Life Before Punk: An Interview with John Hamilton (The Diodes, The Secrets, Zoom, The Daily Planet)

John Hamilton, playing drums with high school band The Sermon, c. 1965/66

Late last year, I received an email from a reader who wanted to gently point out an inaccuracy in the text of Any Night of the Week. The Beverley Tavern, ground zero for the punk/new wave revolution on Queen West, was not, as I mentioned on page 72, a country and western bar, and the place had a history as a music venue going back at least a decade before The Dishes “discovered” it in 1976. (In my defence, I gleaned this information from a secondary source.)

This reader turned out to be none other than John Hamilton, original drummer for The Diodes, easily one of the two best-known first-wave Toronto punk bands, alongside The Viletones. Prior to joining The Diodes in ‘77, Hamilton was a member of Zoom — a proto-punk band who are credited with releasing one of Canada’s very first DIY new wave singles — along with his life-long friend Chris Haight (aka Chris Hate/Chris Paputts), who became the original bassist in the Viletones. (Got all that? A few years later, after Hamilton left The Diodes, he teamed up with all the former members of The Viletones who had quit on singer Steven Leckie - including Haight - to start The Secrets, a new wave R&B band fronted by the late Freddy Pompeii.)

Around the same time as Zoom, Hamilton also fronted his own oddball art-rock band, The Daily Planet, who performed semi-regularly at the Beverley Tavern from 1974 to ’76 — well before The Dishes. I had a phone chat with John to set the record straight, and ended up learning so much more about the pre-punk DIY music scene in Toronto — including the fascinating story of an unassuming curling club in Scarborough that booked psychedelic and soul superstars, way back in the Sixties.

Zoom at the Colonial Underground, 1976

JD: I'm sorry that we weren't able to chat when I was first writing the book, but it's great to chat now.  

John Hamilton: I'm one of the older guys, so I was never a really important player per se, but I was always around. Chris Haight and I, we started playing when we were in high school and we were both born around 1950. We started gigging in about 1965, playing in rhythm and blues bands. By the time I joined the Diodes in 1977, I'd already been playing around for about 12 years.

What kind of venues were you playing in high school?

Well, there was a huge scene in those days. I think you probably touched on some of it, like the union scene where all the bands like The Mandala and that were playing. But then every little union hall, every little community centre, every little place that possibly could have bands, had bands. And there were just like hundreds and hundreds of bands. And there was always work.

We had a high school band. I was in probably grade 10 or something, and we worked every weekend and we would go like slightly out of town, up to Keswick and places like that, played all the Y clubs in Toronto and community centres out in Scarborough and downtown. And we'd be making like 60 dollars a night or something, which wasn't bad money, you know, for like four guys in the band. And you'd all have 10 or 15 dollars in your pocket Monday at school, which would probably translate now into like 50 or 60 bucks each or something. So there was a real opportunity for people to learn how to play and play in public and learn your trade.

And were you playing in Yorkville coffeehouses or the Yonge street bars?

Well, I was too young for Yonge Street bars. We were kids in Scarborough. I think Chris Haight played down at the El Patio a little bit in some other bands, but we played YMCAs in Scarborough and on the west side and just slightly out of town. High school dances and all that kind of stuff.

And did you and Chris Haight meet in Scarborough?

Chris Haight (R) on guitar with The Sermon, c. 1965/66

Yeah, he lived on the street next to me and we were the two more serious, better musicians in our particular neighbourhood. And we had a band called The Sermon. And we were totally influenced by The Five Rogues and the Mandala. And did you mention the Broom and Stone in your book? Out in Scarborough?

I don't believe so. Where was that?

 Okay, well the Broom and Stone started out as a curling club and it was at the corner of Lawrence and Midland, out in Scarborough. It was like a two storey, big huge block building. It started out as a curling club. And then after it was a curling club for a while, I guess in the summer or something, they started having roller skating and then they started getting a band in and it gradually morphed into like, every weekend there would be bands there.

They would have two bands on the on the main floor downstairs and one on the floor upstairs. And all the Yonge Street bands and all the Yorkville bands came out to Scarborough to play at the Broom and Stone. For Chris Haight and me and any of the other people who lived in Scarborough, it was like our music university, because we got to see Jackie Shane, who was playing the Sapphire Tavern downtown. We got to see the Rogues, the Mandala, Roy Kenner, Grant Smith & the Power. And then all the psychedelic bands like Jimmy Livingston and The Trip and even The Stampeders and Frank Motley and The Hitchhikers and, you know, every band that was going around.

We saw rhythm and blues bands with horns, really sophisticated nightclub bands like The Soul Searchers with Eric Mercury and Diane Brooks and Steve Kennedy on saxophone. And it was amazing to be a 14- or 15-year-old kid — you walk a block and you go to this curling club and you pay your three dollars or something. And there would be two bands alternating on the ground floor, which would usually be the R&B bands. 'Cause rhythm and blues was really big around that period, like '66, '67. And then upstairs you often would have like the Yorkville bands. They would have face-painted makeup and be doing real weird psychedelic stuff. So I really got exposure to a ton of stuff, but we didn't have to go downtown.

