Alien: The Strange Life and Times of Mendelson Joe

ALIEN

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ALIEN THE S T H E S T R A N G E T R A N G E I IFF A M I I F F A M U T T M F Q U T T M F Q

OF MENDELSON JOF MENDELSON JOEOE

AS

TOLD

TO

NADIA

ECW

HALIM

PRESS

Copyright © ECW PRESS 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of ECW PRESS. C A N A D I A N C A T A L O G U I N G IN P U B L I C A T I O N

DATA

Mendelson Joe Alien : the strange life and times of Mendelson Joe ISBN 1-55022-426-3 i. Mendelson Joe. 2. Painters — Canada — Biography. 3. Musicians — Canada Biography. I. Halim, Nadia M. (Nadia Maria), 1970- . n. Title. ND249.M446A2. 2000

759-H

000-931726-0

Cover and text design by Tania Craan Cover art by Mendelson Joe Layout by Mary Bowness Printed in Canada by University of Toronto Press Distributed in Canada by General Distribution Services, 325 Humber Blvd., Toronto, Ontario M9W yc3 Published by ECW PRESS 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, M4E IE2 ecwpress.com

The publication of Alien has been generously supported by The Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. Canada

Dedicated to my heroes Rosalie Bertell, June Callwood, Lisa Cherniak, and Lisa Simpson.

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PREFACE

In 1998 I sent Jack David at ECW Press a sample of my third manuscript, "A Man and His Philosophy," formerly "A Man and His Penis." Though Mr. David rejected me as an author, he countered with the idea of "speaking a book." And so I did speak. If I were to name all the people who've inspired me with their love, support, wisdom and silliness, I'd probably still be naming because I've lived a life-times-twenty — or so it seems. I must thank those who gave their time (time is lifetime) aI must thank those who gave their time (time is lifetime) and talknd ta to Nadia Halim and helped make this book have dimension; they gave my little life light and light is everything if you're a painter. Finally, to have been born so lucky (Canada has to be Luckyland unless you're aboriginal or really poverty-stricken), I believe it's my job, my truth to state that our democracy — the democracy that afforded me the freedom to dare to be me — is in jeopardy. Jeopardy? If individual citizens remain silent and passive while visionless greed-driven politicians lead us beyond the beyond of astray, the health of our democracy not to mention our actual physical and psychological healths (health and environment are one and the same) will atrophy and we'll become genetically modified slaves existing in America's Canada's Wonderland . . . you get my drift. That's jeopardy. Very finally, if we rape our Mother enough she won't look after us. Maybe I'll shut up for a minute. Health. M. Joe

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank: All the friends, acquaintances, and enemies of Joe who allowed me to interview them. Stan and Sue, for welcoming me into their home, giving me a tour of Stan's Joe Museum, showing me the scrapbooks and providing visuals. Lisa Cherniak, who in addition to being interviewed, loaned me a transcribing machine, which significantly sped up the production of the book. Paul Vermeersch, who conducted several of the interviews with Joe. Rene Price, for unexpected and generous financial assistance. The Ontario Arts Council, for financial assistance through the Writers' Reserve program. And of course Joe, for his patient and thoughtful cooperation, and for art, tea, and fresh coconut. Nadia Halim

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INTRODUCTION

Joe doesn't much like being called an eccentric. He says he's normal, and the rest of the world, with its racism, conformity, and disregard for the environment, is nuts. Fair enough. But when you first meet him, eccentric is a word you might find yourself reaching for, at least to describe his clothes. "Clothes" is maybe too plural a word for gray-green work overalls with the arms cut off and the legs cut short, but that's frequently all he's wearing, even in the dead of winter, and this garment is encrusted with many shades of paint. His glasses have red plastic frames, also spattered with paint. When they broke at the bridge, he repaired them with strong epoxy glue. (Joe is a big fan of epoxy.) To reinforce them, he glued a pencil across the bridge, so that it hovers over his eyes like a single straight emphatic eyebrow. Onto the pencil, directly above his nose, he glued a bit of plastic labelling tape bearing the word "PEACE." He's wearing the glasses and the overalls for his annual appearance at the Music Gallery. In concert, Joe's like a perverse, oversexed, highlypoliticized children's entertainer: Raffi from Hell. He giggles, squirms in his seat, hunches over his guitar, & begins to strum. He sings: 6rocco//s Are little trees For my mouth . . . He provides percussion by stamping his left foot on the floor. There's a buzz coming from his amps. "You may wonder why I'm moving the microphone around," he announces after doing so for about half a minute.

"There's a distinct hum coming from my equipment. I'm not good at throwing things away, so I'm trying to incorporate it for your listening pleasure." He interrupts one song for a silent guitar solo, complete with facial contortions, that must be nearly a minute long. Someone near the front yells appreciatively: "Play it, Joe!" His refusal to play smoky, licensed venues limits him to one live show a year, but in his self-propelled creative endeavors Joe is, as he says, a "spewaholic." He produces something like ten letters and a painting or two every day, and he's constantly writing new songs and recording new albums (undaunted by his inability to get the last four commercially released). He has written unpublished books, including a roman a clef; he wrote it while waiting for paintings to dry, so it's called Paint Is Drying. There's something inspiring about this relentless prolificness. It suggests a fearlessness about what others will think of him, an imperviousness to the sting of rejection. But more than that, it indicates an absence of the selfdoubt that prevents so many talented people from ever finishing anything creative. Joe's spewing is not inhibited by an inner critic or censor; if he hears discouraging voices while he works, he doesn't seem to pay them any mind. Everything he does is characterized by a simple, unselfconscious joy in the creative act. He does it because it makes him happy. Sometimes it makes other people happy too, and one of the best things about working on this book was meeting Joe's eclectic circle of friends and admirers. As many of them remarked, Joe sets standards for human behavior (including his own) that are almost impossibly high. It says a lot about him that people who actually meet those standards are willing to sustain friendships with him over decades. There's Denise Bellamy, who worked her way up from humble beginnings to become an Ontario Superior Court Justice. There's Dr. Philip Berger, a man with a remarkable list of accomplishments: he's spent most of his professional life caring for disadvantaged people of various kinds, and has been a founding member of two Toronto-based groups that assist physicians working with AIDS patients, and of the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture. There are also accomplished musicians like David Wilcox and Bob Wiseman. The long-term

devotion of Stan the Fan says a lot. So does the continuing friendship of James Manning, who's known Joe since Grade 10. i wish I'd been able to interview Annie Smith, but it seems completely in character that she should remain elusive. She's living on a boat off the coast of B.C.; I spoke to her briefly, on her boyfriend's cell phone, but she doesn't have a phone of her own and was unable to find anyone who would let her use theirs for a longer conversation. She suggested I write her a letter, but she never wrote back. So I can't tell you whether her planned publicity stunt in Notre Dame Cathedral, back in 1981, was intended to sell Joe's paintings or to get her into a Mel Brooks movie. Maybe it was supposed to kill both birds with one stone. For someone who professes to dislike humans, Joe does seem to have a lot of friends; nonetheless, he has made good on his promise to move north, and on the telephone from someplace up in cottage country, he sounds happy as can be. One day, a while before he moved, I asked Joe if he owned any other clothes other than the overalls, and he modelled his finest shirt for me. It was made for him by Therese Washie, a Native woman, from moose skin which was smoke-tanned by an unknown person near Yellowknife. The shirt is wonderfully soft, fringed, caramel-coloured, and it emits an extraordinary smell, of fresh leather and woodsmoke, the smell of a campfire deep in the north Ontario woods on a cold autumn night. It has beadwork on it, too. It's the size of a small tent, so it fits Joe perfectly. It's not meant for everyday wear, and it was hard to imagine him wearing it anyplace in Toronto. But it was easy to imagine him up in the clean unspoiled northland, getting better acquainted with the natural environment that means so much to him, wearing that shirt. Is Joe an eccentric? You'll decide for yourself as you read this book. Bear in mind the findings of British psychologist Dr. David Weeks. Weeks has spent over a decade studying people who don't fit in, and is the author of Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness, According to him, eccentrics "are creative, highly curious, aware of their differentness from an early age, and happily obsessed by their hobby-horses. They are often single, the oldest or only child, and poor spellers. They tend to be cheerful and

idealistic, full of projects to improve or save the world. They are characterized by a sense of humour, creative imagination, and strong will. Not only do eccentrics live five to ten years longer than the norm, they are also, on average, healthier, happier and more intelligent than the rest of the population." I don't know. His spelling is actually pretty good.

TABLE OF CONTEMTS

1 YOUTH 1 Motorcycles and other fast machines

2 SOLO DAYS TO G L O R Y DAYS 22 A fellow musician Musical tendencies

3 THE B U M P 'N' G R I N D R E V U E 48 A falling-out

4 GOING

S O L O 70

Reactions to Joe's art Man of letters

5 ANNIE

S M I T H 88

Women are the Only Hope A Working Woman Don't Smoke around Joe

6 JOE AT L A R G E 112 A fellow activist Artists Against Racism

7 A L I E N 141

8 D I S C O G R A P H Y 149 9 S O N G L Y R I C S 151

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CHAPTER ONE

YOUTH

(1944 - 1964) EARLY

CHILDHOOD

What's the single best thing that ever happened to you? Birth! Birth allowed me to live. I was born in Toronto in 1944 in the Western Hospital, and I have a sister who is 12 years my senior; I was a mistake. My mother had abortions before and after me, so I consider myself to be Mr. Slipped Through the Net. The job of the Jew is to be murdered, it seems, but if you can get away from being murdered, you can flee. My grandparents all fled to America from Eastern Europe. The only one I ever met was my grandmother on my mother's side. My mother was born in Hoboken, N.J. My father was born in New York City, in 1907. He was a product of poverty. I think his greatest poverty was that he was never given any physical affection. He was farmed out at a young age, because he was from a large family; at the age of 7 he was sent up here to work in his grandparents' grocery store, down on Queen and Sumach. I never had any physical

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affection from him whatsoever, and my sister thinks it's because he was never given any as a child. My father was in the reserve — the Irish regiment — during the war, up until 1944 or so. I have memories of him going off to drill with them. I saw him wear a kilt once. We lived in a four-storey apartment building in Toronto, on Lonsdale Road. There were no elevators. I had no idea what Lonsdale Road was or anything, I was a child. My sister babysat me. She resented me. She was twelve, and all of a sudden into her life came this baby, and all it did was shit and urinate. There were wooden stairs descending along the back of the building. I remember getting in real trouble for urinating in a neighbour's window in the alleyway. I remember being beaten up. I remember that I was totally enamoured with the horse that drew the milkwagon. I wanted to be a horse, back then. I was enamoured with cars, trucks, buses . . . I was a very average child, I think. By the time I was six, I knew I didn't want to be a slave. I consciously said to myself, "Well, it's obvious that adults are liars." Hypocrites. I didn't know the word, but I realized that that's what my parents were. I think that all children, at some level, know what I'm saying. It's just that they may or may not consciously remember that they thought it, and then said to themselves, "Well, I don't want to live like that." I think that most people just go along, because that's what they've been raised to do. My sister sure went along. In 1949, we moved into our first house, a sienna brick house at 118 Armour, in north Toronto. We'd been living in an apartment where we were constantly lining up to go to the toilet — there were four of us, and it was a small apartment. Living in a house was totally different. 118 happened to be on a corner, so there was a backyard and a front yard, and the house itself was a two-storey house, a middle-class house, not large. When we moved there, the farmers were still farming the fields next door. They'd just started building Highway 401, so a lot of land to the north was still hay

YOUTH

Joe at age 5, in a party hat.

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fields, they were still baling hay. I used to build forts out of the hay bales. They didn't have storm sewers then, water just flowed in ditches. Nowadays, Toronto has become such a sprawl, it would be hard to find anything like that in Southern Ontario. Our neighbour, who was in the house to the north of us, would go hunting up on Steeles Ave. for crows, and sometimes I went with him. Just north of Sheppard Ave. Crows are hard to kill, by the way. I've never done anything like that at any other time — hunting. This guy, the hunter, he had a very strange son. Bobby Allison was the boy, his father was Ron Allison. Bobby Allison threw a brick at me once and knocked me cold. He was not an aggressive guy, he was just unusual. He had a total obsession with birds. And he was totally obsessed with being an Indian — he was not an Indian, but he wanted to be an Indian. You know how some people want to become something? So he had this Indianitis. He also had a fairly strong obsession with playing doctor. He was a little bit cruel about animals. He was twisted about the animal thing. He later became a Doctor of Ornithology, employed by the Province of Ontario as an ornithologist. Bobby Allison. In the summertime he used to walk around dressed in towels. I never thought of it as unusual until I was told it was unusual. My closest friend in my life was Daryl Leberg. She lived across from us on Armour, and we were friends from about age 9 to when she died in 1976. She inspired me, because we both had fucked-up parents. Her mother was evil. I believe evil is not something that goes away. Evil is wilful malice. It's not just the ability to do it, it's wilful. Daryl's mother was nuts, and dangerous. That's what I thought as a boy. So we communed. Daryl and I. In public school, anti-Semitism was still pretty much a factor. Our federal government in the forties was anti-Semitic. If you're a Jew, it's something you live with. As a little kid, it alienated me from everybody like crazy. And my parents didn't deal with being Jews very clearly. So it was confusing.

YOUTH

Joe at age 8. 1952, North Toronto.

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Other than that, I had a charmed life. The only really eventful thing that happened to me as a child living in Toronto was that I got appendicitis and almost died from it. It happened when I was nine. It was after Halloween, so my parents didn't take it seriously at first, because they thought I had eaten a bunch of candy. But I had a ruptured appendix. When the appendix ruptures, you have poison going throughout your system. So it was a close one. When I was about 10,1 recognized the power of the written word. As a little boy, I was very interested in airplanes. Also cars and motorcycles, but especially airplanes. It's a hormone thing. So I wanted to get pictures of airplanes. My mother said, "Well, why don't you write to aircraft manufacturers?" So before I was 10,1 was writing aircraft manufacturers and getting photographs and letters from major war material manufacturers. They were recruiting me as a child!

FAMILY My father was a lawyer all his life. My mother was what you'd call a housewife. She cooked the meals and did the shopping. By the time I came along, they were affluent enough that they could hire a cleaning woman. But I was the cleaning boy when the cleaning woman didn't come. So my mom didn't have what I would describe as a very heavy load. I think the biggest load she carried was tolerating my father. My mother was a little prune, she was 5'3", 5'2". He was 5'11". He wasn't fat, but he wasn't in good shape. They both smoked — back then, everybody smoked. They were not health-conscious. I was not intimidated by his size as much as I was intimidated by him as an authoritarian father. I was not beaten. But my father was a cruel person in some respects. I once had a girlfriend who was almost a clinical psychologist, and after she asked me a lot of questions, her analysis was that

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she thought I had been psychologically abused. I never knew I was abused before that, because you don't know stuff until someone explains it to you. I survived. I think I'm a really healthy, happy guy, but I'm responsible for my own happiness. I believe that we are responsible for ourselves. However much we are abused in life, we can still conceivably triumph. My father did what a lot of average parents do to their children, and outside the family, everyone thought he was a nice guy. He would make sure I cleaned my plate, and then call me "fatso." I was always an overweight kid; not what they call morbidly obese, but overweight. He would always put me down for all kinds of things, including my music. My mother didn't put me down that way, but she went along with everything he did, so in my opinion she betrayed her child in many respects. I don't think she really wanted me. I think my father was maladjusted. He couldn't have a conversation with a child. He treated me pretty much like our house pet, Buddy the beagle. When I talk to children, I talk to them the same way I talk to everybody, except I recognize that maybe you have to be more patient with them, to explain things. I believe it's important to tell the truth to children. My father and I didn't talk about anything, he wasn't interested in anything that was of interest to me, in fact he loathed my music. He had no concept of what cars were about other than that you turn the key to start one. He wouldn't have known a spark plug from a butt plug. Although there were a lot of things never discussed in the home, there was one thing that was discussed, and I thank my father for that: he always said that if I was going to have sex, wear a safe. He was telling me this from the age of about 12. He would belittle my mother, he would belittle me. . . . I don't have a problem with criticism. You're entitled to critique anything I do or say. I love it when people are honest. If someone has the guts to say, "I hate what you do," I actually like it. But I have a problem with cruelty. There is a difference. Some people say I'm cruel because

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I'm very direct and blunt. One of my women friends says, "Joe, you have to learn the sandwich technique. When you deliver the meat, you have to put some bread around it to make it a little softer." Different people respond to alleged truths in different ways. But my father: we're not talking about the truth here, we're talking about a cruel nature. I tried to understand why he was cruel; I tried to build some bridge with my father before he died, but I never did. I was forced to go to Hebrew school. My parents didn't follow any faith, yet I was put through this bullshit, which alienated me from my parents. My sister never had to go through it. But my father thought I should be given this religious training. My parents didn't worship money, but their purpose was always to prosper, and have their children prosper, and be comfortable. I didn't conform too much. I don't have a lot of connection to my family, I'm a weird person in that way. I have this song called "Alien," and it's not so much about people who come from another planet, but about feeing like I come from another planet. It's about being an alienated person. Which I am truly. I can't explain how I got like this, but I've never felt comfortable, I've never fitted in with anybody's group, I never felt I belonged with anybody.

