go too fast. The driver sees another sports car at the lights and decides to drag race and floors it. The native starts waving his arms and ringing his bell. An OPP officer notices and calls in on the radio "I've just seen something strange - two cars are drag racing," "What's strange about that?" The dispatcher asks. "There's this old Ojibwe on a bicycle trying to pass them!" 

I also wandered around U of Toronto campus. Watched the Canadian Opera Company rehearse.

Mrs Lavoie's

 I wanted to go back to St. Lawrence HS, so I rented a room in a boarding house owned by Mrs. Lavoie (sp?)  and her husband on 705 Walton Street - she was a very good woman, sometimes cooked us food, and so old she remember the great Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1920 where people were dying throughout the world and the hospitals were overflowing with patients. Her husband, who didn't speak English that well, and I couldn't speak French at all, was a mill worker who used to love to play the piano but got rid of it when his hand became paralyzed. They had a big front parlour with the radio tuned to Radio-Canada and people from all around the world dropped in, mostly international students, but also a prospector who had worked up north. There was a Venezuelan named Adnobio (sp?) who died suddenly of appendicitis after I'd moved out.

1976

 Nurses Residence. 

I was staying there with my girlfriend during the summer when it wasn't used by students, and hoping to get back into St. Lawrence HS, since Char-Lan was a terrible place, with a lot of bullying. I remember waking up one morning and hearing this coming from another room:

The Nurses Residence, as people called it, was the Regional School of Nursing and then  Mille Roches Hall student residence, for St. Lawrence College. It had a little library on the main floor. It was actually pretty dirty, and I even saw a maggot crawling on the floor in the collective kitchen/TV area. The cleaning ladies would usually just park themselves in front of the TV and eat a bag of chips. The building is now part of the Chartwell Chateau Cornwall seniors' residence.

The Cinema Show

 (writing Jan 14, 2025) Alexa played 'The Cinema Show' by Genesis, from Selling England By The Pound. 

It made me remember my first kiss, by the railway tracks near her house and then the backroom of her parents' house. She played her album.  "I will make my bed/With her tonight, he cries. Can he fail armed with his chocolate surprise?" The song was appropriate. I was trying to get laid. We did do it at the Château Laurier. I bought us bus tickets and a room at the huge hotel in Ottawa. Had nuts from room service.

 Chateau Laurier, 2010, Michel Rathwell, wikimedia commons