Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Leftsaids podcast.
Speaker 2: My guest today is Johnny Browers, one of the promoters
Speaker 2: of the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 2: featured in the new movie.
Speaker 1: Revival sixty nine. This, of course, was debut of John
Speaker 1: Lennon in The Plastic Ono Man. So tell me the
Speaker 1: history of putting on this concert. What was the thought
Speaker 1: forget when you get John at the end, when you
Speaker 1: initially booked the festival, what were you thinking?
Speaker 3: Well, I was thinking that Chuck Berry stole the show
Speaker 3: in June at my festival called the Toronto Pop Festival,
Speaker 3: which was the first festival of nineteen sixty nine, featuring
Speaker 3: Sly Steppenwolf, the band, Blood, Sweat and Tears, terrific artists.
Speaker 3: For two days, duck Berry had people duck walking and
Speaker 3: like just really absolutely stole the show. And that's no exaggeration.
Speaker 3: So I thought we needed a show for the fall,
Speaker 3: and I thought, why don't we get Chuck and all
Speaker 3: of the old rockers together. And of course, being a musician,
Speaker 3: I had played Chuck Berry's songs, and you know, being
Speaker 3: a musicians sometimes you think everybody else likes all the
Speaker 3: same bands you did, and so Little Richard, Jerry Lee, Lewis,
Speaker 3: Bo Diddley were available in the same day as Chuck
Speaker 3: and that seemed to be an omen So it became like, Okay,
Speaker 3: that's it, that's the rock and Roll Revival. And at
Speaker 3: that point we started adding other artists just to fill
Speaker 3: the bill out and got Chicago. Alice Cooper was just
Speaker 3: an afterthought because shep was our buddy and they were
Speaker 3: going to back up geene Vince and nobody had any
Speaker 3: idea they were going to launch a twenty five year career,
Speaker 3: but God bless them. I'm glad they did. I kind
Speaker 3: of think that was a milestone of the event as well.
Speaker 3: But that was the thinking, and it was thinking about
Speaker 3: doing something that you think's a good idea. But you
Speaker 3: know what, I'm sure you've had it happened to you.
Speaker 3: Sometimes you're a good idea. You go, oh wow, I
Speaker 3: thought that was a good idea, but it doesn't seem
Speaker 3: to be a good idea with the public. Nobody's buying tickets.
Speaker 2: Okay, you'd seen Chuck Berry, had you seen these other
Speaker 2: acts perform live? Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis.
Speaker 3: No, I had never seen any of them. I had
Speaker 3: been in bands that played their songs. I had seen
Speaker 3: them on American Bandstand or various different things, but no,
Speaker 3: not live. I never had. Just based on the way
Speaker 3: Chuck was, I assumed they'd all be incredible, which turned
Speaker 3: out they were.
Speaker 2: Okay, tell me about the venue in the capacity of
Speaker 2: the venue.
Speaker 3: Well, it's the football stadium on the University of Toronto
Speaker 3: campus and depending on the configure, it could probably hold
Speaker 3: forty thousand people. I do remember when Crosby Stills in
Speaker 3: Nash played there with the band opening in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 3: They had the stage right up against the wall and
Speaker 3: Bluer Street. Our stage was halfway up the field and
Speaker 3: we had twenty thousand people there, so I think they
Speaker 3: must have had thirty anyway, but that would have been
Speaker 3: the capacity at that time, the way the stage was
Speaker 3: set up.
Speaker 2: Okay, tell me about your festival in the spring.
Speaker 3: Well, it was the Toronto Pop Festival. It was at
Speaker 3: the same facility two days and as I said, we
Speaker 3: had quite a bill headlined by Sly and the Family
Speaker 3: Stone Steppenwolf. We brought them back to Toronto. They were Canadians.
Speaker 3: It was their return to Toronto. It was the band's
Speaker 3: first outdoor festival. Many people think Woodstock was Toronto pop
Speaker 3: festival was. It was just a great show, and I
Speaker 3: think all the bands are kind of listed on that
Speaker 3: quick shot of the flyer in the Revival six '
Speaker 3: nine film. But it was a huge success. It sold
Speaker 3: out both days. As I say in the movie, we
Speaker 3: made a ton of money in that show, and I
Speaker 3: guess we felt kind of invincible because we had come
Speaker 3: from being regular, you know, small time concert promoters. Maybe
Speaker 3: not small time, but smaller venues. The largest venue we
Speaker 3: had done prior to that was Donovan at Varsity Arena.
Speaker 3: That was seven thousand seats. That was quite a jump
Speaker 3: from there to the Football Stadium. But the energy of
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty nine. Agents were talking about festivals. People are
Speaker 3: going to be doing festivals, and we thought, well we
Speaker 3: better do one.
Speaker 2: Okay, once again, let's talk about the economics for sixty
Speaker 2: nine in the spring, you had two days. How many
Speaker 2: tickets did you sell over the two days?
Speaker 3: We sold twenty five thousand on each day.
Speaker 2: And what were the economics in terms of ticket price?
Speaker 2: How much did you have to be the bands? What
Speaker 2: kind of profit?
Speaker 3: Well, I know we made a ton of money, and
Speaker 3: Kenny was the one handling all the money. I just
Speaker 3: knew we made a lot of money and allowed us
Speaker 3: to roll up into the fall very comfortably. And we
Speaker 3: could have probably stood the losses had we not got
Speaker 3: John Lennon. But the Eton investors had, you know, enough
Speaker 3: shares in the company to be able to say, no,
Speaker 3: we're not going to go along with this. I can't
Speaker 3: remember the scale of economics. The tickets were reasonably priced,
Speaker 3: the same as at the Rock Festival in September, you know,
Speaker 3: six dollars a day. People laugh at that now, but
Speaker 3: you know, in terms of the concert business then these
Speaker 3: were standard prices. Woodstock was eighteen dollars for three days.
Speaker 3: So I think, you know, the fact that we sold
Speaker 3: out both of those eight gave us the confidence that
Speaker 3: we could pretty much put anybody into Varsity Stadium and
Speaker 3: it would be a great seller.
Speaker 2: Tell me who we is? Tell me about the company.
Speaker 3: Well, Ken Walker was the guy that got me out
Speaker 3: of the rock pile. I was in the rock pile.
Speaker 3: That was my club. It was like the Fillmore Masonic
Speaker 3: Temple in Toronto brought led Zeppelin. Who Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart,
Speaker 3: you know, Jethro Tull, all kinds of bands on a
Speaker 3: regular basis, but it became kind of like the same
Speaker 3: thing every week, and there was a ceiling to the capacity,
Speaker 3: so you couldn't really make that much money. And I
Speaker 3: had three other partners. So Kenny said to me, why
Speaker 3: aren't you and I get in business and let's just
Speaker 3: put on bigger concerts. I knew Kenny from you know,
Speaker 3: the chums of high school and different places, and we
Speaker 3: knew the Eatons. That was common friends of ours. They
Speaker 3: were a very very wealthy family and so ultimately Henny
Speaker 3: and I just went out on our own. But when
Speaker 3: we needed to do the festival in June, we brought
Speaker 3: George and Thor in with substantial funds and that allows
Speaker 3: us to really do the Toronto Pop Festival and do
Speaker 3: it properly.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's go back to the beginning. You're from Toronto.
Speaker 3: I am from Toronto, born and raised.
Speaker 2: Okay, So you know, one thing about Canada and non
Speaker 2: Canadians don't realize is direct connection with England. There are
Speaker 2: a lot of bands that connected from England first in Canada.
Speaker 2: What got you excited about music?
Speaker 3: Well, I am a musician. I was also a choir boy.
Speaker 3: I had a band of some note during my high
Speaker 3: school years called the Diplomats. And in terms of coming
Speaker 3: back to Toronto, remember I went to Los Angeles for
Speaker 3: sixty six and sixty seven, and when I came back
Speaker 3: act I did.
Speaker 2: Wait wait wait, wait, wait wait wait, let's just go
Speaker 2: a little bit further. What year did the Diplomat start?
Speaker 2: Pre Beatles or post Beatles?
Speaker 3: Sixty two three four? Definitely pre Beatles because we were
Speaker 3: playing Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye songs initially, and it
Speaker 3: was an R and B band. And I don't ever
Speaker 3: remember being in a band that played Beatles songs because
Speaker 3: after the Diplomats I was out of playing in bands.
Speaker 2: Okay, so sixty two, sixty three, sixty four, what instrument
Speaker 2: did you play?
Speaker 3: I played the bass and sang in some of the songs.
Speaker 3: I played bass.
Speaker 2: Yes, So what a lot of people a little younger
Speaker 2: than you were inspired by seeing and hearing the Beatles?
Speaker 2: What inspired you to get into music?
Speaker 3: I just wanted to be in a band. I had
Speaker 3: played piano and given little concerts in my gray flannel
Speaker 3: short pants when I was you know, ten eleven, twelve
Speaker 3: thirty Team but I wanted to be in a band.
Speaker 3: I started trying to play the drums. I was terrible,
Speaker 3: and I wanted to stand up, and so the easiest
Speaker 3: thing to learn standing up is the bass, and that's
Speaker 3: why I became a bass player. I played guitar later,
Speaker 3: but as a bass player, I was able to jump
Speaker 3: right in. I had a good year, and you know,
Speaker 3: everybody needed a bass player.
Speaker 2: Okay, what kind of background did you come from? What
Speaker 2: did your parents do for a living.
Speaker 3: My family was involved in the legal profession, construction politics.
Speaker 3: I grew up in I guess you would call it
Speaker 3: a blue blood family. I went to Upper Canada College,
Speaker 3: which was the oldest private school in Canada, where apparently
Speaker 3: I was enrolled at birth if I can imagine people
Speaker 3: doing that. So I had the opportunity of seeing, you know,
Speaker 3: what could be done and what money could do, and
Speaker 3: that when you needed I kind of had access to
Speaker 3: friends and family who you know, were not unwilling to
Speaker 3: roll the dice with something that their sons or daughters
Speaker 3: might want to do.
Speaker 2: Now, being a contos entrepreneurial, was there any history of
Speaker 2: entrepreneurship in your family? Any models or were you just
Speaker 2: striking off and you were the first one.
Speaker 3: No, my grandfather was quite a well known entrepreneur. Aside
Speaker 3: from building the Granite Club, he also built the Detroit
Speaker 3: Windsor Tunnel. And his method was to go to the
Speaker 3: United States government tell them that the Canadian government were
Speaker 3: going to put up half the money. He hadn't spoken
Speaker 3: to the Canadian government, but he came back with a
Speaker 3: letter from the US government saying we'll put up half
Speaker 3: the money, and the Canadian government said, oh my god,
Speaker 3: well of course we'll put up half as well. So
Speaker 3: that was pretty entrepreneurial. And you know, my father was
Speaker 3: involved in mining at times. I think that's entrepreneurial.
Speaker 2: And you know, obviously there was a lot of success.
Speaker 2: Did you end up inheriting any of this money or
Speaker 2: any of these businesses when your parents passed?
Speaker 3: No, No, my grandfather died in nineteen thirty. My father
Speaker 3: was when, you know, became a lawyer, which wasn't something
Speaker 3: you handed on. They wanted me to go to law school.
Speaker 3: I had no intention of doing anything that required you
Speaker 3: to be in a room all day with no windows.
Speaker 3: I was, you know, I was bound for California at
Speaker 3: seventeen eighteen, and as I as I said earlier. You know,
Speaker 3: I just wanted to get out and do stuff.
Speaker 2: Okay, when you went to California, was this after the Diplomats? Yes, yes, okay,
Speaker 2: let's start with the diplomats. So what was it like
Speaker 2: with the Diplomats? How successful, how often? What kind of gigs?
Speaker 3: Well, we played the same gigs that you know, the
Speaker 3: well known bands of the day played the Rogues, John Elene,
Speaker 3: the Checkmates. There weren't big opportunities or big venues for
Speaker 3: local bands, but there was the Village in Yorkville, the Alpatio,
Speaker 3: I mean a number of these clubs that that was
Speaker 3: like big time playing those clubs. I think the biggest
Speaker 3: thing we played was the Pepsi Under twenty one club
Speaker 3: at the CNE, which would have had about twenty five
Speaker 3: hundred people at it. We played the Key to Bala,
Speaker 3: various places like that, but it was definitely on a
Speaker 3: local scene. The Diplomats were very highly regarded by other musicians.
Speaker 3: We had a fan base and we were a great band.
Speaker 3: That's basically all they can say. Bob Bob McBride was
Speaker 3: our singer. He went on to be the singer of
Speaker 3: a Lighthouse, which was a very successful Canadian Band, and
Speaker 3: the other singer, Peter McGraw, went on to be the
Speaker 3: singer with Paul Butterfield. So those who wanted to stay
Speaker 3: in the business musically ended up moving up the ladder.
Speaker 2: So tell me about this move to California.
Speaker 3: Well, I had the good fortune to fall in love
Speaker 3: with a girl in Toronto, and she was an actress
Speaker 3: and probably the second most well known Canadian next to
Speaker 3: Lauren Green. She had a TV show five days a
Speaker 3: week from the time she was eleven till she was fifteen,
Speaker 3: and her name was Michelle Finney. But her parents, who
Speaker 3: had moved to California, wanted her to be a movie star,
Speaker 3: had demanded that she returned there. So of course I
Speaker 3: had to go to California, and I got a student
Speaker 3: visa and I moved on to her parents' coach, much
Speaker 3: to their chagrin, but nonetheless I ended up getting a
Speaker 3: job selling photocopy paper, and they gave me a car
Speaker 3: and a box of leads, and that's what I did.
Speaker 3: My school visa went out the window, and I became
Speaker 3: an entrepreneur selling photocopy paper.
Speaker 2: So when you left Toronto, how old were you and
Speaker 2: how did you leave the Diplomats.
Speaker 3: I played at the Pepsieter twenty one club. That was
Speaker 3: the last gig that I played as the bass player.
Speaker 3: It was the big send off. How old was I
Speaker 3: when I went to California? I was just almost eighteen.
Speaker 3: I was seventeen, but in November of that year I
Speaker 3: became eighteen.
Speaker 2: So how long did it last with Michelle Finney?
Speaker 3: Well, we elope to Encinata, Mexico, and came back with
Speaker 3: a Mayorage certificate with our names in English and the
Speaker 3: rest in Mexican or Spanish. Somebody said, are you sure
Speaker 3: you did buy a cow? But it was fifty dollars
Speaker 3: and it was very romantic. And we were then married
Speaker 3: again in the little brown church on Van Knives. And
Speaker 3: then we moved back to Canada, moved back to Toronto,
Speaker 3: and that's when I found a dearth of rock and roll.
Speaker 3: We've been going on too, the Sunset Strip and to
Speaker 3: clubs and seeing great bands, love the doors, people like that.
Speaker 3: Toronto was all folksing back then, and that's how I
Speaker 3: ended up bringing the doors and that was my first concert.
Speaker 2: Okay, how long were you in Los Angeles?
Speaker 3: Two years? Almost two years?
Speaker 2: And your student visa ran out? How did you stay
Speaker 2: in California or no one knew when you were basically
Speaker 2: illegal at that point?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, basically no one knew. No one cared back
Speaker 3: in those days, certainly.
Speaker 2: And okay, so you sold copy paper until you returned
Speaker 2: to Toronto.
Speaker 3: Well not quite. I met a guy named Huggy Boy
Speaker 3: at the racetrack. Because I made so much money selling
Speaker 3: photocopy paper that I kind of just lived on mailbox
Speaker 3: money or picked up my checks. I created the concept
Speaker 3: that paper was going to get to be very expensive,
Speaker 3: but if you ordered a year's worth, I could keep
Speaker 3: it at this price. And so the next thing you know,
Speaker 3: my customers are ordering a year's worth of paper. That's entrepreneurial,
Speaker 3: I guess, whatever. But I wanted to cut to the
Speaker 3: chase and not be going back to the same place
Speaker 3: every two weeks. Ended up going to the racetrack with
Speaker 3: a neighbor of mine. By this time, of course, I
Speaker 3: had moved into an apartment on North Orange Drive in
Speaker 3: Hollywood called the Madison and met a neighbor and he
Speaker 3: took me out to the racetrack and I met a
Speaker 3: guy named Huggy Boy, who'd been a legendary DJ in
Speaker 3: the fifties. It was a little down on his luck,
Speaker 3: but I bankrolled him to get the big forty oldies
Speaker 3: pressed up again and went up and down the coast
Speaker 3: with him in his Cadillac, selling them by knocking on
Speaker 3: the doors of radio stations and saying, Huggy Boys here,
Speaker 3: and people would go, oh my god, Huggy boy. I mean,
Speaker 3: we're in awe of him. And we would go in
Speaker 3: the air with a little pre recorded commercial and people
Speaker 3: would come down to the station and he would sign
Speaker 3: the records. Then Jack Smith gave us a slot on XDRB.
Speaker 3: I think it was midnight to one in the morning
Speaker 3: on Sunday, and it didn't matter, hugging it on the
Speaker 3: air with the big forty oldies and bags of money
Speaker 3: started pouring in. So this was all great until I
Speaker 3: got a knock on my door of my apartment and
Speaker 3: it was US Customs and Immigration. You need to be
Speaker 3: back in Toronto within three days or we'll be taking
Speaker 3: you back. You were working and you're not doing your
Speaker 3: student visa stuff. So Michelle and I had to basically
Speaker 3: go back to Toronto and okay, wait.
Speaker 2: Wait, wait, wait wait. Before you get there, was it
Speaker 2: cheaper if you bought paper for a year, or you'd
Speaker 2: just tell people.
