The Electro-Magnetic Spectrum

Also known as the Silicone Contol and The Solid State Waste removal Company Orchestra and chorus.
The band was created one very late stoned night at Ziggy Blazer's studio. A multi media band consisting of Bart Schoales, Jerry Santbergen, Moses (Edward Smith) and Tom Seniw. The first rule was that you must never have played a musical instrument. Tom admitted he had trombone lessons and was kicked out of the band and replaced by me. The band consisted of 4 2 track tape recorders, 2 or 3 film projectors a couple of slide projectors, and a wind machine and lots of incense.
We had one paying gig. We got $2000.00 to play at McMaster University and were written up in Arts Canada.

Craig Russell

I met Craig Russell in the subway one night. He was on his way to his hit show at the Royal York.
Craig was entertaining about 6 people. He was sitting beside a wino and a small group had gathered around him and he had them in stitches. I stood and watched for awhile and when I got an opening I held out my hand. "Hi Craig I always wanted to meet you. I am a friend of your friend Sandy's." " oh Sandy, How is she? he pushed against the wino slightly to make room for me to sit down.We talked about Sandy for a couple of minutes and suddenly he stopped sniffing."What is that horrible smell?"he gasped. "I am afraid it is your friend." I said nodding to the wino. "Shit!" he said "there goes the promise I made to myself to fuck anybody that asked me."
Links



Craig Russell (from glbtq)

Marcel Barbeau

Marcel was a delightful absolute madman. I met him through Jerry Santbergan in the 60s. he always seemed to be married to some heiress and had tons of money. After drinking 9 bottles of champagne at the rooftop bar at the Park Plaza. Marcel orders a tenth bottle. he sips it dumps the bottle upside down in the ice bucket. "Bah it is young and fruity he yells. so we get kicked out. One night we left the Pilot Tavern to walk down to an opening at a gallery some where south of Bloor. It was garbage night and Marcel gets me to help him carry a 10 ft long piece of cardboard tubing and plastic wrap to the gallery where he tells the owner it is one of his Artworks and he wants to store it there.

Cannonball and Nat Adderley

I met Cannonball and Nat Adderley at the colonial Tavern in 1969. Mickey Handy introduced me. Cannon and Nat became good friends and i was their Toronto buddy whenever they came to Toronto, we spent many days hanging out at the underground railroad etc
I once cooked a seafood chowder dinner for them at Grossmans Tavern. Al let me use the kitchen and was the special of the day. It sold out quickly.
One night I took them to Gordon Rayner's Studio to watch an Artist's Jazzband rehearsal. they liked it but would not jam.
This was very much a "Blackpower time and they got invited to all the Black after hours clubs. But they would not go without me. I knew most of the black clubs and we had a lot of fun.
I was on their permanent guest list at the Colonial and I got to listen to great jazz and meet their fabulous sidemen like  Louis Hayes,Ray Brown, Walter Booker, Bobby Timmons, Victor Feldman, Joe Zawinul.

One night I was late getting to the Colonial , they were halfway through the set and the bar was packed full. The only place for me to sit was at the staff table. They would not serve me until I moved so i sat there drink less till the set was over.They joined me at the end of the set and ordered us drinks. They still refused to serve me. So Nat called the manager over and told them they were not going to play until I was drinking. needless to say that never happened again.

After Cannonball's tragic death in 1975 Nat played Toronto regularly and he was always glad to see me. He embarrassed me on my birthday at the Montreal Bistro by dedicating almost every song to me. Vincent Herring was with him.  I met his wife too and spent a few nights sitting with her.

Cannonball had never heard Paul Desmond's tribute to him until I told him.
Paul Desmond won the Evergreen Review's  Higgledy piggled contest with

Shubada Shubadee
Cannonbal Adderley
Came on the scene with a belt of the blues.
His popularity
Coincidentally
Gives me more time
For women and booze.

Bonnie Raitt - Runaway (Live 1977)

This is the best cover of Runaway it tops the original. i went to see Bonnie at Massey hall with Coleen Peterson. We were back stage before the show and i was having such a good time drinking toking and chatting that Bonnie had to kick me out of her dressing room so she could get ready.

Milton Acorn

I met Milton in Grossmans on Spadina and had breakfast with him at the Crescent Diner a few times too. I might have been the first to hear " I have Tasted My Own blood' at early breakfast there.
"Isn't it wonderful what they are doing in china," He sez one drunken afternoon at Grossman's. I don't think they have taverns in China I said which confounded him for a minute but we soon  broke into song "We'll rant and we'll roar like true Newfoundlanders!.


