Editor’s Note: If you missed it, the author presented the first part of this odyssey here.

The following Monday morning, Scrubby dropped off the band’s van at my place. The drill was that I would drive up to Newmarket for the day and work on putting their PA back together while the band rehearsed. In fact, the band had booked that entire week off to rehearse, which was great as it would give me a chance to learn the songs.

The drive was terrifying for several reasons, including the fact that even though I’d been driving various farm trucks and tractors since I was 11 or 12 years old, the van was my first automatic transmission, which I found unsettling. Ditto having all that glassed-in space behind me. And then there was Highway 400, my first three-lane highway, with way more traffic on it than anything I’d seen before. I quickly figured out that if I stayed in the left lane (which I now know is the fast lane), other vehicles could only come at me from one side!

Somehow, I made it to the band’s rehearsal space, a big room upstairs of an auto body shop. The PA system was piled up in a heap over in one corner. I gave it a quick once over, enough to see that every loudspeaker cabinet was in three pieces: the cabinet, the back cover and jack plate, and a newly re-coned driver in a cardboard box.

However, I didn’t jump right in on putting the rig back together because, A) We had the whole week to do that, and B) I wanted to get started on this newfangled project called a “direct box” that a studio engineer friend of my brother’s had turned me on to. Looking back, I’m not exactly sure why I decided to build the DI first, although I do remember using it for the bass input while I was with the band, so perhaps they just didn’t own one.

I’d gathered all of the parts over the previous few weeks, a Hammond 850N transformer (mail ordered), two switches (sketchy music store near my apartment), two 1/4-inch jacks and a D3M XLR. The case was something I had found in an army surplus store a few years earlier. I guess it had been some kind of fire-control box for an artillery piece as it had two big Bakelite knobbed rheostats labeled “Elevation” and “Range” and in between those, a big red jewel-cut indicator light.

The weird thing about this steel box was that, in the whole time I’d owned it, I’d never seen any way of getting wires in and out of it, and no provision for connecting any wires inside it. Maybe it was “surplus” because whoever had designed it had neglected to include those features, rendering it useless from the get-go.

In any case, it was perfect for my needs, as the 1/4-inch jacks fit perfectly in the holes for the rheostats, the XLR fit equally perfectly where the indicator light had gone, and the switches fit in a couple of holes that were meant to keep the rheostats from coming loose.

Flurry Of Activity

While I was working on the DI, various band members drifted in and out, but the one who was there most of the day was Danny, the drummer and manger/organizer/leader of the group. Sometime later in the afternoon, his girlfriend popped up the stairs to tell him that the band’s booking agent had called about a gig he wanted them to do starting the next day. Danny’s reply was blunt: “Tell him to f-off, we’re taking this week off to practice!”

She went away, but was back about an hour later to say that the agent had called again, and he was really insistent about the band taking this gig. Danny repeated his earlier message and she left once more, only to return again an hour later to say that the agent was driving up from the city, would be there in a couple of hours, and wanted to meet with the whole band to discuss this gig.

Which is how we all ended up in Danny’s living room around 9:30 that evening, having a big meeting about whether to take this gig or not. When the agent got there, he made his pitch, the gist of which was that the band needed the money to pay off various debts. It was in a small town called Amos in Northern Quebec, about an eight-hour drive from where we were.

I cringe at the memory now, but at the time, having been a member of the organization for less than a day, I was a vocal proponent of us doing the gig. Forty-four years on, I don’t remember who was for and who was against, but eventually the “fors” carried the argument and by around 11 pm, we’d committed to doing the gig.

This brought on an immediate flurry of activity as we all (or most of us…) went back over to the rehearsal hall and started loading the band’s (26-foot, 5-ton) truck. The one detail that sticks with me about that is the fact that all of the loudspeakers went into the truck in the aforementioned three pieces, along with a number of screw guns and other power tools to put them back together.