Speaker 3: It was the same price, and paper, of course, always
Speaker 3: like anything else, increased in price, but probably not material
Speaker 3: materially to the degree that if you bought it for
Speaker 3: a year, you were going to save a fortune of money.
Speaker 3: What I was saving was a lot of time because
Speaker 3: we would do deliveries on a three monthly basis, so
Speaker 3: instead of me lugging paper out to people's places because
Speaker 3: there wasn't any deliveries, but once you ordered a year's worth,
Speaker 3: you would get it delivered every three months, so there
Speaker 3: were some benefits to it.
Speaker 2: What was your pitch to Huggy Boy. You only met
Speaker 2: him one day at the racetrack. How did he decide
Speaker 2: to go to business with you?
Speaker 3: Well, I met him one day, but we saw each
Speaker 3: other many times, and as it turned out, I was
Speaker 3: in line behind a couple of very well dressed women
Speaker 3: who I recognized as obviously wealthy from you know, mothers
Speaker 3: of friends of mine at Upper Canada College. The way
Speaker 3: they were dressed, and they were talking about betting on
Speaker 3: a horse. This woman said that they flew in on
Speaker 3: their jet from Connecticut. Now nobody had jets back then.
Speaker 3: The unless you had a leer jet and they were
Speaker 3: going to bet this long shot and it was like
Speaker 3: twenty eight to one, and the woman bet five thousand.
Speaker 3: That brought the odds down. Our friend brought a bad
Speaker 3: a thousand. I had two hundred and sixty dollars on me.
Speaker 3: I put that all in the same horse in at one.
Speaker 3: So I ended up with about seven thousand dollars with
Speaker 3: the tickets. Now, my friend advised me, you will not
Speaker 3: be able to cash those. You're not twenty one, you're
Speaker 3: not even legal to be in here. They will seize
Speaker 3: them from you. We need to find Huggy Boy and
Speaker 3: get them to cash those tickets. So that's when Huggy
Speaker 3: Boy said, I'll only do it if you invest this
Speaker 3: money and we get the big forty oldies going again.
Speaker 3: So I said, okay, I want my two hundred and
Speaker 3: sixty eight dollars back, but yeah, I'll bank roll that.
Speaker 3: And that's how it started.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you go back to Toronto. What year is it?
Speaker 2: Set the scene for me?
Speaker 3: Well, it's now nineteen six and I moved back into
Speaker 3: my mom's place in Rosedale with my bride, with my wife,
Speaker 3: we'd been married for almost two years, and that's when
Speaker 3: I wanted to know what to do, how to you know,
Speaker 3: how to fit in up here. And that's when I
Speaker 3: decided to bring the doors to Toronto, and they were
Speaker 3: very hot. Jamie Sifton's uncle gave us the money and
Speaker 3: he was in the construction business, and we went to
Speaker 3: ask him for ten thousand dollars to bring the doors
Speaker 3: to Toronto, and he was either hard of hearing or
Speaker 3: busy on speakerphones or something, and he said, oh, Jamie, Jamie,
Speaker 3: I'm glad you're getting into the business. It turns out
Speaker 3: he thought we were buying doors, like doors that you've
Speaker 3: got put on a wall, and so you know, that's
Speaker 3: how we got the money for the doors. And that
Speaker 3: was the first time, you know that I wrote in
Speaker 3: a limo alone with Jim Morrison of course at the time,
Speaker 3: and that was very exciting. We sold out the CNE
Speaker 3: Coliseum ten thousand seats and Jim was the Lizard King.
Speaker 3: Then it was April twentieth, nineteen sixty eight. I like
Speaker 3: to think maybe we started four twenty. I'm not sure,
Speaker 3: but that was a very exciting time. I was told
Speaker 3: to bring six beers for Jim and two limos and
Speaker 3: the band and Bill Siddons got in one and I'm
Speaker 3: standing at the curb with Jim and we get in
Speaker 3: and he sees the beers and the opener opens one
Speaker 3: up drains it opens another one, and he kind of
Speaker 3: bumped his shoulder at me, like, you know, meaning have one.
Speaker 3: So I nursed mine all the way downtown and we
Speaker 3: got to the hotel. The driver opened the door. Jim
Speaker 3: got halfway out and he turned back and looked at
Speaker 3: me and he said, hey, man, thanks for not talking.
Speaker 3: Like I was terrified. I couldn't say a word to him.
Speaker 3: I'd find out later. The agent said to me the
Speaker 3: next day, hey, kid, you did gray. You sold out
Speaker 3: the show. And Jim said he likes the promoter. Well,
Speaker 3: that was the only kind I had hitting contact with him.
Speaker 3: So Robbie told me later that would be about the
Speaker 3: best thing you could ever do with Jim is not
Speaker 3: to talk. So that's when fear won out.
Speaker 2: Okay, you start in the business. The concept is easy.
Speaker 2: You book a band, you get a venue, sell tickets,
Speaker 2: big money. But the first time around it must have
Speaker 2: been pretty scaring. You must have fucked up a little bit.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, you try not to think of the
Speaker 3: fuck ups, I'd have to really press hard to recall one.
Speaker 3: Just the thrill of doing these things for me overrode
Speaker 3: any kind of problems that we had with the door show.
Speaker 3: We didn't really have any problems. It was very smooth,
Speaker 3: it sold out. The band was incredible. As I said,
Speaker 3: Jim was the Lizard King. Then on like nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 3: when he came back for the revival, he was very subdued, haircut,
Speaker 3: very you know, you could see the look on his face.
Speaker 3: He was not a happy man. He was facing the
Speaker 3: charges out of Miami. It was life changing. So the
Speaker 3: sixty eight event, now, of course, right after that, Russ
Speaker 3: Gibb got in touch with me from Detroit. He had
Speaker 3: the Grandy Ballroom. He knew me from the Rock Pile
Speaker 3: and he was bringing Jimmy Hendricks and he said, Brower,
Speaker 3: be my local promoter, be my guy there. So that
Speaker 3: was the next show I was involved in.
Speaker 2: But whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa? How did he know you
Speaker 2: from the rock Pile at that point? When did you
Speaker 2: open the rock Pile?
Speaker 3: Well? I had the rock Pile in sixty eight, later
Speaker 3: in sixty eight, and you know, back and forth with
Speaker 3: Russ Gibb was a promoter. A lot of promoters, you know,
Speaker 3: were in touch with each other because it was sometimes
Speaker 3: you'd if, like Donald in Montreal, if a band needed
Speaker 3: two dates, Donald would ask me if you'll take one,
Speaker 3: or I would ask him, like the Doors, they needed
Speaker 3: two dates to play the revival, and so Donald took
Speaker 3: them on the Sunday in Montreal. Russ Gibb on occasion,
Speaker 3: I would, you know, share a date with him, or
Speaker 3: in this case it was you know, the opportunity of
Speaker 3: him for the first time asking me and he didn't
Speaker 3: know me yet from the rock Pile. He knew me
Speaker 3: from the Door show, because I think that was promoted
Speaker 3: also of course in Detroit, Windsor everybody promoted. I mean,
Speaker 3: as you know, back in the day, there was no computers.
Speaker 3: You had to deliver your tickets as far and wide
Speaker 3: as possible in order to sell them. Promotion was easy.
Speaker 3: Radio stations were on the case, not a problem. Buy
Speaker 3: some radio time and they'll blast it out there because
Speaker 3: there wasn't anything else going on, like a million things
Speaker 3: right now, you know, putting on a concert. You were
Speaker 3: you know VIP in terms of promotion at radio stations.
Speaker 2: So when you put on the doors in Toronto sixty eight,
Speaker 2: if we use the line of demarcation of the Beatles
Speaker 2: sixty four, things explode. Were there any the other concert
Speaker 2: promoters in Toronto? Was anybody mad that you got the
Speaker 2: gig and they didn't?
Speaker 3: Well, Marty Enrat was a well known promoter in Toronto.
Speaker 3: He did events at Massey Hall. I don't believe that
Speaker 3: he did any rock events. And of course the Gardens
Speaker 3: did the Beatles and the Stones, and other than that,
Speaker 3: there was the o'keith Center, and I guess there were
Speaker 3: a couple of other promoters, you know, other than Marty.
Speaker 3: I can't really think of them. If there were any,
Speaker 3: they certainly weren't anyone in my social circle or anyone
Speaker 3: that I knew. And the whole thing with Kenny and
Speaker 3: I is we just wanted to do rock shows. I mean,
Speaker 3: that was what we wanted. That's what was happening.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's nineteen sixty eight. How old are you
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm approaching twenty two. My birthdays in November, so
Speaker 3: each year I'm the same as I was almost the
Speaker 3: whole year. Eleven months of the last birthday so yeah, twenty.
Speaker 2: How many How many shows do you put on before
Speaker 2: you open the club?
Speaker 3: Probably four, maybe five, and two of them of course
Speaker 3: were with ruskib because Kenny scooped me up after the club.
Speaker 3: But we decided to do the club basically because we were,
Speaker 3: you know, reading Rollie's sone about Bill Graham and the
Speaker 3: film More and you know, one of my friends said, well,
Speaker 3: you know, my girlfriend's dad's ahead of the Masonic Temple,
Speaker 3: and my other buddy, Doug, said, you know, I have
Speaker 3: some trust fund money, and the next thing you know,
Speaker 3: we're meeting the Masonic Temple and opening up the Rock
Speaker 3: Pile with Blood, Sweat and Tears. Who had a number
Speaker 3: one record and was there coming home to Toronto.
Speaker 2: What was the capacity of the Rock Pile?
Speaker 3: I would say legal about fourteen hundred. There were occasions
Speaker 3: of having over two thousand people in there. There were
Speaker 3: some fire marshall crowbar in the back door nights when
Speaker 3: that's just what had to be done. It was very
Speaker 3: free for all back in those days when there's no seating.
Speaker 3: There were some benches, the concrete benches up on the
Speaker 3: second floor, but for the right band, and when led
Speaker 3: Zeppelin came, the second time. I mean bikers were charging
Speaker 3: five dollars to push people through the open windows from
Speaker 3: the street. It was so packed that you couldn't even
Speaker 3: get in if a door was opened. It was insane.
Speaker 2: How long did the Rock Pile operate?
Speaker 3: I operated in capacity as a talent buyer and producer
Speaker 3: for about eight months. It lasted about another six months,
Speaker 3: so it was about a year and a half.
Speaker 2: And why did you leave?
Speaker 3: I left to do bigger concerts with Ken Walker. I
Speaker 3: just you know, the rock Pile was just like the
Speaker 3: same thing every week. And also there were other weeks
Speaker 3: like Silver Apples, where you drew three people, but the
Speaker 3: agent told you they were the next Beatles. There wasn't
Speaker 3: Led Zeppelin every week, and we weren't Bill Graham, we
Speaker 3: weren't selling posters and merchandise. And you know, this was
Speaker 3: kind of a fun thing for my three partners. They
Speaker 3: all went either back to school or into business or
Speaker 3: to business school. And you know, I was entrepreneurial. I
Speaker 3: just wanted to keep doing this, so Kenny offered the
Speaker 3: opportunity for.
Speaker 2: That and just staying with the Rock pill for a while.
Speaker 2: How often did you do shows and how did that
Speaker 2: work out? Economically.
Speaker 3: Well, there were great weeks and there were disasters, but
Speaker 3: there was talent every week. We had to do a
Speaker 3: show every week in order to qualify as being a
Speaker 3: legitimate venue. You know, we had the debacles there and
Speaker 3: we had incredible sellouts, and we had experiences like Peter
Speaker 3: Grant showing up and try to rob us, and you
Speaker 3: know other times when certain people would show up and
Speaker 3: there would be like they'd be so gracious that you're,
Speaker 3: you know, putting on a show for them. That especially
Speaker 3: the English bands, like you mentioned earlier, many of the
Speaker 3: English bands would get their visas to Canada first and
Speaker 3: then that would be something that they would use in
Speaker 3: the States to add American dates. So a lot of
Speaker 3: times they would come to Toronto or Montreal first and
Speaker 3: then that would trigger them already being in North America,
Speaker 3: or they would be able to apply in the States
Speaker 3: since they were playing Toronto, and then we need to
Speaker 3: come to Detroit. That's kind of where they went. It
Speaker 3: is from Us to ruskild.
Speaker 2: Okay, how did Peter Grant try to rob you?
Speaker 3: Well, Peter Grant was the tour manager for the Jeff
Speaker 3: Beck group. This is pre led Zeppelin, and we booked
Speaker 3: them for two shows on a Sunday. They sold out
Speaker 3: both shows clean afternoon Mattinee, No band, No band, had
Speaker 3: to refund all the tickets. Everybody's now lining up for
Speaker 3: the evening show, and they show up, you know, and unload,
Speaker 3: and you know, you always pay the agent for one
Speaker 3: show and then you give the band cash for the second.
Speaker 3: So Peter Grant shows up and wants the money for
Speaker 3: the second show, and we said, well, we had to
Speaker 3: refund the first show. You didn't show up. What do
Speaker 3: you mean, give you the money for the second show.
Speaker 3: He goes, so if we don't get the money for
Speaker 3: the second show, we're not going on. Well, at that point,
Speaker 3: you know, we'd already let people in the hall. I mean,
Speaker 3: it would have been a nightmare, and of course our
Speaker 3: reputation would have been destroyed. It was bad enough that
Speaker 3: we had to refund the first show. So the band
Speaker 3: starts to play and one of my partners, Doug mcquaig's
Speaker 3: father was a very powerful attorney, and he made some
Speaker 3: phone calls, even on a Sunday, And when the band
Speaker 3: got off stage, there was immigration officers, customs officers and
Speaker 3: police officers there waiting, and two of my partners were
Speaker 3: big guys. They were like six foot three, two hundred
Speaker 3: and something, and they said you have to go talk
Speaker 3: to him because he might hit us. So I went
Speaker 3: up to Peter and I said, look, Peter, I need
Speaker 3: to inform you that the police there are going to
Speaker 3: take you to your hotel and you're going to a
Speaker 3: court tomorrow and be charged with theft by conversion, whatever
Speaker 3: else they can throw at you. And the customs people
Speaker 3: are going to impound the equipment and that's what's happening
Speaker 3: for you guys right now. And so he just now,
Speaker 3: meaning take in our equipment, and I go, well, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm afraid that's not the case. So one of the
Speaker 3: police officers came over and started telling him the same thing,
Speaker 3: and he grabbed the guy through like right here of
Speaker 3: his uniform and lifting him up in the air right
Speaker 3: to his face and said, nobody's taking our equipment. And
Speaker 3: this guy pulled his side arm out and put it
Speaker 3: in his gut and he said to him, you know,
Speaker 3: like let me down roll shoot you. Well Peter looked
Speaker 3: downside the gun lowered him. In La he might have
Speaker 3: been shot, but in Toronto, I think he shocked everybody.
Speaker 3: So much that they just escorted him to the hotel.
Speaker 3: Chaff said to me, can we please take our guitars?
Speaker 3: They said yes, of course. So nine in the morning,
Speaker 3: Steve Weiss and Frank Barcelona are on the phone to me,
Speaker 3: nine o'clock Monday morning, going, John, the band's got to
Speaker 3: be in Detroit tonight. Please, what can we do? How
Speaker 3: can we work this out? And I go, well, we
Speaker 3: just want our money back, you know, like we want
Speaker 3: to pay for one show and if it was we
Speaker 3: paid for the first show and we ended up getting
Speaker 3: the second, that's fine, fine, fine, John. The police are
Speaker 3: over there. They're talking about escorting Peter downtown in an hour,
Speaker 3: and what what can we do? I said, well, get
Speaker 3: Peter to come over here with our money and then
Speaker 3: I'll make a call and whatever, you know, charges whatever,
Speaker 3: Doug mcquig's dadd'll stop everything. So Peter came over with
Speaker 3: the money rolled up in a big thing with elastics
Speaker 3: around it. And the Masonic Temple had these beautiful marble
Speaker 3: steps and leading up to these huge doors, and then
Speaker 3: more marble steps up to the entrance. So I went
Speaker 3: and sit at the top of the inner marble steps
Speaker 3: and within a few minutes because their hotel wasn't very
Speaker 3: far away. It was like the door came off the hinges.
Speaker 3: Peter pulled that door open and like the sun behind him,
Speaker 3: and here's this giant, hoping guy in the doorway, and
Speaker 3: he comes in and he looks up at me and
Speaker 3: he just goes back in one blow and he just
Speaker 3: hurls his money right at me and hit me right
Speaker 3: in the head and it blew up all over the place,
Speaker 3: knocked me on my ass, and I just started scooping
Speaker 3: the money up and I looked at him, I said,
Speaker 3: get the f out of my club. And that was
Speaker 3: my only contact with Peter Grant. By the time he
Speaker 3: came back the second time for led Zeppelin, I was
Speaker 3: not involved with the club. I had been at Woodstock.
Speaker 3: It was the Monday of Woodstock and I was just
Speaker 3: getting back from being on stage at Woodstock for two
Speaker 3: days and we got back to go see Zeppelin at
Speaker 3: the club and just missed their encore. So I saw
Speaker 3: Woodstock and I missed led Zeppelin's encore at what once
Speaker 3: was my club.
Speaker 2: What were you doing on the stage at Woodstock?
Speaker 3: Well, you know entrepreneurial skills, you know, aside there was
Speaker 3: also hustle. Michael Lang invited all the promoters that were
Speaker 3: known to come to his show in Woodstock, which was great.