Wow. See, I'm from Scarborough and, 20 years later there was nothing like that to see in my area. So that blows my mind to hear.

It was a total anomaly, but a lot of the big places were. I think out at Don Mills they used to have them in one of the arenas, but the Broom and Stone was a regular thing for a couple of years. When it started out, they just got one band in for the fun of it with the rollerskating. But then they realized that like, 'hey, you know, there's hundreds of these kids coming here who want to pay their three bucks.'

Do you know when that place stopped booking music?

It was really big when I was in high school, so that would have been probably about '65 to about '68. And by about '69, it must have been all over by then. One of the main things was that they had the drinking age at 21. That's why the coffeehouses and places like the Broom and Stone could really exist. But the year they dropped the drinking age to 18 [in 1971], it pretty well blew away most of those places, because people were starting to be able to get into bars. Girls put up on more makeup and passed for 18. And that was the death knell for a lot of those YMCA clubs and the coffeehouses. It turned very bar-oriented.

And were you playing in bars like the Gasworks?

I played the Coalbin, I played a lot of those bars. Chris Haight, he was in Everyday People that had a record out on GRT. It was formed by Bruce Wheaton who had been in The Stitch in Tyme and the Yorkville bands. Really excellent vocal harmony band, Everyday People, kind of like a funk Three Dog Night band.

And I was playing in a band that was called The Leftovers and later became Joshua. We were working for Ray Daniels' Music Shop — you know, Ray Daniels, the manager of Rush, but he had the big agency then. And I was playing, like, all those kind of bars. We went to Oshawa and Hamilton and up to Thunder Bay and the whole bar circuit that Music Shop ran. That was when I was about 20, 21, that would have been about '70, '71, around then.

And was that sort of a cover band circuit at that point?

Pretty much so, but then most of the cover bands were aspiring to do a bit of original material. The band Chris Haight was playing in, Everyday People, they were totally original. We had some originals. You know, we did some covers, but we had some originals, too. The band I was playing in, it had three guys who'd been in Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, really good singers, so it was a pretty professional outfit. And we did some songs from Jesus Christ Superstar and we did some originals. And then we did some of the standards. I'm trying to remember what we did now, but some of the more popular stuff anyway.

So when did you first go down to the Beverley Tavern on Queen?

Okay well, I started out as a drummer. That was my original instrument. You know, I saw like The Gene Krupa Story on TV when I was about 13 or something. And one of the funny things about Chris Haight and I and a few other oddballs is that we actually decided to be musicians before The Beatles came out, or tangentially to The Beatles. He had been influenced by some Greek music and some classical guitar players. So anyway, I started out as a drummer and I played drums in bands from about '65 until about '73-74.

And then I got frustrated with the lower status position of being a drummer. And I wanted to become a songwriter. So I actually went back to square one again and became a guitar player. I had gone to Europe in 1974 for about a year with a girlfriend of mine, and I was living in Norway. And then when I got back into Canada, I had gotten enough of my guitar chops together to actually start a guitar band. And that was my first Daily Planet band.

The Daily Planet, c. 1974/75

A friend of mine had been going to OCA, the older brother of Bent Rasmussen, who was in Johnny & the G-Rays. I'd go down and meet him at OCA after school, and we'd go to the Beverley to have a beer. And in those days, the Beverley Tavern had blues bands there at night. It was like the Forbes Tavern or Grossman's. But then the blues thing had died down and there was zip happening at the Beverley. So I went down there and met the owner, Al Kolin, and I said, "well, you know, I have a band and could we come here and play on the weekend?" And he said, well, "nothing's happening, sure."

They were paying a hundred and sixty bucks for three nights, Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. And there was three wooden risers on the second floor there in the attic. So we came down, there was me, a bass player and a drummer, and we started playing there, I guess it would have been in the fall of 1974. And we were doing some covers - we were basically playing just about anything that I knew how to play on the guitar, as I was a beginner guitar player.

We would do some old standards, like "Walkin' the Dog" and "Hallelujah I Love Her So." But we also had we also did some oddball stuff like "Baby Lemonade" by Syd Barrett and some Lou Reed stuff, "Sweet Jane."

It was a real mixed bag of stuff that we started playing around there. And that band went through numerous personnel changes from '74 until about '76. At one point we had an older guy, about 60 years old, who played saxophone, doing all kinds of like swing tunes like "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "St. Louis Blues." And we had a whole swing band. And then a few months after that, I met up with a synthesizer player and we ended up having a space-rock band and we played a big New Year's Eve show there, '75 to '76. The Daily Planet, that was our big blowout New Year's Eve show with all original material. And it was a bit like the Tubes with, costumes and all that kind of stuff. It was all part of that whole scene of people who were doing different kinds of things back then and experimenting and trying to find their voice.

The Daily Planet, New Year’s Eve 1975/76 at the Beverley Tavern

So Al Kolin, he was the owner of the Beverley?