It was as this was going on that I made an important decision about drugs, one of two in that week. Not long after we confirmed the gig, one of the band members said, “Man, we’re going to be driving all night…we’re going to need some Bennies!”(Benzedrine tablets), and promptly left to go find some.
When I heard this, I thought to myself, “Am I going to need some of those?” and after a moment’s reflection, thought, “No, I’m going to be fine without them.” And I was.

Somewhere around 2 am, the truck was loaded, the band had grabbed their suitcases and Danny, Rick, the lead guitar player, and I headed out in the truck while the rest of the group made their own way in the van once they’d acquired their “supplies.” Heading out, our first objective was a roadside gas, food, bait, and breakfast joint that Danny’s parents owned in Temmagami, about four hours north of us.

We made it to “Gramp’s Place” by around 7 that morning, gassed up the truck, and had breakfast at the lunch counter cooked by Danny’s mother. Afterwards, as we were preparing to get back on the road, this good woman admonished us, twice, not to share toothbrushes.

Now I’m pretty sure that none of us were entertaining that thought anyway, but looking back, I realize now that this should have been a really good cue for me to say, “Hey, can I buy one of those toothbrushes on that rack over there?” Because… I had no luggage whatsoever! As in…no toothbrush, and no change of clothes either. But, more on this later.

As we were getting in the truck, Danny’s slacker brother slipped out a side door and handed each of us a beer. I quickly decided that I didn’t want or need a beer that early in the morning so shoved mine out of sight under the passenger seat… something that would have repercussions months later.

After about another hour’s driving, Danny and I traded places, and I racked up another in a long list of firsts on this adventure, driving a 5-ton truck. I actually found this easier than driving the van and settled in fairly quickly.

Getting It Together

We rolled into Amos in mid afternoon and quickly loaded in to the bar. While the others dealt with getting the backline and lighting set up, Rick and I put together a little assembly line to put the loudspeakers back together. If memory serves, there were eight in all, four subwoofers that were called “half-tubs” (or possibly also “W-bins), and four JBL 4560 for mid cabinets loaded with Altec 421-A 15-inch drivers. The horns were Altec as well (model 511-B with 802 compression drivers.) At some point, someone had applied undercoating to the outer surfaces of the metal horn bodies to dampen any ringing, a nice touch.

With the PA back together, I set about stacking, patching, and tuning my first-ever tri-amped system. Another first was having a dedicated EQ for the monitors. With my first band, we had the same monitors, the ubiquitous Yamaha 2115-H, but with no EQ, the drill was to turn them up until feedback occurred and then turn them down a bit below that – job done!

But now… a glorious 10 whole bands of graphic EQ, courtesy of another standard of the day, a Tapco 2200. This was the “Feedback-Be-Gone”™ device that I’d always wanted… or thought I’d always wanted. I proceeded to ring the tone out of those wedges, to the point where you could have left a live mic sitting on one for two weeks with no feedback. I did notice that they sounded a bit dull but then moved on to whatever the next task was…

Eventually, that task was the show – the band hit the downbeat, and I was very focused on getting my mix together. With the first song out of the way, I was feeling pretty good, when the singer thanked the smallish crowd for the scattered applause and then said, “Uh… (off mic…What’s the new guy’s name? Ike?) Uh… Ike, do you suppose we could have some lights up here?!” I hurriedly looked up from the console and saw that the band was standing there in total darkness! I quickly reached for the lighting desk, which I’d barely looked at, and brought up some lights.

A pause here to say that after a couple of name and personnel changes, this band went on to make it really big. I was long gone by then, but they did very well.

The rest of the first set came off without incident. Afterwards, the singer, who had a very thick Scottish accent, came up to me at the mix position and said, “Me munners were terrrrible that set!” Now, I’d already had some challenges understanding this fellow – earlier in this adventure when the band’s agent, whose name was Wayne D-something, was on his way up to meet with the band, I kept wondering who “Wing Ding” was when the singer would say things like “If Wing Ding wants us to do this geg…” (“Wing Ding” turned out to be the agent…)

So…his “munners” were terrible that set. At first, I thought he’d said his, “manners were terrible that set” and was genuinely mystified why he would mention it to me, and why anyone would care in a bar in a small town in Northern Quebec. I thought to myself, “His manners? What did he do? Burp loudly on stage? Turn his back on the audience?

