Downtown Montreal was about 45 minute bus ride away from
where I grew up in the district of N.D.G. Up until I was about 13 years of age
I don’t think I made it downtown more than a half dozen times a year and
usually it was in the company of one of my parents. Even at an early age, I was
fascinated by St. Catherine Street.
The old Montreal Forum was located at the corner of St.
Catherine Street and Atwater. Every year while I was in grade school the 3 ring
Shriner’s Circus would turn up at the Forum. Discount coupons were handed out
by our teachers for the circus. I guess because the Shriner’s were involved in
charity. I saw my first hockey game at the Forum in 1962. It was an exhibition
game between the Blackhawks and the Canadiens. Cesare Maniago was the backup
goalie for the Canadiens and I remember being surprised that he had jeans on
under his goalie pads instead of hockey shorts. His shorts must have gotten
lost somewhere. I was a big Blackhawks fan and we waited out by their team bus
after the game. Moose Vasko looked like a giant. A few years later I worked one
night at the Forum for free as an usher at a country and western concert. I
knew some guys who were into that kind of music. I have no idea who the
headliners were that night.
Across the street from the Montreal forum there was a bus
terminal. The beginning or the end of the line for people coming and going from places
like Montreal West, N.D.G., and Westmount.
English speaking people back in the 1950s and 1960s
mostly lived on the west side of Montreal. Downtown to most of us was thought
to be St. Catherine Street from Atwater Street to about Union Street where the
old Morgan’s department store stood. Anything east was a mystery.
If you took a walk down St. Catherine Street in the late
1950s here are some things you would see. The many neon signs that glowed and
flickered day and night. Signs with martini glasses beckoning people to come in
for a drink, the movie theatre marquees at The Palace, The Princess, The
Seville, The Capital, Loew’s, The York, and The Strand. You would see all kinds
of restaurants, big and small, some upstairs and some at street level.
You would notice the streetcars before the tracks were
ripped up. You might see a cop with a white hat and white gloves directing
traffic. In the daytime the wide sidewalks were always crowded with people. If
you walked from the Montreal Forum to Morgan’s (later The Bay) department store
you would pass the Playland arcade and its pinball machines, Toe Blake’s
Tavern, Dinty Moore’s Restaurant, a cake and pastry store that I think was
called Aux Delices where my father would pick up little marzipan treats (some
in the shape of little pigs) from time to time. I seem to remember that Aux
Delices had one of those black cat clocks where the cat’s eyes moved from left
to right as did its tail.
Along the way you would see four of Montreal’s largest
department stores, Olgilvie’s, Simpson’s Eaton’s and Morgan’s. Dupius Frere was
another large department store that catered mostly to French speaking people
and was further east on St. Catherine Street. If you went into one of the
department stores you would notice that the elevator operators were always
young women who wore uniforms and had white gloves on. In the basement of
Eatons’s there was an upscale grocery department. You could order all kinds of
cakes and pastries. They even sold assorted tea sandwiches. Meat and fish were
wrapped in a kind of salmon coloured paper. Cake boxes were tied up with string
that hung from a dispenser over the counter person’s head.
Outside one or other of the department stores it was
common to see an organ grinder with a small monkey or a guy who looked down on
his luck who was missing his legs and begging while he sat on a board with
wheels with his cap in hand.
Back then I knew very little about what went on in
downtown Montreal at night. Occasionally, in the local newspapers (The Montreal
Gazette and Montreal Star) I would read about something that had happened at
The Chez Maurice, The Chez Paris, The Stork Club, or The El Morocco nightclubs.
The mid 1960s were a kind of coming of age for me. For a
period of about 5 or 6 years I would spend a lot of nights in downtown Montreal
along with some weekends in out of town places that young Montrealers flocked
to.
This is my story about those times.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
I lived in a lot of different places around Montreal from
1966 to 1970. At my parent’s place on Harvard Avenue in N.D.G., a bachelor
apartment on Queen Mary Road, another apartment on Forest Hill just off of Cote
de Neiges Road, yet another apartment in Cote St. Luc, 4 different McGill
University frat houses, and in a number of rooming houses in the McGill student
ghetto area. When I was really broke I crashed on people’s couches or floors. I
also stayed out at my parent’s place in Valois (Pointe Claire) a few times for
short periods. I often used their house as a mailing address. Wherever I lived
I was always drawn to Montreal’s nightlife.
I drank my first beer when I was about 16 and got drunk
behind West Hill High School with a couple of other guys. Several months later
I was downtown with some other guys trying to find an establishment that would
serve us an alcoholic drink. As I was to discover, there were a number of
places that looked the other way as far as serving teenagers alcohol. I think
that the bar owners looked at serving under ager’s drinks and being caught and
paying a fine as just a cost of doing business.