MAPLE,

ON

We moved to Maple when I was about 13, in 1958. Maple, then, was really just a rural feed mill town with a post office and a couple of churches. Now, it's like hell on earth — it's now called Paramount Canada's Wonderland, it should be called America's Canada's Paramount Wonderland. It's my concept of going to hell without any relief. When I lived there, we lived in a farmhouse a half a mile from any human. It was a different life, after having been raised in the city. There were 2 farmhouses at the end of a lane, a half-mile from the nearest road. My father bought one of the farmhouses, and the one

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across the lane was vacant. Both of them were very old. I never figured out what was going on with the vacant farmhouse, because although no-one was living there, there were chickens living in the basement. Some farmer must have still been using it as a chicken house. Eventually, a dentist bought the building. But for the first year we lived there, there was nothing near us at all. About a quarter of a mile away, across fields, was a farmhouse, and another quarter of a mile away there was a subdivision. About a year later, developers started to build around where we lived. I started working in construction as a 14-year-old kid. The house was built in the middle of the 1800s — if it's still standing today, it's 150 years old, maybe more. It was originally 2 houses, maybe more. They used to just build a house and then add to it, keep adding. So it was a little farmhouse with a section added to it. It was built out of stone, covered with white stucco. I have a painting of it. It was quite lovely, elegant. This was my parents' dream home. There were almost 11 acres that went with it, so it was surrounded by a lot of greenery. Some of which I planted. I planted a tree when I was 14, a tree that was about a foot, now it's about 40 feet high if it's still there. It's interesting to see a tree grow that you actually planted. I'm always fascinated, if you plant something, at how fast it'll grow. I guess that's how parents feel about their children. No children with me, so ... The house in Maple had a basement with a deep root cellar and a tunnel that went down to the well. There was a garage attached to the house, and also a separate shed garage where I hid my first car from my parents, till they found out and went berserk that I had bought a car. The house had a high roof, and there were a lot of fruit trees around it — old fruit trees, crab-apples and pears. If you get crabapples just before they're ripe, they're quite friendly — I like sour apples. A serious farmer will be always pruning fruit trees so they produce fruit right and they grow right. None of these were looked

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after, so they were lunatic fruit trees. Some of them were as old as the house. Within a few years, we were surrounded by what became subdivisions. But after living in the city, living this way — half a mile from anybody — was a real culture shock. I felt disconnected from my parents, and from almost everybody. I was 14. I might as well have been an only child; my sister was married when I was 9. All of a sudden, I went from living an urban existence with all my friends, experiencing urban anti-Semitism, and now I was living among a bunch of real hillbillies. In the fifties, they were hillbillies up there. My best friend had never had indoor plumbing when I met him. My best friend in Maple was a guy named Jim Manning, whom I called Jimsy. Jim and his family lived a concession away from me, which is about a mile and a quarter, in a backwoods farmhouse. Jim was the second of seven kids. He had an older brother, and the rest were sisters. His father was a clergyman and an apple farmer. I did farm work for them. His father got Lou Gehrig's Disease around 1961. He was about 48 years of age. Mr. Manning stayed at home while he died. It took a year for him to die. It's a disease where your muscles atrophy. So I watched him go from being a normal-looking guy to a 90- or 80-pound guy. That changed my life. I'm talking about what inspired me or what changed me. At the age of 15, I knew I'd better not fuck around doing dumb things in my life, I'd better make the most of my life, because life ends. You watch someone die for a long period of time — or a short period — you realize how finite everything is. And I liked Mr. Manning, too. He was a decent guy. I mean for someone in the religious game, he was a straight guy.

YOUTH

1 1

JAMES "JIWISY" WIANMING: My wife Marian is the sister of Joe's girlfriend from high school. We have this neat little web; Marian is almost as familiar with Joe as I am. I guess we went in different directions in our lives after university, but we've kept in touch with each other. We recently spent about three or four hours over lunch, and didn't have any difficulty in communicating. But we're in different worlds. Mine is more traditional — I don't see myself as living a highly traditional life, but I suppose I'm becoming a rarity now, having been married to the same woman for 34 years! I've had a much more conventional lifestyle than Joe, living in suburbia, raising a couple of kids, so on and so forth. How old were you when you first met Joe? I believe it was either in grade 9 or 10; in grade 10 we were in the same class. We were about fifteen. Joe and I were both sort of misfits in the high school years. Joe mis-fit far more because of his own perception of himself than because of the way he really was. As for me, my father was a minister, and I was raised in a large, close-knit family on a little farm in between Maple and Richmond Hill. I had no typical teenage social aspirations — I didn't care about those kinds of things. So I guess Joe and I initially became friends simply because we both saw ourselves as not fitting in, although from my point of view, I just didn't care what everyone else was doing! How did Joe's perception of himself make him into a misfit? I think he had a lot of angst about the fact that he was Jewish. I was a Presbyterian minister's son, and it didn't even occur to me that he was Jewish. His parents were certainly not Orthodox, they weren't practising. In grade 9, he was probably double the weight he should have been. One of the reasons for that was that he ate a dozen doughnuts for lunch every day. In grades 10 and 11, he went from being a chubby young teenager to being 6 foot plus, still fairly heavy but with a football-player physique, as opposed to a chubby doughnut-kid physique. From my point

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of view, he seemed to be in the in-crowd, but I guess he didn't think so. We just started chumming around in class. In the summer, between grades 1 1 and 12, we went to visit my grandmother in Kentucky. We drove down ourselves. We ended up driving an aunt of mine from my grandma's house in Kentucky down to Florida, where she lived, and taking the train back. It was an interesting summer. My mother's family is from Kentucky. She grew up there and in Florida. Married a backwoods country minister and moved to Cookstown, Ontario. One of my grandmother's friends in Kentucky was an elderly drunk who loved cars, and he had a recent Corvette — this was in '63 or '64 — and a Jaguar, and a couple of other cars. We managed to talk him into letting us borrow his Corvette for the day, which was a huge mistake on his part, but we had a great old time. What did you do? Oh, we didn't hurt it, but we didn't do it any good! We just drove around and squealed the tires, probably wore half of the tire tread off. We of course saw ourselves as very deep and philosophical and so on and so forth. I remember one night we ended up sitting on an overpass over Highway 75, which runs down through Kentucky, watching cars go by and waving at various and sundry. We watched a red Corvette with a woman in it go by, and wondered, "Did she see us? Is she going to stop and give us a ride?" Of course we weren't even in any position for her to see us, really. We sat on this highway overpass half the night, discussing women and fast cars and life in general. You were both big car fans, weren't you? Yup. We bought a 1937 Ford coupe. This was before I started dating my wife, so it was probably the first summer that we were chumming around together. I think we paid $50 for this car. It ran, but it was a wreck. It was about 25 years old, and rusty, and the engine didn't run very well. We stored

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it at my place for a few months, but there wasn't really anyplace there where we could work on it. At Joe's place, there was an old garage that they weren't using, It was a separate building from their house. There was stuff stored in it, but from one day to the next nobody ever went in there. So we came up with the brilliant idea that we'd take the car over and stick it in Joe's garage. But the last thing on earth that we wanted was for Joe's father to find out that we had bought this car, because he would be furious, and of course he would have nothing to do with having it on his property. Well, we trundled in this beat-up old car, pouring blue smoke, and here's Joe's father sitting in his car in the driveway! We pulled in behind him! We never actually did anything with the car — we ended up selling it a year or two later for $25, As I mentioned, my eldest sister's best friend then is now my wife; I met her through my sister. They chummed around together and were at our place occasionally. Helen, my wife's sister, was in our class, and Joe and Helen started dating. I ended up dating Marian. I'm not quite sure how the relationships developed, but Joe ended up dating Helen most of the way through high school. In terms of social sophistication, he was significantly beyond me, in that he'd been messing around with girls from age 1 1 , 1 think, My first date was when I was in grade 1 1 . 1 was 16 or so. Both my wife and I were pretty naive when we first started dating, when I was 17. But by that time Joe had been dating women for years. Did he give you advice on girls? Well, he'd encourage me to ask girls out. If I said I thought a particular girl was attractive, he would try to encourage me or shame me into asking her for a date, Which I never really ended up doing, because my wife asked me out the first time! Was he already a musical guy in high school? Yeah, he played guitar at home. There was a blonde bombshell in high

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school — Marian, what was her name again? Susie. One of these flamboyant Madonna types. I remember at one school dance, she and Joe played — Marian, what was the song? "Splish Splash, I Was Taking a Bath." Joe was on the guitar, and she was singing. So he played occasionally at school, though I don't recall that he ever was part of a band. He was involved in music, and in sports, like football and so on. I was involved in soccer and track. We did our homework together, a lot of times just on the phone. There was a little airport behind Joe's property. We used to sit out on the fence posts behind his house, watching airplanes take off and land. We both used to have a fascination for airplanes. I don't think Joe ever pursued it, but I got my pilot's licence while I was still in high school, and I still fly occasionally. It sounds like it was a nice place to grow up. Oh, we had a great time. Although I don't think Joe was particularly happy with his home life. His parents were close to 20 years older than my parents. And I think he was kind of lonely at home by himself. He was at the end of a long road with no neighbours nearby and no friends to play with. My life was exactly the opposite — I was overwhelmed. We had a tiny little house, and with seven kids, it was pandemonium. I think one of my attractions, for Joe, was my family — Marian's just saying, the farm was part of his home, almost. We used to grow apples commercially. Joe used to like coming there. A lot of the painting that he's done relates to that, to the apple farm and to my parents. My father died when I was in grade 12, and I think that had a big impact on Joe as well. Ves, he mentioned that. Can you tell me about the circumstances? Well, he had Lou Gehrig's disease, amyotropic lateral sclerosis, and was significantly ill for several years. He died when he was 48. I kind of grew up with it; for several years before he died, we all knew that he was termi-

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nally ill. It was a part of my teenaged years, and so as an individual event, his death probably had less impact on me than it would on someone like Joe, who wasn't as closely involved. For the family, it wasn't a surprise.

HIGH

SCHOOL

I was alienated in all the schools I went to, either because I was persecuted for being a dirty Jew-pig, or because I didn't fit into anything. I mean, I really identified with ET. That movie is my favourite movie in the whole world. I am ET's brother. Or whatever he or she wants to call me. I had fears about going to a high school where there were only three Jews, two of whom were twins. If you're any kind of minority, you always know that sooner or later, you're going to get it. There weren't really any identifiable minorities in Richmond Hill High School back then. There were a couple of Asian kids, I remember one guy played football. Maybe one or two mixed racial people. But really it was a very white Canada, I guess, back then, except in pockets. I didn't stand out that much, I don't think. I don't know how they percieved me. I always felt that I was awkward. I was smitten with music, though, and the music provided me with a way in to functioning socially. I was smitten with other things too: Motorcycles. And I was just wild about girls. Since I was five or six, I just loved girls. But I found myself through music. Once I performed in front of people, it helped me become somebody. I liked the fact that people would like me because I could do this music thing. I became outgoing and learned how to be an extrovert. I'm actually a very shy person. If my parents hadn't bought my sister a guitar, I'd not be a guitar player today. I'd be a drummer for sure. That would have been my instrument of choice. But when I was born, they bought my sister a guitar as a special treat, because she was going to have to tolerate

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having a baby around. They sent her to lessons, but Sybil had no talent whatsoever to play the guitar. So the guitar sat in the closet till I found it, and I was old enough to realize that I was smitten with music. Helen Knott was my girlfriend for a while. Her father was a milkman. They lived in Richmond Hill, a typical working-class family. Helen and I were in the same Grade 10 class. We were 15. Helen was slender, very smart. Brown hair. I was just an average horny boy. Helen would bake me chocolate chip cookies. I was enamoured with her, but at that age I was enamoured with anything that had breasts! She was kind to me and never did me any harm. But I don't think she was the right girl for me, and I definitely wasn't the right boy for her. I had plenty of girlfriends before and after Helen. I had kissed lots of girls before I was 15; I was having sex when I was 13.1 had a girlfriend who lived in the city; as soon as I was old enough to ride Jimsy's father's motorcycle, I used to commute to the city to see Linda. There was also Francine, who had the largest breasts in Richmond Hill High School. When I was 17,1 think I was probably a bit of a Lothario.

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Motorcycles and Other Fast Machines AESTHETICS I learned how to ride a motorcycle at age 15, and man, once I got the motorcycle disease, I had the disease. The one I learned on, which was Jimsy's father's bike, was a Sunbeam 500, an English bike, a big motorcycle to learn on. The first one I ever owned myself was a BMW, which I picked up at the BMW factory in Munich, in '66. It was slow, trucklike, and reliable. That's what BMWS are still like, but today they're a little smoother, they're less trucklike. BMW makes a good bike. Harley Davidson makes the icon of conformity for people who have small dicks. It's all about noise. If you want to be a real man, you buy a Harley. A Japanese bike means you're not a real man. I'm not a real man, I have a Yamaha. The best bikes on the planet are Japanese, in my opinion. I am a hypocrite, because I ride a polluting machine, and I allege to be an environmentalist. But I try very hard not to be a hypocrite. I never go for a ride for pleasure; I only use it as a utilitarian machine. If I go for a walk, it really helps to have good shoes — it's better for comfort and for health. If you're going to ride a motorcycle, it helps to ride a good one. It's like having a good pen, and good paintbrushes. My motorbike is like the ultimate 150-horsepower brush that I ride. I've got this genetic disposition towards riding motorcycles and driving cars. I like watching motorcycle road racing a lot. I watch certain types of automobile racing. Formula One, and CART, which is open-wheeled racing American style, one of the many types. Bikes are much more liberating than cars. Cars are physically bound by other cars. Motorcycles, you have the advantages of a bicycle and a horse, and with many horse-power.

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From a very early age, I loved airplanes too, aesthetically. Including fighter planes. The idea of shooting and hurting people didn't appeal to me, ever, but I loved the aesthetic design and how they could do what they could do. I'm fascinated with flying. You don't have to know how to paint to like art. I have never flown a jet plane, but I'm nuts about jet planes. It's about having an ability to appreciate what life offers, whether it's art or design. I didn't pursue flying, I just love the design of planes. I sure love looking at them. I find some war machines gorgeous to look at, even though they do horrible things. It's all the same stuff to me. It's about an aesthetic appreciation for everything that comes your way. There are certain vehicles that I see beautiful designs in. When I talk to women about this subject, some of them look at me like I'm from Uranus, but some of them look at me and say, "Yeah, I get it." My motorcycle is beautiful because it had a degree of almost outer-space design. Many people find aesthetic beauty in motorcycles or cars. I'm lucky — I get it from almost everything but opera.

DR. PHILIP BERGER: I went on a ride with him once, on his motorbike. Not long ago — last fall. I know it's not a double sealer, but for years I wanted to ride it He took me on it, and I was hanging onto him for dear life. It's hard to get your arms around Joe entirely, I'll tell you. I was leaning right into him, just terrified. He's the most defensive, careful driver you could imagine. I'd put my life in his hands on the roads anytime. He's absolutely correy the way he drives. Doesn't trust anybody. You'll notice that his motorcycle has the tiniest mirrors you're legally allowed to have on a motorcycle. The reason is, he thinks they're useless and you should never depend on them. You should be shoulder-checking all the time and not relying on the mirror. And in fact he's absolutely right, that's the safest way to drive. He also believes that if you're

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Joe's 1950 Vincent Rapide, photographed by Joe in 1971. in a car you shouldn't listen to radio. I don't comply with that rule - I do listen to music in the car — but I understand it. And it's turned out that he's absolutely right about cell phones — he believes you should never talk on the phone in your car, and the truth is they are risky, there are more accidents.

Where did you go on your motorcycle ride? We went from his house to Bathurst. We went by Casa Loma, where the wall is. I wanted to get a sense of the power of being out in the air. He loaned me a spare helmet he had; it was too big, he put a towel in it for me. Had you ever been on a motorcycle before? Well, as a kid, but not since, which was why I wanted to do this. I'd like to

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get a bike myself. Joe was very good about it, he got me all this information about lessons, but I haven't proceeded with them. My wife doesn't want

me to do it.