Speaker 3: He called us in June. I don't know who he was,
Speaker 3: and you know it was great. Sure, man, that's great. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we'll come to your show. Well, on Friday, Hugh Curry
Speaker 3: and I and are production manager and receptionist started driving
Speaker 3: up Young Street and on the radio comes this incredible
Speaker 3: story Woodstock and everything, and on the interview in a
Speaker 3: radio comes Michael Lang talking about it. So I'm going
Speaker 3: that's that guy called our office in June. That guy
Speaker 3: invited us to come. So long story short, we decide
Speaker 3: we're going to turn the car around, go to my place,
Speaker 3: get some underwear, socks or whatever. Nobody's calling their wife,
Speaker 3: nobody's The receptionist said, I don't need to call anybody,
Speaker 3: and we had to Buffalo. So we get to the
Speaker 3: border and tell the guy we're going to visit friends
Speaker 3: and have dinner in Buffalo. We know we're not telling
Speaker 3: them we're going to Woodstock. We get to fifty miles
Speaker 3: from Woodstock and the roads closed and everybody steered into
Speaker 3: a roadside whatever the through way things are. There was
Speaker 3: probably a thousand people there, So, you know, my buddy says,
Speaker 3: and we had a couple of joints with us some alcohol.
Speaker 3: So my buddy goes, well that's it, man. We tried.
Speaker 3: We gave it a shot, and I said, no, give
Speaker 3: me a joint. So there was probably fifty people at
Speaker 3: the pavephone. I lit it and came up to the
Speaker 3: front and I said, look, somebody's having a baby. You
Speaker 3: got to have the phone just for one minute, please
Speaker 3: play is here? So okay, man, So pass the joint
Speaker 3: down a couple people. I get on the phone, call
Speaker 3: the New York State Police. I go listen, we're roadies
Speaker 3: for a band that's playing at the festival witch Talk.
Speaker 3: I think we're lost. We're trying to get there. How
Speaker 3: do we get to the back roads? How do we
Speaker 3: get to the heliport? So he goes, I don't know
Speaker 3: what back roads, but the heliport. Where are you? And
Speaker 3: I tell him He goes, go back to exits, go
Speaker 3: south to Route seventeen, Go eastern Route seventeen. You'll run
Speaker 3: right into it. You'll see the clevelands. So an hour
Speaker 3: later we're there at the heliport and we go up
Speaker 3: to the chopper guy and tell them, you know, when
Speaker 3: can we get on a chopper? He goes, what band
Speaker 3: are you with? You go, we're not with a band.
Speaker 3: Michael Lang invited us. He goes, Michael Lang invited everybody
Speaker 3: get out of here. If you're not on a band
Speaker 3: playing tomorrow, you're not getting out of chopper. So now
Speaker 3: we're like, oh my god. It was a motel there,
Speaker 3: and of course it said rooms available, and nobody want
Speaker 3: to stay there. So the production manager and the reception
Speaker 3: just go, look, we've got to get a room. We
Speaker 3: can't drive back to Traunta now. So to them, it's over.
Speaker 3: So a cab pulls up and a guy gets out
Speaker 3: with the guitar and he comes over to the chopper
Speaker 3: guy and he goes, Eric Barrett got Jimmy Hendrix's guitar,
Speaker 3: going to get on a choupper right now. The guy goes,
Speaker 3: you're not getting on a chopper right now. Jimmy's playing
Speaker 3: Sunday night. You don't get on a chopper till tomorrow.
Speaker 3: So he's going fuck, you know, So we sidle up
Speaker 3: to him, and you know, we're limiting that. The chopper guys,
Speaker 3: which are always the worst guys in the world at
Speaker 3: any festival and a station wagon pulls up and this
Speaker 3: guy gets out and he's chewing on some tobacco, and
Speaker 3: you know, Levon Holm would be the perfect guy to
Speaker 3: play this guy if this is a movie. And he
Speaker 3: sidles up to and he goes, hey, you boys, don't
Speaker 3: want to go to that big hip show. Get you
Speaker 3: right in fifty bucks each. So we look at this
Speaker 3: guy and like so Eric Barrett goes, all right, let's go,
Speaker 3: let's go.
Speaker 2: I'll go.
Speaker 3: Well, Hugh and I look at each other. Makets for
Speaker 3: eighteen dollars, but fifty bucks each. Now my friends come
Speaker 3: back and they've got a motel room. They're all excited.
Speaker 3: It's one hundred bucks for the next two nights and
Speaker 3: there's two beds in a couch. I said, we're going
Speaker 3: into the festival with this guy. Well, my receptions looked
Speaker 3: at this guy and she said, I'm not getting in
Speaker 3: the car with that man. I mean he looked rough,
Speaker 3: and so I said okay, And they've gotten kind of
Speaker 3: snugly in the car, and a production guy you know, says, well,
Speaker 3: we'll stay here, man, We've got a room. If it's
Speaker 3: good coming at us, I said, I don't think we're
Speaker 3: going to get you. But anyway, so we get in
Speaker 3: this guy's car and he drives down the road and
Speaker 3: all of a sudden he pulls right off the road
Speaker 3: and crashes into the woods, and we are screaming, but
Speaker 3: all of a sudden he's laughing, and he's driving through
Speaker 3: ruts in the road and branches are flashing off this
Speaker 3: windshield and Eric parents says, you know you got me pot,
Speaker 3: and then Hugh goes, yeah, we got to do before you.
Speaker 3: And this guy goes he bowys wants a pot, and
Speaker 3: he pulls up his bag from under the seat, big
Speaker 3: buds the size of mice, and he sells us two
Speaker 3: of them for fifty each. Long story short. He drives
Speaker 3: through the woods, comes into a field, goes through the
Speaker 3: woods again, comes out and pulls up and drops right
Speaker 3: into the backstage of Woodstock. There's the stage, okay, and
Speaker 3: so security comes running over. Eric Barrett jumps out, Jimmy
Speaker 3: Hendrix wesby Trailsmie laminates and I go where with him?
Speaker 3: And so they give us backstage all stage laminates and
Speaker 3: we never see him again. And that was it. We're
Speaker 3: now backstage at Woodstock with all access laminates in twelve hours.
Speaker 2: Okay, you're there, you're there for three days. Where do
Speaker 2: you sleep?
Speaker 3: No, we don't sleep anywhere, because a girl came along
Speaker 3: very shortly thereafter with two giant mushroom stems. I ate
Speaker 3: my allmine right away. Hugh do doled his out of
Speaker 3: the weekend. He has some stories about what happened to me,
Speaker 3: But nobody slept. There was no sleeping. You might lean
Speaker 3: up against something. I fell in love with the trumpet
Speaker 3: player for Sly and the Family Stone, standing about ten
Speaker 3: feet from her. Abby Hoffman was standing next to me
Speaker 3: when The Who was playing, and between one of their songs,
Speaker 3: he ran out and grabbed the mic and goes, what
Speaker 3: are we gonna do? But John Sinclair, what are we
Speaker 3: gonna do about? John Sinklair and Pete Townsend come up
Speaker 3: and smashes him on the back of the head and
Speaker 3: knocks him out. Roady's drag him off. I'm on mushrooms
Speaker 3: watching this. I never could have an infinity for The Who.
Speaker 3: After that, Janna threw me off the stage. My friend
Speaker 3: was her guitar player, John Till. We're smoking a joint
Speaker 3: behind the amps and she comes out to go on
Speaker 3: and doesn't see John as she goes, where's my guitar player?
Speaker 3: Where's my guitar player? She sees us, He who the
Speaker 3: fuck are you? Are you getting my guitar player's stone?
Speaker 3: Get the fuck off my stage. So Rody's come and
Speaker 3: grab me. I have to get off the stage. Lamit
Speaker 3: or not, you get it off the stage right now. Now.
Speaker 3: Those are some highlights. And then of course Monday morning
Speaker 3: on stage for Jimmy, and that was incredible. I'm down
Speaker 3: by now, and so Jimmy's over and my buddy looks
Speaker 3: at me. He goes, where's that guy with the station wagon? Well,
Speaker 3: of course he was nowhere to be found. But I
Speaker 3: see about one hundred yards away a National Guard helicopter
Speaker 3: and the blades were like it was sort of on,
Speaker 3: like idling. I guess what their blades do? They kind
Speaker 3: of move, So I said, come on, I remember we
Speaker 3: have these laminates. So I come up to this kid
Speaker 3: that looks younger than us, but he's about six '
Speaker 3: three and he's in a uniform and he's standing next
Speaker 3: to this huge helicopter. So I go, listen, man, can
Speaker 3: you take us to the Montsello Airport? I said, we're
Speaker 3: with the promoters. Very important. We have to get there.
Speaker 3: He goes get in. He slides this door open, this
Speaker 3: like the size of the wall in the one of
Speaker 3: my apartments. And of course when we get in, people
Speaker 3: rush the helicopter. I mean, nobody wanted to ask. I ask,
Speaker 3: that's who I am? So I asked, Now the door's open.
Speaker 3: Finally he had to stop, like he had twelve more
Speaker 3: people in there. I don't know how many, but bum
Speaker 3: bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum
Speaker 3: down right there, and there's the car, and there's my
Speaker 3: production manager and receptionist standing next to it. And that's it.
Speaker 3: We drive home and misleds up.
Speaker 2: Okay, you do the festival in the spring. You've already
Speaker 2: left the venue and the rock pile before you do
Speaker 2: the Rock and Roll Revival sixty nine in the fall.
Speaker 2: Did you do any other shows?
Speaker 3: I did? I must admit that I did Blind Faith
Speaker 3: at the end of July. Kenny wouldn't do it with me.
Speaker 3: The record was now yet. My friend Hugh Curry was
Speaker 3: a DJ on Chalmy at a Sunday night radio show
Speaker 3: called The Dream Machine. He was saying, you have to
Speaker 3: do it, you have to do it. This is the
Speaker 3: super group. You have to bring them here. So Stan
Speaker 3: Freeman at the Electric Circus in Toronto or in New
Speaker 3: York had an electric circus by this time, competing with
Speaker 3: the Rock Pile in Toronto. He said, I'll do it
Speaker 3: with you, and so he and another guy I can't
Speaker 3: remember his name, they put the money up and we
Speaker 3: lost twenty thousand dollars. There's only three thousand people came.
Speaker 3: The record came out the day of the show, and
Speaker 3: it was an incredible show. Of course, it was an
Speaker 3: amazing show, and Hugh and I sat and played records
Speaker 3: with Stevie Winwood and Rick Gretch after the show all
Speaker 3: night long. Back at Hughes Plays, Clapton went off, I
Speaker 3: don't know where with Bonnie Bonnie Delaney. They were the
Speaker 3: opening act. It was a magical experience, but it costs money.
Speaker 3: It was. It was a bomb, as were many of
Speaker 3: those dates because there was no record. If there's no record,
Speaker 3: there's no internet, there's no nothing. There's no tribal drums.
Speaker 3: You know, there's rolling stone.
Speaker 2: Okay, what let's go back to the show. What is
Speaker 2: the exact date of the Spring.
Speaker 3: Festival September thirteenth, No, No, the one in the spring
Speaker 3: June twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: Okay, so how long after that festival do you start
Speaker 2: deciding you're going to do something in September.
Speaker 3: Like probably the day afterwards.
Speaker 2: And is the initial idea this rock revival thing or
Speaker 2: is anybody saying anything different?
Speaker 3: No? No, I was usually the guy that would call
Speaker 3: the shots on who we were going to book. Kenny
Speaker 3: was the business guy. He always made sure, you know,
Speaker 3: we made money. I don't know how, but he did.
Speaker 3: And so it was this whole thing that Chuck Berry
Speaker 3: stole the show. Everybody's talking about Chuck Berry the next
Speaker 3: few days. So that's when it was let's do all
Speaker 3: the old rock and rollers.
Speaker 2: Okay, so tell me about building the show, getting the tech.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, the talent came together in one day,
Speaker 3: literally the rockers, and that was what was made us
Speaker 3: feel for sure, this is a great idea because just
Speaker 3: two calls to Universal or you know another booking agent
Speaker 3: I can't remember who, didn't matter. We were, you know,
Speaker 3: Jerry Lee's available. Gene Vincent came on later, Kim Fowley
Speaker 3: got us to bring him up there, and little Richard,
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, probably those guys were not getting
Speaker 3: booked very often, and this was like I got a
Speaker 3: date for you. It was probably what their agent said, Hey,
Speaker 3: I got a date for you up in Toronto, and
Speaker 3: we thought it was propitious and you know, a good omen.
Speaker 3: In hindsight, it was probably them excited to get a gig.
Speaker 3: I don't know, nobody knows, but it all came together
Speaker 3: in like a few phone calls.
Speaker 2: Okay, so how did you end up booking the more
Speaker 2: contemporary acts Chicago? The Door's Alice Cooper.
Speaker 3: Well, Chicrgo had a number one record. Okay, they were huge,
Speaker 3: and so they were an obvious buy just because they
Speaker 3: were getting massive radio player. In terms of the doors,
Speaker 3: they did not come along until I saw that this
Speaker 3: was going to be an unmitigated disaster. And that's when
Speaker 3: I bore the money from Edgo the Biker to bring them,
Speaker 3: and I thought, well, for sure, now we're going to
Speaker 3: sell out the doors because the year before we sold
Speaker 3: out the coliseum in like days. But the you know,
Speaker 3: blush was off the rose whatever that expression is, and
Speaker 3: the doors. Remember something else. I believe a lot of
Speaker 3: parents were involved in kids getting permission to go downtown
Speaker 3: and be at a show. They didn't end till eleven
Speaker 3: o'clock at night, and also to have six dollars or
Speaker 3: eight dollars, and then I need money for a hot
Speaker 3: dog and a coke, et cetera, et cetera. This was
Speaker 3: not entrepreneurial teenagers. This was provincial Toronto. Liquor stores closed Sunday,
Speaker 3: bars closed Sunday. I mean, this was still very provincial,
Speaker 3: and I believe parents had a lot to do with it.
Speaker 3: I'm sure the story about Jim Morrison more in Miami
Speaker 3: had spread far and wide on the parental tribal drums.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's go a little slower. Basically, in one day,
Speaker 2: you book all the fifties rockers, do you in from
Speaker 2: the beginning? Do you plan to book contemporary stuff like Chicago?
Speaker 2: Or is an afterthought because those things are a little
Speaker 2: oil and water. They're both music, are both rock, but
Speaker 2: from different erows.
Speaker 3: Yes, we intended to book other acts as well, because,
Speaker 3: of course, from the June show there were acts that
Speaker 3: were so off the wall, like Doctor John, that were
Speaker 3: like incredible, that stunned the audience. Nobody knew who Doctor
Speaker 3: John was. And we booked Tony Joe White, who also
Speaker 3: had a big record and who was he was a
Speaker 3: country guy from Nashville or something like that. But they
Speaker 3: had big records and that was getting airplay. That obviously
Speaker 3: did not translate to ticket sales either. And I think
Speaker 3: you have to remember as a festival, parents were involved
Speaker 3: in approving their kids coming down there.
Speaker 2: How long after you booked the initial talent did you
Speaker 2: decide and then book the doors.
Speaker 3: Well, the doors were the very late booking. That was
Speaker 3: a hail Mary pass right there before we had a
Speaker 3: Hail Mary with Lennon. That was when it was obvious
Speaker 3: the ticket sales were not going to reach any kind
Speaker 3: of line like a stock where you know it's climbing.
Speaker 3: They were flat, and I just felt from the Door's
Speaker 3: performance the year before, and you know, girls were screaming,
Speaker 3: they were like fainting at the coliseum. It was pandemonium.
Speaker 3: Jim had his shirt open and his hair and he
Speaker 3: was the lizard king. That's what I thought we were getting.
Speaker 3: And you know, we didn't get latest photos of people
Speaker 3: sent up to us. Oh wait a minute, here's Jim's
Speaker 3: latest mugshot. No, that didn't come up with the contract.
Speaker 3: So they came and you know it was a very
Speaker 3: different reception.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's talk before the date plays. So when you
Speaker 2: booked the doors, are you aware of what happened in Miami?
Speaker 3: Oh? Absolutely, of course.
Speaker 2: Okay, so tell us about getting the money from the
Speaker 2: biker gang.
Speaker 3: Well, it was from the leader, edgo and I needed
Speaker 3: to borrow the money because he said, look, this is alone,
Speaker 3: this is not an investment. Okay, we don't want anything
Speaker 3: for it, but you know what, I'll help you out.
Speaker 3: But guess what. So that's why when I said to Kenny,
Speaker 3: you know we need twenty five thousand, he said, no,
Speaker 3: I'm not going to do it. Borrow it from somebody,
Speaker 3: and you know, and then when I told him I
Speaker 3: bored it from Edgoe, he said, well, you know that's great,
Speaker 3: but you know, if it's a bomb, it's on you.
Speaker 3: So rolling ahead a little further, when it was like
Speaker 3: the Eatons went and canceled the show, you know, my
Speaker 3: wife was ready to take the baby and move back
Speaker 3: to her parents in California on the next plane, thinking,
Speaker 3: you know, the Eatons aren't going to pony up to
Speaker 3: twenty five thousand. We're Johnny going to get that money?
Speaker 3: I don't know anyway. Then Lennon came alone and saved
Speaker 3: the bacon.
Speaker 2: Okay, is that what the door has cost?
Speaker 3: Twenty five thousand for each day? Donald paid them the
Speaker 3: same in Montreal.
Speaker 2: Okay, how did you know this guy?
