“Break it to them gently.”  That’s what the owner of a roadhouse in Geraldton, Ontario did when he fired our rock band, Bruce the Moose.

We had been booked for a one-week gig, way up in Lake Superior country, playing rock, blues and a few original songs for a motley crowd of forestry and hydro crews, bikers, and locals. We thought it had been going well.  We made a few fast friends in the audience and even allowed some enthusiastic patrons to join us on stage to belt out their favourite songs, or jam with us on harmonica.

The original Bruce the Moose, minus one antler, poses in front of some old guy’s bike tools.

But after we played the Monday to Thursday segment of our gig, the hotel owner dropped the bomb.

“Hey guys, you’ve been great, but I’ve got strippers coming in this weekend, so I don’t need the band.”

Gulp. We had been usurped by exotic dancers.

“But listen… My buddy runs the hotel in Beardmore down the road. He’s taking you on for the weekend for $500. You’re going to end up making more dough this week!”

Now you’re talking. We would end up making $1,300 for the week instead of $1,100.

We packed our gear into our brown van, the one with the brown shag carpeting inside, floor to wall to ceiling and back again. Some of the letters had fallen off the nameplate on the front hood. So now instead of being a Dodge, our van was a Dog. Our enormous brown Dog was powered by an undersized but sturdy slant six engine that burned oil.

The town was buzzing

We got to Beardmore and set up for Friday night.  The place was buzzing as the town had not had a live band play in its hotel for several years. Two young women came by to chat.  “We hear you guys stopped for Coke and O’Henry bars at the variety store.”

“Oh hi, wow. Actually, how did you know that?”

“Everybody knows there’s a band coming to town; word travels fast I guess,” replied one of them, Donna, whose nickname was Cowboy, matching the big hat she wore. Her friend was Penguin.  I was a bit confused by the nicknames but they were really nice.

We knew we had to step up, and for the next two nights we had a lot of fun. It seemed like the whole town came out to see us play, to dance, sing along and kibbitz.

We had a good long set list, so kept it fresh night to night.  We had a blues set, in which we all donned sunglasses like the Blues Brothers. We played a couple of songs from the classic Dan Ackroyd/John Belushi album popular at that time. We hammered out a couple of ZZ Top songs, some slick Powder Blues, and some original blues songs. John played keyboard and lit into the blues vocals; he sent his synthesizer soaring on solos, eyes closed.

We were high school friends from Don Mills Collegiate Institute. We had practiced in the band room there after hours, thanks to our talented, dedicated, generous, if sometimes grumpy, band teacher, Al Harkness. Our parents also had extreme patience as we honed our craft playing amplified music in their basements and garages. We would play ZZ Top’s “Tush” at full power in John’s basement, then afterwards his sweet British parents would offer us tea and biscuits and tell us: “Well done boys, it’s sounding quite good!”

The Moose’s backstory

The name of our band was derived from an antique moose handed down from the Kinross side of my family.  It’s the type of artifact you’d take to the Antiques Road Show.  John, who would go on to a career in music performance and recording, used his artistic skills to paint the band name on the front skin of my Ludwig bass drum: Bruce the Moose.

Music is a about feeling and we gelled on those songs on our summer road tour. We had practiced hard and had been playing five or six days a week. We could lose ourselves in the feeling of the music, like The Doors songs we performed. “Try to set the night on fire!” You can’t help but get hypnotized by that song.

Or “L.A. Woman”, where Steve, on bass guitar, channelled Jim Morrison on the lead vocal. Steve laid down a nice bass line on his blond lefty Fender, but because lefty instruments had been hard to find, he could also switch-hit if necessary on a righty bass played upside down. Joe played rhythm guitar and then would speak in tongues on his lead guitar solos, sometimes venturing into wild territory on key signatures, rhythm and scales: major, minor, mixolydian, you name it. He got a nice ovation from the crowd for his work. I was back on drums keeping the beat and sometimes singing some backup vocals.

Turn me loose!

The good folks of Beardmore were dancing and wanting to party with us during break. They had song requests, some of which we could take. We had to disappoint one of our biggest fans though. Through most of the night, in between songs she kept screaming out: “Turn me loose!”

Hey, it’s a great song, but we hadn’t practiced Loverboy.