SAFETY I've only been in two motorcycle accidents since I started riding. Crashes, they're not accidents, they're crashes. I believe that crashes are always about incompetence. And I always want to know if I screwed up. Both crashes were legally somebody else's fault; they admitted that they were at fault. But I blame myself for putting myself in jeopardy. I do take responsibility for things. The first one, I injured my left foot. My boot was torn off and they took me to the hospital, and I took a cab home on crutches. That was in 1968. The second crash that happened, on Yonge St., in 1997, was virtually the same situation — someone who was parked in the right-hand lane did a U-turn as I was going by them. Both times I blame myself for not being aware of the fact that they could and would do that. I don't wear leathers, I wear shorts. I don't believe in protective clothing. The helmet I know is necessary, because that's where you keep the brains, and it's the law. I've always worn helmets. But rearview mirrors are a placebo, and all that protective clothing is a placebo; it gives you a false sense of security. There is no security, ever, on a bicycle or a motorcycle. The greatest security you can have is to know there's no security. You have to learn how to handle your bicycle or your motorcycle. I always tell people to take the driver training courses, so they can learn how quick, and how fickle, and how incompetent people are. If you think they have some safety and security, you'll become a victim. There's never a time on a motorcycle

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when you're safe, even when the engine's off. It could fall over on you! What do you do if 500 pounds falls on your leg?

BOB WISEMAN: His personality is characterized largely by a commitment to safety at all times. Safety in living among machines, really. As a pedestrian, or as a motorcycle or automobile driver. I moved to the country five years ago, and frequently in my conversations with him he asks about how I'm driving, how fast I'm driving. He tells'me to be careful, he sent me decals to put on the back of my car that flash - that reflective material. He sent me a sticker that says "CONCENTRATE" to put on the steering column. I had a cellular phone a while ago, when they first came out, for touring. I told him I had it, and he was like, 'Are you on it right now? Hang up! If you're on it right now I don't want to talk to you! Hang up, I'll call you back!"

CHAPTER TWO

SOLO DAYS TO G L O R Y DAYS

(1964-1971) CALGARY I left home briefly when I was 17, but I went back, which was a mistake. At 19 I left home permanently. I went out to Calgary for the summer of '64. A friend of my father's had a warehouse out there. They needed summer help in the warehouse, and I was told if I could get to Calgary, I could make $75 a week. So I drove a school bus to Calgary, delivered it to some school board. They manufacture school buses over here, and that's how they get them out West. I appreciated the fact that I didn't have to hunt for the warehouse job, as every summer I used to have to hunt for work. I had done some horrible summer work — I had to clean up garbage, and I used to clean out horse barns, construction, sewer cleaning, that kind of stuff. And I later worked doing window displays, I did odd jobs for a guy who ran a clothing store. Joe jobs. That summer was when I started performing for money. It was a pretty heavy load: I'd perform at night and work by day. I was living in a rooming house on llth Ave. West, right downtown. I lived in an

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attic room — one room, one shared toilet in the whole house — and the rent was $25 a month. So I was fucking rolling in money. I was making $75 a week at the day job, plus sometimes I'd make $150 a week playing music. I paid for my second year in university, easy! The first place I played, and the first place I ever got paid, was called the Depression Folk Club, which was famous because some very famous people played there, such as Joni Anderson (who became Joni Mitchell), and David Wiffen, and Brent Titcomb. The Irish Rovers started there. I played there regularly throughout that summer. But the real money was not in folk clubs, the real money was playing to the morons drinking at motels. I used to do all these horrible jobs playing to people who drank. I don't play places like that anymore; I call those places toilets, vomitoria. I was still learning to be a performer back then. You have to do it to learn it; there's no school you can go to.

FLEA I came back to Toronto in the fall, and I started playing at the Half Beat on a regular basis every week. It was on Avenue Road, very close to Elgin Avenue, just up from what became the Four Seasons Hotel. I lived in a horrible dump on Elgin. It was owned by this couple in their fifties. They lived like slobs. I don't know how many children they had. Every room in the house, except the back room on the ground floor, was rented out to people. The basement was rented out to some guy who rode a Suzuki Hustler (250 cc, 2-stroke), the ground floor was rented out to I don't know how many guys, the second floor was rented out to a whole bunch of guys living all together. My buddy Jimsy lived on that floor, that's how I wound up in that house. The top floor was a single mother with 2 children, and a senior citizen guy who used to rape her fairly regularly. It was

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Newlyweds Joe and Flea in 1966.

PHOTO BY ROLF GRUMSKY

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bizarre, filthy. And everyone — there were maybe 20 people — shared one disgusting toilet. I lived above the kitchen. There was a hole in the floor, so when they cooked their food I got all the stink. But it was cheap. That's when I met Flea. Her name was Lea, but her friend called her Flea; she became Flea to me. She was a waitress at the Half Beat. I was playing there a couple nights a week; paid my rent. She would always make my lunch. She was feeding me, and so I got to like this woman. If someone offers me food and is kind to me, it makes me want to know them. She had a boyfriend at the time, so I didn't bother her at all, but we liked each other. She lived with a girl in an apartment building where the Four Seasons now is. One night they had a party, and she invited me, and somehow at the party I recognized that she was sweet on me, even though she had her boyfriend with her. I said something like, "Why don't we go for a ride tomorrow?" And after that, I got involved with her. I was 20, she was 19. She was really slender, 5'6"3 fairly blonde, very lovely, beautiful skin. She affected an English/Irish accent. Her family was Irish, but I think she was putting it on a little bit. Still, it was attractive. And she was kind, and smart. I was just a hormoneat-large. And I loved her, as much as a 20-year-old knows what love is, and she clearly loved me. In 1965,1 moved to another rooming house, on Admiral Road. It was another dump, but not as bad a dump. It's some rich person's house now — probably worth a million bucks. It was a pot nest — everyone in the building was a fucking drug taker except me. Everyone was on pot all the time. Nothing but hippies. I wasn't a hippie; I could not relate to that. I was going to school, I rented a room there, I paid my way playing music. I went to the University of Toronto from '63 to '66. I almost dropped out; I know I should never have gone. I wouldn't have finished the last year, but Flea convinced me to do it. I went to university because I made a promise to my mother, and I mistakenly

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Joe performing with the original Old Upper Canada Ragtime Mama Jugband, in 1965. Joe, Donna Marie DeBolt, Marvin Terrell, Randy Torno.

kept that promise. All parents want their children to go to university. My parents thought they were doing the right thing; they thought an education meant you would do well in life. But it was a waste of my time. If I'd dropped it and focussed more on the music — well, it's hard to say where I'd be today. I did get a degree from the University of Toronto. A Bachelor of Arts — and I am a bachelor, and I am an artist. I married Flea in '66. I was 21, she was 19. I had just finished school. We rented a huge apartment at 21 Avenue Road. We rented some of the rooms to other people so we could save money to go to Europe. The place had 2 bathrooms and several bedrooms; we rented it all out. Dealing with humans makes me puke, so it was not a nice experience, but we wanted the money. I think Flea was still a waitress. I was teaching music, I think I worked at University of

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Toronto Bookstore then. And playing, of course. At around that time I did a job in Timmins; I spent 14 hours on a fucking train, going to Timmins. For 100 bucks, to play for a week. It's no fun on a train — smokers just kill you; back then everyone smoked, it was allowed.

J1MSY MANNING: After high school, I went to Guelph for my first year of university. But then in second year I decided to switch to Toronto, It happened that the rooming house that i lived in had a room available, so I ended up living in the same house as Joe. We both lived there for a couple of years. Then I got married before I finished school, and he got married right after he graduated, and we ended up living in the same apartment building; that was also by accident as opposed to design. That building was on Avenue Road at Cumberland. It was an old 3-storey apartment building that used to be where the Four Seasons Hotel is now. This was in 1966, 1967 - the height of the hippie movement in Toronto. But I don't think Joe would have considered himself a hippie, and I certainly wasn't. I probably was in a coffee house in Yorkville three times in my whole life, and mainly that was because Joe encouraged me to come to see his playing. When Joe moved in after getting married, he painted his bedroom in flat black, and he had his wife's picture on the wall in a toilet seat, so you had to lift up the toilet seat cover to see her. How did she feel about that? Well, I don't remember that she had any negative comments about it, Did he have any explanation for why she was in a toilet seat? I don't think he needed an explanation, If we had any art on the walls, it would have been much more conventional. Joe and I started to drift apart at that point I finished university, went on and got a master's degree, and

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went out and got a job and stayed in that job for almost 15 years. Joe was working at his music, but I'm not aware of him ever having a job since he graduated from university. He's always been a freelance free spirit.

EUROPE WITH FLEA In 1966, Flea and I went to Europe for four months; travelled around, stayed in cheap hotels called pensions. Going to Europe was a very common thing that people did then, especially people not going straight into the workforce. I bought a brand-new BMW motorcycle which I picked up at the factory in Miinchen, Munich. Flea got sick in Munich; they looked after her very well in the hosJoe Mendelson, 1966 pital there, and I was very PHOTO BY KASPARS DZEGUZE pleased with that. Then we toured all over. We went down to Austria, to Italy, and rode around there, rode around over to Monaco, France, Spain, back up to France and then over to England. We went and visited her family in Belfast. Then we came back to England, then we came back to Canada. We almost stayed in England; we probably should have stayed in England. Every time I've been to England, I always say to myself, I should've stayed there.

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There were some good experiences. We saw major poverty in Spain, people living in garbage and things like that. Seeing poverty always changes how you look at life. And when we were crossing from Spain through Andorra, which is a little country between Spain and France, we went across the mountains in snow. That was my first experience riding a motorcycle in snow. Flea wasn't interested in motorcycles. She was literally along for the ride. I already regretted being married. In retrospect, I was an immature, part-time asshole. Flea wasn't the problem; I was the problem. We got back to Canada, moved into a place on Hillsborough. Flea started working in the Bank of Montreal. In 1969, we moved to Lowther, the second floor of a house, but we only lived there a month or so. I was starting to get known then, and when they realized they had a pop star living with them, they didn't like it at all, and we were forced out. I could've fought it, but I don't want to be where I don't belong. We wound up at 2 Sultan Street.

MCKENNA MENDELSON MAINLINE: ORIGINS In the spring of 1968,1 answered an ad that Michael McKenna put in the Star or Telegram. He initiated this thing, and for a guy who's as passive as he is, that's quite significant. We started the group, the two of us. He was an electric guitarist, I was an acoustic guitarist. I didn't have any experience playing in electric bands; McKenna had a lot of experience. At the beginning, it was McKenna, myself, Tony Nolasco, a drummer from Sudbury, who was much younger than us, and Timothy O'Leary, who was an American bass player. In our first month of playing together, we dumped O'Leary and replaced him with Dennis Gerrard, who was probably a genius bassist. But he was fired in '68, by the end of the summer. Tony Nolasco suggested another bassist, whom we hired: Michael Harrison, whom I refer to as Harry.

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McKenna Mendelson Mainline, Summer, 1968. Joe, Dennis Gerrard, Michael McKenna, Tony Nolasco.

He's a social worker now. He was a phenomenal bass player. The next bass player was Zeke Sheppard, who was the brother-in-law of Tony Nolasco. He died from lung cancer, he was a heavy smoker. The next bass player after him — we went through a lot of bass players — was Edward William Purdy, who is a lawyer today. After a couple of months, we made a demo tape, which was stolen and later appeared as a bootleg. That album has been put out on CD too. It has reference vocals. A demo tape is usually a live recording, as opposed to a recording that has overdubs. So often when a band would make a demo tape, the producer would have the band come in and record the songs live. They use the term "live off the floor."

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In this case, we were doing a demo tape, but we were going to use the band's live performance and over dub my vocals. So the band recorded the instrumental parts of the songs live, and I sang along with them; the vocals were just as a guide for the band. I think I sing out of tune — it's high energy, but it's not quality singing. But I never got a chance to re-sing the vocal parts on an overdub, because the tapes were stolen. The so-called producer, whose name I can't even remember now, he stole it, and disappeared from Toronto — I know he disappeared, 'cause I looked for him! Then maybe a year and a half or two years later, I think in early '70 or late '69, an album appeared using my artwork (for which I was never paid), using our performances (which we were never paid for), on the label Paragon. That album has now been sold to some other asshole, and it's been released as a CD. It's called McKenna Mendelson Blues. In my opinion, it's totally unacceptable, but you can't imagine the number of people who tell me how great it is. It makes me puke. I figure I've been screwed for huge amounts of money for something I hate. I went to a lawyer to see what could be done, and the lawyer wanted 5 grand as a retainer to get an injunction to stop this thing. I had already been in the music business long enough, even by then (like a year or 2 after we made the demo) to know that the music business is about business. It's not a whole lot different from crime. I don't know how much money I was screwed for personally on this stolen bootleg album, but I can tell you, if I spent my time worrying about how I got screwed in life, I'd be a very screwed-up person. I don't think about these things.

ENGLAND With Michael Harrison on bass, and with our then manager Warren Haller, we all went to England, where we built a following immediately, quickly, because we were very good. Oh yeah, I forgot to

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mention: We were very good at our job. We were just hot. We played bluesy music, not emulative blues, but rock blues. I wrote the songs, I sang, I played guitar, harmonica, and bass. McKenna played the guitar, and he definitely enhanced my songs. Harrison was the key to why we were so good, in my opinion; he was brilliant. And Tony played well with Mike Harrison. There you have it. We'd play someplace in England, and the next time we'd go back there, there were lineups. They appreciated us because we were good. That wouldn't happen in Canada. In Canada, you can be good at something and it doesn't mean anything. We worship clonery and mediocrity in pop music. Anybody doing anything remotely original has, I think, no future in Canada, unless they succeed in another place first. We were in England six months. We should have stayed there. I hated touring. Until we got our record deal — even after we got our record deal — we had to go all over England and Scotland in the back of a fucking little truck. I mean a small truck, not even as big as a minivan. Full of equipment, with four musicians, plus the driver, who was also the equipment man. It was horrible! Once we played some town in the south of England, and I had to go and convince a guy to pay us. I know I can be intimidating, and in some cases my intimidating nature got me out of sticky situations. I can't remember the name of the town. At that point I was taking drugs. (The first illegal drug I ever took in my life was LSD. Start with the biggies! I did a few jobs on LSD, which was totally irresponsible and wrong.) The drug I was taking in England was just hashish. Hash was common among the players. I don't like marijuana, I hate cigarettes, but I always liked hashish, because I liked the smell, and I liked for a while how it got me high. And, you know, I was a conformist. So I can't remember the town. But this place we played, I'm pretty sure it was a pub. This was before our record came out, and before our record came out we were playing nothing but vomitoria. This tells you how much we struggled: We were getting probably 100 pounds or less for a show. Back then a pound bought about 3 bucks

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or so. This was for 4 guys, plus an equipment person, plus the manager, plus the agent. So it was very small money. But the guy didn't want to pay. He said he didn't have any money, but we'd just had a successful evening, and there were plenty of people there, and ! knew he was lying. Then he said he didn't have the money there, but he had it at home. I thought that was pretty strange. And I didn't want to let him go — oh no. He wasn't going anywhere. If I'd let him go, he could've gone home and call the cops. So I said, "Well, I guess I'm gonna have to come home with you. Because we need to be paid for our work." And I went home with him in his Mini (a little English car). I didn't hurt him or anything, but I explained to him that I would not leave till I was paid. And he gave rne the money. Our first legitimate record was the Stink album, which was recorded in the spring of '69 in London, in a famous studio the Beatles recorded at, in Soho. It's fairly embarrassing lyrically, some of it. Some of it isn't. With the Stink album, things started to take off. We were playing more and more. But before the album got made, we did a onenighter in Utrecht, Holland; we played a big festival there. When we were about to leave the airport in Amsterdam, a baggage truck knocked part of the wing of the airplane off. We did a lot of jobs around London, like 50 miles out. We were at the level of doing what were called "ballrooms." They had bars, but ballrooms were dance halls. They were nice, physically nice. We once did a lovely dancehall in Detroit called the Grandee Ballroom. It was gorgeous. So we were doing big halls where people danced, or often they sat on the floor.

SUCCESS

IN

CANADA

So we got a record deal. We signed to Liberty/United Artist Records, made an album, and we came back to Canada. We should have

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stayed in England, built our following higher and higher, and then gone from there to the States and other places on various tours. But we came back to Canada. It was a mistake. I blame myself. But we flourished here. In '69 and '70, we were pop stars here. Our alburn came out, and we had a Top Ten hit with the first song.

(John Oswald has worked with Joe as a musician and recording engineer.) JOHN OSWALD: I first saw Joe play when I was about 12 or 13 years old. This was sometime around '69, CKCO-TV in Waterloo had a Friday night show called "Canadian Bandstand." They played music, mostly top 40 hits, and people would dance. My friends and I would regularly go down there to dance, and then we'd try to watch ourselves on Saturday afternoons, but we'd dance so strangely they'd usually not put us on camera. So every now and then it was like, "There's your arm!" Very occasionally, maybe it only happened once, they would have an allegedly live band that would lip-sync to their hit record. They had McKenna Mendelson Mainline on once. I hadn't seen very much live music, and I was kind of impressionable. Most of the musicians tended to fake their thing — the drummer had his hi-hat clamped down so it wouldn't make any noise, the guitar player had the cord from his guitar tied around the hihat, and I thought this was all very clever. But what I found quite amazing was that Joe, who was singing and playing harmonica, was actually singing and playing harmonica He wasn't faking it. And he wasn't playing in sync with what we were hearing coming out of the loudspeakers, and what you'd hear in TV Land. He was really playing! That impressed me. It also impressed me that he was wearing about six or seven different belts, which I think he was making at the time, and he was a big guy. So I remembered him.

