My sophomore year (67/68) at St. Paul's High in Winnipeg was one of the best of my pre-adult life. (Note -I'm not claiming that I'm an adult now - it's just a figure of speech...)
It was also a time when America changed in some very fundamental and irreversible ways. I'm talking about the Tet offensive in Vietnam - the assassinations of MLK and RFK - the riots and fires in all the major U.S. cities - the raised fists at the Mexico Olympics - the list goes on and on... And I watched it all unfold from across the border...
But it wasn't all negative...
Those were also the days when high school parking lots were filled with Camaros, Firebirds, Mustangs, Chevelles, GTOs, Road Runners and Chargers. One of my most vivid memories was the day my classmate Alan Bernstein showed up in a brand new 68 Plymouth Hemi GTX (one of 414 made) and gave me a ride in it... Yeah - for those who aren't aware I'm a 'car guy' - and it was unbelievably fortunate that my high school years coincided with "the muscle-car era" :-)
Then there was music... Canada was pretty closely tied to the British scene - but we still got our share of Americana...
Right before my sophomore year "Sergeant Pepper's" was released. And during that year Cream released "Disraeli Gears" and "Wheels of Fire" - Hendrix released "Are You Experienced" and "Axis: Bold as Love" - Iron Butterfly did "Heavy" and "In-a-gadda-da-vida" - not to mention albums by The Who, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, The Animals, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane (I had such a crush on Grace Slick - those amazing blue eyes), and Procul Harum. And it wasn't just rock - there was a lot of good soul and Motown too...
I suppose in deference to Peter Paolucci I have to mention Paul Revere and the Raiders... And right around the end of the school year Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild" and "Hush" by Deep Purple (I loved that keyboard) hit the charts...
BTW - the good thing about "Born to be Wild" was that everyone finally stopped asking you to play "Gloria"... The bad thing was that they started asking you to play "Born to be Wild" instead... After a couple of years I hated it almost as much as Gloria :-)
Yeah - I could go on for pages - a lot of iconic music was released at that time - songs that my children know - and they didn't hear them from me :-)
And that was the year I officially became a "guitar whore". I would play almost anything just to be in front of an audience ... My sophomore year I was in a folk mass group at school - and in the band for one of the school plays - and I got worse over the following years...
That year also marked the birth of my first garage band... Actually, you couldn't really call it a "garage band" because Winnipeg garages are too freaking cold to practice in most of the year... We were more of a "basement band" :-) But there will be lots more about music as the blog progresses...
St. Paul's had become a comfortable and familiar place. I hadn't done anything intensely stupid for quite a while. The whole "getting my butt kicked / fairy boots" thing had blown over - and I was on pretty good terms with most of my classmates...
So yeah - it was good times... It almost made up for those -40 degree winter days :-)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Sounds like an amazing time to have been alive. Did it feel like a pivotal moment in history at the time??
Yeah - a lot was happening REALLY fast - it was kind of unsettling...
The older people were really freaking out - there was a lot of paranoia about hippies and rock and roll destroying society - they may have been right :-)
And among the youth there was a lot of disillusionment. There was the war in Vietnam - and the 2 people my generation admired the most had been assassinated.
The "experts" were predicting we'd be out of oil by 1980 - that was if the chemical pollutants or nuclear war didn't kill us first...
So yeah - might as well drive fast and party hard :-)
Post a Comment