I ordered my first alcoholic drink in a place on St.
Catherine Street called the Venus de Milo Room. After surveying the drink menu
I ordered a Sidecar. Years later I did a bit of bartending and a lot of waiting
on tables and nobody ever ordered a Sidecar.
The area I grew up in Montreal, N.D.G., was quite
conservative and in high school drinking was not what most kids did. If you did
you certainly didn’t tell your parents that you were going to spend the night
getting pissed somewhere. It was all clandestine. In some ways, getting drunk
for the first time was like losing your virginity. Nobody ever thought about
who might be getting started on a life of being an alcoholic.
There was a rumour mill if you were about 17 or 18 as to
where a young guy could get into a nightclub. Carloads of Montrealers would
head out of town on weekends to places like Brodie’s on the beach in
Plattsburg, New York, The Saxony in Rouses Point, New York, The Inn, Nadeau’s,
and Nymark’s Lodge in St. Sauveur in the Laurentian Mountains. Labatt’s 50 and
Molson Export were the most common beers asked for in St. Sauveur and you
ordered them in quarts. A few never made it home from those drinking
excursions.
In downtown Montreal, two of the easier places to get a
drink, pimples or not, were the Café Andre and the downstairs bar in the
Berkley Hotel.
The Café Andre was run by and older gentleman with white
scrambled hair. It seemed like he was always counting heads. The place was just
off of Sherbrooke Street by McGill University. It wasn’t very big. The bar sat
maybe 8 people with 4 or 5 other small tables tables. There was a curtained
entrance to a bit larger room that had a very tiny stage. The place was known
as a folk singing joint. A group called The Raftsmen provided the entertainment
for a few years and they were followed by Penny Laing who sometimes had people
lined up down the block to get in.
The Raftsmen started out as a trio playing acoustic
guitars. They later went electric when a guy from New York (I think his name
was Jake) joined them. One of their songs was called “The Big Bamboo”. I think
they got the song from Jamaica. It was quite suggestive. Another song they
frequently sang was “Scotch and Soda” which I think ranks right up there with
Sinatra’s “It’s A Quarter To Three”. Other tunes they sang were a Canadian
version of “This Land Is Your Land” and “Something To Sing About, This Land Of
Ours”. “From the sound of Mount Royal’s Chimes, up to the Maritimes…..”
When the “British Invasion” happened in rock and roll the
old guy who owned Café Andre decided to open
a place upstairs to cater to people who preferred wilder music than folk
and liked to dance. They had a disc jockey who I think was named Gordie
Lariche. He once told me a story about being a golf hustler in Texas and
turning his profits into a Studebaker Avanti sports car. It could have
happened? I remember dancing with a gal I met from Verdun to the Stone’s “Get
Off Of My Cloud” and Len Barry’s “1-2-3”.
The bartender downstairs at the Berkley Hotel on
Sherbrooke Street was German or Austrian. The place was really only for going
to have a drink. Although there wasn’t any dancing there was a juke box. For
several months the Association’s “Never My Love” was played over and over
again. A number of wealthy Westmount kids hung out in the bar and occasionally
the bartender would hand the phone over to them. Maybe an inquiring parent
wondering how drunk their kid was and if a car should be sent to pick him up?
When I was still in high school somebody rented a room at
the Berkley Hotel and over 100 people turned up and trashed the place.
Now and then the police raided places where underage
drinking was going on. All in all I think I was picked up and taken away in a
paddy wagon about 4 times. One of those 4 times was at the Café Andre and
another was at the Berkley Hotel.
Some young guys would head down to Lake George, New York
on the Labour Day weekends for 3 days of drunken partying. The town is about
half way between New York City and Montreal. I remember somebody putting Kool Aid
in the motel manager’s aquarium. The town was packed with people on those
weekends. Motorcycle clubs, hippies, college kids, all turned up. I remember
this one huge bar very near Fort William Henry and facing the lake. A black guy
who looked a bit like Jimmy Hendrix with a headband and a vest and his band
were the entertainment. The security staff were all local guys and wore road
crew vests. I remember standing outside this joint and seeing drunks and shit
disturbers being tossed out on their ears. The only thing missing was the
saloon swinging doors.
Back in Montreal things were changing very fast. Coffee
houses started to spring up like The Yellow Door on Aylmer Street and The
Limelight on Pirece Street. A guy named Gary Eisenkraft from N.D.G. owned a
number of these joints including The New Penelope. He brought acts like Gordon
Lightfoot, Ian & Sylvia, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, Buffy St. Marie, Sonny
Terry and Brownie McGee to Montreal. A big name folksinger at the time was
Bruce Murdoch. One night I saw him outside one of Gary Eisenkraft’s clubs
totally wasted. Years later I was surprised to read that he had put his life
back together and had actually been a high school principal for a time. Good
for him!