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AUSTRALIA Before you knew it, we were booked to do a tour in Australia, opening for an American band called Frigid Pink. We went to Australia, and that's a long ride, that's 24 hours on the airplanes. The first time we went, we stayed a month. We didn't go all over Australia, but we were in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney — we were based in Sydney — and Brisbane. The biggest city in Australia is Melbourne, and climate-wise it's moderate, it's probably like Windsor. But if you go to Brisbane, north of Sydney — that's semi-tropical. For me, one of the most fascinating things about Australia was that when you looked out and saw birds, instead of looking at robins and starlings, you saw budgie birds and parakeets. Very beautiful to look at, and I'm a bird guy. I was fascinated. But it's a hot place, central Australia. And once you get to Brisbane, God it's so fucking hot. I hate heat. So I didn't want to be there. Frigid Pink, the band we were touring with, was a trio and they were hacks, they couldn't play very well, but they had a huge hit with a song that had been a hit for other groups, called "House of the Rising Sun." They were a terrible group. Every time we opened for them, we made it very difficult for them because we were so good. The tour was poorly organized, so we were stuck in a hotel in Sydney. The deal was on this tour that all expenses were paid. I gained ten pounds in that place, I was eating lobster every five minutes. Couldn't stop. I like lobster. We were having a lot of drugs supplied to us. When you go to a new place, everyone wants to interview you. I was the spokesperson for the group, 'cause the other guys, in my opinion, had nothing to say. When they did speak, it was good that they didn't speak much. So I was being interviewed till I was hoarse. I remember sitting in the hotel restaurant at breakfast one morn-

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ing, having just ingested a whole bunch of mescaline, and 1 was being interviewed about the name of the band, Mainline. They always wanted to associate the name with drugs. I tried to explain it's really about what happens when you have a bunch of train lines — the main line is called the mainline. That's where the name came from — from trains. Not from arteries or veins. So I'm sitting there, and this guy's interviewing me, asking me all these straight questions. And the mescaline's starting to take effect. And I see the sugar running around the table. I actually saw grains of sugar moving all over the table! When you're hallucinating, you don't think "This is a hallucination." It is happening. Lven though your brain sort of knows you're on mescaline. So I know I misbehaved during that interview; 1 was irresponsible. 1 was trying to explain my views on drugs to this guy. My views were not as liberal then as they are now, but I thought marijuana should be legal. It's stupid to say that a natural growing weed is an illegal substance. You don't even have to process it! No-one even has to do anything except plant a seed and smoke what it grows. How can it be a bad thing? Alcohol promotes stupidity — you've never heard of people getting into a fight after smoking a joint. So I'm trying to explain this stuff to this guy, but I made a fool of myself, because I was watching the sugar, and I must have allowed him to know that 1 was hallucinating at the time. And then the next day, there was a huge two-page spread in the centre of the newspaper about Mainline and my views on drugs. The picture showed a woman lying on a bed, looking like she had just injected something, under the name Mainline. It was big news.Well, hey, newspaper people want to make you into a story. I realized then that we were going to get into serious trouble in that country. At rhe time, we had just made a purchase of some hashish. And we were to travel to either Melbourne or Adelaide on a plane. After this article appeared in the newspaper, we became very, very paranoid. So another band member, I will not mention his name, we split the quarter ounce of hash and we each ate an eighth

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of an ounce of hash. 1 was stoned for days. That's a large amount of hash to eat. But at least they didn't find any drugs on us. We were constantly harassed by the cops, because of the name Mainline. That first Australian tour wasn't as bad, because the people running the tour owned the police. But one of my songs, "Pedalictus Rag" on an album I made in '71, was about how the cops barged through our room in the hotel. They knocked on the door and in they walked. And the second time we came to Australia, the police handcuffed us at the airport. I think drugs should be totally legal. 1 don't think you should be called a criminal if you take drugs. I don't take drugs anymore, by the way, except Tylenol once in a while. I think drugs aren't the problem, the problem is our culture; our society is twisted and it promotes the use of alcohol and drugs. You don't want to make people who use heroin into criminals. What you want to do is help them with their drug thing if you can, make 'em productive. Don't make them beat up little old ladies for the money to buy the drugs. It's a waste of time. The health hazards of smoking are well known: why aren't those people called criminals? We played mostly university concerts in Australia. The press would write about us favourably, the next cities would get wind of the good press, and we'd do well as a result. We played one bar in Sydney a couple of times. We played there once, and the next time we played there it was full to the rafters. There were lots of groupies. Although that was something that I didn't pursue as much as some of the other band members. If you ask them, they may tell you about it proudly. Yes, I engaged in some freelance smooching, and I betrayed my wife. But even though 1 was the singer, I don't think I attracted the women nearly as much as some of the other musicians. I think that I was probably a little more frightening to people. Enough people told me that I was scary. I did have many, many, many experiences, pre-Ains. I didn't want

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to be a philanderer, and I didn't want to be a promiscuous man, even after I parted with my wife. But I have an appetite, and unless I find the right sweetheart, my approach is: do the research. Science is my life! So I did a lo: of research. But once I found someone 1 could commune with, I was faithful to her. 1 never betrayed anybody after 1977. Not once.

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A Fellow Musician In about 1966 or '67, David approached me out of nowhere. He was determined to come and play for me and prove to me how great he was. That's his goal. And he was great indeed. He had learned and had absorbed all the mannerisms of a guy named Robert Johnson, who's long dead, who was an American blues songwriter and musician. So David is not a quintessential original, in my opinion. But I'll say without hesitation, he's one of the greatest guitar players I've ever heard.

Do you remember first meeting Joe? DAVID WILCOX: Yes. It was around 1967. I was 17 or so. I had heard about him, and I was interested in him, and he was giving a solo concert at the Colonnade — there used to be a little theatre in there. I'm not sure if there is anymore. A friend and I went. And I went up to him afterwards and said, "Could I jam with you sometime?" And he was somewhat put off with that. If somebody asked me the same way, I'd probably be put off too. I was a rather cocky person in those days. A little while later, I noticed an ad in the paper saying, "Mendelson Joe gives guitar lessons." Well, I called him up and said I'd like lessons in slide guitar. Now, I had been working on slide guitar very very hard. And I'd already heard him play it. I thought "Okay, I'm going to show this guy a few things." So at the appointed hour I went, and he said, "Let's hear you warm up.' Well. I played the best stuff I knew to warm up! Now, to his everlasting credit, he had complete humility. He said, "I can't teach you anything;' Another student came, and he told the other student that one of the most important lessons is to be able to listen, and so they listened to me play for awhile. As I say, I wasn't very nice; I was young and cocky. But that's how I met Mendelson, and that's how we became friends.

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It was some time after that that McKenna Mendelson Mainline became successful. I never went to see them play. But I was working in Sam the Record Man when "Watch Out" came out, which was one of their singles, and I remember people being excited about it. I can talk to Joe about all kinds of things: political opinions and art, and ethics. "What would you do if?" All kinds of theoretical discussions. We've never lacked for anything to talk about. And even when we disagree, it's always interesting, and I generally learn something, and I feel heard. Which I can't say about everybody I disagree with. I don't always feel like I've learned something, and I don't always feel heard. Was his political and ethical stance back then, as a young man, similar to what it is now? It was probably less aware, but so was mine. I can't speak for him, but I would guess that the person who wrote a song called "Fifty Foot Penis" would have been a different guy than the guy I've known in the last few years. Has he talked to you about his disillusionment with the music business? He's definitely disillusioned about the music business. I find him a bit more cynical than I am about it. It feels to me like he takes an automatically negative view of people at large record companies. To some extent he's right; it is a very screwed-up business. My opinion is that music itself is such a magnificent sacred thing that it has to be surrounded by tremendous ugliness just to balance its existence in the universe. But I still think there's hope, and occasionally something really wonderful comes through, Sinead O'Connor or something, that really does have a lot of integrity. Has he encouraged you to write letters? He has encouraged me to, and I have spoken up a bit, made one or two phone calls, things like that, but I'm not the activist he is. I tend to operate

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in a different way. I've felt tremendous need for acceptance, in my way of getting along in the world and in life. My path is different than his. I respect his very much. But he has encouraged me, and I haven't responded perhaps to his liking. We're just different that way. I've occasionally found him self-righteous, but by the same token I'm very grateful that he's in the world. I think he makes it a much better place, largely by his activities — the letters that he writes, and you know. Once when I was broke, I asked Mendelson to buy me a meal, and he did. He's someone I would call if I was in trouble. I really love him a lot, I just wanted to say that.

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Musical Tendencies I've recorded 24 albums, but only 14 have actually come out. My stuff doesn't sell; the kids aren't interested in what 1 do. What are your musical influences? Who do you admire? At my age, I'm not influenced easily by anyone anymore. The music of the people I admired when I was 11 is still the music I admire. But most of the people whose work I loved devolved. Most of the people who I thought were great artists became lesser and lesser artists as they succeeded economically. It seems to me that people do get lost sometimes when they get fat. When you get a taste of stardom, you usually get dumb. I loved the music of Little Richard, very early Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Reed; there was a very short period when their music influenced me. But the fact is by the time the '60s came, their music was impotent. There are still people I like today. When I listen to Bjork I get excited. I like Beck. I like Big Sugar — I love that group, can't believe they're so good at what they do, can't believe they're so underappreciated. The type of music they do happens to be a type that I'm very knowledgeable about, because I played it. After I was exposed to it, I loved the music of Jimi Hendrix's first couple of albums. It's usually when an artist is at an early stage that they seem to be the most exciting for me. I'm fascinated by those who can sustain the dream. Who does? There's a singer named Gwen Swick, who sings on my recordings. She's also a genius songwriter. Bob Wiseman: Bob seems to sustain my attention completely. I'm interested in people who are prepared

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to explore, take risks. These are unusual. In order to develop, you have to take chances. Anything that has any meaning usually is based in truth; it's not schlock. When I listen to Bryan Adams, I think of the guy counting money. That's basically what it's about, is placating a market. If you play to a market, you're not really an artist, you're a businessperson. And I'm not against business; I don't think business is necessarily a bad thing. I just think that it's important to understand that if our culture becomes a culture of Celine Dions and Bryan Adamses, it's a culture of utter saccharine emptiness, performed by skilled automatics. Every time I perform, I extend myself. When you play music, it's transient — it's not like when you write stuff down, you can look back on the page and if it's good it stands. It's risky. Nothing I do is safe. What do you mean by that? The lyrics of a song are there, and there's a structure. But I still play with the structure. I like to make fun of myself. I like to improvise. If you sing a song and it's already stuck in the file up in your head, then it's in you, and you can just be a singer, you can deliver this thing however you think it's supposed to be. Unless someone else interprets your work. I interpret my own stuff, and because I am a very very developed musician, as well as the writer and the composer of the song, it's a pleasurable experience to extend myself. To give complete vitality to something that may be 30 years of age. When I sing a song from the '60s called "I Think I'm Losing My Marbles," I can still sing it with complete authority, because I'm still living on that edge. I consider my music to be art. I don't write a song as a hobby, I do it because it's my life's work. When I write a song, it's about reality and truth, it's not about going to and from the bank. My songs are not briefcase music.

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I can write the best poem of my life by accident, or I can work at a poem for 5 years and never get it right. Songwriting is more complex because it involves music and alleged poetry. If you take enough stabs at something, and it's done with passion and you have some element of talent, by default sooner or later serendipity will bless you. It's called the Muse. I ascribe my successes as an artistic man to the fact that I keep trying. I'm not a polished, pensive, Leonard Cohen type of guy. I'm a spewaholic. I spew occasionally well.

JOHN OSWALD:: Around 1982,1 recorded an album with Joe called Not Safe. I was the recording engineer. What was he like to work with? Great; inspiring in a lot ot ways. He would come in and he would sit down and he would do a performance. I think the first song we did was "I Am a Cockroach." These days, Joe usually sings in a quiet tone. But he also has this real growl, that was a lot more prevalent in his performances back then. "I Am a Cockroach" was an angry song: "I am a cockroach, and you are a cockroach too! We live together in poopoo," or something like that. He just screamed it out. After one take: "Okay, that's done." He was stomping his foot, playing guitar, we added Colin Linden on guitar as well. It was quite satisfying. It was almost entirely a solo Joe album. There were some other stellar guitarists, like Colin, and David Wilcox. It went fast. I was distressed at his mixing process, which was bang-bang-bang! I like to fuss with things for years. In the studio Joe and I are completely the opposite. I'm like a painter. If I want to make something that looks like a dog, I have to paint hundreds and hundreds of strokes and make it look like a dog. He's like a photographer. That's not to say that he doesn't do studio kinds of arrangements, effects, all that sort of stuff. But the core idea is to get something that has this sense of being alive.

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He has me come in and do saxophone parts. It's usually done in one take. I go crazy, and he gets enthusiastic about it, and I'm in and out of there in five minutes,

(Stan "The Fan" Joskowitz has been following Joe's career since 1972. His girlfriend Sue is a more recent convert.) STAN "THE FAN": Do you remember the first time you heard Mainline? Oh yes. I was about sixteen, seventeen. We were drinking at my friend's house, and my friend put on Stink and said, "You gotta hear this when you're drunk!" So we got drunk and he cranked it up and we loved it. We played it over and over again. That's how I got interested in Joe. So I really enjoyed Mainline. Then I saw him interviewed on TV when he released Mr. Middle of the Road. He was wearing a construction helmet, construction boots, and he was sitting by himself, stomping his foot and playing his guitar. At that point he was Joe Middle of the Road. He was looking around for a name. He was going to call himself Elvis Joe, or something, but then he just changed it to Mendelson Joe rather than Joe Mendelson. So I saw him do his solo stuff on City-TV, and I really, really liked the guy, I thought he was a real character, different than everybody else, and not afraid to be different I met him for the first time, actually talked to him and got to know him, around 1983 or '84, at the Bamboo Club. I just called him over to my table as he was walking by. I bought some of his postcards from him, and I told him that I'd really like to write him a letter. He told me to go ahead, and we started exchanging letters, and then I bought a painting off him. As I gained his trust, we became friends. Then I started promoting him, writing letters on his behalf, everywhere. I'd send him a copy of every letter that I wrote about him, and the responses. And eventually I became his archivist and his pro moter.

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How would you describe the way his music has changed over the years? STAN: He used to follow sort of a blues formula. He still sometimes follows that formula in the structure of the songs, but the content has really changed. He used to do what you could call cock-rock, whereas now, he's very socially conscious. Feminist causes and environmental music. Musically, he's a very brilliant musician. His songs are really well-structured. He orchestrates albums like Frank Zappa, almost. He does everything, he controls almost every aspect of the album. SUE: I told him it's a shame that he and Zappa never met. / can see how that would have been quite the meeting of minds. STAN: Although Zappa was a heavy cigarette smoker. SUE: Yeah, that would have been troublesome. But aside from that, they coulda had some interesting conversations: "I think politicians are assholes." "Yeah, so do I." They could've agreed on a lot of stuff!

(Singer-songwriter Bob Wiseman has recorded with Joe several times over the years.) BOB WISEMAN: Joe has a distinct style on the guitar that's unlike anyone I know. I believe he influenced some musicians of his time or shortly thereafter. I've just recently noticed this. Yesterday, while driving back from being on the road, myself and Bob Snider, there was an interview on the radio with Joe Hall, who I believe is a friend of Mendelson Joe's. I think he was in Victoria or something. He played a song, and I don't know if I'm right or wrong, but it seemed to me like this guy had really studied Mendelson

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Joe at some point When he was younger, he must have listened to Joe often. David Wilcox is another guy — when I hear him play, even when I hear the way he sings, it seems to me I can hear the influence in there. Joe has a great improvisational style where he kind of - how do I put it — he'll venture into certain directions on the guitar, in a way that's almost naive, and then he'll resolve things in a way that's surprising. It speaks to how comfortable he is with himself. He plays the guitar like it's almost an extension of him. It's distinctive, even funny. He likes to include the sound of his foot hitting the ground and his breathing deeply, so it all becomes part of a kind of machine. His songwriting is very confessional, stream-ofconsciousness, some of it, and it's also political.

