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| Les Wiseman and yours truly in front of the Dakota in the late 80s |
There is a unique invention that is all about Vancouver. The
Fu.. Band was invented in the early 80s by punk musicians who would temporarily
form short lived bands made up of punk stars. These musicians would play
drums if they played guitar in their group and a singer might really be a bass
player. They played for the fu.. of it (and had fund doing it) and that is why the name for this type of
band was coined.
The best of the Fu.. Bands were The Popularos.
The best of the Fu.. Bands were The Popularos.
There is a contemporary version of these bands made up by
musicians who don’t want to be pigeonholed and in some cases have gotten bored
(in the case of classically trained
musicians) with the usual 19th century repertoire.
In this pandemic one such musician is violinist Cameron
Wilson who has a band called the Wahs. I wrote about them here.
Now they have come out with a relatively unknown cover of a
Beatles song called Bulldog.
Listening to them I began to think back of my relationship through the years in listening to the Beatles.
It began in 1962, at Number 18, Privada de las Camelias, in
Colonia Florida in Mexico City. While going to Mexico City College by bus I had
made friends with a Yorkshire man called Andrew Taylor. He had returned from
Britain in late 1960 and knew of an obscure band, the Beatles.
In his house he slipped a single Love Me Do and asked me for
my opinion. I did not warm up to the band as at that time I was into Miles
Davis Live at Carnegie Hall. When the Beatles became big I still did not like
them all that much. In my teenage days at a Catholic Boarding school in Austin
my kind of music were The Ventures, the Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee and Conway
Twitty.
While doing my military service in the Argentine Navy in the
mid 60s I was assigned an Irish/Argentine secretary called Edna Gahan. I had
lied when asked if I knew how to type so she typed all the documents I
translated from English into Spanish and vice versa. She was a Beatles fan and
she could not convince me to listen to them. I was into jazz records by Andre
Previn.
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| Susy |
Then I met a lovely Argentine girl of Austrian/Jewish
extraction called Susy. She said I was an uncouth foreigner who needed a
cultural education. In my ill-fitting winter suit she took me to the Teatro
Colón during a sweltering summer to see and listen to my first opera, Sergei
Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel. Next she took me to see a wonderful Japanese film
called The Woman in the Dunes. My entry into culture did not end there. We went
to a live Piazzolla concert and then she said I had to see this film which she
adored. This is how I ended up seeing Richard Lester’s Help! Perhaps it was my
love for the woman, but the fact is that
my eyes were opened to the wonders of the Beatles and to this day my fave tune
is Help!
In the late 80s I went to New York City with Vancouver
Magazine writer and rock reviewer (a monthly column called In One Ear). We had
to go to the Dakota but we each had a different reason. He wanted to make a
pilgrimage of the place where John Lennon was murdered and my reason was Jack
Finney’s lovely science fiction novel, Time and Again set inside the Dakota.
In the late 60s while in Mexico City one of the popular
radio stations I listened to had a daily contest to determine which of these
two bands was the best (the bands were the same every day). These were the
Beatles or Clearance Clearwater Revival. What this meant is that by the time my
family and I arrived in Vancouver in 1975 my knowledge of rock music amounted
to knowing about Clearance Clearwater Revival, the Beatles and the Allman
Brother’s Band. By 1977 my association with Les Wiseman corrected that gap in
my popular music education.
But I must assert to this day that Help! is my favourite up
there with Message in a Bottle by The Police, and Neil Young’s Ohio.