Everybody should have a clubhouse – especially when you’re a young rabblerousing reprobate. It could be a shed in the backyard, a tree house somewhere or an honest-to-goodness special place where only you and your friends can go and hang out. I was one lucky guy; I had a whole bunch of them.
We called ours “studios” and they became a huge part of our lives starting when we were teenaged punks. Our first paying gig as a band was our own Grade 9 graduation dance at Central School downtown. We had a little instrumental combo and our English teacher, Mr. Morris Flewwelling, (yes, that one) somehow took a chance and hired us. We thought we were rock stars, and we managed to get through our tiny song list well enough that Mr. Flew later hired us to play his actual wedding!
And of course, to put that band together in the first place, we needed a place to practice. No basement for us. John’s dad had a sign shop downtown which even had a paint-splattered piano and Mr. L. let us take over the place one night a week. Our first studio! And the little old building is still there, now a tattoo parlor (coincidence?)
In high school our busy part-time job consisted of playing dances all over the place and falling asleep in class. We travelled in our 1951 Buick Flxible hearse (yes, a decommissioned hearse) that we wrangled from Sorenson’s for $300. And by the time the band grew and we graduated to decking out our very own rock and roll school bus, we finally had our own studio, which, believe me, became the best clubhouse a 17-year-old could ever hope for. There was a series of buildings on the Bettenson’s Sand and Gravel lot kitty-corner to the hospital and our band rented one building and Jim Murphy’s band rented the building next to it.
We had a TV room in there with a ratty old couch and a black and white boob tube the size of a refrigerator and an actual refrigerator (for pop, of course), a separate rehearsal room with all our gear, and – bonus – a functioning bathroom! And even when (especially when) we weren’t working on tunes it was a sanctuary – a clubhouse to go to when you really needed to escape life’s complications for a while. Oh, and also, there were quite a series of epic teenaged social events happening at the studios, if you get my drift.
That studio was home base when we played our first dance at the Comp (known as “Thurber” to the young punks today) and our memorable shows at Varsity Hall at Sylvan Lake. It was where we discovered that a rock band could have a horn section (i.e. the band “Chicago”), and the place where my life-long addiction to Colas (first Coca-Cola, then Pepsi) began on account of Murph always brought a six-pack of Coca Cola to band practice.
Years go by and bands break up and new bands get together and new clubhouse studios are found. We found a good one on the truck route south of the water treatment plant and again, sometimes there was more clubhousing going on there than actual music, and it made all the difference when you needed a place to belong.
I was thinking about all this because I was downtown yesterday and found myself stopping by our old studios for a moment. Two are gone now, as the song says, because someone “put up a parking lot”. But the memories are still there, and I almost started humming that old tune “Thanks For The Memories” right out loud.
Harley Hay is a Red Deer author and filmmaker. You can send him column ideas to harleyhay1@hotmail.com