the journals of alan rhodes

March 24 Sunday
A photo of Michelle, Mark Simmons and Foster working on the Doodle-Art (which we worked on when we had nothing to do. We began it during the afterschool partying. Some of the other people to work on it were Rob, Maggie, Danny, Fred, Ernie and myself. It was a stylized underwater view of many fish).

March 25 Monday
Photographs at school. Tim, Ralph B (the only one of those two)., Pat (the first), Donald Bains, Denis, Andy, Bennie, Ernie, Fred, Mark, Mish, Mike, Steve Mc., Rob, Ralph, Connie ( a leech of a girl), Dave, Bill Halikas, Foster and me.

March 26 Tuesday
More photos, Mish, Rob, Ralph, Pat, Denis, Heather and 3 others (after a trip to the Manior, a now favourite spot for drinking. It had been heavily busted earlier that year), plus Steve Mc. and Robbie Alison (from my Grade 9 English class).

March 27
"After school gatherings - 6 weeks"..that all the fragmentary note says.

(Andy's) March 29, Friday
Bennie broke off with me on Thursday. It hardly came as any shock at all-I had only stuck with her so long because she was so nice looking-as well as being bitchy and a little ignorant.

Anyway, tonite I snorted 2 hits of mesc and went up to Fairview with John Taite. It was quite fuck-up...wrecked at that dump again...I never learn. Bennie, Julia +co were there...Ralph, Dave Hughes, Heather, Pat etc were there.

John and Larry had a helluva time trying to persuade me to go to the Manoir, but I didn't give in. Me and Ralph waited around until nine when were supposed to meet Gillian. We stuck around outside waiting for her bus to come. Bennie + Julia + co., were there also. Murry was drunk + chasing Bennie around. I had a gas watching, the natural dislike for ex-chicks merging on my feelings along with my liking for her.

115. A three piece acoustic guitar group from Québec, their sound was reminiscent of the spirit of "Sunday in the Park", thought I never saw them there.

French music was a large part of CHOM's playlist. Artists like Michel Pagliaro* (who's 1972 song "Loving You Ain't So Easy" sounded a great deal like the Beatles), Gilles Valiquette (Je suis cool), Plume la Traverse, Octobre, Offenbach, The Ville Emard Blues Band, Beau Domage and of course Robert Charebois (Ralph had an album of his and didn't know the meaning of the slang term 'pi' ("and") in one of the songs ("...pi Pan American").

This song would be "Lindberg". The upper section of this footnote was written c. 1993-95 (as this part is being written on December 26, 2000), before the advent of the Mp3. With mp3, one can search out and collect music that would be very difficult to find otherwise. When it came to the french music of this period, there wasn't much available on the net, but what was there were the songs I remembered, and some I didn't (some Octobre for example).

"J'ai Marche Pour Une Nation/Mama River" and "Mon Coeur," M. Pagliaro avec Les Rockers

A good double shot of the brilliant Quebecois rocker. Actually, this is more of a four-pack, considering the introduction by Montreal disc jockey Yves Sauve is backed with the vamp riff from a fourth Pagliaro song, “J’entends frapper.” These cuts are from the 1973 Canadian RCA Victor PAGLIARO “LIVE” double record set. I once called CHOM in Montreal to request “Lovin’ you ain’t easy” so that I could hear it over their Web feed; the disc jockey who took the call remarked how Beatlesque the tune was. True, and I guess one could argue that if one was curious about what The Beatles would sound like in French (aside from those lines in “Michelle” or the French national anthem in “All you need is Love”) all one had to do would be to pick up a copy of Pagliaro’s French-language recordings of “Hey Jude” and “Step Inside Love” from ’68. In fact, this album also contains a performance of “Revolution,” but it’s in a frenzied English. At the time, Pagliaro had a split record deal in Canada; his French material came out on the blue-label RCA Victor, while his English sides were handled by the Decca/London-distributed Much Records, owned by Toronto radio station CHUM. (A more recent CHUM product is the Fuse cable music channel, formerly known as MuchMusicUSA.) His second English-language hit in Canada, “Rainshowers,” was recorded in part at the Beatle-owned Apple Studios in London, and I suspect Pagliaro did that in part to try to wrangle an English-language contract out of Apple Records (his Much material came out on Pye Records in the U.K. and the U.S., instead). If you can find a copy (most likely through an eBay auction), grab this album; not only is it the most exciting live LP I’ve ever heard, it was even recorded at a concert inside a massive recording studio RCA Victor had (still has?) in Montreal. Thus, Rockers drummer Derek Kendriks’ electrifying rhythm is the sharpest sounding I’ve ever heard.