Speaker 3: No? What guy ed Joe? He did security for us
Speaker 3: at the rock Pile. Whenever British bands played at the
Speaker 3: rock Pile, the Scotty Mods would come out of Scarborough,
Speaker 3: and I mean the guys that were speaking English came
Speaker 3: from English families, dressed like the Scotty Mods in Scotland
Speaker 3: or in the UK, and they would come and they
Speaker 3: would fly in a v right to the front door
Speaker 3: and smash their way in. Well, they only did that
Speaker 3: one and then we got Edgoe and some of his
Speaker 3: guys to come and be security. And when they did
Speaker 3: that the next time, they never did it again. So
Speaker 3: I knew Edgoe also from the village. Edgo was like
Speaker 3: a character hanging around the village, and that's where we
Speaker 3: all hung around, like in the Diplomat's days. So I
Speaker 3: mean these were characters. I was a character. I think
Speaker 3: in one thing edgo says, you know John Brower was
Speaker 3: another character hanging around the village. I mean we were
Speaker 3: all characters against.
Speaker 2: Okay, where did you think he got the twenty five
Speaker 2: thousand dollars.
Speaker 3: Where did he get it? Probably out of his back pocket,
Speaker 3: I'm not sure. I'm sure they had businesses. I'm sure
Speaker 3: they had enterprises that were enterprising back in those days.
Speaker 3: As he says in the Revival movie, you got to
Speaker 3: remember there's a lot of pot smoke back then. Well
Speaker 3: there were a lot of people selling it back then too,
Speaker 3: and I'm sure they may have been.
Speaker 2: Some of them, so you weren't aware that they were
Speaker 2: in the business. How do you know we had that money?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I asked a couple of people before
Speaker 3: I asked him. Believe me, Okay, I asked a couple
Speaker 3: of people. I asked a couple of guys from Upper
Speaker 3: Canada College, could you get your mom to loan me
Speaker 3: twenty five thousand? You know, I think one guy asked
Speaker 3: his mom. She laughed him out of the house. But remember,
Speaker 3: my friend got his uncle to give us ten thousand
Speaker 3: to bring the doors. So I mean I was canvassing
Speaker 3: some of those things before I settled on Edgoe. Edgoe
Speaker 3: was very quick to say, yeah, no problem, okay.
Speaker 2: How long after you announced the doors you realized this
Speaker 2: isn't going to sell any real.
Speaker 3: Tickets, probably seventy two hours.
Speaker 2: Then what's going through your mind?
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know, but probably wasn't very good basically,
Speaker 3: you know now what And that's when I believe Thor
Speaker 3: Eaton called and said, we're not going to you know,
Speaker 3: green light the rest of the money because they had,
Speaker 3: you know, stock in the company and they had to say.
Speaker 3: And Kenny didn't want to green light at either. Kenny
Speaker 3: wanted to cancel the show. We didn't want to lose money, Kenny.
Speaker 3: You know, to me, I was losing a reputation. It
Speaker 3: was an unmitigated disaster. I'd never be able to book
Speaker 3: another band all of that. That's what I thought. Kenny
Speaker 3: and Thor were like, we're not going to lose any
Speaker 3: more money. That was just the accountants versus the creators.
Speaker 3: And that's when I went to tell Kim Falley it's over,
Speaker 3: and he said, you got to call John Lennon.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well before we go there. How did Kim Fowley
Speaker 2: and Rodney Bingenheimer get involved?
Speaker 3: God bless him. I'm glad they did. Well. Richie Yorke,
Speaker 3: the journalist, had suggested early on, you should bring Kim
Speaker 3: Fowley and Rodney Bannheimer up to be the MC's. Now.
Speaker 3: I knew Rodney from Rodney's English Disco in La Rodney
Speaker 3: was the mayor of Sunset Strip, so that name was familiar.
Speaker 3: I had no idea who Kim Falley was. But when
Speaker 3: they got up there, you know, they were characters and
Speaker 3: it sounded like they were going to be great MC's,
Speaker 3: and in the movie Kim Fowley is a great MC.
Speaker 3: Rodney drifted off. He didn't do anything on stage, but they,
Speaker 3: you know, were celebrities, and you know, announcing them also
Speaker 3: did not mean anything. It was like way over everybody's.
Speaker 2: Head, and you booked them thinking they would do what.
Speaker 3: Well, the first of all, they'd be the MC's as
Speaker 3: opposed to people from Chum Radio, which would be doing
Speaker 3: nothing but talking about Chum Radio all the time. That
Speaker 3: was the one thing we wanted to avoid. We didn't
Speaker 3: have any MC's at all in June, but a couple
Speaker 3: of DJs did snatch the mic, you know, because they
Speaker 3: were allowed to be there and say, well, we need
Speaker 3: to make an announcement and Chum wants to thank you.
Speaker 3: You know, everybody took credit for everything at radio stations
Speaker 3: wherever possible, So we wanted to avoid that. So it
Speaker 3: sounded great. We'll have the mayor of Sunset Strip and
Speaker 3: some other guy named Kim Fowley, and they'll be the
Speaker 3: EMC's that'll keep the radio guys off the stage.
Speaker 2: Okay, if the show is going to play in September,
Speaker 2: when do you decide to hire Fouley in Bingenheimer?
Speaker 3: Oh? Probably not till the middle of August, or even
Speaker 3: a bit later.
Speaker 2: The movie gives the impression that they ultimately moved to
Speaker 2: Toronto for a month. Is that kind of what happened?
Speaker 3: Now? I don't I've seen the movie one hundred times.
Speaker 3: I don't ever remember anything that indicated that they came
Speaker 3: up like the week of the show to do promotion
Speaker 3: and that was it. They were basically only there like
Speaker 3: two days before I went to tell them that we're
Speaker 3: pulling the plug and we'll send you home. But the
Speaker 3: idea of booking them, the idea of booking them and
Speaker 3: paying them and getting them there line tickets would have
Speaker 3: been several, you know, weeks, at least a couple before that.
Speaker 2: Okay, So now in this great run you have the
Speaker 2: fifties acts you booked the doors, tickets still aren't selling.
Speaker 2: What's going through your brain?
Speaker 3: Like, why was this my idea? You know?
Speaker 2: Why?
Speaker 3: Why was this my idea?
Speaker 2: Why?
Speaker 3: Why did I think of this? What did I think
Speaker 3: about this that was going to be good? Like, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm sure every promoter's had that happened once in their life.
Speaker 2: And if you had brought the show down, how much
Speaker 2: would you've only owed the acts for cancelation.
Speaker 3: That I really don't know, but probably a lot less
Speaker 3: than if they'd had to show up. And I don't
Speaker 3: know what those contracts said. I don't know that there
Speaker 3: was cancelation clauses in our agreements. I don't think we
Speaker 3: ever dealt with anybody canceled before, or US canceling anybody.
Speaker 2: It was like to just let's go back one chapter.
Speaker 2: Why did the Jeff Beck group not show up for
Speaker 2: the matinee?
Speaker 3: I don't have any idea, and we never heard. But
Speaker 3: obviously they were coming by car. They may have had
Speaker 3: a problem getting across the border because I don't know
Speaker 3: where they came from. But they did not fly into Toronto.
Speaker 3: They drove and they came in a station wagon and
Speaker 3: a van, So where they came from, I don't know.
Speaker 3: There were other acts that were delayed getting in. Some
Speaker 3: were even stopped from coming into Canada even though we
Speaker 3: had sold out shows for them. I can't think of one.
Speaker 3: Some guy set himself on fire. What was his name, Northrough.
Speaker 2: Brown Crazy World of Arthur Base, The World.
Speaker 3: Of Arthur Brown. It took him forever to get into
Speaker 3: the country. And there were other acts that were canceled
Speaker 3: that they couldn't get in.
Speaker 2: Okay, between the decision of deciding to hire Foully and Bingenheimer,
Speaker 2: before the John Lennon idea comes, are there any other
Speaker 2: ideas that come up that you either take action on
Speaker 2: or decide not to do.
Speaker 3: No, No, there were no other acts available that would
Speaker 3: have made any difference. There was no budget to spend
Speaker 3: on them because ticket sales were so disastrous and after
Speaker 3: the doors got there twenty five thousand and that didn't
Speaker 3: produce any tickets at all. That would have been a
Speaker 3: fools game to think anybody else would. So, you know,
Speaker 3: it was all moving so fast. Right now. Remember it's
Speaker 3: like winding down to you know, the week before the
Speaker 3: show and there's two thousand tickets.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's the week before the show. Are your partners
Speaker 2: still saying we want to cancel.
Speaker 3: No, they didn't want to cancel till the Monday. The
Speaker 3: show was on the Saturday. Monday was the day they
Speaker 3: pulled the plug.
Speaker 2: And what were you thinking?
Speaker 3: Should I go to LA with my wife and child?
Speaker 2: Okay, So it's Kim Fowley who comes up with the
Speaker 2: idea of John lenn Yes, and this is on the phone.
Speaker 2: Who does he call? What does he say?
Speaker 3: No? No, no. I go to the hotel room to
Speaker 3: tell he and Rodney there were the show's being canceled
Speaker 3: and we're going to get you guys and fly you
Speaker 3: back to LA. Their tickets were for like a week
Speaker 3: from then. We didn't want to keep them in the
Speaker 3: hotel any longer. Get them out of there. And that's
Speaker 3: when Kim Fowley had a meltdown and started stomping around
Speaker 3: the room, going, you can't cancel this show. It's a
Speaker 3: classic show. What's wrong with these guys? Da Da Da
Speaker 3: da da. And that's when he said, look this way
Speaker 3: you need to do. You need to call John Lennon
Speaker 3: in the more And I'm looking at him like you know,
Speaker 3: I know he doesn't do drugs. I heard that already,
Speaker 3: So where's this coming from? And you need to tell
Speaker 3: him You've got Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis,
Speaker 3: gen Vincent, Bo Diddley. Don't tell him about the Doors,
Speaker 3: don't tell him about any other bands. He loves these bands.
Speaker 3: The Beatles have played songs by Little Richard and Chuck Berry.
Speaker 3: The Beatles open for Gene Vincent at the Star Club.
Speaker 3: I didn't know any of this. Were citing all these
Speaker 3: things to me, and I go home and tell my
Speaker 3: wife and she goes into a complete meltdown, screaming around
Speaker 3: the house. You're out of your mind. I guess Elvis
Speaker 3: is waiting for your call too, And what about the
Speaker 3: Rolling Stones? Why don't you call them? You know? I
Speaker 3: mean it sounded so completely insane, ludicrous. But at six
Speaker 3: in the morning, Kenny Walker and I with Thor Eaton
Speaker 3: because we brought him to the office, it was like,
Speaker 3: if we get John Lennon on the phone, this has
Speaker 3: to be heard by Thor, not a story and lo
Speaker 3: and be old. We call out and you know, get
Speaker 3: Faucett there on the phone and tell him about the bands,
Speaker 3: and he comes back and it's like, okay, we'll do it.
Speaker 2: A little bit slower. How'd you get the number? What
Speaker 2: do you say when you call the number?
Speaker 3: Kim Fowley gave us the number for Apple. I mean
Speaker 3: it might have been that information too, I don't know.
Speaker 3: But Kim Fowley gave us the phone number. Here's the
Speaker 3: phone number. He went in a book and looked it up.
Speaker 3: He had everybody's number.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you called and someone picks up. Who do
Speaker 2: you say? Who you want to talk to? And what's
Speaker 2: your pitch?
Speaker 3: My pitch is just exactly this. Hi, this is John Brower.
Speaker 3: I'm calling from Toronto, Canada. I need you to write
Speaker 3: these names down please, It's very important. Chuck Berry, Little Richard,
Speaker 3: et cetera. I said, please give this to John Lennon
Speaker 3: and tell them all these acts are playing this Saturday,
Speaker 3: enter on and we want to invite he and Yoko
Speaker 3: to come and be the m Sieves, because that's what
Speaker 3: Folly said, invite them to be the m Sieves. So
Speaker 3: a minute or so later, you know, Anthony Faucett comes
Speaker 3: on and well where is it and when is it?
Speaker 3: It's this Saturday? And da da da da da, And
Speaker 3: then you know Lennon's there and hearing this and goes well, okay,
Speaker 3: we wouldn't want to come less we could play. So
Speaker 3: it was like what the Beatles, No, No, just us,
Speaker 3: me and me and Yoka and will get a little
Speaker 3: band together. All right. That was good enough for us,
Speaker 3: you know. Thor Eaton was like, okay, wow, that was cool.
Speaker 3: John Lennon on the phone, you know, because John Lennon's
Speaker 3: voice came on. He was on the phone. They had
Speaker 3: a speaker, So there you go, John Lennon, the real
Speaker 3: John Lennon. So that's why we went to chum. They
Speaker 3: laughed us out of the place, you know, like get
Speaker 3: out of here.
Speaker 2: Put a little bit slower. How is it left when
Speaker 2: you get off the phone?
Speaker 3: Well, we're jumping out and down, screaming and yelling. At
Speaker 3: six o'clock in the morning downtown in our office on
Speaker 3: Richmond Street. We had to wait three hours to go
Speaker 3: to Chump.
Speaker 2: Okay, but how do you leave it on the apple side?
Speaker 3: Appleside, I'm calling you back tomorrow. I need the names
Speaker 3: for the plane tickets, John said, I'm going to get
Speaker 3: a band together and for immigration and the plane tickets,
Speaker 3: and fine, call back tomorrow.
Speaker 2: Okay, And then you wait till nine o'clock. You go
Speaker 2: to the radio station tell the story there.
Speaker 3: Yes, and it's like, you know, ha ha ha, we
Speaker 3: know your show is bombing and I don't think we
Speaker 3: can go on the air with that. Boys.
Speaker 2: Sorry, you know.
Speaker 3: Now, there is a tiny backstory that came up on
Speaker 3: Tuesday Wednesday when we came back with the tape with
Speaker 3: Anthony Fawson on it. Now, Kenny and I had also
Speaker 3: been given the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour movie and we
Speaker 3: by Natwis, their lawyer guy in New York. They wanted
Speaker 3: to give it out to a few good promoters and
Speaker 3: we got it. So we sold out the O'Keefe Center,
Speaker 3: that's what it was back then. Klein Hands in Buffalo,
Speaker 3: Saint Lawrence Center, I think, in Montreal and at the
Speaker 3: Elegant Theater in Ottawa. It was a complete bus at
Speaker 3: twenty five hundred seat theater with four hundred tickets sold.
Speaker 3: The night before, Kenny and I are having dinner at
Speaker 3: the Chateau Laurier lamenting the fact we're going to lose
Speaker 3: our ass here and I had another idea. And back
Speaker 3: in the day, you always had the phone number of
Speaker 3: the radio station guy in the studio where they were
Speaker 3: on the air in case you had breaking news. And
Speaker 3: it was very organic back then. So I called a
Speaker 3: little hippie girl over that was a bus girl, and
Speaker 3: I said, how would you like to see the Beatles
Speaker 3: Magical Mystery Tour movie tomorrow? And she looked at us
Speaker 3: like I don't know what is that? You know? And
Speaker 3: Kenny's looking at me like, see, nobody knows. Promotion was terrible.
Speaker 3: So I said, Kenny, open me your briefcase. He opens
Speaker 3: his briefcase filled with tickets. I said, I'll give you
Speaker 3: ten tickets for you and your friends to go to
Speaker 3: the movie is playing right down the street at the
Speaker 3: Elgin Theaters, the Beatles movie. But I want you to
Speaker 3: call my friend to tell him that you work here
Speaker 3: and that you saw George Harrison. He's here having dinner
Speaker 3: with friends. That's innocent enough. So she goes okay. So
Speaker 3: she comes back a few minutes later and she's like
Speaker 3: kind of white. She goes, guy, you didn't tell me.
Speaker 3: You didn't tell me that that was the guy on
Speaker 3: the radio. He made me go on the radio and
Speaker 3: describe what was George Waring? And did I recognize anybody
Speaker 3: that was with him? To make it up, But she
Speaker 3: said but I did tell him that me and all
Speaker 3: my friends are going to see the Beatles movie tomorrow.
Speaker 3: I was like, oh my god, yes, okay, I love you,
Speaker 3: so we give her the tickets. Not even twenty minutes later.
Speaker 3: Thirty minutes later, kids were coming into the Chateau Laurier
Speaker 3: looking for George Harrison with Beatle records, wanting to say
Speaker 3: the next morning it was below the fold on the
Speaker 3: Autawa Citizen, George Harrison in town for Magical Mystery to
Speaker 3: our movie question Mark. Of course, we sold the show
Speaker 3: out by ten in the morning. The other twenty one
Speaker 3: hundred tickets were gone, so that became a bit of
Speaker 3: a story ha ha. You know, a little elbow on
Speaker 3: the side back in Toronto. And of course people at
Speaker 3: Chum had heard that, maybe a couple of the DJs
Speaker 3: or something. So when we came in there the second
Speaker 3: day with the tape, that's why they were really upset,
Speaker 3: because they said, you know, the Beatles must love you guys. Right,
Speaker 3: you're bombing with the movie in Ottawa. But George Harrison's
Speaker 3: in town, supposedly nobody sees him, but you sell that out.
Speaker 3: Now your festival's bombing. And John Lennon's coming with a
Speaker 3: band with Eric Clapton, no doubt, get out you guys,
Speaker 3: disgust me, you know, get out of here. That's that's why,
Speaker 3: you know they knew, And this was like that was
Speaker 3: our fault, but you know we had to be victim
Speaker 3: of our own uh you know, skullduggery if you will.
Speaker 2: So you called back Apple the next day and tell
Speaker 2: me about that conversation.
Speaker 3: Well, I asked for John Lennon. I said, he's expecting
Speaker 3: my call. Well, of course, Anthony Fosset comes on the phone. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: we've got a suction cup on the phone and we're
Speaker 3: taping this and I was like, you know what, I
Speaker 3: didn't want to say, well, we need John Lennon on
Speaker 3: the phone. Nobody believes us. I didn't want to put
Speaker 3: any shade on this thing. So he recites these names,
Speaker 3: John Yoker here, Clappton Club's Forman Ellen White, mel Evans.