 Yeah, I think he was the Conservative candidate for Mississauga. Or he was hooked up to the Conservative Party. He owned the Beverley and then later on, his son Lawrence was running it. And, you know, we started talking about politics and that kind of stuff, and I kind of made a connection with him. So we got in there and started playing, but there was still the odd little local band playing in between us, like Portuguese kids with their Zeppelin cover band or something like that. But then again, there was still the oddball art band that would play in there, too, you know, doing like free-form jazz.

There was even one character who used to come around who had an electric hockey stick where he had a pick-up on a hockey stick with a tuning pin on the other end of it and used to sit in with the bands and play. So it was it was kind of a wide open spot.

And did Al like your band?

Well, you know, as long as they were selling beer... he didn't hang around much. But Johnny, the waiter, kind of ran the upstairs. And this was the days when you got big jugs of draft beer and then skinny little draft glasses. It was the art bar, you know, the students from OCA and the teachers. I remember hearing some of the students, they had to go to the Beverly to find their teacher in the afternoon.

And then the housing around there, the apartments were dirt cheap, Queen Street was a little deserted village. All the businesses had moved out and some of the art people had moved in. Literally, if you lived down there, when you walked down the street, it was like a small town. You knew everybody, you said hi to everybody. The streets were really beat up from the streetcars, so the car drivers used to avoid that area. It was really a quiet little neighbourhood. A deserted corner of Toronto at that point.  

Can you describe the chicken slaughterhouse that was next to the Beverley?

Oh, yeah, definitely. No posers were going to come to the Beverley because they were never going to get past that chicken slaughterhouse!

One time, we were playing there in the middle of summer. And there was that street that ran between the Beverley and the slaughterhouse, A. Stork & Sons. Now they've got it closed off into a kind of a walkway, but it was a going street in those days. I used to park my little Toyota on it and carry the P.A. columns in the side door of the Beverley. But in the 90 degree weather, they had the back parking lot there that was dirt. And the back door of the slaughterhouse would be wide open and there would be guys out there with their rubber boots on up to their hips, you know, wading in the blood and the blood would just be running down that alley.

And the smell was a real slaughterhouse smell. You know, there was a couple of little houses where people actually lived behind the Beverley. And I thought, well, how can anybody ever live there? I don't think they ever opened the windows. But now they'd be multimillionaires because of the real estate value. And then the big parking lot behind the slaughter house, the trucks would come down there at night and on a Sunday night or something, they'd park there and leave the chickens in the truck overnight.

I remember one night, me and a couple of guys, I think we'd had a lot of beer at the Beverley and we decided to liberate the chickens from the truck. So we opened up a whole bunch of the cages and let all the chickens loose. And we opened the back door to the Beverley and pushed a bunch of chickens up the stairs! And about a week later, we heard from some of the people who were there about Johnny the waiter running around in the top of the Beverly Tavern trying to catch the chickens and get them out of the club. And there was an article in the Sun or something the next morning about a flock of chickens walking down Queen Street West.

So, you want to set the record straight and let people know that The Dishes were not the first band to play the Beverley.

Yeah, no, I mean, they did bring in a crowd and they had a big following and all that. But the Beverley, it was not ever a country and western bar. That's something Steven [Davey, 1950-2014] made up. He was always trying to trying to prove that he was the smartest, best guy on the scene, which is kind of a shame because he was a good songwriter. We used to do some of his songs in the Diodes. But, you know, he was the critic and a lot of his newspaper articles weren't entirely true, you know. He would promote his little gang and his Thornhill people to the detriment of anybody who wasn't from Thornhill. He would put down The Ugly or the Zero 4, or he would just ignore that they even existed.

So, yeah, the Beverley, as I said, was long going as a blues bar. And I remember at one point I even auditioned for a blues band that was playing at the Beverley. And I remember going by and seeing their name up in lights and thinking, “oh wow, they really even have a gig, man, in a club.” So that would have been about '66 or something like that.

Oh wow. So that's going back a ways.

Yeah, I know. It was around at the same time as Grossman's, and there was also the Forbes Tavern on Shuter Street. There was that whole blues era, with Downchild and Whiskey Howl and Mainline and stuff like that.

Were there any other places besides the Horseshoe that were booking live music on Queen?

Well, the Cameron had country and western, and what was going on at the Horseshoe in those days, I can't remember. It probably was a country and western place. But that that would have been venturing too far out for most of the art scene people, you know. The Beverly Tavern was where you went to.

And I guess that would have been the Cameron when it was more of a hotel, before it was bought by the family?

Yeah, back in those days, it was a country and western bar. Probably for local country and western guys or something like that. But I never checked out that scene. The other thing was, I was still living in Scarborough. So, until I moved down to Queen Street in about '77, I would usually just come down there and play the Beverley and maybe do a walk-around and then head back out to Scarborough.

John and I talked more about Zoom, The Diodes, and The Secrets, but those are tales best saved for another night of the week…