Gary Eisenkraft had a pretty interesting life and I
highly recommend Googling him. Unfortunately the only time I met him was one
night when he was checking out the line-up outside one of his clubs and picking
out who could jump the cue. Shades of Steve Rubell at Studio 54 in New York a
few years later?
Nightlife in Montreal was evolving. You just had to
decide what your musical preference was. There were places for jazz, places
that looked liked discos, clubs that specialized in soul music, and of course
venues that were all about rock and roll.
All the “soul” nighclubs had a large amount of black
patrons. Places like The All American, Rockheads’s Paradise Club, and The
Esquire Show Bar. The Esquire had as its stage a platform that was above the
service bar. One night I saw Junior Walker And The All Stars there. Man, that
guy could blow sax. The odd thing was that his group was all dressed up in
costumes that made them look like Robin Hood.
Over near the Montreal Forum a place opened called Your
Father’s Moustache. It might have been in the old El Morocco building. People
sat at big long tables stacked with huge pitchers of beer and sung along to
some of the corniest songs ever while a Dixieland band with striped pink and
white striped shirts and suspenders banjoed away. I think the joint lasted
about a year or so. There was also the same club out in Vancouver for a short
while.
I picked up a gal one night at Your Father’s Moustache and
we ended going out for about a month. One night, we were both asleep in her
basement apartment in Snowden when we heard some banging and crashing. Some guy
was trying to climb in the window. I picked up an iron off of the ironing board
but thought the better of it. It turned out it was the gal’s Swedish ex-
boyfriend. In his drunkenness he asked me to go outside and fight him. I got my
clothes on. We were kind of circling one another when he took his shirt off. He
looked pretty fit. I got in one shot and thought the better of this deal and
took off into the night. The gal and I broke up a week or two later. About a
month later I was back at Your Father’s Moustache and spotted the Swedish guy
walking towards me. I thought I was in for a beating. Instead, what happened
was he sat down and bought me a beer and we both agreed the gal was a big waste
of time. There is nothing wrong with being lucky once in a while.
A lot of young guys back then discovered local taverns
that had been around for years. The beer was cheap (10 cents for a small draft)
as was the food which always came in large portions. A hangout for many years
for university students was the Stanley Tavern. Seated in amongst the students
were the regulars who were often old drunks. The common term for them back then
was “rubby dubs”. A lot of students looked at them as an annoyance, perhaps
because they would sometimes try to horn in on a conversation or become a
distraction. A few students would toss their one cent coins in the urinals in
the bathroom knowing that the old drunks didn’t have much money. It wasn’t a
nice thing to do.
In the 1950s my father had an office on Crescent Street
in one of the old houses that later became bars and restaurants. I remember his
copies of some the Group Of Seven’s work on his office walls. By the mid 1960s,
Crescent Street, Mountain Street, and Bishop Street were all starting to become
the hip area of Montreal.
I think Le Drug was on Mountain Street. It had kind of a
chainmail tent like entranceway. Very artsy. I was only in the place a few
times and kind of got the impression that most of the patrons were French
Canadian intellectual types. Quite possibly plotting to get rid of us English
speaking types. I remember that they made baguette sandwiches.
Over on Crescent Street a little pub (compared to today)
called The Winston Churchill Pub opened around 1967. It wasn’t as sophisticated
as it is today. It was common to see guys there from the Maritimes with their
beards and pea jackets in the pub.
I can’t remember the exact location of the place but I
believe it was called Le Discotheque. My understanding was that a Disco was a
concept initialized in France and was basically a dance club with a disk jockey
who played whatever music was popular at the time. This was a bit different
than the disco craze that happened later in the mid 1970s when the tunes that
were played were almost all several minutes long and had a certain kind of high
energy beat.
(A lot of people forget that the twist craze in the 1960s
was kind of a second go around. Chubby Checker recorded The Twist 2-3 years
before the craze. Hence his tune Lets Twist Again.)
All of sudden there were a number of discotheque type
dance clubs downtown. I hung around the downstairs Copacabana and La Place
Pigalle near Olgilvie’s department store for a while. Both were on St.
Catherine Street. Other places I remember were The Scandanavian Club and The
Seven Steps. I remember dancing to Chis Montez’s “Call Me” and the Box Tops’
“The Letter”…”.Give me a ticket for an aeroplane, ain’t got time to catch a
fast train” at the Copa.