Speaker 3: I knew they named mel Evans and it was like, okay,
Speaker 3: So that's what we went up to Chum with that
Speaker 3: tape with him on the phone. Now, if John Lennon
Speaker 3: had come on the phone, Chum would have gone crazy.
Speaker 3: Of course, they would have everybody would have known John's voice.
Speaker 3: But Chum was kind of wondering about this. And that's
Speaker 3: when they call Capitol Records, who called Alan Kline, who said, boys,
Speaker 3: John lenn and it doesn't do anything I don't know about.
Speaker 3: Forget about it. Just forget it. And then the word
Speaker 3: came back to Chaum, it's all b as the Beetle's
Speaker 3: manager said, So well, that was it. We were dead.
Speaker 3: That's why the night before when Edgeo came to my house,
Speaker 3: he said, it's all good. If this is bullshit, that's fine,
Speaker 3: you're a promoter. But if my guys out at the
Speaker 3: airport tomorrow eighty people and there's no John Lennon, he said,
Speaker 3: now is the time to tell me. Not tomorrow. So
Speaker 3: I'm going. We talked. I talked to John Lennon. He's coming.
Speaker 3: We got them plane dikets now. Four in the morning.
Speaker 3: I hit a call Anthony Foss that John's not feeling well,
Speaker 3: doesn't want to come. Send roses and flowers, you know,
Speaker 3: like no, no, no, no, that's not going to fly.
Speaker 3: He has to come. And then Clampton came on board
Speaker 3: and that was it. John wasn't going to come without
Speaker 3: a guitar. Player. Not gonna come with a bass player
Speaker 3: and a drummer. Eric was the lynch pin. It was Eric,
Speaker 3: you know, on his way to the airport. All Riot,
Speaker 3: that's it, let's go.
Speaker 2: Okay, you talked to him if the show's playing on Saturday.
Speaker 2: The first conversation with Apple is what day of the week?
Speaker 3: Tuesday morning?
Speaker 2: Tuesday? It's confirmed on Wednesday. Do you have any contact
Speaker 2: before Anthony Foster calls you the night before saying we're canceling.
Speaker 3: Well, it was the morning of, not the night before.
Speaker 3: It was the morning of. Anthony Foster was canceling at
Speaker 3: nine o'clock in the morning, at four in the morning
Speaker 3: my time when the phone rang. So no, no conversation
Speaker 3: at all. Tickets were sent, immigration papers were organized, you know,
Speaker 3: the tickets arrived, they had them there. They missed that
Speaker 3: first plane. They had to switch all that around. No,
Speaker 3: that was it. And then Anthony, you know, got John
Speaker 3: on the phone and Eric was on board and it
Speaker 3: was like, okay, we're going to get the next plane.
Speaker 3: And that was it.
Speaker 2: And next time, okay, a little bit slower. He calls
Speaker 2: you says you're canceling.
Speaker 3: You say what, no, No, he can't cancel. He can't
Speaker 3: if he cancels, I have to leave my city. I
Speaker 3: have to leave my country. I'm figuring it's now four
Speaker 3: in the morning. I can't phone Edge oh and back
Speaker 3: the thing off. He had guys coming in from other
Speaker 3: cities for this run. This was like the VIP run.
Speaker 3: This was like a big deal for them. There wasn't
Speaker 3: anything about the twenty five thousand anymore. It was like
Speaker 3: I asked them to escort John Lennon in and he
Speaker 3: pulled out all the stops. Now you don't get a
Speaker 3: guy like that to get egg on his face. Okay, no,
Speaker 3: And I needed John Lennon anyway. Our whole credibility was
Speaker 3: based on this. Now we'd sold all these tickets in Detroit,
Speaker 3: Rusk Gid went out on the line, played the tape
Speaker 3: every fifteen minutes at his show. We had to fly
Speaker 3: Dennis down there with their shoe box full of tickets.
Speaker 3: You know, there's no computers. It was like people. Every
Speaker 3: ticket in Detroit Windsor was bought up in like after
Speaker 3: the first hour of Rusk get being on the radio,
Speaker 3: and Dennis had to fly down the next day with
Speaker 3: a shoe box full of tickets packed thousands.
Speaker 2: And when did schum finally say okay? They never said okay,
Speaker 2: So they never went on it.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they went on it. Let me tell you
Speaker 3: when they went on it, and it didn't get in
Speaker 3: the movie. And you know what, I brought this up
Speaker 3: with Ron Schoppman, the director. I love him to death,
Speaker 3: but this was something that was missed and I gave
Speaker 3: it to them in my interviews. When John Lennon finally
Speaker 3: gets to Heathrow, and you know, Eric Clapton had been
Speaker 3: there for a while, and Eric Clapton was highly recognizable,
Speaker 3: and the media people that were circling around there, just
Speaker 3: because at any major airport there's always media people. Eric
Speaker 3: wouldn't talk to them. But John Lennon rolls up and
Speaker 3: gives a press conference at the curb that he's out
Speaker 3: his way to Toronto to play a rock show with
Speaker 3: Chuck Berry and Little Richard and all the great rockers.
Speaker 3: And this goes out on the teletype all over the world,
Speaker 3: and then Chum at nine in the morning, because this
Speaker 3: is two in the after it comes up on the
Speaker 3: telemachine whatever those things were, Chik Chuck and I guess
Speaker 3: the guy in the newsroom looked at it and runs
Speaker 3: it into the program director who was ever calling the
Speaker 3: shots at nine o'clock on Saturday morning, and they went
Speaker 3: on the air with it immediately. Chump Presents Worldwide Exclusive.
Speaker 3: They took credit for everything, and they blasted it out
Speaker 3: every fifteen minutes. By one in the afternoon, we had
Speaker 3: pretty much sold out the stadium. People were pouring down
Speaker 3: there because this spread you know what we call now virally,
Speaker 3: people calling each other. I just heard on Chump. John
Speaker 3: Lennon is the airport. He's on his way to Toronto.
Speaker 3: They're playing at that show, and I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: Geddy Lee and them thing. You know. His friend said
Speaker 3: to him that morning, it sounds like a good idea,
Speaker 3: Let's go down there. They didn't have plans to go there.
Speaker 3: They went down there then it sounded like a good idea.
Speaker 3: So it was all last minute and Chump sold the
Speaker 3: show up. That's how I had somebody say to me,
Speaker 3: what didn't people come from? Get? Two thousand tickets sold
Speaker 3: well between Russ, Gibb and Chum in two chunks. That
Speaker 3: place sold out. In fact, I had to let fifteen
Speaker 3: hundred people in at the Northwest gate because we had
Speaker 3: no more tickets to solve the stadium. People were going,
Speaker 3: we have nothing to sell them, and the police were
Speaker 3: on horseback and that was the gate where the bikes
Speaker 3: are going to come in, and I just said, open
Speaker 3: the gates and let them in. We already sold out
Speaker 3: who cares and we could go with your bankrupt are
Speaker 3: going to be let them in. And then that really
Speaker 3: raised the vibe in the crowd. When fifteen hundred people
Speaker 3: came in. It was very exciting.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's four in the morning. You say you can't cancel.
Speaker 2: What's your next communication with Lenin or Lenin's team.
Speaker 3: Well, Faucett calls back and tells me that, you know,
Speaker 3: Eric Clapton's on board and on our way to the airport,
Speaker 3: and John is now on and they're getting in the
Speaker 3: limo and they got to get the next plane and
Speaker 3: he said, you know, I'll let you know when that is.
Speaker 3: And then I guess he was, you know, dealing with
Speaker 3: some paperwork somebody did. Okay, it's going to be five
Speaker 3: o'clock instead of two o'clock.
Speaker 2: Okay, what time does the show start?
Speaker 3: Oh, probably started at like eleven in the morning or
Speaker 3: noon with early local bands.
Speaker 2: Okay, what time is the first real band?
Speaker 3: Well, I think the first real band was Bo Diddley,
Speaker 3: but I may be wrong. You know, I was not
Speaker 3: on stage putting bands on stage. That was Rolly Paklin
Speaker 3: and Dennis Hill. That's what those guys did. They got
Speaker 3: the show going. They were the producers of the stage
Speaker 3: itself and who's coming on and when all of that stuff,
Speaker 3: I'm still dealing with money. People need to get paid.
Speaker 3: Kenny Walker and the lawyers are dealing with Pennybaker, and
Speaker 3: that's a whole not good story. But we finally I
Speaker 3: got that sorted out. They were wanting Pennybaker to give
Speaker 3: us twenty five thousand dollars or they couldn't start filming.
Speaker 3: And when I found that out, I had a meltdown
Speaker 3: and went up to where the meeting was and start
Speaker 3: screaming and yelling, and so the lawyers and Kenny backed off,
Speaker 3: and Pennybaker went and started shooting. But that's why the
Speaker 3: footage of Bo Diddley doesn't capture his whole performance, because
Speaker 3: they weren't allowed to start shooting until about halfway through
Speaker 3: or close to the end, and they caught the encore.
Speaker 3: That was a kerfuffle that I did not like.
Speaker 2: How did Penny Baker even get involved.
Speaker 3: Amazingly enough, Pennybaker called up and said, I'd like to
Speaker 3: come up and shoot your show. I mean, the word
Speaker 3: was out in New York that the show was happening.
Speaker 3: It was off, it was on, the doors were on.
Speaker 3: Now they were going to be on the show. And then,
Speaker 3: you know, that was enough, Pennybaker. It was enough to
Speaker 3: have those four guys up there, That's what he meant.
Speaker 3: Not those four guys meaning maybe the Beatles, Chuck Berry,
Speaker 3: Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bo Diddley. Those are
Speaker 3: the four guys that he knew about. I don't even
Speaker 3: think Geene Vincent was involved in the promotion. He came
Speaker 3: up as a last minute thing that Kim Fowley got
Speaker 3: him added, and he was available, and he flew in
Speaker 3: and he needed a band, and that's how Alice became
Speaker 3: that band. So Kim Fowley again, if he hadn't brought
Speaker 3: Geene Vincent up, Alice Cooper might have played in the daytime,
Speaker 3: in the morning or something like that. See, that was
Speaker 3: the magic for Alice was that Jean Vincent got to
Speaker 3: play at night after Chuck Berry with the lights and
Speaker 3: so Alice got to have the magic of the lighting
Speaker 3: and the energy at night. I mean that's when the
Speaker 3: energy really was buzzing, and so it all just worked
Speaker 3: out and cheffing the chicken, I mean, it was crazy,
Speaker 3: It was crazy, but it was fortuous for Alice that
Speaker 3: they backed up Jean Vincent, or they'd have been on
Speaker 3: in the morning.
Speaker 2: Okay, are you checking with Heathrow whether Lennon and Posse
Speaker 2: actually get on the plane?
Speaker 3: No, no, no idea, And I'm not never a thought
Speaker 3: of that, never, Just like whatever, get the bikes out
Speaker 3: to the airport.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what's the plan.
Speaker 3: They're going to land, And well, they're going to land
Speaker 3: and we're going to get them into limos and they're
Speaker 3: going to come down the service road where Edgo has
Speaker 3: left enough space between all these bikes for the limos.
Speaker 3: As it turned out, that wasn't the way it was done.
Speaker 3: They realized that many bikes in front of the limos
Speaker 3: was going to be chaos. So Edgo and a couple
Speaker 3: of bikes rode in front and then the rest of
Speaker 3: them road behind. But nobody cared. There was a thrill
Speaker 3: to be riding escorting these limos. That was it, and
Speaker 3: of course, you know after they were delayed, like I
Speaker 3: had to call Edge in the morning and go, look,
Speaker 3: there's been a slight delay, and he goes, that's not good,
Speaker 3: and I go, look, I know they're on next plane. Okay,
Speaker 3: John's at the airport. I know that much. So Edro
Speaker 3: says to me, when are the doors coming in? And
Speaker 3: I said, they're coming in around the same time John
Speaker 3: was supposed to. He goes, okay, we'll go and do
Speaker 3: a dry run with the doors. That'll keep my guys cool.
Speaker 3: I start to tell them now there's a delay. That's
Speaker 3: not going to be good. Some of them are already
Speaker 3: accusing me of being a sucker and that there's going
Speaker 3: to be no John Lennon. I go, okay, well there's
Speaker 3: going to be John Lennon, so you're no sucker, So
Speaker 3: go escort the doors. Well, the doors thought they were
Speaker 3: being kidnapped by the bikers. There was no organization. Nobody
Speaker 3: told their doors anything. They leave the airport and they're
Speaker 3: swarmed by motorcycles like a hornet's nest, and they're in
Speaker 3: the cars. They don't know what's going on. Robbie told
Speaker 3: me Laterry said, we were terrified. Nobody warned us. There
Speaker 3: was no nothing build and know anything sittings and whatever.
Speaker 3: So that was just the bikers having fun, roaring down
Speaker 3: and then they roared back, and they still had to
Speaker 3: wait like another two hours for Lannon or more. But
Speaker 3: ed Joe knew, let these guys ride the doors, you know,
Speaker 3: let them get at their mojo here, at their excitement
Speaker 3: level up. And you can see in the film. By
Speaker 3: the way, this is a whole other thing. I've hat
Speaker 3: people say to me, how in God's name were all
Speaker 3: those bikers able to be drinking and smoking drugs in
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty nine in public, out at the airport like they,
Speaker 3: you know, any other place. They'd all been arrested, I said,
Speaker 3: because the Eatons were involved, hands were off everything. The
Speaker 3: police were told to stand down, okay, And I knew
Speaker 3: that was happening because I was told, don't worry about
Speaker 3: the bikers, they'll be fine.
Speaker 2: People south of the border off familiar with the Eatons,
Speaker 2: tell us who the Eatons were.
Speaker 3: Well. Timothy Eaton was the man that coined the phrase
Speaker 3: good satisfactory or money refunded. He's the first person to
Speaker 3: say that back in nineteen sixty nine. The Eaton's catalog
Speaker 3: was doing one billion dollars a year for twenty five
Speaker 3: or thirty years. People bought ninety percent of everything they
Speaker 3: bought from Eaton's catalog. It was famous, okay, and it
Speaker 3: became Eaton stores all across the country, and so the Eatons.
Speaker 3: When the Queen came in the fifties, she stayed at
Speaker 3: Lady Eaton's estate, which is where we put John and
Speaker 3: Yogo up. Thor was able to ask his mom, and
Speaker 3: his mom said, yeah, okay, no problem. That's why that
Speaker 3: classic picture of the band by the swimming pool, that's
Speaker 3: the swimming pool at the Eaton estate. So there it
Speaker 3: was hands off. The biker's got a free free pass
Speaker 3: that day.
Speaker 2: So John and Yoko and their band land.
Speaker 3: Then what happens get into the limos and we pulled
Speaker 3: down the service road.
Speaker 2: Are you there now?
Speaker 3: I'm in the car with John Roddy Banheimer and I
Speaker 3: went to meet him. So Rodney and I and Johnny Yoko.
Speaker 3: So we see the bikes and John reached down and
Speaker 3: pushes down the two door locks and looks at me
Speaker 3: kind of like you know, okay, and I go, look John.
Speaker 3: I didn't want to say anything till we got here,
Speaker 3: but this is your escort in Toronto. And we pulled
Speaker 3: into the space. Edgoe left and John was like, you know,
Speaker 3: he looked at Yoko and he was like, holy should
Speaker 3: So of course Edgoe has to see that this is
Speaker 3: not some Hollywood double in a wig, and so we
Speaker 3: have to put the window down and Edgoe comes up
Speaker 3: and you know, as Edgoe says, you know, we saw
Speaker 3: that's the real people. He kind of looked at me like,
Speaker 3: I don't know how you did it, man, that's the
Speaker 3: real people, okay, And so window goes up and Edgoe
Speaker 3: does like this with his thing, and eighty bikes fire
Speaker 3: up like firecrackers and off we go.
Speaker 2: Okay, you directly to the venue. What's happening at the
Speaker 2: venue when Lenin arrives, Well.
Speaker 3: It's it's pandemonium because they limos have to come in
Speaker 3: and pull right up to the tunnel and you know
Speaker 3: tent area that connects the dressing rooms with the stage,
Speaker 3: pull right up to that. And of course the crowd
Speaker 3: by now has been told throughout the day somebody specials company,
Speaker 3: somebody bigs coming. Well, once Lenin landed Kim Fowley was
Speaker 3: telling people John Lennon and Eric Clapton are here, and
Speaker 3: they're going to be here soon and they're going to
Speaker 3: play tonight. So now it's madness. And now when these
Speaker 3: limos come in. No other bands came in limos that
Speaker 3: came into the stadium, they might have got dropped off
Speaker 3: outside if there were even any other bands that had
Speaker 3: limos other than the doors. So there was pandemonium. It
Speaker 3: was excitement level as I say in a movie. I mean,
Speaker 3: this was like the thrill of a lifetime. I mean
Speaker 3: it was amazing. From panic at four in the morning
Speaker 3: where I see my life pass before my eyes in Edge,
Speaker 3: you're putting these flowers on my grave. Now I'm riding
Speaker 3: with John Lennon and this chariot into a sold out
Speaker 3: packed stadium and it's all happening. It's like, you know, crazy,
Speaker 3: It's better than any acid trip or mushrooms or anything else.
Speaker 3: That was like the real deal. That was like just
Speaker 3: pure adrenaline, pure incredible.
