National Post

Beatles remind Toronto of its vim and vigour

Band found warm home here, as exhibit shows

- cselley@nationalpo­st.com Twitter.com/cselley Chris Selley

Rock and roll arrived in Canada, and was received, much the way it was across white North America. “This music works on a man’s emotions like the music of the heathen in Africa,” Rev. W. G. McPherson of Toronto’s Evangel Temple warned Maclean’s magazine in 1956.

When the Beatles came along, however, The Man was more bemused than concerned. “34,000 Beatles fans pay $ 100,000 to hear themselves,” a Toronto Daily Star headline wryly observed of their first shows in the city: matinee and evening performanc­es on Labour Day 1964, when no one in Maple Leaf Gardens reported hearing a note over the screaming.

To someone born 12 years l ater, who is still in awe of the band, it’s astonishin­g how quickly the mania f aded. The Beatles’ 1965 shows barely made the front page of the Star. In 1966, the paper declared Beatlemani­a eradicated.

It’s all relative of course. Mayor John Tory, who was 12 in 1966, recalls “complete chaos” in the floor seats and barely hearing anything above the screaming. “As we left, there was a long row of chairs along the wall of MLG, each … occupied by a fan who had been brought out in a completely overwhelme­d state,” he says.

A solid day’s work for a band, you would think. But less than two weeks later, they played their final concert at a half- full Candlestic­k Park.

An i nteresting exhibit opened l ast week at the Market Gallery ( upstairs at St. Lawrence Market), celebratin­g the 50th anniversar­y of the 1966 shows. It features some wonderful treasures: Beatles- brand pantyhose; a Ringo- shaped bubble bath dispenser; photos of the insanity at the Gardens and the jampacked press conference­s. There is a rare copy of Yesterday and Today, the Beatles’ 1966 North American LP, featuring the hilariousl­y idiotic “butcher cover”: Paul McCartney imagined having the band pose with dismembere­d doll parts and cuts of meat would serve as trenchant commentary on the Vietnam War. And there is one of only two extant posters promoting the 1966 shows at the Gardens — promotion not having been an issue beforehand.

The Beatles are still a reliable conversati­on piece, all these years later. But the exhibit isn’t just cashing in on that. Its claim that Toronto was “Canada’s Beatlemani­a epicentre” sounds a bit contrived — where else would be? — but if anything it undersells the city’s role in the band’s North American breakthrou­gh, as exhaustive­ly documented in Piers Hemmingsen’s book The Beatles in Canada: The Origins of Beatlemani­a.

First and foremost, whereas Capitol Records in the U.S. didn’t even bother releasing Love Me Do, Please Please Me, From Me to You and She Loves You, Capital Records in Canada, led by British expat Paul White, very much did. And North America’s first official No. 1 Beatles Fan was Scarboroug­h’s Trudy Medcalf, who started the continent’s first fan club, secured sponsorshi­p for it from CHUM radio and eventually ended up as the voice of her generation in a regular Beatles-themed show on the station.

“Every Friday at 3: 30 a taxi would come to the door of the high school and take me downtown to Yonge Street and we would record a week’s worth ( of shows),” she recalls, laughing at the unlikeline­ss of it.

The Beatles even flew her and another fan club bigwig down to New York for their Ed Sullivan Show breakthrou­gh, to thank them for their efforts — all before there was any organized fan base in the U. S. at all, notes Hemmingsen, who co-curated the exhibit. “John said ‘oh you’re the fan club people’ and then he got down on his knees and started bowing,” Medcalf recalls. Her father had to wait i n the l obby while they and the band sorted fan mail and posed for photos.

The exhibit’s real value, however, is that it uses the Beatles as a window into Toronto’s history. This city’s willingnes­s to erase itself and start over is largely for the good, but its indifferen­ce to its own past is not. We were never New York or Chicago and we never will be. We’re too happy with world class to strive f or world’s best. But we sometimes forget how big we dreamt and how hard we worked to get this far.

The exhibit offers a deconstruc­ted version of what it claims was a typical 1966 basement rec room, t he centrepiec­e being a gigantic lime- green leather sectional. ( It was only just recently dragged out of a North York basement, says Wayne Reeves, chief curator of the city’s museums and heritage division.) It’s a healthy sort of veneration of bourgeois lifestyles that Americans seem to indulge much more than Canadians, but you can’t appreciate history in photos or in words nearly as much as in sight, smell and touch.

And while it’ s not especially sexy, the exhibit’s 15- year timeline effectivel­y illustrate­s what an amazing period of innovation, transforma­tion and audacity led up to those final Beatles shows. Toronto cut ribbons on three subways, the Regent Park housing developmen­t, Yorkdale Mall, Terminal One, Highway 400, the Gardiner Expressway, Viljo Revell’s improbable City Hall and the first TD tower, which at first loomed prepostero­usly over downtown.

As early as 1956 teenagers flocked to Maple Leaf Gardens to see Bo Diddley, The Drifters, Clyde McPhatter, Frankie Lymon and Bill Haley, and their parents didn’t quite know what to make of it. In 1957, God help their parents, it was Elvis. Oscar Peterson and Ronnie Hawkins moved to Toronto in 1957. Bob Dylan stole the Hawks in 1965. Sam the Record Man opened in 1961, when there were 500,000 more people in the city — very different people — than a decade earlier.

“What was going on in Toronto was already pretty exciting ( before the Beatles came),” says Nicholas Jennings, a veteran music journalist and co- curator of the exhibit. “The Bohemia of Yorkville — that started before the Beatles came. … You had the Joni Mitchells and the Gordon Lightfoots and the Neil Youngs.” And you had literally hundreds of groups striving for fame in what Jennings calls the “neon jungle” of the Yonge Street clubs.

“The button down conservati­ve Presbyteri­an side of Toronto was getting shaken up,” he says. “It was driven by the baby boom kids who were embracing this new lifestyle and the music and the fashion and the drugs. It was causing Toronto to have to unbutton its top collar.”

For a city that still mostly likes its top collar buttoned, and that has a very fraught relationsh­ip with various brands of progress, it is a welcome and sobering reminder of just how bold we can be when we want to.

THERE WAS A LONG ROW OF CHAIRS EACH OCCUPIED BY (AN OVERWHELME­D FAN).

 ?? JOHN ROWLANDS ?? The Beatles hold a press conference at the Hot Stove Lounge in Maple Leaf Gardens.
JOHN ROWLANDS The Beatles hold a press conference at the Hot Stove Lounge in Maple Leaf Gardens.

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