Xmas on the Carleton Streetcar. People everywhere carry armfuls of presents. Milton appears looks straight in to my eyes, "They are starving on the streets!"

I am at the Club 22 trying to produce a movie. I go out for some cigars and run into Milton and invite him in for a drink. He shows me his poker chip that he must break, he is on the wagon. Ok a coffee and I bring him in to my table of suits. Ad men and movie men. I introduce Milton and order coffee. The suits are confused at Miltons crumpled and unshaven appearance and my obvious deference to him. Finally one asks him. Milton What do you do?

 "I am a latent science fiction reader.' says Milton

. They asked no more. When I stopped laughing I explained he was one

of Canada's Premier poets.

The last time I saw him was about 1982. I said hello to him walking up Spadina. He looked into my face wildly trying to recognize me. "You are killing the fetuses of the working class!" he raged. I guess he thought I was Henry Morgentaler. Milton Acorn



Milton Acorn is one of Canada's most unfortunately unstudied poets. He wrote down-to-earth words in an original way. He was quoted as saying to an auditorium of schoolkids, "To be a poet in this country, you had to be a tough bastard". "I've Tasted My Blood" was his "trademark" poem.

He took a lot of inspiration from another Canadian poet cut from the same cloth, Archibald Lampman, born sixty years before him. They were both relatively unrecognized in their own lifetimes, and each active in socialist causes. Joyce Wayne wrote: "If Lampman was a hot-house flower, Acorn was a bull in a china shop. Both were too good to be ignored; both were too weird to have tea with".

Milton Acorn was born in Prince Edward Island in 1923. He suffered a severe head injury in World War II, and collected a military pension for the rest of his life. In poverty, he took up carpentry in his home province, but eventually drifted to Montreal and became friends with poets Al Purdy and Irving Layton. He had a strong social conscience. He joined the Communist Party, leaving it after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

He was married to prominent Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen in Toronto for less than a year in the early 1960's. Acorn moved to Vancouver, where he co-founded the popular newspaper "The Georgia Strait". The American Black Mountain movement in poetry took the province by storm, though, and Milton Acorn was a committed Canadian nationalist and so couldn't appreciate the style. He was forced to return to Toronto in the late 1960's.

He spent the last 15 years of his life in Toronto's Waverly Hotel. This rather suspect edifice still stands at the corner of Spadina and College, right next to the Scott Mission (for men), a place of hard life. He lived to the age of 63, and died on August 20th, 1986.
In 1988, Joyce Wayne had this to say about him:
"He left behind him the most original verse written in this country since the poetry of Archibald Lampman, his nineteenth-century doppelganger.

His great gift was to share a tune; and even if he was never asked to give a command performance, he was the People's Poet. When I've tasted My Own Blood was not awarded the Governor General's Award in 1970, Al Purdy, Irving Layton, Margaret Atwood Eli Mandel and others presented him with a silver-grey medal on a violet-velvet ribbon inscribed "Milton Acorn, the People's Poet"...

Feverishly, Acorn threw himself into the role of People's Poet as the opera of his life played itself out. By the time he did win the Governor General's Award for the Island Means Minago in 1975, he was delighted, but remained unchanged. Far from the cultural mainstream, he found his special place at the centre of the Canadian psyche.

With an authentic working-class voice, Acorn's poetry reflected the uncanny ability to replicate the nuance and cadence of everyday speech so that the delicacy of his imagery is also fraught with the wrath of hardship.

His generosity was astonishing; his pig-headedness outrageous... When a studious young man volunteered to copyedit manuscripts for Steel Rail (a publishing house he helped set up), Acorn inexplicably accused him of being a CIA agent and pinned him squirming to the wall until he vowed never to return.



Acorn was the naughty, precocious child inside each of us. The clenched fist that says no to injustice; the searching eye that spots greed or cruelty; the ringing voice that shouts love "even though it might deafen you"."



Source for text and information: Joyce Wayne, "Shouting

Harold Town

Harold Town (not Harry, it's Harold)




I met Harold at the Pilot Tavern he was not a regular there.
we got into some long discussion and he invited me back to his place.
We go to the den and he takes 2 quarts of Scotch out of the cupboard and
he hands me one and a glass. We tour around the house looking at works of Art.

Mostly his, really impressive. We end up in the basement sitting on carasol horses which he collects.
He also shows me a old xray machine he was experimenting with. (I think it might of killed him)
And so we shot the shit til the scotch was gone. he got me some blankets and a couch to crash on.
Not much to talk about next morning heavy hangovers coffee and gone.

"Toronto is a one Town town".

I dropped in on Harold several times after midnight always welcomed with a bottle of Scotch.
I remember some people being there the next morning like wife kids ? I was never introduced.