Speaker 2: Wow. Okay, The original pitch was he's going to be
Speaker 2: there with all these heritage acts. Did Lennon even go
Speaker 2: to look at the axe on stage? Did he hang
Speaker 2: with anybody backstage? Or it was just like he was
Speaker 2: here to headline. The rest didn't matter.
Speaker 3: No, he did come up on stage for a couple
Speaker 3: of things. I think he actually had contact with Little
Speaker 3: Richard and they had conversation together. There was a kerfuffle
Speaker 3: with Little Richard and the Doors and Lennon. That's not
Speaker 3: in the movie. But Bill Siddons and the Doors knew
Speaker 3: that the show was about to be canceled because the agents,
Speaker 3: you know, were calling every day, what's the ticket count?
Speaker 3: What's the ticket count? And on Monday, you know, a
Speaker 3: couple of them were told it looks like this is
Speaker 3: going to be canceled. So now Lennon is coming. So
Speaker 3: Bill Siddons asked me, if you know, can we talk
Speaker 3: to John and you and would you get him out
Speaker 3: of the dressing room. So I get John to come
Speaker 3: out in the hall and the Suddents goes, listen, John,
Speaker 3: you know, we'd like you to close the show because
Speaker 3: they thought if Lennon plays before them, everybody will leave
Speaker 3: because the show would have sold out if they were
Speaker 3: coming to see us. So John like a verge of
Speaker 3: a meltdown, is like you're the headliners. John's nervous enough anyway. Now,
Speaker 3: the Doors wanted him to close the show, like are
Speaker 3: you kidding me? And Siddons just laid this out. He
Speaker 3: didn't tell me in advance what he was going to
Speaker 3: ask John, So I was like, you know, I didn't
Speaker 3: know what to say. But Little Richard had been very
Speaker 3: close by and heard this, and he comes over and
Speaker 3: he goes, I will close the show the way it
Speaker 3: should be closed by me, the king. And he looks
Speaker 3: at Lennin and he goes, you know that, mister Lennon.
Speaker 3: He looks at me and he goes, you know that,
Speaker 3: mister promoter. And he looks at Jim Morrison. He goes,
Speaker 3: you know that, mister Doores. And he didn't know his
Speaker 3: name right, And John and Jim were like dumbfounded. Here's
Speaker 3: little Richard's banking them. And I said, listen, Richard, you're
Speaker 3: going on next. And I said, you know that piano
Speaker 3: was my personal one. I brought it for you. He
Speaker 3: was bitching about the piano, wanted just to get him
Speaker 3: another one, right, and I said it's mine. It's perfectly tuned.
Speaker 3: He goes, okay, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: So he walks in, which was a lie.
Speaker 3: Right. Another lie is you know, Live of Convenience. So
Speaker 3: promoters get like elephants. Elephants get to never forget. Promoters
Speaker 3: get to get off with a few lies once in
Speaker 3: a while. Nobody got hurt, nobody was shot, nobody costs
Speaker 3: them any money. But somebody moved on to where they
Speaker 3: needed to be. They needed their ego something a little massaging.
Speaker 3: So I said to John, I said, just go in
Speaker 3: their dressing room. And I said to Siddons and Jim Morrison, look,
Speaker 3: I said, if you don't want to close the show,
Speaker 3: I will let little Richard Clark the show. You guys
Speaker 3: don't even have to play. I got to tell you honestly,
Speaker 3: like I can't have any kerfuffles here. If John Lennon
Speaker 3: does not want to close the show, John Lennon is
Speaker 3: going to play when he wants to play. Today is
Speaker 3: about John Lennon, and that's it. And Siddons looked at
Speaker 3: Jim Morrison, and Morrison looks at me and goes, okay,
Speaker 3: we'll close, but we got to be on stage for
Speaker 3: John and Eric. They got to be going. That's what
Speaker 3: Morrison wanted. As long as you promised me that we
Speaker 3: can be on stage to watch John and Eric. I
Speaker 3: was like, okay, no problem, man, that's easy.
Speaker 2: So tell me about John and the band going on.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, John was very nervous and he did
Speaker 3: a lot of coke that day, and it was very
Speaker 3: good coke because I gave it to him. I got
Speaker 3: it off a guy in the audience that I knew
Speaker 3: had that stuff. I'd never done any made up for
Speaker 3: it in the eighties. But that's not the point. Back then,
Speaker 3: I was terrified holding this vial of like these little
Speaker 3: crystals and little powder and shit. And as Eric Clapton
Speaker 3: said a couple months after the show, I don't know
Speaker 3: how John even played. He was so coked out because
Speaker 3: that coke went directly to John and Yoko and they
Speaker 3: were alone in the dressing room and they asked me
Speaker 3: to ask Eric to come in. Now, remember later on
Speaker 3: it became, you know, public knowledge that they were all,
Speaker 3: you know, on heroin and kicking heroin. So that was
Speaker 3: probably another reason why without Eric coming along, John did
Speaker 3: not want to go. And that's why when Eric said
Speaker 3: all go, it was like, okay, we'll all do the
Speaker 3: Monkey danced together. But as soon as they got in
Speaker 3: the dressing room and I said, you know, can I
Speaker 3: get you or anything? That's what the wanted. And of
Speaker 3: course fool that I was thought they wanted Coca Cola.
Speaker 3: I mean, a complete fool of myself. But regardless got
Speaker 3: them that.
Speaker 2: And that was that.
Speaker 3: Now I did not see a lot of them. I
Speaker 3: was not in and out of the dressing room hobnobbing
Speaker 3: with them or bands or anything else. I mean there
Speaker 3: was business and money, and there was coordinating and the
Speaker 3: filming people, and there was always little problems. There's platform
Speaker 3: for the camera or getting up on stage. Too many
Speaker 3: people on stage, you know, got to get them off
Speaker 3: the stage. Not not a froom for the cameras. I
Speaker 3: mean that stage was, you know, not much bigger than
Speaker 3: you'd have for your kids, you know, birthday party or
Speaker 3: something if they had a band. I mean, this was
Speaker 3: not Woodstock, This was not Strawberry Fields the next year
Speaker 3: that I did. No, this was like a few rock
Speaker 3: and roll bands. That's how it started. And even Steppenwolf
Speaker 3: and Sly in the family Stone in June they played
Speaker 3: in the same stage. I don't know. Maybe the Woodstock
Speaker 3: stage got everything Jack, But back in the day, a
Speaker 3: stage was a stage if there was room for the
Speaker 3: band and the roadies and a couple of people and
Speaker 3: that was it.
Speaker 2: Okay, was the first time the audience saw Lenin when
Speaker 2: he came out with the band?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say absolutely. I do not ever recall
Speaker 3: John Lennon standing on the stage even the doors were
Speaker 3: behind the amplifiers, or Jim was on the stairs. I
Speaker 3: don't think Jim wanted to go up and be on
Speaker 3: the stage. He was on the stairs watching. In the
Speaker 3: Chuck Berry scenes there you can see him. And again,
Speaker 3: I was not spending a lot of time on stage.
Speaker 3: That's not my gig. It's not me standing there, you know,
Speaker 3: watching the band.
Speaker 2: Okay, gay, I guess what I'm asking is when Lenin
Speaker 2: actually hits the stage, what is the audience reaction.
Speaker 3: I think it's overwhelming because Kim had asked them to
Speaker 3: light matches and lighters, and there was a sea of
Speaker 3: lights and there was a lot of you know, you know,
Speaker 3: screaming and like, oh my god, you know, and there
Speaker 3: he is. It's real, you know, he's unmistakable in his
Speaker 3: white suit. And I think it was just, you know,
Speaker 3: it was magic.
Speaker 2: So you were watching the show or were not?
Speaker 3: Oh, I was watching that show. Yeah, I was watching
Speaker 3: that show.
Speaker 2: Okay, And what was the vibe as they played thrilling,
Speaker 2: disappointing shock.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it was fabulous until they did Cold Turkey,
Speaker 3: which was, you know, like a bringing a dead fish
Speaker 3: to a birthday party, and Yoko got in the bag.
Speaker 3: And now I think people started to wonder what was
Speaker 3: going on. There wasn't any Beatles songs. Your Blues is
Speaker 3: not a recognizable Beatles song. Okay, it's so obscure, it's unbelievable,
Speaker 3: and it's not even a good song. So I think
Speaker 3: people wanted to hear a Beatles song. There's one of
Speaker 3: the Beatles, it's John Lennon, you know, plain Norwegian Wood
Speaker 3: or something. But John was determined not to play a
Speaker 3: Beatles song. I'm surprised he played Your Blues Give Piece
Speaker 3: of Chance. Everybody came back to life and that was
Speaker 3: a beautiful time. But it was a very pedantic version
Speaker 3: compared to the recording in the hotel in Montreal. It
Speaker 3: kind of slogged along, but nonetheless people had the peace
Speaker 3: sign that were waving it up in the air. That
Speaker 3: was one of the things John told Kleine on the
Speaker 3: plane on the way back. I never felt so good
Speaker 3: in my life. People were jumping up and down, waving
Speaker 3: the peace sign and I want to do my own
Speaker 3: songs with my own band. That moment I think was
Speaker 3: the transfixing moment.
Speaker 2: So you say, Kline on the plane back, did Alan
Speaker 2: Klein actually come to town?
Speaker 3: Oh my god. Ellen Climb flew in on Saturday morning
Speaker 3: on the first plane. When he heard, however, that John
Speaker 3: Lennon was at the airport. Maybe John said, Anthony, possit,
Speaker 3: call Alan, let him know, tell him to come out.
Speaker 3: And because Klein Kleine, what a dog he was, so
Speaker 3: Clin grabs me backstage right and he goes, listen, can
Speaker 3: we talk? So I go, yeah, sure, Well it's pretty noisy.
Speaker 3: We'll go in the men's room. So we go in
Speaker 3: the men's room and he goes, listen, looks like he
Speaker 3: got a lot of people out there. He said, I'd
Speaker 3: like to get something for John. I said, like what,
Speaker 3: and he goes, well, you know, maybe ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 3: He said, look, I don't know what we've spent or
Speaker 3: what we owe or whatever. But I said, you know,
Speaker 3: I can't do anything like that right now anyway, And
Speaker 3: he said, well, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I have to talk to me.
Speaker 3: He might not want to play. And I said, well,
Speaker 3: I know he'll play because he signed a contract at
Speaker 3: the airport. But Clapton had come in, had gone to
Speaker 3: the urino, and Kleine said to him out, no, no,
Speaker 3: I aren't they know they don't want to pay you,
Speaker 3: and clamp And goes, well, piss on them as he's pissing. Okay.
Speaker 3: It was hilarious, classic moment, I said, Well, Tony Joseph
Speaker 3: Fido from the Musicians Union, who I used to take
Speaker 3: bass lessons from, came out to the airport with a
Speaker 3: contract for John to sign so he could play, and
Speaker 3: he signed it for two hundred and sixty five dollars.
Speaker 3: I think we have a check for him somewhere. Klein
Speaker 3: looked at me and he goes, you're good, kid, You're good, okay,
Speaker 3: and that was it. I never heard from him again
Speaker 3: about any money, but he did try to put a
Speaker 3: little scare into me. Well maybe he won't play. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't think so. I think I'll play, Okay.
Speaker 2: Lennon leaves the stage. What does Lenin then do?
Speaker 3: Gets into a limo and they go up to Lady
Speaker 3: Eaton's estate, which is, you know, like forty minutes north
Speaker 3: of town out in King so you know, they were
Speaker 3: in the limo together. He and Yoko have no idea
Speaker 3: what they said. I think it was a fabulous experience
Speaker 3: for the two of them. The Oko's face when you
Speaker 3: see her when he finally got her off the mic,
Speaker 3: she was blissed out. I mean, she had done her
Speaker 3: thing and that's what she wanted to do. I love
Speaker 3: Klaus form going. She came down the plane said can
Speaker 3: we do my song now? And John gets up the steers,
Speaker 3: your back up for a cup of tea. He didn't
Speaker 3: want anybody to know what was coming, you know, he
Speaker 3: really didn't. He was smart enough to know, like, we'll
Speaker 3: just roll with it, just you know, follow me. Put
Speaker 3: your aunt guitars up against the amplifiers. It was definitely
Speaker 3: cinema verite and it was flying. They were just flying
Speaker 3: by the seat of their pants. Like Klaus said, we
Speaker 3: didn't know what was coming next.
Speaker 2: So they go to the estate. When do they go
Speaker 2: back to England?
Speaker 3: They go back Monday. The Sunday was spent there on Sunday.
Speaker 2: Night And did you go visit them at the end.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there was a big dinner party. It was
Speaker 3: like a whole huge thing.
Speaker 2: Okay, now the date is played you make international news,
Speaker 2: you make history. What is going through your brain?
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, I don't think we made international
Speaker 3: news on any level that they had any impact.
Speaker 2: I think you're wrong. There. Everybody knew that John Lennon
Speaker 2: played in Toronto.
Speaker 3: Okay, Okay, well I'm glad to hear that in Toronto.
Speaker 3: It was great. It was like, you know, I don't
Speaker 3: think we could believe what happened. To be honest with you,
Speaker 3: it was stunning. It was successful, It was financially successful.
Speaker 3: I do know one thing. We weren't sitting around going
Speaker 3: what's our next show? I mean, the film had been shot.
Speaker 3: I think there was dealings with Penny Baker. But what
Speaker 3: happened is Alan Klein again comes in and convinces Penny
Speaker 3: Baker to give him the tapes, the recording tapes that
Speaker 3: Penny Baker had paid for Wali Hyder, and he agreed
Speaker 3: to sign a film release, and he reneged on that
Speaker 3: and instead took the tapes and put the album out.
Speaker 3: And it wasn't for quite some time that he actually
Speaker 3: got to put out this Sweet Toronto movie. And that
Speaker 3: was just a you know, a few glimpses of these bands.
Speaker 3: No narration, no nothing, and you know, then John and
Speaker 3: Yoka's performance. You know, that was like in the eighties.
Speaker 3: This was after John was gone, and then Yoko of
Speaker 3: course had to be in the opening of it talking
Speaker 3: about it from an art gallery. It was not a
Speaker 3: movie that Pennybaker wanted to make. It was a desperate
Speaker 3: attempt to get something out of that footage. That's why
Speaker 3: when Ron Chapmin came along, and Ron Chapman has credibility,
Speaker 3: He's made some award winning movies, they went, oh my god,
Speaker 3: here here comes the you know, resurrection of this footage.
Speaker 3: And this guy's got a great idea. Brower's still alive.
Speaker 3: You know. They had to do their interviews with me,
Speaker 3: and by the way, people said to me, man, you'll
Speaker 3: get rough in that movie, you know, And I go, well,
Speaker 3: that was years ago, and you know we were like drinking, smoking,
Speaker 3: having a good time, and all of a sudden, I
Speaker 3: get a call, you have to be on camera tomorrow.
Speaker 3: I wasn't ready. There was no hair and makeup, there
Speaker 3: was no nothing. I needed three days to detox before
Speaker 3: I should have been on film. But Ron couldn't raise
Speaker 3: any money unless he got me on film because they said,
Speaker 3: no one else is alive. If you don't get Brawer
Speaker 3: on camera, then what are you going to do? What
Speaker 3: if he dies while you think you're going to get
Speaker 3: on my camera in three four years? So that became
Speaker 3: him having to get me on camera for several hours
Speaker 3: sweating under lights in a velvet jacket. I don't know
Speaker 3: why it wore. And that's how that happened. That was
Speaker 3: what really triggered the beginning of getting the thing funded.
Speaker 2: According to Ron Okay, what happens in your promotion career
Speaker 2: after that?
Speaker 3: Well, I went to his stan Bull to buy sheepskin
Speaker 3: coats in November and the Eatons were going to sell
Speaker 3: them in every store of the country, And of course
Speaker 3: I got there with another guy and found that all
Speaker 3: the sheepskin coats had been paid for the year before.
Speaker 3: If you wanted sheepskin coats, buy them now, we'll deliver
Speaker 3: them next year. So we bought a few at the market.
Speaker 3: My friend had bought some hash, a few kilos of it,
Speaker 3: and I strapped it on to take it back to
Speaker 3: Toronto to figure it'll cover the expenses of the of
Speaker 3: the debacle of being istan Bull for a month not
Speaker 3: being able to get coats well, I almost got busted
Speaker 3: at Heathrow coming in. I didn't my health card. They
Speaker 3: sent me over to go to a doctor. Take your
Speaker 3: shirt off, they'll look at your vaccination marks. And of
Speaker 3: course if I took my shirt off, either the person
Speaker 3: looking at it would have to be a hash smoker,
Speaker 3: that I could give some of it too, and they
Speaker 3: would green lightning, or I'd be in jail. But my
Speaker 3: friend had the health cards. He waved them in. They
Speaker 3: called them in, they looked at them, and they let
Speaker 3: me go. So I was too traumatized to get on
Speaker 3: the plane to go to Toronto. I got a hotel room,
Speaker 3: sent my friend on, grabbed the sheepskin coat off him
Speaker 3: because it was November. Woke up in the morning and
Speaker 3: realized I'm in London and the last thing John lyn
Speaker 3: And said to me was you know my number? So
Speaker 3: I called Apple and got him on the phone. He
Speaker 3: came on the phone right away. I said, look, I'm
Speaker 3: in London. I got a present for you. He goes,
Speaker 3: we have a surprise for you. Come right over. So
Speaker 3: I rolled some of this hash up. I put the
Speaker 3: rest of it under the mattress in the hotel room,
Speaker 3: smoked a couple of cigarettes in there that covered the stink,
Speaker 3: because it was like waking up in a barn and
Speaker 3: come over to Apple with this big chunk of hash
Speaker 3: and you know, I just said, I come back from
Speaker 3: Miss Dan Bull. I jomped that I was a drug
Speaker 3: smuggler or whatever, it didn't matter back in those days.