Stan "The Fan" Joskowitz, in the small home office which he has wallpapered with Mainline memorabilia PHOTO BY NADIA HALIM

CHAPTER THREE

THE BUMP 'N' GRIND REVUE

(1971-1974) PROBLEMS

WITH THE

BAND

By 1972, I wanted out. I hated the lifestyle. I hate travel. Even if someone says, "We'll have a jet pick you up, we'll take you there, and you'll stay at the finest hotels, blah blah blah," the process wears you down. I was excited by it the first few times, but after a while, it's all tedious, and it's not for me. I like sleeping in my own bed. As much as I like eating with fancy silverware on thick linen tablecloths, people wanting to kiss my ass in C major 7, it doesn't mean anything to me, and it never really did. It's all unreal, it's all about fucking business. And all that ever matters to me is the actual music. When we played, right up to the end, the music was sound. But I was writing songs that had nothing to do with blues anymore. When you succeed at something, they never want you to change. They don't want the well of money to dry up. As soon as you change, it frightens people. The other guys in the band really liked the ego boosting (when you're on stage, women love you), and they liked the fact that they were on TV, they were in magazines, they were on records. They hoped that they were going to see large loonage down the road. But 48

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we never got into large loonage, because the more money you make, the more money you're spending to keep making it. Working with other people was not good for me psychologically. In the winter of '69, in England, I already knew there was something wrong, and I went to a psychiatrist. I was lucky: I met a shrink who set me straight in 45 minutes! Which means I was straight already, I just needed a little guidance. What was wrong was, I shouldn't be working with other people. I'm not good at working with humans. I'm the problem, doctor. I didn't feel comfortable with those guys, even though we worked together very closely. I resented their laziness, and their values made me puke. I don't like self-centred assholes, and pop stars are always self-centered assholes. I hate the music business. Business makes me puke, in general. I believe in profit sharing, I don't believe in profiteering. I believe in sharing profits with the people who earn them. In 1972 we were making big money for a Canadian act; we were getting $2500 a night. The equivalent today would be, I don't know, ten or 15 grand. We were set to do one show at the Calgary Stampede, then we were going to go up the road to Edmonton to do a job, then we were doing one concert in Winnipeg, and coming back. Three one-nighters. I was on the stage outside in the daytime, doing this one show in Calgary, and I knew right then that I was just going through the motions. You cannot go through the motions, if you're an idealist. It's suicide. I got off the stage, and I told the band in the dressing room that I couldn't do this anymore, and that after Winnipeg, which was our last booking on this tour, that was it for me. Of course they thought I was nuts. Even my wife thought I was nuts. But I was stuck in this rut, and I recognized that this was not where I wanted to be anymore. I didn't want to be spending my life with these people. I'm not very interested in playing old songs. When I do a concert, I only ever play a few songs from the past. I've written hundreds of songs, there's usually something I can review and do it well, but I'm more interested in the present.

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McKenna Mendelson Mainline in 1969: (left to right) Michael Harrison, Tony Nolasco, Joe, and Michael McKenna.

PHOTO BY: LIBERTY/UNITED ARTISTS

There was tension, because I was the singer and the songwriter in the group. But after Winnipeg, sure enough, I was done. And when the guy who's the singer, songwriter, and guitarist leaves a band, there's no way to really replace him. They got another guy to replace me for awhile, named Ricky James, but with all due respect to him, he was just a different type of guy, artistically. Though I thought they could have done worse — he had some energy. So the band went on and did further work with him. I don't know exactly what their destruction date was, but it all came apart eventually. Rick James later became a funk singer in the United States. He had a hit song called "Superfreak."

THE BUMP 'N' GRIND REVUE

THE

BUMP

'N'

GRIND

51

REVUE

The last show I did with Mainline (not counting a reunion series that we did a few months later) was an encore show on New Year's Eve, 1975, at the Victory Theatre, which was a strip club at the corner of Spadina and Dundas. We'd done a similar show once before, in February 1972; that one was recorded for an album called the Bump 'n' Grind Revue. It was a simple thing: we played our music, and strippers took off their clothes to it. Back then striptease, the theatrical sex trade, was still to some extent an art form. The exploitation of women's gorgeous bodies still, at that point in Canadian history, had an element of vaudevillian burlesque. For example, we had a comedian open for us. We took the electric blues music, and combined it with the old school burlesque entertainment. It was funny, and we had some very talented women. Blues music to me was always about two things, really: Truth. (Even though some of the greatest blues songs have lots of doubleentendre lyrics, Pve always thought of blues music as being true music, honest music. It's direct.) And, completely, sex. Anything that doesn't have the elements of blues is not real rock 'n' roll. It's some other kind of stuff, it's Wonder Bread. Mainline was famous for the exploitation of women's bodies on our posters, which were drawn by David Andoff. There are feminists who hate me for my exploitation of women as sexual beings. But I celebrate women — not just as sexual objects, I just celebrate women. I don't see anything wrong with it, as long as everyone's doing what they want to do. If a woman wants to work as a stripper, or a hooker, for that matter, rather than work as a secretary, I don't see anything wrong with it. I don't really care if my girlfriend works as a stripper, as long as she's happy. I think I'd have trouble if my girlfriend were a hooker. I don't know how I would deal with that. The way I see it, we exploit ourselves however we can. If I

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Joe in drag, circa 1975. Another portrait from this photo session was used as the cover of the Sophisto album. PHOTO BY WILLIAM WILLIAMS

thought that I could get my music heard by going onstage wearing a G-string or a diaper, I'd wear it in a minute. All the strippers were chosen for the fact that they had specific characters they portrayed. One girl came as a nurse. She rode a little tricycle out on the stage. There was one woman, I made her a leather S & M kind of costume. (I'm a leather worker.) She performed to the motorcycle song. I think she later committed suicide. The star of the Bump 'n' Grind Revue was known as Mother Superior. So she had a nun routine, and she did a good job. I don't remember it all too clearly. Keep in mind, all the time I was playing and singing at the microphone. We were all on the same stage, but there was a runway out into the audience where the stripping was occurring. The band was back at the flat part of the stage.

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I think the show was busted, the cops busted the show — one woman was having sex with a stuffed beaver, I think that's what stopped the show. We did a good job. We pulled a good crowd, too. If I formed a band now and performed with strippers, I'm sure we'd draw a good crowd. Flesh was the reason. And the fact that we were fairly well known in Canada. The recording speaks for itself, if you can find one. A consortium of investors wanted to record the first show. One of them was CRT Records, an international record company which we were signed to at that time. And Thunder Sound, which was Moses Znaimer's baby at the time; he was running a recording studio, amongst other things. That's when I first met Moses. I think he's a bit of a bully — he didn't bully me, but he's the type of person who does intellectually bully people. He tried to get me to do what he wanted in the deal, before the deal was sealed, but of course I didn't comply. By then I was already a hardened guy, having travelled around the world and learned about the way the music business was. I had learned not to take shit from anyone, and not to cooperate unless I at least get to follow my artistic vision. So I did my best, I protected the band from Moses, and in the end we did it my way. We did mix it in his studio. As a result, I think that he recognized that not only was I difficult, but I also had my own vision. We did two shows in one night. It seems so long ago. It was not a pleasure for me. By that time, I still loved doing the music, but my interest in the band was pretty much gone.

Do you recall The Mainline Bump 'n' Grind Revue? MOSES ZMAIMER: I do. I wonder if he's got the year right, because '72 was the year that I launched City. 1971 was the year that I was involved with what was then a new recording studio, which was called Thunder Sound. One of the things that distinguished Thunder Sound at the time

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was that it had the first 16-track recording console in Canada. Somehow, Mendelson convinced me to actually tear that mixing board out of the studio, which was located on Davenport just west of Yonge, and take it over to the burlesque house — the Victory Burlesque, a famous burlesque house which is no longer standing today. And miraculously, the whole damn thing worked. I was crazy to agree to it, because the entire business depended on that board, and machinery is nervous, machinery actually sometimes has a spirit or a soul. I don't know if you've ever noticed that. But some machines work fine as long as you leave them alone. Others are afraid of the dark. When you start moving machinery, especially complex machinery, you're asking for trouble. The board had only recently gone into Thunder Sound, but we moved it, and we moved it back, and somehow it survived. In retrospect, I think I was luckier than I was smart. The event itself really gelled, which was also miraculous, given that there were all these different forces swirling round. It was quite a remarkable, in its way brilliant, event because it connected rock 'n' roll to stripping at its best - stripping presented really as a form of dance, as a wannabe art form. The chief stripper lady at the time — she was featured in the playbill — she was sensational. She really did make that idea work, of doing more with striptease. That's really the first time that I came head-to-head with Mendelson Joe. At the time he was still Joe Mendelson; he became M. Joe a little while after that. Joe doesn't remember the show very clearly, because he was busy trying to do his thing onstage. I wonder if you can remember what went on. I have to tell you, I have the same problem — he was focused on his performance, I was focused on the production. I didn't spend much time relaxed and watching. We were recording the event for subsequent release as an LP. I remember this woman. She was striking. I caught her act, she was sort of the culminating act. What stays with me was that, first of all she was a great dancer. So often the cliche of these clubs is the women can barely move to any kind of rhythm. And they're not up there with a full heart, necessarily. Often in these divey joints, no one's really paying attention — the dancer isn't

riHE BUMP 'N1 GRIND REVUE

bb

really paying attention, and neither is the clientele. But this was a committed woman - she danced well, she was beautiful - I can't remember her name, but it was something like "Anastasia" It was kinda up-market, you know? She danced well, and she danced provocatively. And it was in the context of this bizarre location, which was a classical vaudeville roadhouse. In the 1920s and 1930 it was part of the vaudeville circuit in North America. All the great names in vaudeville had actually played at the Victory. That was a time when you didn't just get stripping, you got a warm up comedian, ajuggler, maybe you got a singer, then a striptease. The early 70s was the tail end of all of that The music was great, the equipment stayed together and didn't get stolen, even though, you know, there were a lot of weird people floating about. Joe says he thinks the show ended when it was shut down by the police, when one of the women began simulating intercourse with a stuffed beaver. Do you remember anything about that? \ don't but we might ask Jim Hanley what he remembers. He was at the time the program director of TVO, which had gone on the air just before City-TV. I know that TVO had some involvement in the show, and it was controversial. If you like I can call Jim Hanley and see if he remembers anything. [Moses calls Jim Hanley.] Hi, it's Moses calling for Jim Hanley . . . Jim, how are you? Total change of pace. I'm sitting with a woman who is preparing a book about Mendelson Joe. We are thinking back to the day in either '71 or '72 when he did the McKenna Mendelson Mainline Bump 'rv Grind Revue. JH: Oh, I taped it! WIZ: Exactly. We supplied the audio remote, but some crazy TV station supplied the video, and the question has come up whether or not that event was shut down by a raid of the police.

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JH: No, no it wasn't They tried to shut the television down. David Walker [president of TVO] tried to shut it off. He came from home on New Year's Eve, and we locked him out of the control room. MZ: So was it New Year's Eve? JH: Yes. It was the New Year's Eve Bump 'n' Grind Revue. MZ: So it was 71/72? JH: Yes it was. It was full frontal nudity, it freaked everyone out. MZ: Do you remember the name of the fantastic stripper lady? JH: Well, Linda Leather was one, she played kind of a dominatrix type. Then there was another one that was kind of in a nun's outfit. MZ: Yeah. The headline act, though — JH: Can't remember. Joe would. MZ: Well, apparently his recollection is starting to wander as well. All I remember is that the stripping was actually terrific. JH: It was, it was good. MZ: High class. And the dancing was good, and the women were really good-looking. JH: Yeah, it was pretty good. We did it live, we called the show Mean Business, we had pre-taped this Michael McGee running commentary thing, which was kind of a satire on show business. The idea was that the Bump 'n' Grind Revue was real show business. That the rest of it, hockey

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or whatever, was all fake, but at least down at the Victory there was some real entertainment going on. There was nothing fake about this; that was kind of the notion behind it. And then, the McKenna Mendelson Mainline Band, they were all in drag of course, Joe himself was in silk stockings and garter belt and a slip, the whole thing, it was bizarre. MZ: And how much of it did you show on TVO? JH: All of it.

STAN "THE FAN": I watched the first show of the evening on City-TV, at home up at Bathurst and Steeles. And then my friends and I decided to go down there, 'cause it was New Year's Eve. What year was it? STAN: The one I went to was New Year's Eve,1973/74. See, here's a poster for it And here's a poster for the earlier one, the first one, in '72. So they had 2 Bump 'n' Grind Revues. They had one in February 1972, which they made a record album out of. Then the second year, they did it again for New Year's Eve, and that's the one I went to. I was about 16 or 17 years old. I was with a whole bunch of my friends, and we were all 15, 16, 17, and we all took hits of LSD and went to this show. The Victory Theatre was a sleazy old burlesque theatre. It was once one of the grand palaces of burlesque in North America; in the 1920s, it was the capital of burlesque, which was a big art form. But by the time this Bump 'n' Grind Revue came along, this was a really sleazy, dirty old theatre where your feet would stick to the floor and the seats were all rotten. Raunchy people hung around there, it was a really dirty place. You couldn't even use the toilet — it was disgusting. We were waiting in line to get in. Everyone in the crowd were these

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huge biker-type guys, real scary looking people. They all started pushing, and I started getting squished against the door. I started getting really paranoid, I said to this guy, "Please, don't push so hard!" He said, "Whaddaya want me to do? Put you in my pocket?" Then we went into the show, and the group came out. There were some really strange people in the theatre. There was a guy selling posters, a weird guy whose eyes glowed in the dark. I looked at him and I went, "Your eyes are glowing," and he showed me this little thing of phosphorescent eyedrops that he used that made his eyes glow in the dark. So I bought a poster from him. And then instantly, I was sitting there with my poster, rocking on to the music, and some guy in a black leather jacket with greasy hair, a drunk, he came crawling across us, jumping over the crowd, and he almost wrecked my poster, he got grease on it. It got really, really rowdy. People were throwing bottles. The band were dressed like ladies, Joe had a big beard, but he was wearing women's clothing. Tell me about the strippers and their routines. STAN: Okay. One of the routines was, they painted letters on their butt cheeks. And then they all stood in line and bent over, and it spelled out Mainline. One of the girls was a black girl, and she had white lettering, and the rest of the girls were white girls, and they had black lettering. They also did this schtick where they all got on the floor, and they put a big blanket over them, and they formed what looked like a giant penis with testicles. They all sort of got on their hands and knees and formed a kind of a line. And they put a blanket over them, and it actually looked like a big giant penis. Made up of naked strippers. And it was ejaculating! The women actually took everything off, which back then I don't think women did at strip joints - they usually wore little coverings and stuff. But they actually took everything off. In the intermission between the sets, one of the women came out completely naked, covered in blue powder. Like blue chalk, over her whole body. She held up a sign that said "AUCTION." None of us really knew what she

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was doing, until some man in a business suit at the back said, "Fifty dollars!" "Going once, going twice ... Sold to the lucky gentleman!" And they told him to come up on the stage, and this businessman in a suit goes up on the stage, and the stripper, totally naked, covered in blue powder — he and she disappeared through the back curtain, never to be seen again. I suppose they went upstairs and did their business. He bought this stripper for $50 at the show! SUE: That would never happen at a Joe concert again! STAN: Joe is so against that kind of thing. That's what makes this very interesting. But I gotta say, he did a heroic thing. There was a sort of a marquee, a runway, going into the crowd, where the strippers would do their bump 'n' grind thing. One of the strippers got carried away. She walked down the runway, and she started shaking hands with all the crazy enraged people in the crowd. And a friend of mine, I'm embarrassed to say, he grabbed her hand and pulled her. She fell into the crowd. She was naked. And about twenty deranged guys jumped on the poor woman. I don't think they intended to do anything, it was just they got carried away. Joe stopped playing in the middle of a song. And he got up, and he was a big big guy, he was six foot six, and he growled. He had this dress on. And he growled: "RRRRRRR! Get off her, or the show's over!" Everybody got off, and he rescued the woman. So that was the first time I saw feminism in action from Joe. The Joe back then was a complete turnaround from the Joe today. He was Joe Mendelson then, now he's Mendelson Joe. SUE: But even then he didn't want women to be treated badly. STAN: He was not happy-looking during that whole show. I guess he was already at the point when he was disapproving of Mainline. That was a lastditch effort to get the band back together or something. He told me years

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later he wasn't happy with their performance that night. But as a fan, I was very happy with their performance. I thought it was the most interesting, eclectic show you could ever go to in your life. You'll never see a show like that again. It was a historical event in Toronto. I think he's in a lot of ways embarrassed by a lot of the stuff from back then. But I really loved the music of Mainline. It was the best drinking music and partying music around, at that time. And you know, even today I still love that music. I find that it stands up to the test of time. It's classic music. And I love the artwork, the style reminds me of Robert Crumb. This guy David Andoff was obviously influenced by Robert Crumb.