One night after the Pilot had closed I dropped in with Duke Rebird. he went ballistic. He told be not bring any friends . Then he took a look at Duke. Hey aren't you Redbird that guy trying to smarten up ACTRA.
I'd like to talk to you.
So I was forgiven. he gives Duke and I each a bottle of Scotch and we take the tour.
Only after most of the Scotch. Harold is somhow become a native and is Duke's ally against the whiteman Me?

Harold described one of favorite moments paddling a canoe on a very foggy night in a friend's swimming pool in Claremont.

I liked Harold a lot he was creative and quite brilliant. he was difficult to be friends with. he was slighted easily and always critical.

I went his studio a few times it had been owned by AY Jackson at one time. it was full paintings everywhere he had bought an adjacent studio just for storage and that was full.

One night I was going to a party and I stopped by his place and asked if wanted to go. It was basically an Artist's party and they were usually pretty good back then. It took some prodding but he finally agreed. He was concerned that all Artists seemed to be taking verbal shots at him. He grabbed a bottle of Scotch and a bottle of Vodka and away we went. it was at a studio on Spadina. We got there about 11 and lasted an hour everybody was taking verbal shots at him and he wanted to go. I was driving so we grabbed the bottle of Vodka and took off up Spadina.

He swore he would never go to another "artist" party. Then he said Doesn't Iskowitz live around here?
I pulled over sure right here. I pointed up to a window. It was a hot summer night and Gershon's studio window was open and the light was on. So there is Town and screaming at the 3rd story window, GERSHON! ISKOWITZ! over and over. Gershon comes to the window and looks down at us and closes the window. We leave laughing.

I started doing a lot of sailing around then.

One night Harold said I could have his sailboat. He says it had been sitting at boatyard in Kingston for a couple of years, He couldn'r sail it himself and he was afraid it would rot away. He owned it with his dentist and Jack McLellland. He got their permission to give it to me. I was excited

It was a beauty from the photos a 40 ft yawl built by Stevens. I gather some sailing buddies John Radcliffe and Gord Jones and went down to Kingston to see it. It was beyond repair. it had sat outside uncovered for 3 years with the hatches open. It was a real shame.

I went sailing for 15 months in the Caribbean and sort of lost touch with Harold and he really never forgave me.

I ran into him at the 22 once a few months before he died of cancer. He kind a gave me a hard time. Like some friend you are. he was as contemptuous of cancer as he was of anything but he wasn't the same it was wearing him down. I think of Harold often especially when I am being too critical.




  Remembering illustrious artist Harold Town The Story

He was an abstract painter, illustrator, printmaker, sculptor and writer. He rose to fame as a founding member of Painters Eleven, a group of avant-garde artists. And on December 27, 1990, the man who defined art with a rich and varied palette, Harold Town, died at the age of 66. In this clip, four years before his death, Town speaks about his rise to fame and his life as a Canadian icon. Did you know?

• Born in 1924, Harold Barling Town's artistry began at a very early age when, as an only child, he often spent time drawing on the walls of his parent's home in Toronto. The young Town's affinity for art even prompted a frustrated school teacher to exclaim the child would make a great student – if only he stopped drawing.

• Upon graduating from Ontario College of Art in 1945, Harold Town first became an accomplished illustrator for ad agencies and magazines such as Maclean's and Mayfair. In fact, his listing in the phone book at the time read: "Town, Harold, Advertising Artist."

• Town invented the name Painters Eleven, for the Southern Ontario abstract painters who came together in 1953 to share information and collectively exhibit their work. Inspired by American artists such as Jackson Pollock, the group's self-proclaimed objective was to enliven the visually sedated city of Toronto. Despite an accomplished portfolio, it was only through Town's membership in Painters Eleven that he gained popularity as an abstract painter. He has even been referred to as the "Picasso of Canadian art."

• Although renowned primarily for his abstract art, one of the most impressive aspects of Town's career was his ability to work on three or four different styles and media concurrently. From prints, drawings and collages to sculptures and paintings, he pursued each with equal passion and intensity.

• Town's reputation for popularizing abstract art in Canada was as notable as his provocative manner. "I paint to defy death," he once stated.

• From 1953-1959 Town garnered recognition for his "Single Autographic Prints". They won him international awards and were acquired by the Solomon Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York. Alfred Barr, MOMA's director of collections deemed Town one of the world's greatest printmakers.

• Town continued to re-invent himself and his art until his death in 1990 in Toronto – the city where he lived all his life. Though he received constant praise over the years, Town's later work was disparaged for its lack of intensity and gravity. In response to his critics Town declared, "all criticism of the visual art is suspect."