I acknowledge that whatever I recall from the bad old days has been obscured by my distance from the times I am trying to recall and more importantly; no one, neither musician nor fan in the milieu I began performing in was old – not a teenager. My personal awareness of American expatriate Frank Motley having gained notoriety recently as a central figure in Toronto’s 50’s R&R era has for me until today existed only as a name on a sign on the Holiday tavern that for years I’d see through the window of the Queen streetcar on Queen Street near Bathurst before and after I became a drummer as I imagined him and his audience being my parents’ age or older. In them days it was hard getting into a bar unless you could prove you were 21 and not a teenager.
Ronnie Hawkins is another enigma from those times made famous in articles written by journalists and academics whose ideas about pop music in Toronto in the !950’s and 60’s have today become transfixed in the minds of people in the 21’st century. And believe it or not, my first reaction to seeing Ron, now the emblem of Rock and Roll in Toronto, as an image on a sign in the “Le Coque D’Or” window was: who’s that old dinosaur? Then I was still a teenager and student, though drumming with The Consuls, being too young and timid to even think of entering bars like “Le Coque D’Or”.
Toronto's Secret The Book 