I knew a kind of sucky guy at one of the frat houses I
stayed at who was from out of town and had somehow managed to buy himself a
membership at the new Playboy Club that had just opened on Sherbrooke Street
near the corner of University. One night he invited me along as a guest but for
some reason I never got past the front door.
Over those years I was in a number of joints only once.
One of these places was a spot called Aldo’s. They had a doorman that looked
like Herman Munster. The gal who took the cover charge was about 60 and quite
overweight. Once I got into the place I realized that there were only 2 or 3
other customers. A fool and his money are easily parted I guess.
Anyone who spent some time downtown at night in Montreal
in the mid to late 1960s will remember the go-go place on St.Catherine Street.
I can’t for the life of me recall the name of the place. You didn’t have to go
into the nightclub to recognize the place. Naked go-go gals danced solo in a
window on the second floor. I don’t know how the management ever got away with
it.
I was a regular customer at the go-go club for a number
of months. You would walk up the stairs and pay an admission price. Then an
older guy in a tuxedo with slicked back white hair would take you to your
table. He would then curve one of his hands backwards to receive his
forthcoming tip. If you didn’t get the jist of what he wanted and were perhaps
from out of town, a waiter might whisper in your ear what the local decorum was
about tipping.
One night I went to walk up the stairs and a number of
the waiters had rags in their hands and were wiping up blood. It seems that the
French navy was in town and there had been some kind of disagreement. The
waiters in the club were tough S.O.B.s and I always watched my peas and queues.
On another night in the club I was sitting at the bar and
decided to go and ask a gal to dance who I had met on another previous night.
When I got back to the bar I told the guy next to me that I thought this gal
was going to be pretty easy. It turned out the guy at the bar I was talking to
was her brother. Ouch!!
A lot of the last half of the sixties was about hippies
and student protests and the Viet Nam war. Montreal was no different than a lot
of American cities in some ways. I knew two different guys who didn’t know one
another who got up on step ladders on St. Catherine Street and did some ranting
in front of large crowds. One was a guy named Alan Marks who I had gone to
school with in N.D.G. I used to watch Huckleberry Hound cartoons at his house.
The other guy was Dave Young who was from Toronto but was a student at McGill.
I rented my apartment in Cote St. Luc to him a few times for the night so he
could have some “personal” time with his girlfriend.
Another odd nightspot was a place called the Pussy
Galore. It was right next to the Sir George Williams campus on Burnside (de
Maisoneuve). A cook in a restaurant where I worked suggested that I meet him
there for a beer. The joint was hardly a university hang out. I ran into a neat
guy I used to walk to high school with now and then. The cook guy told me my
old high school friend was now pimping for his sister. I never knew if it was
just BS but nevertheless it creeped me out. I never went back there. Anyway
pretty well everyone in the place looked like a gangster and I wasn’t looking
for trouble.
Somewhere along the line I managed to scrape up enough
money to buy myself a 3 piece pin striped suit. There were a number of times I
would grease myself up with Bain de Soleil in the daytime and head downtown in
my spiffy suit with no more than a few bucks in my pocket. By the end of the
night I didn’t have enough money left to catch a bus.
I started to get involved with French Canadian girls. I
remember one of them had a fur coat and later went on to be a university
professor. I ran into her a few years later in Banff. I wasn’t above doing a
little fibbing to them at times although I wasn’t a congenital liar. I told
some of them that I was a writer to deflect from the fact that I was often
broke. The starving artist routine? At least I didn’t have to use the “come on
up to my room and see my etchings." (Although I never used it, I always liked
the line “Do you like music? Why not come up to my room? I have a radio.”
In 1969 I was living at a frat house at the top of
university street and renting out rooms to out of towners. Occasionally if they
seemed like good people I would show them the night spots around town. I also
spent a number of nights at a nightclub on La Ronde. I always looked younger
than my age but I was now 22. I didn’t have a driver’s licence and one night at
La Ronde the security guy told me he wouldn’t let me in without ID. I was
surprised that nothing happened after I pushed him aside and walked in.
I left town and hitchhiked across Canada to Vancouver. I
hung around there for a few months and made my way back east again. I really
didn’t have much of a plan. I phoned up an old high school friend from Montreal
one cold autumn night in Toronto and ended up moving in with him and another
high school friend. Over the next year and a half or so we would go down to
Montreal for weekend every now and then. We almost always ended up at the
Winston Churchill Pub.
Can I use the Gino Vanelli lyric again?……”When I dream
about those nights in Montreal….”
PS….Montreal wasn’t the end of my night clubbing days.
There are tales still to tell of other cities I have lived in. And….just for
the record I never became an alcoholic which was more good fortune than anything
else. I used to say that there are two things that I could never be in life,
gay or an alcoholic. Even if I was interested they both look like they require
just too much effort.
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