In any case I decided that the best course of action was to just keep him talking to try to figure it out from context. Somewhere in there he said, “there must be something you can do about it, they just sound kind of dull…” And I replied, “Oh, your monitors! Sure, I’ll have a look at them!” At which point, I went in and un-did most of the EQ I’d done and they immediately improved.

The Routine

Things progressed smoothly from then on and the rest of the week was uneventful, audio wise. Which brings me to the second drug thing. Even though it was years before legalization, the “regulars” in this joint were openly smoking hashish spliffs right at the bar. As I would walk the 15 feet from the entrance to the mixing console, it was totally routine for one of these characters to reach back from their bar stool and hand me a joint as I walked by.

After about two days of this, I realized that it was far too easy to fool yourself into thinking your mix was brilliant when you were buzzed. On the spot, I decided that, going forward, rather than be the easiest person to please, mix wise, I wanted to be the hardest person to please in the whole room. I have stuck to that credo to this day.

Well, that’s drugs and rock ‘n’ roll covered – what else does that leave for my first week on the road? Ah, yes! So, for starters, you couldn’t ask for a better set-up for your first week on the road. The bar was attached to a small hotel and a 24-hour restaurant. The rooms were small and clean, something I was soon to learn was not a given, and the food at the café was quite good, also not something to be taken for granted out there in road-land. The ability to sit down and have a decent meal after the show, sleep in a clean bed and get up the next morning and have a nice breakfast was a godsend to an always hungry 18 year old.

Bernie, the manager of this establishment and an ex-jazz drummer from Montreal, would come and chat with us after the show, as would some of the guys from the other band that was playing down the road. They were playing with an Elvis band and were losing their minds because they kept getting held over in this little town. They’d been there for something like three weeks when we came along and were prone to asking questions like, “How was Toronto – is it still there?”

Now, there were a couple of young women who were, as far as I could tell, the chambermaids responsible for changing towels and cleaning the rooms (in which, I’m pretty sure, the band was the only guests). This was an informal set-up so they just wore jeans and t-shirts instead of hotel maid uniforms, and they seemed to have plenty of spare time to hang out with two of the band members who had quickly swooped in to monopolize their time.

And my situation was this: I had the jeans and t-shirt that I was wearing the day I drove up to spend the day at the band’s rehearsal space…no change of clothes, no toothbrush, no deodorant (I was still about a year away from even using deodorant at that point…), nothing. I realized some years later that I could have gone to a drug store and bought a toothbrush, but at the time, I just knew that my toothbrush, which I’m sure my mother had bought for me, was back in Toronto.

I did at least try to keep clean… I’m sure I must have rinsed my socks and t-shirt a few times, and I tried to keep my teeth clean with a washcloth and my finger, but the point is, I probably wasn’t looking (or smelling) my best any time I might have had interactions with the two women. Which would have been mostly bumping into them in the hall when they were going somewhere with the two band guys.

In spite of this disadvantage, after a few days, even though they spoke only French, it dawned on me that these two had given me a nickname, which I thought was really cool. They noticed me! Poubelle – they called me Poubelle! I didn’t know what it meant, but from my high school French I knew that “belle” was good, non?

So, I was quite chuffed with that, even though I knew I had no chance of getting to know them better. That is, until a couple of weeks later, when I was walking through the housewares department of a Canadian Tire store (like a Sears or Walmart) and spotted the word – my nickname! – “Poubelle”… on a trash can!

Postscript – As we were putting together this article, the author sent along a note about the homemade DI box he describes in the text: “Fun fact, the transformer and some of the other parts got re-packaged into a more traditional Hammond box and are still working to this day in a friend’s studio.”