Speaker 3: And he said, look, yo, go a Turkish golf ball
Speaker 3: and he rolls across the desk. So we smoked some
Speaker 3: of it, and of course he goes over to the
Speaker 3: record player and takes a record and puts it on
Speaker 3: and it's the live piece in Toronto Record and he
Speaker 3: says Capitol didn't want to put it out, but Alan
Speaker 3: made them. And he said, I'm really excited about it.
Speaker 3: You're the first person to hear it. Well, when I
Speaker 3: heard the beginning Toronto Presents, Broward Walker Present, our names
Speaker 3: were on this record, man, I was like floored. I
Speaker 3: thought I was going to faint or something, you know,
Speaker 3: and he kind of looked at me. I think he
Speaker 3: picked up on that, you know, like yeah, he's tripping. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he's definitely tripping here in that. So we talked about
Speaker 3: doing a peace festival and that's when he, you know,
Speaker 3: having been at Woodstock. That's the thing I didn't tell
Speaker 3: you during that story is on that stage after Jimmy played,
Speaker 3: I had this feeling that I said to you, we
Speaker 3: need to do one of these in Canada. We need
Speaker 3: to do a big festival. This is a real festival,
Speaker 3: not a football stadium. This is real. And I ended
Speaker 3: up doing the Strawberry Fields Festival one year exactly to
Speaker 3: the weekend of Woodstock, after trying to do a peace
Speaker 3: festival with John. Toronto Peace Festival probably considered the biggest
Speaker 3: non event in show business history. Rolling Stone thought five
Speaker 3: million people wanted to come. But John and I were
Speaker 3: very naive and we didn't realize the power of the
Speaker 3: Nixon White House. And I didn't realize the power of
Speaker 3: the Eatons because when I showed up back in Toronto,
Speaker 3: Kenny and Thoris served me with papers instead, we're throwing
Speaker 3: you out of the company, and they voted me out
Speaker 3: and I didn't even tell them I'd met with John
Speaker 3: Lennon and he went to a peace festival. I said, okay,
Speaker 3: and I like, literally, you know, you see in the movies,
Speaker 3: you clean your desk out and you leave. And I
Speaker 3: went home and I got kicked out. But I have
Speaker 3: John Lennon, you know my wife, because John Lennon is better.
Speaker 3: I like him better than Kenny A. Richie York and
Speaker 3: I and Chef's partner Richie Miller went back a few
Speaker 3: weeks later and made a normal presentation to John and
Speaker 3: got letters from him authorizing us to request a meeting
Speaker 3: with the Prime Minister and to launch a festival. And
Speaker 3: then we brought him back a week and a half
Speaker 3: later for a press conference at the Science Center when
Speaker 3: we also launched the Wars Over campaign around the world,
Speaker 3: and Toronto was the biggest of the campaigns because having
Speaker 3: come back with a letter from John Lennon, I was
Speaker 3: able to raise fast hundred thousand dollars and we probably
Speaker 3: spent half of it. People thought there was a Nike campaign.
Speaker 3: We had more billboards. Even Sean Lennon in his ode
Speaker 3: to the Little Movie about War Is Over, makes note
Speaker 3: of the fact that Toronto was the biggest War Is
Speaker 3: Over in the world. Other cities had a billboard. We
Speaker 3: had at least fifteen or twenty, and I had at
Speaker 3: least five hundred kids from Roussdale College out on the
Speaker 3: street with handbills. So we really kicked it off and
Speaker 3: John was very excited and he gave a great press
Speaker 3: conference and then everything sort of began to go downhill.
Speaker 3: Tragic experience watching politics and money and power crush culture.
Speaker 2: A little bit more detail there well.
Speaker 3: From the press conference. Of course, everyone in the world
Speaker 3: wanted to be part of the festival, and we wanted
Speaker 3: it to be at Mostport Ground Prix Racetrack, and that's
Speaker 3: where it was announced by Jean there it would be,
Speaker 3: and it was going to be a wonderful thing until
Speaker 3: Harvey Heudis, the park owner, called me and said there
Speaker 3: was an emergency meeting called by the town council. I
Speaker 3: wasn't allowed to go, but the opp that's the Ontario
Speaker 3: Provincial Police, made a presentation to them, I understand. They
Speaker 3: showed pictures of people frolicking nude and fornicating in the
Speaker 3: woods at Woodstock and mounds of garbage and told them
Speaker 3: this is what's coming to your community, and your permit
Speaker 3: was revoked. All right. That repeated itself four or five
Speaker 3: times over the next couple of months in the province
Speaker 3: of Ontario until we found out through somebody that our
Speaker 3: festival was never going to happen Ontario. John David Eaton
Speaker 3: was claiming at the Toronto Club with a whiskey glass
Speaker 3: up in the air, that festival will never happen in
Speaker 3: my province. That's who the Eatons were, and they were
Speaker 3: my former partners, and now it became a war that
Speaker 3: they declared when they found out that I had come
Speaker 3: back with Lennon and didn't tell them, well, yeah, what
Speaker 3: I'm going to tell you, I just get kicked out
Speaker 3: of my company. So that became very distressing to John
Speaker 3: because he's one that said I'm going to ask everybody
Speaker 3: that's anybody to play. But every week we are losing
Speaker 3: another site every week in rolling Stone park Hill site
Speaker 3: you know, canceled or this site canceled. And so John also,
Speaker 3: you know, was upset by Clin because Clin had called
Speaker 3: me to come to New York and he and Steve
Speaker 3: Lieber were in his office and Steve I knew I
Speaker 3: bought bands from him. He later on went to do Beatlemania,
Speaker 3: but he was a respectable agent head of ICM, I think.
Speaker 3: And he's sitting there with Klein, who's telling me there's
Speaker 3: a world Beatles tour and your festival is screwing it
Speaker 3: up because promoters they're scared you're going to take all
Speaker 3: the people, and I need you to cancel your festival
Speaker 3: and I'll give you all the Canadian dates, five cities.
Speaker 3: So I go, wow, I look at Steve, I said,
Speaker 3: you know, and Steve, yep, I'm booking it. Steve was
Speaker 3: full of shit, but for Alan Kline, he'd do anything,
Speaker 3: I guess, as most people would. So I go home
Speaker 3: and call John and tell him this, and he goes,
Speaker 3: oh my god, he's freaked out. He's full of bullshit.
Speaker 3: That's all bollocks. We're not doing any Beatles World tour.
Speaker 3: And at out of Day's Yelliott Yoko Klins screwing everything
Speaker 3: up in the festival. So he said, you guys need
Speaker 3: to get me the dirt on Cline. Well, Richie Yorke
Speaker 3: own journalists and used to asking tough questions and he
Speaker 3: prepared Adarcier and what people thought of Klein and there
Speaker 3: wasn't much good in it, if any. So then Lennon
Speaker 3: calls me and he wants me to get a guy
Speaker 3: named Don Hamrick to come over to Albert, Denmark. This
Speaker 3: is like in February, close to March, and he's going
Speaker 3: to get them off smoking cigarettes. And because they've changed
Speaker 3: smoked Galway cigarettes. And so we get him a ticket
Speaker 3: to go over there, because remember the Beatles have no money.
Speaker 3: I was paying for everything, you know, Chatau Laurio, hotel, airflights, trains,
Speaker 3: private railway car to meet Trudeau. I forgot to tell
Speaker 3: you that yet. You know, in Toronto we did get
Speaker 3: a meeting with the Prime Minister Greenlit. We rented a
Speaker 3: private railway car with an observation car and two sleeping
Speaker 3: cars went to Montreal so the press wouldn't know we
Speaker 3: were going to Ottawa. Ended up in Ottawa and it
Speaker 3: was a different visit than bringing the Beatles movie there
Speaker 3: because I was bringing and a beadle and Trudeau met
Speaker 3: with him only he and Yoko. None of us got
Speaker 3: to go in there, and it was a very highlight.
Speaker 3: It was for John. It was the first time a
Speaker 3: world leader ever received a rock star. It was unbelievable, unprecedented.
Speaker 3: So he wanted us to come to Denmark and give
Speaker 3: us a report on the festival. I need you know,
Speaker 3: a report, Amy, you know what's going on, and you
Speaker 3: better have a site. You better show up here of
Speaker 3: a site. Well, we didn't have a site, but we
Speaker 3: came Anyway, Richie brought the dossier on Kleine, so we
Speaker 3: had a good time in London. We met some stewardess
Speaker 3: is on the way over there and they were off
Speaker 3: for the weekend, so we changed our flights, booked the
Speaker 3: penthouse at the Playboy Club and had a few days
Speaker 3: in London just to cool out. And we get to
Speaker 3: Alberg and Anthony Fossett tells us, you know what, things
Speaker 3: are really bad here. John has not invited me out there,
Speaker 3: and he just keeps wanting me to get stuff from
Speaker 3: the office and telex and sent out a cab and
Speaker 3: that guy Hamrick you sent over here is still here,
Speaker 3: and John wants you to go meet him. Now. What
Speaker 3: I'm going to tell you right now is written and
Speaker 3: documented in Albert Goldman's book The Lives of John Lennon.
Speaker 3: So this is not new information, but it might be
Speaker 3: newer to your audience. So we go to our hotel room,
Speaker 3: Ritchie York and I and there's a note on the
Speaker 3: door says blue piece to you and love. It's kind
Speaker 3: of weird. We just checked in. We come up in
Speaker 3: the elevator. How can there be a note on the door.
Speaker 3: The hotel was kind of full. There was a convention
Speaker 3: of some sort there. So Anthony says, you know, you
Speaker 3: need to go meet the guy Hammrick. Well, John wants
Speaker 3: you to go meet Hammerck now. So we go up
Speaker 3: to Hamrick's room and knocking the door, and the door
Speaker 3: opens and it was like spider webs came out. It
Speaker 3: was really weird, like this whole energy came out. And
Speaker 3: the door opens and here's this guy six foot two,
Speaker 3: long stringy hair in his underwear and he's motioning us
Speaker 3: to come in. Boys, come in. So he turns and
Speaker 3: walks in. He's got a hole in his back size
Speaker 3: of a mango, and there's stitches and everything, and you
Speaker 3: can see something moving like a lung or. I don't
Speaker 3: know why.
Speaker 2: It was terrifying.
Speaker 3: And he goes, oh, don't worry about that, boys, I
Speaker 3: had a little operation. I'll heel myself better than them.
Speaker 3: So we come in this room. It's dark, the blinds
Speaker 3: are pulled, there's a light on in the corner, and
Speaker 3: he starts to tell us that John has been chosen
Speaker 3: as an emissary between an alien race and Earth, and
Speaker 3: that he's been on a space ship in Norway, and
Speaker 3: that's what's happening right now. So he had a little
Speaker 3: plastic city of toy looked like a toy from Toys
Speaker 3: r US but it was floating above the dresser and
Speaker 3: he goes and runs his hand of her and he says,
Speaker 3: we have the secret of anti gravity and we're building
Speaker 3: a city in the clouds above Brazil. Well, my first
Speaker 3: thought was I want my mom. I was scared to
Speaker 3: get I mean, this was like too much, Matt, you know,
Speaker 3: this was too much. I mean I was terrified. And
Speaker 3: so he said, you know, come and do it. Well,
Speaker 3: I you know, I wanted I want to put my
Speaker 3: arm into there. There's nothing there and that could have
Speaker 3: been magnets underneath the drawer whatever. It was some kind
Speaker 3: of weird thing there. But so Richie Yorke goes, what's
Speaker 3: John's part in this? And he goes, John knows his part.
Speaker 3: And I said, well, look here's the deal. We'll do
Speaker 3: the festival thing, you do all that stuff. And I said,
Speaker 3: but I got to go, and we backed out Richie
Speaker 3: and I backed out of the room. I didn't want
Speaker 3: to turn my back on this guy. So we come
Speaker 3: running down to Faucet's room and go, oh my god,
Speaker 3: you're not going to believe what happened. This guy is
Speaker 3: crazy and he's talking about you know, space people and everything,
Speaker 3: and Anthony goes, I don't know what to do.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: So anyway, we go decide to go have dinner up
Speaker 3: at the roof Top restaurant. It's nighttime now and we're
Speaker 3: having dinner, beautiful dinner, you know, a lovely restaurant, probably
Speaker 3: the best one in Aulberg. And the matre d comes
Speaker 3: over to the table and he says, mister Brower, which
Speaker 3: you signed the chip for the barber, and you know,
Speaker 3: like like the what he goes, mister Lennon ordered the
Speaker 3: barber this morning to go out to where they're staying
Speaker 3: and cut everyone's hair. And he said to charge it
Speaker 3: to your room. So I said, well, of course, where's
Speaker 3: the barber And he points to this dominion of young
Speaker 3: woman over at the matre d e stand. I said, well,
Speaker 3: ask her to come over. I said, yeah, of course,
Speaker 3: I'll have no problem to sign him. So we asked
Speaker 3: her to sit down. Her name's Renata and she's very
Speaker 3: shy and you mirror maybe in her late twenties, early thirties.
Speaker 3: And Richie Yorke goes tell us what happened, you know
Speaker 3: what's going on? And she goes, well, no, I go
Speaker 3: out there. I won't do her accent the whole way,
Speaker 3: but she's got a little accent. I go out and
Speaker 3: it's very far out. It's past the edge of the
Speaker 3: city where the roads are now not paved, and there's
Speaker 3: a farmhouse and I come in. The taxi waits for me,
Speaker 3: and I am told to cut everyone's hair, like Mia Farrow,
Speaker 3: and mister Cox has a magazine cover with a picture
Speaker 3: of me at Pharaoh. Now she had just had her
Speaker 3: haircut as thin as you know, like makeer marines look long.
Speaker 3: And so they proceeded to have all their haircut. Kyoko,
Speaker 3: the little child, they cut her hair, then they cut
Speaker 3: Melinda Cox, Tony's wife. Then they cut Tony Cox, then
Speaker 3: they cut Yoko. And when they cut John, she said,
Speaker 3: everybody started to cry. And Yoka took his hair and
Speaker 3: put it in a bag. Okay, So this is like
Speaker 3: between the guy in the room with his space story,
Speaker 3: and now I'm starting to feel like, you know what,
Speaker 3: there's something afoot here. So I said, look, guys, do
Speaker 3: you see what's going on? You know, the space guy
Speaker 3: now her and the haircuts. They're trying to freak us
Speaker 3: out before the meeting because a meeting, you know, was
Speaker 3: supposedly coming, so literally on cue, I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 3: The matreat comes over and says, we just got a
Speaker 3: message from mister Lennon and it says, please be here
Speaker 3: tomorrow at eleven in the morning. Bring Anthony. So that's
Speaker 3: our meeting. I said, see this our meetings tomorrow with them.
Speaker 3: They're trying to freak us out. I said, look, we'll
Speaker 3: freak them out. Let's get all her haircut. She's right here.
Speaker 3: Can you cut three haircuts if I pay you doubles? Yeah.
Speaker 3: So we go out down to one of the rooms
Speaker 3: and I get all my haircut out, and it was
Speaker 3: longer than this, and I got the mere Faraoh aircut.
Speaker 3: There's a picture of me in Rolling Stone looking with
Speaker 3: that aircut for posterity. And of course Richie York and
Speaker 3: Anthony Faucet say no, no, no, we're not doing it.
Speaker 3: They got like an inch cut off. So now we
Speaker 3: have to go out the next morning and I've got
Speaker 3: all my haircut off. We come in. Tony Cox gives
Speaker 3: me a weird look when he sees all my hair off,
Speaker 3: and there's Johnny, Yoko and Kyoko and Melinda Cox and
Speaker 3: Tony and she's handing out this stuff they called mar June,
Speaker 3: which when I had a bite of it, it was
Speaker 3: like there was something in it. I did like that
Speaker 3: to Richie because Richie smoke a joint fall over. I
Speaker 3: don't go near this stuff. I took a bite of it.
Speaker 3: John was eating it, and everybody was eating it, and
Speaker 3: Belinda was eating the crackers like full of it. And
Speaker 3: John is very upset. And but first of all, he
Speaker 3: looked at me and goes, had your haircut? You had
Speaker 3: your haircut? And I realized then that that was not
Speaker 3: a setup the night before sending me the bill wanting
Speaker 3: us to know they had their haircuts John, that was
Speaker 3: just John charging me normal stop. He was shocked and
Speaker 3: I said, yeah, I heard it is the latest thing,
Speaker 3: and he goes, we did too, And I was thinking,
Speaker 3: oh man, this is really easy getting crazy. Okay, good. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So he got very upset. You know, the sixties are over,
Speaker 3: Prime ministers are over. You got to have a site,
Speaker 3: this festival, have a site. How can you expect me
Speaker 3: to call bands when every time I talk to anybody
Speaker 3: they tell me, you just lost the last sight and
Speaker 3: I'm way out on this thing, and you know I've
Speaker 3: stood up for it. Knocking the door, Tony Cox goes
Speaker 3: downs it. Oh, by the way, Richie had given John
Speaker 3: the dossier on Klein, which he kind of looked at
Speaker 3: in walks Allen Klein, and I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 3: this is like unbelievable. So John introduces him all around,
Speaker 3: and then John takes the dossier and hands it to
Speaker 3: him and is here, Allan, here's what people think of you.
Speaker 3: John and Richie put it together for us. I thought
Speaker 3: Client's probably got guys outside with shovels waiting to dig
Speaker 3: us into the frozen ground. Because we had called Ronnie Hawkins,
Speaker 3: our mentor, from the hotel room after we came back
Speaker 3: from seeing the spaceship guy, and told him, and Ronnie said, boys,
Speaker 3: I don't think you should go back to that room.
