MAKING the SCENE: Yorkville and Hip Toronto, 1960-1970 by Stuart
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MAKING THE SCENE: Yorkville and Hip Toronto, 1960-1970 by Stuart Robert Henderson A thesis submitted to the Department of History in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada October, 2007 Copyright © Stuart Robert Henderson, 2007 Abstract For a short period during the 1960s Toronto’s Yorkville district was found at the centre of Canada’s youthful bohemian scene. Students, artists, hippies, greasers, bikers, and “weekenders” congregated in and around the district, enjoying the live music and theatre in its many coffee houses, its low-rent housing in overcrowded Victorian walk- ups, and its perceived saturation with anti-establishmentarian energy. For a period of roughly ten years, Yorkville served as a crossroads for Torontonian (and even English Canadian) youth, as a venue for experimentation with alternative lifestyles and beliefs, and an apparent refuge from the dominant culture and the stifling expectations it had placed upon them. Indeed, by 1964 every young Torontonian (and many young Canadians) likely knew that social rebellion and Yorkville went together as fingers interlaced. Making the Scene unpacks the complicated history of this fraught community, examining the various meanings represented by this alternative scene in an anxious 1960s. Throughout, this dissertation emphasizes the relationship between power, authenticity and identity on the figurative stage for identity performance that was Yorkville. ii Acknowledgements Making the Scene is successful by large measure as a result of the collaborative efforts of my supervisors Karen Dubinsky and Ian McKay, whose respective guidance and collective wisdom has saved me from myself on more than one occasion. I have been so lucky to have such helpful, brilliant, and amiable supervisors for these past five years – my thanks and, as always, my great admiration, is theirs to share. This project was funded in part by fellowships and scholarships from the Queen’s School of Graduate Studies, The Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) program, and the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). I have been terribly fortunate to receive these awards where many others were not, and I hope that I have made good on my promise to deliver valuable work. I offer my gratitude to my interview subjects for their always friendly agreements to work with me toward presenting a fuller picture of the Toronto of their youth. I hope I have done well by their memories. It has been my pleasure to get to know them. A special thanks to Michael Cross, my undergraduate thesis supervisor at Dalhousie University, and the man who once encouraged a young, unsure hippie kid to write freely, madly, but with purpose. Finally, thanks to my parents Gordon and Pam, my sisters Kate and Liz, and all of my extended family, who have helped to build in me the kind of insane self-confidence it requires to write a 500-page essay. I love you all. Making the Scene is dedicated, with so much moon, to Lowy. iii Table of Contents Abstract………… …………………………………………………………..ii Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………….iii Table of Contents……………………………………..………………….. .iv PART ONE – Narratives and Frameworks Chapter One – Re-Making the Scene (Introduction)…………………… ….2 Chapter Two – Performing the Village Spectacular (Literature Review) …50 PART TWO – Yorkville: It’s Happening! 1960-63 Chapter Three – From Gerrard Street to Yorkville Avenue…………...….107 Chapter Four – Sophistication, Bohemia, and the Coffee House Days…..148 PART THREE – Performing Yorkville, 1964-66 Chapter Five – Riots, Rowdies and Rock’n’Roll…………………………182 Chapter Six – Are You Here To Watch Me Perform?................................232 PART FOUR – Summer in the City, 1967 Chapter Seven – Under the Spell of the Hippies…………………………284 Chapter Eight – The Flower Children, et les Fleurs du Mal…………......338 PART FIVE – Yorkville’s Hippie Disease, 1968-1970 Chapter Nine – Let Me Tell You Who They Are………………………...400 Chapter Ten – The “Perverse” Psychology of Village Youth……………451 Conclusion – Rochdale, Rural Communes, and the Hippie Diaspora…. …….....496 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………… ..504 iv PART ONE: Narratives and Frameworks Chapter One : Re-Making the Scene And those who are beautiful – oh, who can retain them? -Rainer Maria Rilke1 There was a time when I thought that hippies were the coolest people on earth, and I fully intended to become one when I grew up. I was, let’s say, eight years old. I had been, ever since I was in the cradle, exposed to the music of my parents’ generation, the 1960s rock’n’roll that had redefined what teenage life could sound like, had opened up new dimensions of sound and fury, had played soundtrack to countless back seat fumblings, had fuelled the dreams and desires of a generation. Bored, even at that age, by the overwhelmingly synthetic music that poured over the airwaves in the mid-1980s, I was entranced by what I heard coming through my old man’s speakers. