CHAPTER ONE

MAKING CHANGES HAPPEHAPPENN IN TERRA INCOGNITA

A Process of Re-enactment

I picked up my New York Times on April 20, 2012 and read that Levon Helm had died. I quietly turned to the obituary page and as I read what was written about this man, memories flooded back to me. The drinking age was twenty-one so we had to sneak in the back door off Yonge Street, Toronto’s main drag. It was a seedy section of the street below Bloor then, lined with strip joints and bars, and because of this it was one of places where you could go and hear exciting music in the early sixties. I was there with my friend, John. The two of us were freshly admitted undergraduate students at the University of Waterloo and anxious to make early marks in life. So we became concert promoters. This was a short career because even then concerts were presented by organized thugs and there was no room for amateurs like us. On one occasion we brought into town a singer who had a number one hit in Canada, Ronnie Hawkins and his band, known then as the Hawks. We got to know Ronnie pretty well and he was kind to us ingénues. About two weeks after the concert we got a phone call from Ronnie’s manager inviting us to come into the city and watch the band play for what he called an interview. So, on a Friday afternoon John and I crammed into our friend Ted’s Porsche 356 and headed down Highway 401. We parked in the alley behind the bar, knocked on the back door and were let in. Once inside, our escort took us down a flight of stairs to a door that was labeled "Dressing Room" but which really could have and should have been condemned. In the crowded room was the band and Ronnie, center stage talking energetically with a tall skinny kid with a lot of frizzy hair. He introduced us …. Bob Dylan. Dylan had flown in to hear the Hawks at Ronnie’s invitation. I knew who Dylan was. I had bought Free Wheeling and there was no doubt in my mind that this was a special occasion. Ronnie brought us into the conversation and we sat and talked for what seemed like forever before we all mounted the stairs and the band nervously took their accustomed place near the bar. Dylan sat alone in a corner. We were all young apart from Hawkins, who deservedly acted as the master of ceremonies. It didn’t start well. The band was nervous and there were several mis-takes. They ran though their usual set of Hawkins' favorites and versions of well- known pieces and as it all got going it was clear that something very special was happening. Hours past, Dylan never moved, the bar opened and the usual crowd drifted in and out. The band kept playing, never once looking at the guy with all the hair.

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We stayed transfixed for hours but in the late afternoon the bar owner informed us that if we stayed any longer we risked to getting caught as minors and that the bar could lose their license. That magic of that moment is frozen in my mind. Those young men on that little stage in a run-down bar playing with all their hearts. We coasted home, full of beer and excitement. Later, Dylan signed the Hawks and they became The Band. Time passed and John and I never crossed paths with Hawkins again or with any of those no longer innocent youths. Neal Cassidy (2004), the Beat poet, put it well when he said it was a time when we had no idea of what we would become. The fifties were a time of escape for American youths. Images cascaded across the silver screen, James Dean in Rebel without a Cause, Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock. It was a period of rejecting the austerity of the post-war but with little sense of direction. Even the Beat poets like Kerouac and Snyder expressed a rejection of middle class mores rather than challenging the system. The sixties, however, were a time of great hope. Whereas the Beat generation had no direction home, the hippies directly challenged all facets of American culture and right where it hurt. They didn’t want security or traditional jobs or a house in the suburbs. We emerged from the post-war dreariness to a time when everything seemed possible. Instead of coffee houses, poetry and jazz, industrial rock and roll, and sex and drugs became the discourses. These fundamentally challenged the Capitalist structure. We could conceive of Western civilization simplistically as a static set of presuppositions that held sway over much of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance and Reformation, and then the set called the Enlightenment until very recently. This helps us grasp just how difficult change is. It is expedient economically, politically, and socially to believe that one grand narrative exists in perpetuity and one belief system encases it; and it is crucial that in order to maintain the paradigm societies must create institutions to enforce and reinforce it. The extent to which this is brought about often draws the line between popular democracy and autocracy. There is also a necessary philosophical component to this process. We need to reflect on questions such as the nature of knowledge and if and how it changes. These are not all the questions that need to continuously be addressed but they are imperatives. There are cracks in our epistemological egg, and as they become more and more evident, counter-forces emerge to propel alternatives. One of the major advantages of living in a period of shifting strands is that it becomes more explicit that the presuppositions which once provided us with answers no longer fit. This confusion has not been a major concern in the past because questions about the past and meaning were not pertinent to a populace concerned with day-to-day survival and where access to information and access to knowledge creation were very limited. Today we are at the beginning of a revolution of open access. Each one of you reading this book has the ability to retrieve more data than anyone who lived in the Renaissance. Being able to understand and critically appraise information is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity. Nevertheless, we continue to be more

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