The Canadian Invasion

JOHN LEMON:

The weirdest part about it all was that we were so popular, eh? Like, when I made that remark about us being more popular than God I was only foolin’ around, but everybody took me right serious ‘cause of who I was, ya know? But there was some truth in it, given how many records we ended up selling and all that.

The thing is, none of us meant to become stars. We were just after playin’ some rock and roll, and trying to make a living at it, eh?

And me, I probably needed the companionship more than the others, given how I was raised up.

You see Toronto on a map, it don’t look like that big a place, but it’s right big enough to disappear in and never come out. I got brought up in Etobicoke, which is as far out as you can get and still be in the city. It wasn’t the greatest thing, what with my mother out in the psych ward downtown- she went nuts when I was little and never got better- and only my aunt to raise me. So I grew up having only two things excite me: the hockey games on the radio on Saturday (naturally, I was and always for the Leafs); and, then when I was in my teens, this new-fangled rock and roll came on the scene. None of the local stations would play it at the start, ‘cause Toronto was and is such a conservative place, but I could get a good signal on my transistor to the American stations that did play it, out in Buffalo and Detroit. Sometimes, on a clear night, I could get WINS from New York City and hear Alan Freed’s show. That guy forgot more about rock than most people knew, and really turned me on.

Next thing you know, I got a guitar and learned how to play, and then I started hanging out on what passed for a music scene on Yonge Street in those days. And that’s how I ended up starting what eventually became the Beavers…

PAUL MCKENZIE:

Back at that time, Montreal was kind of a divided place, even more so than now. The French people lived in their neighborhoods, and Westmount, which is where I lived, was all rich English people. Mount Royal, in the center of the island, was the divider.