THE

END OF MAINLINE

I made a solo album called Sophisto in 1975. It didn't sell, and my record company at the time, Taurus (they're called Anthem now) wanted me to do a reunion with Mainline. I didn't want to do it, but they convinced me. The guy who ran the record company, Ray Danniels, was my pimp at the time, that's why I did it. When your pimp wants you to do something, you usually have to do it, or he's not going to pimp you, and if you don't have a pimp, you don't have a career. The album was called No Substitute, from the song "No Substitute." We did a few jobs as Mainline, but all the same problems were still there. Michael McKenna is not a malicious person, but I just didn't want to be around him. I don't enjoy being around humans very much, unless they respect themselves. Very few do. Most people are just confused, they're just wandering around polluting. I finally said to the pimp, I can't do this with these people. So my relationship ended with him, and I went off to California.

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A falling-out David Andoff was the guy who did the illustrations for Mainline's album covers. He painted and drew pictures of women with large bottoms and large breasts. They were depicted in a way that a lot of women didn't like. I would say they were exaggerated and grotesque, and sexist. He was recruited to work as a director of the reunion Mainline Bump 'n' Grind Revue. We had a huge falling-out over that, Andoff and I. The patterns of my life indicate to me that I am the author of my own broken relationships, to some degree. I met Andoff, he was a few years younger than me, and recruited him, befriended him and paid him generously to do the album cover work and posters for Mainline. But in the end we had a falling-out over political things. Money. Greed. He had different values, but he hid his values around me. He tried to behave around me in a way that I wouldn't be put off. I think he was very appreciative of the opportunities I provided for him, until he realized he no longer needed me. A similar thing happened with Colin Linden, by the way. He was a very talented painter. We had a huge falling-out, namecalling et cetera. I always felt that I invested a lot of time and energy in him, and he disappointed me. He was always remunerated for his art. I'm not looking for him to tell the world that I did him any favours, but. . . . He hid his nature from me. In the end, I felt used and stupid.

DAVID ANDOFF: Just out of curiosity, who suggested that you call me? Joe did. He did mention that you guys had had a falling out over - he was somewhat vague about it, he said you'd had differences in political

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views, in values. But he encouraged me to get your side of the story. [laughs] Political views. Really. That's interesting. I have a very different take on our differences. Well, feel free to give me your side of the story. Do you want to start with that, or do you want to start with when Joe and I first got to know each other? Let's begin at the beginning. I understand that you were doing cover art for Mainline's albums, and posters and stuff like that. That's right. I think it was probably 1969 when Joe and I met. I'd done a year at OCA [Ontario College of Art] and I'd gone on to another alternative school. The CNE [Canadian National Exhibition] had what they called a youth pavilion. They gave you free space to do stuff, if you were sort of artsy and crafty. I had a booth set up with the girl that I was going out with at the time. I was making these sculptures out of papier mache. They were very cartoonlike. Joe happened to walk by and see these. He really liked the shoes, and he asked me to make him a pair of shoes out of papier mache. What were these shoes like? The first ones a pair of two-tone shoes, brown-and-white saddle shoes, only very sort of misshapen and oversized. Then he asked me to make him some cowboy boots. There were running shoes too. I think it was the brown-andwhite shoes that came first Strangely enough, at the same time, same year, same place, I met Paul Hoffert, who was with the band Lighthouse. I had a full figure, a cartoon fat man, and he bought that from me. So Joe started asking me to do stuff. I think the first thing I did for them was a poster with an ink drawing of Joe, and it went in their first album that they recorded in England. For the album cover, Joe cut out the letters that

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I'd done on the poster and just put them in white against a black background. The rest of their album covers were paintings of mine. They were done specifically for each album. The posters continued, and they've sort of become collectibles. I've had interest recently from people asking me if I had anything to sell. The artwork I did for Mainline was really distinctive. I created these two characters, a gorilla and a woman who was outrageously proportioned. There was a very high erotic content, and at the same time it was very humorous. Sounds kinda like R. Crumb. Well, I was certainly influenced by R. Crumb, but I think I was more influenced by S. Clay Wilson, who was another of those underground comic guys. Joe tells me you were involved in the Bump 'n' Grind Revue. I've heard bits and pieces about this event, but no-one seems to remember it very clearly. Everyone saw something different. Are we talking about the first one? There were a few. The first one I never saw, and I don't think many people did. How about the one that happened at the Victory Theatre? TVO was there, Moses Znaimer was recording it. Were you there for that one? I certainly was. I was there. I fell passionately in lust with the lead dancer. What was her name? Her professional name was Fantasia Her name for the show was Mother Superior. Her real name was Renee Falcon. She pronounced it Rini. From that night on, she and I lived together for five years. Joe tells me that the show was shut down by cops after a woman started

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simulating intercourse with a stuffed beaver onstage. Do you recall anything like that happening? Well, there was a stuffed beaver. I don't remember the cops shutting anything down. I do remember Moses Znaimer. It was the only time I ever met him. I knew who he was. The show had ended. The band had left. They'd gone home. I was hanging around, waiting for the girl. The theatre was empty. Apparently Moses thought the band was going back to Thunder Sound to work on the recording. He didn't know who I was, but he figured I was somebody because I was hanging around, wearing a white tie and tails. He said, "Where's the band?" And I said, "They left" He was there with like an entourage of people. He said something about how they were supposed to be recording. And I wasn't bowing and scraping or anything. And he said, "Don't you like me?" That's my memory of Moses Znaimer. A lot of the '70s, for me, are seriously fogged. I was, as many people were in that decade, often under the influence of drugs that you can smoke. That was very prevalent, and it really plays havoc with your memory. What can you tell me about Fantasia's act? Clearly it made quite the impression on you. It wasn't so much her act, it was physical attraction. That's really about all I can say. We had a relationship for a long time; it ended badly. I moved on. But then there was a later show that I directed. This was a couple of years later. By this time, the band was really not getting along. Particularly McKenna and Mendelson. McKenna was a very brilliant guitar player with no personality; very quiet guy. In the Toronto music scene, he was a big star. He'd been in Luke and the Apostles before he was in Mainline. And he was a fantastically brilliant guitarist. There was a lot of animosity between the other band members and McKenna, a lot of it stemming apparently from when they went to England and he had enough money to have his own room. They all had to share another room. They were really mad at him about this. I always thought he

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was some rich kid or something, right, the way they'd talk about him. Well, what's he doing today? He's selling guitars in some music store, and he's lost part of one of his fingers. And he's older than me. So he wasn't a rich kid, he just happened to have some money at the time; he'd already had a successful career in another band. But he and I were never close; we virtually never talked. I only happen to know about where he is now because I saw a story about him in the newspaper. I felt that I was quite close to Joe. I was in my early 20s by then, and Joe was a few years older. He was like a mentor to me. Then I directed this show, and it was a really, really bad experience, In what way? Well, I put a lot of energy into it, a lot of my own money - which they asked me to spend. I'd been having a very good year. I'd actually made money that year, for probably the first year ever, doing work for Lighthouse. So I was spending my own money on props and things. I had a lot of ideas. I felt that the show should have a script. There was going to be a master of ceremonies, the dancers would represent assorted characters. I was really inspired by cabaret. And I had the idea of the band wearing drag. Joe got right into it, and 1 have some really incriminating pictures of him. He was great. McKenna refused to put a dress on. The other guys sort of halfheartedly did. A week or two before the show, I talked to Joe and I said, We need a script. We have to decide what the MC is going to say, and stuff like that. What's going to happen and when. So I went over to his place. He was married at the time to a bank manager. We sat down in his apartment in the Manulife Centre, and started writing this script. It took hours. By the time we were finished, Joe said he never, ever in his life wanted to do anything like that again. Why?

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Well, we'd be bouncing ideas around, and I was coming up with a lot of ideas, and he sort of wasn't. After a while, it seemed to me like he was getting pissed that I was having all these great ideas and he wasn't, you know what I mean? Anyway, that's what he said. So the show went on, and it was certainly imperfect, it was seriously flawed, but it was good. The house was packed. I was very naive in those days, and I always operated on trust. Someone would say, "Can you do us a poster?" and I'd say "Sure," and I'd do it, and then they'd say "How much do you want?" "Well I don't know, how much do you want to give me?" "Well here's fifty bucks." So when the show was over, we didn't have anything on paper, nothing was negotiated, we hadn't talked about it as far as money was concerned really. After it was all over — and for me this had been weeks of work — the receipts had all been counted and divvied up, and Joe said my cut was $600.1 just thought that was outrageous. That's where our serious problems began, though I think really it went back to the scriptwriting session. I just went completely apeshit I can be extremely abusive verbally when I'm angry, and I was. This was all over the telephone. I felt like he was ripping me off. When it came down to money, I always felt that Joe looked after himself, and screw everyone else. You know, the band went through many different managers, and he referred to them all as pimps. Pimps. It was just sort of a general attitude. After all this stuff went down between me and Joe, I went through a major clinical depression. I was a vegetable for six months. I'd spent all my money. I was being supported by Renee. I gradually recovered and started working again. Another good friend of mine was very supportive, steered people to me and stuff, I got to know Ross Reynolds pretty well. Ross is the chairman of Universal Canada. At the time he was running GRT Records, which was Mainline's record label in Canada, and also Lighthouse's. He started giving me jobs. He put me in touch with the Lighthouse people, who I'd lost touch with, and I did a bunch of stuff for them. He had me do a mural in the GRT offices. While I was there, we were talking about Joe, and money. I'd done an album cover for Joe, for Mr. Middle

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of the Road, a large, photorealistic painting of him sitting in a chair. I got paid $800 for the cover. I was so ignorant in those days about how to do album covers that we walked into the place where they print the jackets with the painting and said, "This is the album cover," and the guy goes, "What, are you crazy?" But I kept the painting, and I got $800 for it to be used on the cover, plus I did the back of the cover, which was a pen and ink thing. So I'm talking to Ross, this is a year or so later, and Ross says, "We paid more than $800 for that cover." I said, "Are you serious?" And he called to one of the accountant people, it was a pretty small office, and he asked him for the books, and he looked it up said, "Yeah, here it is: $1000." And I got $800. So I'm going, "Okay, so Joe made $200 off me doing his cover." Which just sort of, you know, was verification of what I thought. I wasn't talking to him or associating with him anymore. So I felt betrayed by my mentor, over money. The late '70s, for me were a pretty grim time. My relationship with Renee got really bad, she became a very unhappy person and a serious drug abuser. I think she recovered from that, I don't know, I haven't had any contact with her for a long time. But I didn't get into the kind of serious drug use that she did, and I couldn't live with it. Joe didn't paint when I knew him. He only started painting in '75. His mother used to paint. She painted very much the way he does, only not lewdly. She painted in a similar primitive style, but it was all like strawberries and stuff. Artist, I feel, is a term that you shouldn't confer on yourself. It's fine for people to say, So-and-so is an artist. But for someone to say, I'm an artist — that has always sort of offended me. I would never call myself an artist; if anything I would call myself a painter, or a designer. I read something about the term jazz singer, in the same way. It's a descriptive that has to be conferred, not appropriated. Just after my son was born (he's 19 now), my wife and I invited Joe to come over to our little rented house in North Toronto. It was a tiny tiny

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house. It's not standing anymore - it was levelled to make way for one of those monster homes, It was like a cottage in the country. He came over. He was very gruff, and he looked around and said something like, "How very bourgeois." Talked about himself a lot. And then he propositioned my wife. I wasn't there when he did that. I was in the other room, or the kitchen or something, and he suggested that she come down to his studio sometime alone. My son was a year old, maybe 2, so we're talking 16 years ago? From that day, she's considered him pond scum. The last time I spoke to Joe was about 7 or 8 years ago. My wife is a commercial photographer, she's quite successful, and she had a studio at Bathurst and Queen for a long time. I was down there, and at the time, I was a smoker. I left the studio and went around the corner onto Queen St, to get a pack of cigarettes at the convenience store. I walked in, and there's Joe, who I haven't seen in years. He's leafing through the skin magazines. I said, "Joe." He looked up and he saw me, and he put the magazine back. I bought my cigarettes, and we were sort of chit-chatting. The guy behind the counter says to him, "Nothing today for you?" and he sort of grunts. We walk out of the store, and we're standing on the sidewalk talking. I'm talking about my job, I'm telling him how now we've got 3 kids, because the last time I talked to him we only had one, and how things are going really well. And he's getting sort of grimmer and grimmer. And then he says to me, "So. You've got two daughters. Well, don't abuse them." And he turns and stomps away. I stood there and . . . I couldn't believe what he had just said to me. I couldn't believe it. And that's the last time I talked to him, I mean, I can let bygones be bygones. The whole money thing and all that crap, that's nothing. That's stuff that can be overcome. But I don't think I'd want him near my children. I've always felt that Joe is really good at promoting himself, which is something that I'm really not good at, and I admire that. But what I admire more is character. I feel that Joe is a poser, and his pose is the buffoon-like, opinionated curmudgeon, and I'm sure he is that But there's a malevolent side to him that I don't want to be exposed to.

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I think Joe has a lot of valid political viewpoints. I would have to agree with a lot of things that he says from a political standpoint. But on a personal level, I think he's devious, self-serving, and I don't ever want to put myself in the same room with a man who is going to talk to me about abusing my daughters. I mean, how dare he. The work I did 30 years ago, it certainly had a high sexual content, but it had nothing to do with children, that's for sure. I felt very close to Joe, at one time. He was closer to me than my own brother, which is not saying much, but it's true. And I felt that he provided me with a forum and the confidence to do the work that I did at that time. But I also felt abused and taken advantage of. Maybe that's my problem.

CHAPTER FOUR

G O I N G SOLO

(1975-1977) PAINTING I started painting in 1975. I found the paints in the garbage. I'm a garbage-picking guy; most of what I own is garbage. I like to find things. It's a hobby. People throw away great stuff. And resourcefulness is part of being an artist. I was visiting my parents, who still lived in Maple in 1975. My mother was an amateur oil painter. I would describe Mumsy as a dabbler in a lot of things. For some reason she had purchased some acrylic paints, and hadn't used them. I was taking the garbage out for her, and I saw these tubes of acrylic paints. I just took them home, and tried painting. It was a cinch. And it was a pleasure right away. I'm one of these people who, if you leave me locked in a room with bricks, I'm going to build a house. I'm just naturally creative. I taught myself how to play music. And I think I'm a self-taught writer, even though I went to school; I never did well in school. It's one thing to try something, it's another thing to just continue. An idiot can make art, the thing is can they do it every day? The difference between painting and music is that the music business 7O

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is all about interacting with people. You have to get people to get you jobs and stuff, if you're a professional. The music business was driving me nuts by the time 1975 rolled around. I had been with several record companies already. I'd been a pop star, I'd travelled around the world, and I'd come to the conclusion that the music business is really a disgusting business. I never thought of painting as a business, because I just did it for pleasure, but I did it so much that within a year and a half I had a show. I painted so prolifically. Painting allowed me relief from the music business. Because my problem, Doctor, is I have a lot of energy and a lot I want to do, but I get frustrated dealing with humans. I have real problems dealing with humans.

MOSES ZNAiMER: By way of supporting Joe - his fierce independence, and some of his views, but mostly his development as an artist — I've bought his stuff over the years. I eventually sort of settled on the idea of buying his self-portraits. He's always doing self-portraits, so you see his progress as he moves along. I don't know who else buys his stuff consistently, but I think I have one of the better Joe self-portrait collections. I also like some of his simpler landscape things, I keep those around . . . charming . . . I have a paddle that he did. It always made sense to me that an artist who gets frustrated in an industry that requires other people to give you permission to work dreams about doing something where they're liberated to express themselves when they feel like it. I think that's why there's such a connection between rock 'n' roll and art. We actually did a show about that on The New Music. We charted how many of today's rock artists and bands came out of art schools, I also know some filmmakers who, when they're just totally made crazy by the complexity of pulling the deal together, take refuge in the thing that they can do because they feel like doing it, because the means of doing it are not expensive - a piece of paper, some paint, some canvas. So it makes sense that Joe would turn to that, and in fact it's become by far the largest part of his creativity.

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What painters do you admire?