Speaker 3: Doesn't sound good. He said. I talked to Morris, meaning
Speaker 3: Morris leaving. He said. Morris said, Klein is on the
Speaker 3: war path for you boys. You were getting too close
Speaker 3: to his fatted calf. I'd be very careful out there.
Speaker 3: So now here's Kla Right there after we hear this
Speaker 3: from Ronnie Hawkins. So Klein looks at the Dosier and
Speaker 3: you kind of like he would say that, yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: I took a band from this guy. And he made
Speaker 3: kind of light of it. And then he looked at
Speaker 3: me right in the eyes and he said, I wouldn't
Speaker 3: have thought you'd have time for all this, all the
Speaker 3: problems you're having with your little festival. And that was
Speaker 3: like cold. It was like he had us nailed. I mean,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean, yeah, exactly, how do you
Speaker 3: have time for any of this? Well, Baba John asked
Speaker 3: us to whatever. I don't know. All I want to
Speaker 3: do is get out of there. So we promised to
Speaker 3: have a sight within two weeks, three weeks, and we
Speaker 3: would get back to them. And we got out of there,
Speaker 3: left Anthony there, got the cab that was waiting for us,
Speaker 3: and got backpacked and split went back to Toronto and
Speaker 3: got to work trying to get another festival site. So
Speaker 3: now John calls in tells us that they've met us
Speaker 3: some people that are friends with Tony Cox and they
Speaker 3: really get the vibe of the festival and he wants
Speaker 3: to send them to Toronto and work out of our office.
Speaker 3: So I'm like, fine, no problem. So these two guys
Speaker 3: show up. One of them, Leonard Hollihan, long red hair,
Speaker 3: wears a purple suit, tells me he's from the Plates
Speaker 3: and he's got picture of an aircar. The other one
Speaker 3: is David Britton. Tells me his name's Britain. No it's not.
Speaker 3: His name's David Snyderman. He's the guy that I went
Speaker 3: to the microphone for John for the cocaine at the
Speaker 3: revival and said, doctor Snyderman. Plays to the backstage area,
Speaker 3: doctor Snyderman, because I knew he was there, because everybody
Speaker 3: we knew in the world and everyone they knew was there.
Speaker 3: We probably gave out thousands of free tickets. And he
Speaker 3: had this stuff called cocaine. Jazz musicians had it.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I was married with a kid. We were hash smokers.
Speaker 3: So he comes to the back stage snow fence and
Speaker 3: he's like, going, what is it?
Speaker 1: Man?
Speaker 3: Is it a Boston I go listen, John Lennon want
Speaker 3: can you have some? Go? Yeah? I did, I did,
Speaker 3: but I put it in the grass. I thought it
Speaker 3: was a bust. Could you please go get it? So
Speaker 3: he comes back in a couple of minutes literally, and
Speaker 3: he's holding this thing. I got Denis my roady next
Speaker 3: to me, and he's got one of the other guys,
Speaker 3: and I said, look, give it to me. I'll give
Speaker 3: you money, dinner next week, whenever you want. He goes, no,
Speaker 3: I have to give it to John lenn and myself.
Speaker 3: I look at Dennis. Get it, grab his arm and
Speaker 3: rip his hand open, get the vial. Give it to me.
Speaker 3: I go, you can't come in here. I'm sorry. I'll
Speaker 3: take care of this later. I was terrified coming walk
Speaker 3: and there's police everywhere all over the place, policeman in uniform.
Speaker 3: I'm walking in with this vial which I kind of
Speaker 3: looked at and it was all shiny rocks and everything.
Speaker 3: I knew that was good. Whatever it was, that was
Speaker 3: the stuff. And that's why when I gave it to John,
Speaker 3: he looked at me like I was Jesus, because he
Speaker 3: knew that is bad, bad shit, that's the stuff. That's
Speaker 3: why he said, ask Eric to come in. So now
Speaker 3: here's the same guy back from meeting with Lennon telling
Speaker 3: me his names, David Britten. Now well, let's jump ahead
Speaker 3: a little bit to Keith Richards book and Witness X
Speaker 3: that busted the Stones was David Schneiderman from Toronto, who
Speaker 3: we find out had been busted by customs with ten
Speaker 3: thousand tabs of acid in like nineteen sixty three and
Speaker 3: had been ratting people out ever since. So that's that guy,
Speaker 3: all right. So now we get out of there and
Speaker 3: come back to Toronto, and it's like, okay, Now these
Speaker 3: two guys arrive and we have to give them an office,
Speaker 3: and they want to make an announcement about the air cars,
Speaker 3: and I go, no, it's not time for that right now.
Speaker 3: Festival's not ready for that kind of publicity. Just slow down.
Speaker 3: Because also what was happening was Rolling Stone had turned
Speaker 3: against us. Obviously Alan Klein and by the way, Yan
Speaker 3: Winner was not a mogul publisher. He was putting a
Speaker 3: magazine together with Bailing Wire in Scotch tape every two weeks.
Speaker 3: So ads were critical, and I was led to believe
Speaker 3: the client had basically told them, look, you're not getting
Speaker 3: any more Beetles or Stones, ads or anything from their
Speaker 3: record companies if you don't start winding down this festival.
Speaker 3: So they had gotten a guy named John Carr who
Speaker 3: had been interviewing us, and in one of them, I
Speaker 3: had made a stupid mistake. And when I've been in
Speaker 3: La Jogive, Jean had been driving me, my driver, and
Speaker 3: he had told me that in India they had these
Speaker 3: massive festivals with millions of people, and they had pits
Speaker 3: where you would defecate and then they would you know,
Speaker 3: cover the pits up because they never get enough portable toilets.
Speaker 3: So I told John Carr that. So the next week
Speaker 3: in Rolling Stone has said John Brower wants your shit
Speaker 3: in headlines.
Speaker 2: No less.
Speaker 3: Okay. This was like the beginning of the Rolling Stone,
Speaker 3: you know, winding down their support of the festival. At
Speaker 3: that point, we were in a disastrous chaos situation. There
Speaker 3: was no way to get a site. Everywhere you went,
Speaker 3: the opp came with the same movies. Finally, jan Winner
Speaker 3: asks us to come to California to talk to the
Speaker 3: dead and the airplane, and Lennon insisted on these two
Speaker 3: guys coming with me, Snyderman and Britain and this Leonard guy.
Speaker 3: So like John Lennon, Man, what am I gonna tell them?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 3: You know, okay, okay, we'll take them. So in the
Speaker 3: meeting it's like been documented in Rolling Stone as well.
Speaker 3: The airplanes, there are some of them Grace is there,
Speaker 3: Jack Cassidy's there, the Couple of the Dead or their
Speaker 3: Ralph Gleason's there. There's a lot of very heavy, respectable
Speaker 3: people from the music community. And before I even speak,
Speaker 3: this guy, David jumps out and starts giving giving them
Speaker 3: this whole story of like the space guy gave in
Speaker 3: the hotel room, and Grace Slick just looked at him
Speaker 3: and goes, you know what, if that's what John lenn
Speaker 3: is into, then fuck John Lennon and fuck the festival.
Speaker 3: We don't want to be part of it, and walked out,
Speaker 3: and everybody walked out with her, and jan Winner looked
Speaker 3: at me hopelessly and goes, you guys are ruining me.
Speaker 3: And my buddy Jerry that was with me said you
Speaker 3: just lost control of your deal and that was it.
Speaker 3: So I told these two guys out on the street,
Speaker 3: I'm not flying you back to Toronto. Get John Lennon
Speaker 3: to fly you back. So that's when Joan Wnder called
Speaker 3: John and said, look, man, this is out of control.
Speaker 3: Like these guys show up here. John must have realized,
Speaker 3: oh my god, Allan was right, it's all going to
Speaker 3: blow back on me. And so they pulled out and
Speaker 3: that was the end of it. And two weeks later
Speaker 3: I meet a guy that's just inherited ten million dollars
Speaker 3: and he gives me two to put on the Strawberry
Speaker 3: Fields Festival. And that began another battle. But we went
Speaker 3: to another province. We got the Prime Minister's lawyer who
Speaker 3: told us, get a motorcycle sanctioned, have a motorcycle race
Speaker 3: at Mostport with added entertainment, and you'll go to court
Speaker 3: and my lawyers will win. And that's what happened. We
Speaker 3: put on one hundred and fifty thousand people at Mostport
Speaker 3: Brown Free Racetrack three days and it was beautiful. People
Speaker 3: could drive under the track and then park and camp
Speaker 3: with the car, so it's no woodstock parking and like,
Speaker 3: I don't know if dude, where's my car? No, I
Speaker 3: mean there was, you know, forty thousand cars parked on
Speaker 3: the site, bonfires at night, campfires. It was an incredible show.
Speaker 3: Sly in the family Stone. Of course Alice Cooper came
Speaker 3: in headlined as well. They were big by then a
Speaker 3: year later Mountain. Ten years after Bonnie Delaney and Friends,
Speaker 3: Melanie I can't remember a lot. Ten years after a
Speaker 3: lot of incredible bands. It was an amazing three day
Speaker 3: show and that became me resolving the whole thing with
Speaker 3: the Peace Festival. It was like we did Canada's Woodstock,
Speaker 3: that's what they call it. That's what I wanted to
Speaker 3: do in the beginning. And we called the Strawberry Fields
Speaker 3: because we moved to Shetty Act, New Brunswick and we
Speaker 3: got a site right on the ocean. There were sheddy acts,
Speaker 3: strawberry Capital of Canada, and so I said, well we
Speaker 3: call Strawberry Feels Festival because we were looking at all
Speaker 3: these strawberries in this field, and Jerry, my buddy, goes,
Speaker 3: that's a good idea. So when we moved it back
Speaker 3: to Toronto with Trudeau's lawyers in this new plan, because
Speaker 3: we were told by her contact in the RCMP that
Speaker 3: Trudeau was not happy with John Lennon and he wasn't
Speaker 3: happy with John David Eaton and this was payback and
Speaker 3: so we basically got tipped in by the Prime Minister
Speaker 3: and his lawyers to pull this off and we did.
Speaker 3: It was amazing.
Speaker 2: So how much longer did you promote concerts? Well?
Speaker 3: I moved to Laguna Beach and Larry Weinstein and I
Speaker 3: formed Laguna Concerts under the Sky. We took over the
Speaker 3: Laguna Bowl, which had never had a concert. He brought
Speaker 3: beautiful acts like Emmy, Lua Harris and different country bands,
Speaker 3: very gentle stuff. And then we did the Tubes with
Speaker 3: Bill Grahame. He gave us all their dates down in
Speaker 3: South we did some rush dates. I did not do
Speaker 3: anything significant along the lines of a festival until I
Speaker 3: had moved back to Toronto and did the heat Wave
Speaker 3: Festival again at Mostport, which was now sanctioned because now
Speaker 3: they saw that there was no nudity, there was no
Speaker 3: mouths at Garbage. It was like okay. And this was
Speaker 3: ten years later. Music had become the big business by now,
Speaker 3: and I was very proud of doing the first, last
Speaker 3: and only punk festival. But as David Byrne said, we
Speaker 3: would never play a festival ever. And then we heard
Speaker 3: about this crazy guy in Toronto that was willing to
Speaker 3: get us seventy five thousand dollars for one show, and
Speaker 3: we didn't make that much all last year, so we said, okay,
Speaker 3: let's take the money, and Jake took money for Elvis.
Speaker 3: We got to B fifty two's Rumor Rock Pile Pretenders.
Speaker 3: It was an incredible show. The clash canceled, my investors
Speaker 3: went around behind my back tried to sign them to
Speaker 3: a movie deal so they could take over the deal.
Speaker 3: Investors are always trying to take over deals. I can't
Speaker 3: understand why they can't just leave well enough. But they
Speaker 3: get producer itis where they want to be the producers.
Speaker 3: They're not happy to just be investors or lawyers whatever.
Speaker 3: They're all necessary investors and lawyers, but you know, sometimes
Speaker 3: they get these visions they see their name up in lights,
Speaker 3: like a brightly lit marquee. Any event, we managed to
Speaker 3: fight past that assault and put on an incredible, beautiful show.
Speaker 3: Was hotest day of the summer. And Dan Aykroyd came
Speaker 3: out there and did an interview with me as Elwood
Speaker 3: Blues and Danny really on a Danny. He's incredible. I've
Speaker 3: known him so many years, but he never fails to
Speaker 3: surprise me. He did the imitation on the radio interview
Speaker 3: as Elwood and he goes to John, I'd like to
Speaker 3: ask you a favor. I go what, And he goes,
Speaker 3: I'd like to invite everybody listening to be on my
Speaker 3: guest list. I go, sure, no problem. So like this
Speaker 3: isn't late in the afternoon. Less than an hour later,
Speaker 3: Harvey Pewdis, the park owner, calls me. He goes, John,
Speaker 3: where are all these people coming from? What's going on?
Speaker 3: I said, Oh, they're on Dan Ackroy's guest list. He said,
Speaker 3: we don't have any tickets left. He said, it's all
Speaker 3: been done. The count's over. I said, they're on his
Speaker 3: guest list. They're coming in for free. He goes, oh, damn.
Speaker 3: I said, well, sell them hot dogs. You got the concession,
Speaker 3: sell them some food whatever. They're coming in free, and
Speaker 3: they well, the audience up significantly. Justice Talking Heads was
Speaker 3: coming on with their nine piece band, and David Byrne
Speaker 3: was so nervous his voice was croaking. That's one of
Speaker 3: the moments, Bob, that that cheers me up. Is the
Speaker 3: magic of some of these moments, you know that I
Speaker 3: recall and I don't recall them often, but once in
Speaker 3: a while a guy like you will pull them out
Speaker 3: of me and I have to just have that moment
Speaker 3: to just remember that, Like being in the limo with
Speaker 3: John coming in. I was too busy then, but on
Speaker 3: stage at heat Wave, you know, I was like, really,
Speaker 3: I just couldn't believe that it was happening anyway, Let's
Speaker 3: get back to your question.
Speaker 2: Sorry, So when was the last show you did?
Speaker 3: A heat wave? Was the last show I did? That
Speaker 3: was it? That was my swan song. I went out
Speaker 3: on a high note. That was the end.
Speaker 2: So you're happy with the movie, you know, I.
Speaker 3: Mean, I'm overjoyed with the movie. I'm a little there's
Speaker 3: a couple of things in the movie that kind of
Speaker 3: like are over the top. Like when it comes on
Speaker 3: on the screen, you know John Brower, I say, the producer, Yeah,
Speaker 3: John Brower, the producer. Was that him in the phone?
Speaker 3: John Brower? When my name comes up four times on
Speaker 3: the screen around some card, Like, I was like, that's
Speaker 3: over the top, man, I mean that's like, really, that's
Speaker 3: not who I am. I'm not like all about t
Speaker 3: shirts with John Brower on them. That was a little
Speaker 3: you know, overwhelming for me. Like I was kind of
Speaker 3: embarrassed by that. It was flattering, and I guess, you know,
Speaker 3: the director wanted to do that, and yes they were
Speaker 3: saying those things. That was on the tape. But you know,
Speaker 3: I will tell you that I was very glad in
Speaker 3: the beginning. I had an agreement with these guys that
Speaker 3: I was an executive producer and Ron Chapman came to
Speaker 3: me before anything went down and said, look, I need
Speaker 3: to ask you a favor. I want you to give
Speaker 3: up that executive producer title. He said, I'm going to
Speaker 3: make this movie. It's going to be your movie and
Speaker 3: everyone else is in it, but if you're an executive producer,
Speaker 3: it's going to look like a vanity movie. And I went, Okay,
Speaker 3: I get it. I see what you're saying. And when
Speaker 3: I saw the movie, I was very glad my name
Speaker 3: was not on the screen as an executive producer. That
Speaker 3: had just said the producers wished to thank John Brower
Speaker 3: for sharing his story. That was enough, because that's was
Speaker 3: what it was. And I am, you know, a little
Speaker 3: overwhelmed by the fact that the movie is being received
Speaker 3: so well, and by you especially. I cannot tell you
Speaker 3: how many times I've read that I don't want to
Speaker 3: embarrasue it. Probably ten times I've read your review, making
Speaker 3: sure that I didn't hallucinate this, that bob Lefsits really
Speaker 3: wrote that. Yeah, so there's been other reviews, et ceter
Speaker 3: but no, there's been nothing like yours. And in the industry,
Speaker 3: there's no one like you, and so that review and
Speaker 3: your love of that movie, that's beyond anything I think
Speaker 3: anybody expected. So thank you.
Speaker 2: Well for those people who have not seen the movie,
Speaker 2: the movie is really that good and I lived through.
Speaker 2: And remember my friend bought the you know, the live
Speaker 2: in Toronto ahilbum with a cloud in the sky, as
Speaker 2: I say international news. I certainly was following the whole thing.
Speaker 2: It was amazing that it happened in Toronto, and we
Speaker 2: didn't know all the backstory until the movie, but the
Speaker 2: fact you got John Lennon was unbelievable. So John, John,
Speaker 2: I want to thank you so much for sharing your
Speaker 2: story with my audience.
Speaker 3: Well, Bob, I want to thank you. It's an honor
Speaker 3: to be on your show to have finally gotten to
Speaker 3: meet you, even though it's electronically. I'll look forward to
Speaker 3: the first time that I can shake your hand and
Speaker 3: give you a hug, and I hope it's this year.
Speaker 2: Sounds good job until next time. This is Bob Left
Speaker 2: said