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Grateful Dead, Neil Young, the Byrds. There are photos of a toddler version of myself, long curls of blonde hair falling across my face, standing on tiptoes trying to turn up the volume on our comically ancient Hi-Fi. My generation, then, or at least my demographic, was brought up by Baby Boomers. We were raised by the richest cohort in the history of the world, in the most affluent surroundings imaginable and amid the most highly developed technologies of comfort and convenience that had ever been devised. We had nothing to worry about, nothing about which to complain. Our parents loved us, gave us Big Wheels and He-Man toys, let us stay up to watch the Family Ties and, if our folks were liberal enough, Cheers. 1Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegies”, Selected Poetry, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1989) 151-152. 2 We went to schools that had been redefined by our parents’ generation – redefined by an influx of so many children into the system that it had seemed that schools were being built faster than homes by the mid-1960s. In Toronto, where I grew up, and where this story takes place, the Baby Boomers were in control by the mid-1980s. Already homeowners in their early 30s, they were having second and third kids, tinkering with cars and mowing lawns just like their folks did. And they were wealthy too. In curious, distorted ways, my demographic – white, Anglo-Saxon, suburban North Toronto wide-eyed kids – reflects its parents’ demographic as though through the fun house mirror. Maybe that’s why it was so easy for me, and for so many of my friends, to identify with their time, with the concerns of their teenage years, with their music, literature, ideologies, refusals, dreams. Or, perhaps, as Freud suggested, my own “archaic heritage… includes not only dispositions, but also ideational contents, memory traces of the experiences of former generations.”2 Either way, by the time we were teenagers, my friends and I were long-haired, tie- dye-wearing neo-hippie kids. We smoked grass and tried LSD, some of us even eschewing liquor for drugs not simply because it was more expensive and harder to get (the usual reasons why teens use drugs instead of alcohol) but because we felt booze to be a downer when compared to the transformative powers of dope. We deeply envied what we heard about “free love,” although we largely failed to implement any aspect of this titillating, but ultimately terrifying, sexual ethic. If we were lucky, we went to Grateful Dead concerts and saw something of a revival (or persistence) of the 1960s that we were so dejected to have missed. Some of us 2From Freud’s definition of “Race Memory.” Sigmund Freud, Freud: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, edited by Frank Gaynor (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003) 153. My emphasis. 3 spoke in hushed tones about the transformative power of such music – the Dead, Neil Young, the Band, and the Allman Brothers were perennial favourites – about the way that the right guitar solo heard under the right psychedelic conditions could literally change us, rearrange our mentality, bring us third-eye insight. Sure, most of us didn’t care one way or the other about stuff like this – we just wanted to get lit up, listen to good tunes, hang around with our friends, maybe try to get laid. But isn’t that high school all over? What else do North Americans do at that age if not experiment with drugs, sex, music, identity? The difference was that some of us, and perhaps me especially, were actively trying to recreate a scene over which we all knew we had no real purchase. This was our parents’ generation, the mythic 1960s, and we, wishing we could have been there, tried to recuperate something of it every weekend when we blasted Credence Clearwater Revival and ate “magic” mushrooms, throwing the Frisbee around in the sun in our Guatemalan skirts and patchouli oil. And so we grew up, and most of us “grew out of it.” We became doctors, lawyers, accountants and, some of us, perpetual university students. We all, by the old logic, rapidly and effectively “sold out” to the system, to the Man. No matter how much we had talked about refusing money, business suits and consumerism as false idols when we were 17, virtually all of us had immersed ourselves in such waters by the time we reached the age of 25. A combination of cynicism, “sensibleness,” and disillusionment conspired to relieve us of our collective dreams of living in some new and different, better world. Instead, we wound up inheriting the very world we had initially refused as corrupt, immoral, insane. We had become enamored of various aspects of the “real world” (pay 4 cheques, security, the stuff behind the counter at Future Shop) and fallen into the flow of “straight society” so easily that it exposed a truth we had been unable, and certainly unwilling, to recognize only years before: we had always been mainstream.