I like the work of William Kurelck, a Canadian painter who died in 1977. He painted what I would describe as illustrative paintings, and a lot of my paintings are illustrative — you can tell there's a little story going on. He influenced me, as did Tom Thomson. I paint the landscapes of Algonquin Park, so too did Tom Thomson. I'm influenced by Magritte, who used to paint surrealistic paintings, like that one of a room with a giant apple in it — I liked his art a lot. 1 like David Hockney's art. I like how he paints his dog, I like how he paints portraits. Artists mythologize themselves through their art, and that's what I've done. When I paint myself, I mythologize myself. When 1 paint my world., or I paint my front porch, or I paint our history — for example, a painting about the 14 women who were murdered in Montreal on Dec. 6, 1989 — I'm an historian. I like painting rabbits. 1 once had a run-in with a rabbit. One day in about '78, when I was in my early 30s, I was visiting my parents, and there on the grass in front of me was a white rabbit. White rabbits are not wild, they're domesticated, so this one must have got away. And 1 snuck up on it, I got really close to it. I crawled up to it in the ground on the grass — till I was a few feet away from the rabbit, and then it oolted. I painted a painting of that, it shows me almost nose to nose with the rabbit. I made a postcard of the painting so it became famous. Rabbits are really fascinating in that you don't know how they're going to behave. Sometimes at night with car lights in front of them, they'll just sit there until they're run over. 1 just like the idea, the image of a rabbit. I feel a strong relationship with all non-humans, rabbits included. That's all. They're just nice to paint. They're cute. Nothing with me is deep. It's strictly what it seems to be.

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In painting, I'm obsessed with the female breast, totally addicted to it. I believe the female breast is the meaning of life. I'm serious. If you think about it, it's the source of everything that babies need. And I need still today, as a big baby. Tits, motorcycles, that's a genetic thing. I'm totally enamoured with the Canadian landscape. I love winter, I love fall. 1 paint it all the time, every year. I'm obsessed with painting portraits of myself, although they are not necessarily flattering, sometimes they're quite strange. My first solo show was at the Isaacs Gallery, on Yonge Street at Bloor. I lived near the Isaacs Gallery from '64 to '76, and I used to go in there to look at art. There were a few galleries around there, and in Yorkville. Isaacs' gallery showed Canadian art, including William Kurclek. It turned out Isaacs knew my father. Avrom Isaacs' brother was an accountant, and my father had had his books done by the firm of Isaacs' brother. So that may have been how I met the guy. Isaacs showed some of my sculptures in '74 and '75 in group shows, when 1 was still a pop star. 1 wasn't calling myself a visual artist or anything at the time, but I was always making things. I used to be addicted to Otravin, so I made an Otravin cake made out of all these empty bottles of Otravin. (Otravin is a nasal spray.) 1 had a cowboy boot filled with concrete, I know he had that in a show of his. A pair of my boots filled with cement. Art can be silly, it can use anything. Anyone can call anything art, that's what's happened. So when I became a painter, Isaacs took a shot on me. But he didn't stick with me, because he already had two painters: Kurclek, and another illustrative artist who did a lot of ships. (lie was good; I liked his art.) Kurelek encouraged me. We traded paintings in 1977, just before he died. Isaacs was good to me, but my paintings didn't sell very well; I think that's probably why he didn't represent me on a long-term basis.

V4

ALIEN

NAME

CHANGE

In 1975, I changed my name to Mendelson Joe. First, I changed it to Elvis Mendelson, because when I heard this Elvis Costello guy from England, I knew there were two reasons he was getting all this attention: One, he was from England, which means he gets attention right away. Two, people notice a name like Elvis Costello. It also happened that the guy had some talent — I'm not a fan of his, but I recognize that he's talented. Meanwhile, my music career was going downhill fairly rapidly. So I changed my name to Elvis Mendelson, thinking that I might derive some power from the name Elvis, because Elvis Costello sure did. Well, nothing happened. Then 1 changed my name a few more times — I went through about 4 or 5 different names. I can't remember all the names. One of them was Joe Precious. 1 was Toronto Joe for a while. Tedious Joe. It was silliness — like when Prince changed his name to The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. (When Prince changed his name, Bobby Wiseman changed his own name to Prince. Of course, Prince tried to sue him.) When I changed my name to Mendelson Joe, I used to tell people I changed my name so they wouldn't know I was a Jew. Because, you know, Bob Dylan isn't Bob Dylan, he's Bob Zimmerman. Jews throughout history have always been changing their names to hide, because Jews are always persecuted. When I changed my name to Mendelson Joe, I thought it was a weird twist of humour. Almost no-one ever got the joke or thought it was very funny, but I stuck with the name because it sounded right. I like the sound of words, and I thought Mendelson Joe was a good name. Also, I used to tell people that it was because the government kept sending my mail addressed that way. It's just a joke, it doesn't mean anything! But it is my name.

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LOS ANGELES I knew that I had no future as a musician in Canada, so I went to California for about three months to find a manager and/or a record deal. It was interesting. Because I had limited money, I lived in a dump hotel on Sunset Boulevard, in East Hollywood, which gets nastier and nastier. It was not a good place to live. Across the street was a motel where they had shootings almost every weekend. In L.A., you get helicopters hovering overhead, and you hear this huge noise, and lights come on, and you hear the shootings — it was not good. ! could have signed a deal with a company that was probably run by criminal elements. They were prepared to pay me money to sign their management contract, which I'd never heard of before. The woman I dealt with had the longest fingernails of anyone I'd ever met in my life — about four inches! And she actually typed, with fingernails that long. They offered me 25 grand to sign a contract, but they wanted me to do what they wanted. They were going to turn me into a country singer, and I wouldn't get to sing my own songs. I'd have to sing what they gave me, and I'd be this guy with a hat implant, probably. 25 grand back then was a lot of money, but I wouldn't have signed if they'd offered me 250 grand. This was a management contract — not a production contract, not a record contract. I'd never heard of a management company advancing an artist 25 thou — for anything. 1 wound up going with a fairly well-known manager, a lawyer called Robert Fitzpatrick, who used to co-manage with an Knglish guy called Robert Stigwood. Stigwood used to manage the Bee Gees and Cream. I went to see Fitzpatrick because he had represented Taj Mahal, a rootsy blues singer, whose work I really respected. He convinced me he could do something for me, get me a record deal. So I signed with him. Well, as a manager, he managed to waste my time. He said, "You might as well go back to Canada and work there and wait till we get you a good deal." So I came back to Canada to wait

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for him to get me the deal. At first, I'd call him periodically, the secretary would talk to me, his assistant would talk to me. After a while he wouldn't even take the calls. He didn't get me the deal he had promised. Promises don't mean anything anyway. You can't force somebody to get you a book deal, or a record deal. He tried. I don't know how hard he tried. But the name of the game ain't schmaltz, it's results. And I got none. Zero. And he never gave me a release, the bastard. But after a year 1 was free of him. And in retrospect, I did the right thing by not signing with the woman with the long fingernails.

HOME, MARRIAGE In 1970, Flea and I had moved into an apartment on Sultan Street. I didn't care, I'd live anywhere, because I was always on tour, travelling. But Flea liked Sultan a lot. It had brass on the doors, lots of wood. There was an old elevator that took forever, probably still does. It was a tiny, old-school small apartment. It had charm. It wasn't looked after well, though, so in 1972 we moved to the Manulife Centre — 44 Charles. I liked Sultan St. better, just because it was closer to the ground. Living in a high-rise apartment will guarantee mental illness for all. It's very similar to prison life. Psychologically not healthy. You get a sense that you're just one of a bunch of cockroaches living in boxes. 1 don't care how fancy it is. I can't relate to living on the 23rd floor, going up and down in an electronic box, facing people who don't want to face people. So in 1976,1 went to California, came back to Charles Street, spent a summer there. Flea and I were growing apart. She was good to me, but her interests in life were what I would describe as conventional. She had become a bank manager. In the fall, she went on a holiday to Ireland or Europe, and it turned out that she went with her new

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boyfriend that I didn't know about. She had gotten involved with someone at the bank. When she came back, we dissolved our relationship. She stayed at 44 Charles, but I was out before the end of '76. I did a painting which says it perfectly. The painting looks down from the sky onto a winding 2-lane highway. Just above the road are two human figures, they've got shadows underneath them, so they look like they're flying above the road. One's going in one direction, the other's going in the other direction. One's a picture of me, and one's a picture of Flea. Going in different directions. That's what we were. She never really had a direction in her life. She's like my sister, she just wants to live as a normal, average consumer. They want to have money so they can travel, have a nice home — you know, average things. Things that are of no interest to me whatsoever, never were. Everything Flea wanted was very normal and conventional; everything I wanted was tied up with my own self-interest, which was music, and then it became painting too, and social activism. I was 32 when we parted in '76. Just a hormone at large, still. It was tough, because when Flea went off to Europe, I encouraged her to spend all the money that we had to enjoy her trip. So when she came back, there was no money, and when we split up I had $500 in the whole world. I don't know if any of the money wound up in her boyfriend's hands, I don't know if she bought his ticket or anything, but I do know that I resented the fact that I wound up with $500. I'm not saying Flea was a crook, not at all. But I resented the fact that there was no money. Because I had made some money when I was a pop star, and I just always gave it to her; I trusted her totally with money. I moved out, to Ossington Avenue. I lived on Ossington for 18 years, in 2 different storefronts. The first, 59 Ossington, was a real dump. There was dogshit in the place, it was an abandoned store owned by a guy who owned a cheese factory. That part of Ossington was rough, and poor. That whole area is very much influenced by the fact that there's a mental hospital there, at 999 Queen St. From then on, for a long long time, I was poor. I was raised in

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middle-class comfort, I was not deprived as a child. Then from 1976 to 1994 I lived through what I would describe as very difficult times. I wasn't homeless, but I was close.

PERFORMING

POST-MAINLINE

I don't want to be cast as a Blues Guy, even though my music is bluesy. It's not that I have any disrespect for great blues musicians, but the thing is I'm not from Chicago, I'm not black. For a while in the 1970s, I appeared regularly on Peter G/owski's TV show. Once a month, I got to be the warm-up act in the audience before the show started. So I was actually just a peepee training guy; 1 told the audience where the toilets were. But I did it as a stand-up comic. I got that job because 1 was friendly with the producer. I met him when I worked as a security person in a clothing store. It's always who you know. So I would open shows for them, and sometimes I would also appear on the show. Anyone who was anybody got on that show. At that point I was a former pop star — heading towards being a has-been pop star, eventually to become a was-been and now a former was-been. Back then, I was still prominent, and I'd had a couple of exhibitions of my paintings. The show was based in Toronto, and if you become prominent in Toronto, then things that emanate from Toronto will include you. Being the warm-up act was basically an embarrassment, but when you're struggling to survive purely from your art, and not selling your voice for voiceovers, it's tough. It's even tougher when you're doing idiosyncratic work and it's not mainstream. I was writing all kinds of music in 1975 — some of it was bluesy, but some of it was very much what I would describe as country. Mellifluous music. I just broadened as a songwriter. I think I'm a reallygood pop songwriter. I probably am the Canadian counterpart to Captain Beefheart.

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I used to play the Riverhoat a lot, which was the famous folk club in Canada back in the '60s and '70s. The real fans usually showed up early, because they wanted to get the best seats. One night, this guy shows up, and sits a little distance from the stage. And as it turned out, he was the only guy in the audience! I said, "Come and sit closer. You're going to get the concert of your life." And I performed an entire show for him. As soon as I was finished, and I did a good job, he quickly got up and left the building. 1 think he was probably overwhelmed and intimidated. One-to-one, it's a pretty heavy trip if someone's really putting out the BTUs; it's very overwhelming.

DAVSD WILCOX: Joe phoned me up and said, "I've got this house gig as an entertainer at the Cafe des Copains." And so I went there to see him play. This place was obviously trying to create a bit ot an upscale atmosphere. And there was Mendelson. in his construction boots and shorts. And he kept pronouncing the name of the place as "the Cafe Dayz Copaynz." He sang his songs — you know, "Liars," the songs he was doing at the time. And he got fired the first night! It was still an artistic triumph, considering the whole situation, and I really enjoyed it. Though nobody likes to got fired, it was for all the right reasons.

Performing, to me, is just something I know how to do. I would draw the analogy to wiping our bums. By the time you're a teenager, you know where your bottom is and you don't have to think about it too much, right? But I do take it as a serious opportunity to stretch as an artistic, musical guy. I include the audience in what I do and try to make them feel that they're a part of something, but it's really a very selfish thing about: me getting inside, totally intimate with, my songs. It's me trying to make beautiful art in front of people.

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Joe opening for Patti Smith in 1975, at Massey Hall,

PHOTO BY ART USHERSON

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Reactions to Joe's Art Has Joe ever painted you? BOB WISEMAN: Yeah. Maybe five times. The last 3 years, every now and then he says, ''Bob, it's time to paint you." Okay! For me, it's always fun to visit with him, and talk. I've sometimes wondered if I might try to get them all for album artwork What's interesting to me is talking with him about painting portraits, and how upset a lot of people are with their portraits — with the natural way that they're represented by him in a painting, with the distortions of their features. He's told me about people responding immediately from a vanity point of view. He can see right away that they're upset or flattered — I think more often upset than flattered! But for me, it's not just about that. I try to keep that in check when I look at his portraits of me. It is hard to look at yourself — but I don't own his pictures of me, I don't live with them, so I don't really invest too much in it. JUDGE DENISE BELLAMY: I was one of the early ones. He painted me twice. The first time I was standing, and the second time I was sitting. The first time, I was a lawyer, and he wanted to paint me in my gown — in rny court outfit. This was how he described it: because he put me on a pedestal, he said, he wanted me to be standing on something, so that he was painting me looking up at me. So that's how he painted me at that time. That was a long time ago, and he had not done very many people yet. He had done a lot of trees and birds and rabbits, and flying people, stuff like that, but he hadn't done actual portraits. And I think I must have been there for about six hours. And then the next one he painted of me, which was just about two years ago, was four times the size — it was a huge thing — and he did it in an hour and a half, or something. Two hours at the most. So he's much more proficient than he was. As one would expect, after twenty years of experience! He's very focussed. At the beginning, I found posing for him was a bit

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nerve-wracking, because I wanted to talk, and he's very clear when it's time to shut up! When he wants you to stay in the same position so that he can get your mouth a particular way, or the crinkle in your eyes, or whatever. The likeness was actually better than I thought it was going to be. And he had clearly thought about the background. So there was a shock of very vibrant colours on one side, indicating a period of great turmoil for me, when my spouse of 14 years had died. I was coming out of that period, my life was getting back on circuit, and so there was nice blue sky on the other side. I recently got married again, and as a wedding present he did a painting for us, and it is just such a wonderful painting. We just bought one of those lime-green Volkswagens. He loves that car. So he painted the car driving in the clouds, so we're sort of tilted on one side, driving in the clouds, and the license plate says HEALTH. You can see Ian in the driver's seat and he's got a hat on, a hat he often wears, and I'm in the passenger seat. It's so much fun, it just makes both of us giggle all the time when we see it. DAVID WILCOX: Yes, on numerous occasions. I generally like them. I'm always interested to see what's reflected there. There's never been one that didn't reflect something of how I perceived myself. They may all be very accurate, I don't know. It's very hard to see how others see us, isn't it? When ! first shaved my head, he did me. I had a blue foo at one point, a soul spot, he did that. If there's been a change in my appearance or some turn in my life, he's said, "C'mon, let me paint you." JOHN OSWALD: For Not Safe, he did a painting of a person with two heads, and one head's mine and the other head's Joe. We're supposed to be a worker in front of the Pickering nuclear power plant. That was going to be the album cover for Not Safe, but it never came out as a vinyl album, so I don't think anyone's ever seen that one. He also did a portrait of me, sometime shortly after that. Initially, I think I probably had the same reaction that a lot of people do when they see a Joe portrait: That's kind of severe. All my features seem sort of exaggerated. I don't think it really looks like me. But in the past year,

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I've gotten into photography. I waited till digital photography got to the point where I could just ignore all that stuff about film processing, and just really concentrate on that area which I know quite a bit about: light, and trying to capture a subject. I've exclusively been taking portraits of people. And what I find quite amazing is, although I do things under very controlled conditions, how much the photograph deviates from what a person looks like when I look at them. I've been mostly taking friends, and it's partly because I don't tend to stare at people. I just glance. So when I look at these photographs it's a very different thing. I'm getting kind of used to that now; if I'm working with someone, taking their picture, I'll stare at them, I'll stare at the photograph, et cetera. The photographs are quite different from what I see. And they remind me of Joe's portraits. Joe has always said, "I just paint exactly what I see, I try to be truthful in my painting." I always took that with a grain of salt, I thought, Joe's technique is limited, maybe, or what he sees is quite different from what I see, in the same way as what Goya or Giacometti saw really differently from what everybody else sees. Their figures seem distorted. But now I can see how he's really faithfully trying to paint what he sees. Which of his paintings appeal to you? DAVID WILCOX: I like the nature studies very much, I've bought a number of those. The ones he does when he goes out to the bush, or out to rural Ontario, those are some of my favourites of all. There's such a deep mood to them, the colours are so magical. JUDGE DEMISE BELLAMY: His painting has changed a lot. At one point he would have lots of little bunnies in the picture - there was always a bunny somewhere — and birds, flying people, or cows humping in the fields — it was what's been called "naive" painting. Not that he was na'i've, but they were always pretty pictures, fun pictures that made you smile. Now, over the years, he's moved very far away from that. There are still some that make you smile, but there's a lot of strong political commentary. And a lot of

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portraits that people find not so flattering, so they don't always want to buy them. I suspect some people buy them so that no-one else will see them. I think he's had more difficulty selling some ot those types ot paintings. Some of the ones he has are very in-your-face. They're hard to look at. And he understands that. But I think he gets frustrated, because he's painting what he perceives as the truth, and people don't want to buy that, they don't want to see it every day in their living rooms. BOB WISEMAN: I recently got an incredible painting from him. I was at his place a few months ago, and he'd done this painting of Mike Harris, where instead of hands he has jaws lined with sharp teeth. I saw it and I said, "That's amazing." He said, "Thanks, but nobody would buy that." Obviously he's learned that political things don't sell, that folks are more interested in buying portraits or landscapes. He said, "What would you pay for it? Would you like to buy it right now?" And I did. It's in my living room at my place. And I love looking at it. DR. PHILIP BERGER: In my office, I have a peace wall and a political wall. When I feel like peace and quiet and calm, I look at the peace wall; when I want to raise my conscience a bit I look at the political wall. But you know, Joe's on both walls, which is kind of interesting. I ran into a guy once who was a classmate of mine in Grade 12, in Winnipeg. He used to work for the Art Gallery of Ontario. I mentioned Mendelson Joe, and this guy had such a strong negative, visceral reaction! Wouldn't even call him an artist. I'm still mad at that guy.