Steve recalls: “The Roxy Hotel in Beardmore was packed and rockin’. We finished a song and some older dude comes from the back of the room shoving his way to the stage. He’s got a drunken grimace and a clenched fist in the air. He gets closer and I think we were ready for some kind of altercation but instead he reaches up and shouts “you guys are fuckin’ great!” and hands me a US 20-dollar bill!”

Late at night we hung out and watched some spectacular Northern Lights streak the Northern Ontario sky with shades of green.

The next morning Steve was wearing a red bandana around his neck, obscuring a hickey from Donna. I was jealous. Steve looked like Jim Morrison. I was still in my Richie Cunningham phase. Penguin apparently was not a fan of Ron Howard.

Let’s not think we were too cool. We were fresh out of high school. Two of us were still underage. When one bar owner asked Joe to produce ID, he gave them his North York Public Library card, which did not have a birth date on it. They accepted it and we played the gig.

That summer of 1981, our trusty Dog van propelled us across Ontario, from Niagara Falls to Minden to Huntsville to Chelmsford to Wawa to Blind River, Geraldton and Beardmore.  And then back south to the Rockcliffe Hotel in Minden, where a bunch of our friends showed up to join camp counsellors, cottagers, locals and, of course, bikers in the audience.

Redcap and vitamin C

We stayed in grungy rooms upstairs with a closet big enough to hold a 24-case of Redcap Ale.  Typical of Ontario hotels, there was a single washroom accompanying the rooms upstairs, so when we took a shower we had to make sure the coast was clear of the old guys whose Canada Pension Plan cheques funded their semi-permanent stay at the Rockcliffe.  One of these characters once came down the stairs in the middle of our set and bellowed: “Can’t you play any country music?”

The bartender at the Rockcliffe was a guy nicknamed “T.R.” from California who drove a Corvette and claimed to be a Vietnam veteran with a metal plate in his head from a war wound. When one of our visiting friends challenged his claim after too many drinks, some quick mediation and changing of the subject was in order to prevent a scene from Platoon.

“It was a wild ride that summer and I didn’t want it to end,” says Joe, now a professional guitarist in south-western Ontario. It was also a blur for Joe because he played many of the same bars with different bands in later years — “same bars, sometimes different names.” Joe recalled an incident in Huntsville where a friend of our band took off at night in a canoe and we were scared for his safety. The police were called and “it could have been a case of CUI — canoeing under the influence.”  However the police took kindly to the situation and let our friend off with a warning.

A quick note about nutrition. As we were on a shoestring budget, we ate just two meals a day.  Waking late, we would go for a big breakfast, typically bacon and eggs and coffee.  Then a western sandwich or burger or grilled cheese special for supper.  A couple of venues offered us beer at cost during the show; those calories were welcome. Finally, we tucked into Joe’s huge supply of Vitamin C pills at all hours.

That Rockcliffe gig was the highlight and twilight of our summer road tour.  We packed up our instruments and sound system and took our last trip home in the Dog. School and jobs and girlfriends and new destinations beckoned in the fall. We were mostly broke and could use a short break from each other after being together 24/7.

We were moving on, like the line in the Burton Cummings ballad:

“Break it to them gently when you tell them that you won’t be coming home again.

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Epilogue: And I heard from our keyboardist and singer John Brocksom, who has played many roadhouses over his career in music writing, performing and recording:

“It’s all just a blur, or even a remnant of a blur that I might have heard about second hand — seeing the impressive countryside and rolling hills in Norther Ontario, a foggy view from a window in Wawa, throwing myself to the stage during a song (Automobile?) and your shocked looks, sleeping in the van in a hotel parking lot somewhere outside of Chelmsford, staying up all night with Steve writing in Huntsville. Also the hitchiker we picked up somewhere who promptly sat on our cooler and snapped the lid.

I agree the highlight was the Rockcliffe, though I can’t for the life of me figure out how (and why) all those Don Mills friends got there.”

Editor’s note: The Rockcliffe Hotel closed just a few years ago. A Canadian icon, it is in dire need of TLC and can be had for a song: under $400K. Here’s to more music memories at the Rockcliffe and Ontario’s hotels and roadhouses that have supported live music for so many years.