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Man of Letters It's about democracy. The power of letter-writing is the highest power there is in a democracy; the only power that could be a little higher is street demonstrations. If enough people realize that a letter they write can make a difference, and can actually have an influence, we can bring about change. Whether it's a letter to the editor or a letter to the premier or a letter to the prime minister — they take these things seriously, especially if the letter is well-written and potent. Letter-writing is about having the power to say what you think without fear of censorship. It doesn't matter if you're not published. Approximately one percent of the letters I write are published. But it empowers me, because I feel less impotent when I speak out. When I see so much that's wrong — we live in Spoiled Bratland, relatively speaking, but the fact is, there is corruption here, there are wrongs all the time, there are hate crimes. And also, sometimes, there are things that I want to comment on that are positive. When I read someone's writing, or I hear someone say something and it's positive, I respond, I encourage them. Letter to the Toronto Star, November 30, 1987: Canada needs nuclear submarines like I need a larger stomach. While people go homeless and Mila Mulroney needs more room for her shoes, Brian wants to spend billions on arming ourselves, against whom? The conscience of Canadians is like the elusive sock that got lost in the wash.

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A 'Joe' letter written or, rather printed by a child (pseudonym) invented to influence then Prime Minister Mulroney.

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BOB WSSESVIAN.0 I don't know how to describe his politics. I think we overlap on a lot of issues of the environment and human rights. But he writes letters, and he does stuff. He does more than me. I'm aware of stuff that upsets me, and I'll make songs that are in some ways ammunition, but he'll go farther, he'll make a picket. He'll write everyone he knows — he writes letters to the editor perpetually. It's an interesting thing, that some people dislike him because he writes letters to the editor. They don't even know him — they just think, oh, it's him, that nut who writes letters to the editor. They don't even fucking look at what the issue is that he's writing about.

Letter to the Toronto Star, February 22, 1989: Canadians are half-hearted whiners. They whine about free trade and they whimper about the ozone; if it's not Joe Clark, it's his transparent boss. The answer to all our woes, countrymen and women, is quite simple. Mobilize, activate and persist. If you're tired of industrial pollution of the Great Lakes, write the Premier and the Prime Minister, daily. If you'd like to halt carnage on the roads (drunken driving), write your elected representatives, daily! When voters get angry and active and persistent and the mail floods the halls of Parliament(s), the politicians will jump quicker than car salesmen. It's as simple as taking responsibility. Daily.

CHAPTER FIVE

ANNIE

SMITH

(1978-1981) "Annie Smith, she is not a myth, she's a Large Child."

MEETING In 1978, 21 years ago, I met the greatest love of my life. She was the first person in my life who expressed respect and encouraged me to do what I was doing. I think that when you run in to somebody who gets what you're doing, and you know that they're sincere, all of a sudden you feel a whole lot better about what you're doing. And she did that to me. She says she met me once when I was playing at the Riverboat maybe 3 years before. I don't remember that, but you know I meet a lot of people. What I do remember is that she sent me a postcard, in '78. I don't know where she got my address, somehow she got the 59 Ossington address, and sent a note saying she was interested in seeing my art and she wanted to come hear me play. I'm fascinated with handwriting, and her handwriting I liked a lot 'cause it was so primitive. So I sent her a card saying that I was going to be performing at Glendon College. And that's where I met her — I was 88

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playing down on a soccer field at Glendon College. Very lovely area. And she looked just like a teenaged tomboy. She said she was interested in coming to see the paintings, and she did. I liked the way she behaved — very respectful, open, not sycophantic, just straight. She liked my art a lot. Turns out she was going to Central Tech, taking an art course there, living on student welfare. I was curious about her, I liked her. She was very smart. Of all the things that turn me on about women, it's the brain I really go for, and this woman's brain was gi-normous. Her imagination I just went nuts for. She was totally silly. But I was 34, and I had no interest in her in a sexual way whatsoever. That never occurred to me. Until, one day, she kissed me. And then it occurred to me. Like crazy.

THE KISS Having had so much experience, I don't jump into things with women quick. Even when I'm attracted to them. You don't know what you might get — I'm not talking about diseases, you just don't know who you might be getting involved with. One of the things I have learned is that sometimes crazy people, like mentally ill people, may not appear to be mentally ill at first. And I have a very strong fear of becoming involved with mentally ill people. Mental illness is as contagious as anything; people who are mentally ill, if you get involved with them, will make you mentally ill. They always do. They'll make the world mentally ill if it gets involved with them. The world got involved with the Beach Boys, that was a mental illness. And Elton John — I think of him as a mental illness. I was totally enamoured with Annie in a non-sexual way. Before she kissed me, I had no thought of smooching her, because she declared herself to be a lesbian. I don't care what people are, I don't think I even commented on it except to say, "Have a good lesbian." She had been in love with a woman who died from cancer. I was

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"Nurse Annie" Smith in costume, circa 1980, PHOTO BY BRUCE COLE OR ANDREW DANSON (BOTH TOOK PUBLICITY SHOTS Or "NURSE ANNIE")

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empathetic to that because my best friend Daryl had died from cancer two years earlier. The woman's name was Sarah Ellen Dunlop. I guess you could say she was a seminal musical voice in the lesbian scene of Toronto in the early '70s. I had heard of her, but I didn't know her music until Annie brought it to me. The woman could sing. One day, Annie was visiting my storefront at 59 Ossington. I was on the telephone — the telephone was by the bed, it was a big bed — and she was lying on the bed, just taking a nap or something. I've had women lie down right here and nod off, sometimes. Irshad Manji was lying on the floor here once, and I'm not even close with her. The point I'm making is it was not a sexual come-on or anything. She was just lying down on the bed, away from me, I was on the telephone speaking with someone. The bed was big enough that she was away from me, but it was also small enough that if I reached out my hand or something, I could have touched her. And for some reason, I just stroked her hair. An affectionate gesture. She immediately responded by coming closer to me. Didn't do anything, but immediately came close to me. She had gorgeous hair. It was just literally siiklike, and it was the orangest hair I've ever seen. Well, as soon as I was finished the phone call, she just attacked me. I never forgot that kiss. It changed my life. It was a great kiss, too. I mean, I've been kissed lots of kisses. To quote myself, in the song "The Kiss Tells All" which was inspired by that kiss, "I have lived my life times 20/And I've joined my lips with many" — but I can tell you, no-one ever kissed me like Annie Smith did. I couldn't believe what had happened. I think that sometimes you can be completely enamoured of a person — they're intelligent and kind, and you have respect for their values and their ethics and all kinds of stuff about them — and all of a sudden, when you start putting that in a sexual context, it just blows everything up. Wild!

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WHO

WAS ANNIE

SMITH?

Annie was a stripper, but before she met me and before she was involved with Sarah Allen, she had been a hooker. She came from a very screwed up family. She's the eldest of three daughters. Her mother teaches art to little kids, and her father is now a shrink. Annie told me about her parents, but when I met them and I saw that they were quite caring and quite smart and quite unusual in the sense that I could actually commune with them a bit, I realized that there are some dark sides to people, and a lot of people really don't want you to see their underwear. I mean, my own father was Mr. Straight, Mr. Decent, blah blah blah, but the fact was, at home, he was Mr. Cruel sometimes. I don't think Annie's parents abused her, but I'd say they neglected her for their own selfishness. She had a very fucked-up family life. When she was a young teenager, her parents were experimenting with having affairs with other people; her father was having affairs with men. Annie did not respond well to this. She's a very reactive person. Some people say orange-haired people are very sensitive. She became troublesome, in reaction to what she saw as total upheaval in the family home. So they put her in some kind of institution, one of those convents for wayward girls. She's not nuts. She's connected to her feelings, some people would call that emotional. She ran away from the convent, and she was on her own at the age of 15.

LIFE W I T H ANNIE In 1980 with Annie's help and encouragement, I mounted my first really big protest against nuclear power. I went on a fast. It was a big thing, I'd never done anything like this in my life, where I made speeches. I thought I was actually doing something important. Annie was the only one who thought what I was doing was smart. Everyone

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else thought I was out of my mind! I don't know how much she had done as an activist, but she was politically savvy. I believed that by going on this fast, I would be taken seriously, because who would do something like this? Initially, I said I'd do it for 40 days, but at the end of 40 days I decided to keep going. Once you're on a fast, after a certain period of time it's not that difficult. The first week is the hardest. After that, all you have to do is make sure you don't go and hurt yourself. I was going to a doctor every week. I fasted for 100 days. I ate nothing, just drank juice. Some people probably thought I was anorexic — I lost 50 pounds, maybe more. What effect, if any, did this hunger strike have? Cynicism from the media. In my opinion. The best relationships, whether they're romances or friendships or marriages, are where people are mutually supportive. Now of course, Annie wouldn't have supported me on something she didn't agree with — and believe me, there were things she and I did not agree upon. But we shared views on nuclear power. I believe nuclear power is the worst technology that was ever invented. And there are a lot of dead people who would agree with me. A lot of people with cancer, who are suffering from the effects of what they call "depleted uranium sickness," who would agree with me. Whether it's from the so-called Desert Storm, or Kosovo, or going back to Three Mile Island, or Chernobyl, or right back into the 1950s, to Kyshtym, which was the first huge nuclear accident. I haven't cried about it lately, but Annie used to cry about it. I said it in a song: "She cried for the planet." We shared views in general about the rape of the environment. Anybody who has a brain knows that we're in trouble, at least anyone with access to TV. It's on the television all the time, whether it's nuclear power or acid rain — it's just all there. So Annie didn't think I was nuts, and she didn't for a second think I was doing anything

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because I was trying to get publicity for my music career. Fasting for 100 days is not touted to get your music career on track. Letter to the Toronto Star, July 30, 1994: Antonia Zerbisias's column, "The greening of the media never seems to last very long," confirms that we humans don't really get the picture even as our demise is imminent. It seems human nature is to stay stupid like other animals even though, unlike sheep or chickens, we do know and have the facility to reverse our suicidal course. It is for that reason that I consider humans to be the lowest life form. When Zerbisias says the world needs an "environmental disaster" (here) to get us off our ignorant, lazy posteriors, she speaks for this Joe.

[An old friend of Joe's, Denise Bellamy is now an Ontario Superior Court Justice.] I wanted to ask you about Annie Smith. DENISE BELLAMY: "Annie Smith, she is not a myth, she's a large child." [laughs] He has a song about her - that's trom the song. What about Annie Smith? Did you know her? What was your impression of her? Oh, did I know her! Well, Annie Smith played a very large role in Joe's life. He loved her deeply. And still does, really, in a way. Of the women that I've known him to

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be with, she's probably the one that had the most positive impact on him. He was very happy when he was with Annie. A lot of those paintings of the bunny rabbit, the food in the sky — a lot of those came out when he lived with Annie. She was eccentric too. I mean . . . who goes out with Mendelson Joe? [laughs] He says that too, he says, "You know what? I'm a weird kinda guy! Not everybody wants to go out with someone like me!" Well it's true. She was, if I recall correctly, a fair bit younger than he was — she was an arts student at the time, going to Ontario College of Art, doing exotic dancing. I went to see her dance once, with Joe. They were really after me to go and see her for years, so I finally went. She did a routine, it was a nursing routine. It was nowhere near as graphic as the dancing now. I suspect! She would make her own costumes and props, everything was handmade. Joe had made her a sort of billy club to put in her little nurse kit so that she could use it if she was walking home at night. And in fact, once she did get followed when she was walking home from stripping, and she was assaulted, and there was a trial. She had to testify at the trial, and the guy was convicted. He was a stockbroker. This was probably 1980, maybe 1979.1 went to the trial, just to watch. They didn't know what to expect — I didn't know either, really, I'd just barely been called to the bar, it was very early days for me. I remember the guy's lawyer saying that Annie should not be believed because she was a stripper, and everyone knew that strippers stripped because they hated men. And so therefore the judge shouldn't believe her when she testified. And the judge said, "Well, you know, some people would say that about your client. He's a stockbroker at King at Bay, and some people would say you can't trust anybody at King at Bay!" [laughs] I think the guy was convicted of indecent assault, but not the sort of serious, violent sexual assault that you read about in the papers. It was more like inappropriate touching. I think he got a suspended sentence, or a fine or something. Annie liked to do things to attract attention to herself. I remember once we all went out to dinner. I was meeting them at their place, and we were going to a place that they frequented. Annie put a black wig on over her red hair, and then she wore a sort of see-through chiffony kind of thing on

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lop. You could definitely see her breasts underneath it. We walked into this restaurant together, and the waitress came over and said, "Oh hi Joe! Hi Annie!" and Annie said, "You recognize me?" She was just flabbergasted that anyone would recognize her. I don't know if they actually recognized her, or if it was because she was with Joe. She was going to go to Paris, and she wanted to try to sell some of Joe's paintings in Paris - or as Joe would say, "pimp" his paintings. And she thought, "Who's going to even notice me? How am I going to get any attention?" So they were trying to find some way to gain attention. What they came up with was: they decided she was going to go to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on Christmas Eve, for midnight mass, and she was going to go from the back of the cathedral and run all the way down to the front and lift up her skirt, and she would have nothing on underneath. And she would be yelling, "Buy Mendelson Joe's art!" I think she came up with it, then Joe asked me what I thought might happen if she did it. Now I didn't really know, since I didn't know anything about French law, but I said I did not think it would be something that she would want to do. She could end up in jail. And he might not sell a single painting. She softened him; he was a kinder, gentler person when he was with Annie. And since then, he has not met another Annie Smith kind of person. He's been with other people, but they've not had that kind of impact on him.

HOW

SHE

LEFT

She was rny equal; she was just as powerful, strongwilled, opinionated, difficult, and creative as I was. Living with an equal is difficult in one room. She also did things differently from me. She would start things and not finish them. When you're living with somebody in one room who does that, it gets to be a bit much. I rented 138 Ossington under my name, so it behooved her to leave rather than I leave, because I

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wasn't going anywhere and she wanted to go. She wanted to do things with her life, she wanted to travel, which was totally reasonable. She was 14 years younger than me. But I hate travel. I've travelled all over the place, I hate it. It was November, 1981. She had a broken foot. I had gone up to Yellowknife to earn some money, partly to pay for her travel. She wouldn't fly to France — she had to go by boat, which means she had to fly down to New York to take a boat to England, and then go to France. She wanted to go to France and be in a Mel Brooks movie. She had a plan to pull down her pants at Notre Dame Cathedral on New Year's Eve in order to get Mel Brooks' attention. She had already been contacting him with telegrams. She was a strategist! Very clever. And Annie had ambitions not just to be in a Mel Brooks movie, not just to go to France. She wanted to go all over the world. So, when we parted, I told her, "I love you, and if you come back here and you want to resume this relationship with me, I'm here." I was totally sincere. I was as supportive of her as she was of me. I mean, I helped pay for her fucking travel. Well, she went to England, but she never went to France. She got involved with a comedian there, and she wound up living with him. And it broke my heart. After that, she travelled around the world. She got to Australia, she pulled down her pants in Malaysia, far as I know. And Belgium. I used to get cards from all over the place. Eventually she wound up getting involved with a guy who was an exiled marquis from Chile. Had a kid with him. Then they had a huge falling-out. Then she had another kid with another guy. The last she told me, they had both taken custody of her children. So I think Annie has a fucked-up life. I can't say anything else about it because I don't know anything else, but it upsets me tremendously. Of all the women I ever met in my life that I knew would be good to have a kid with, she was the one. I loved how she was with children.

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She calls me periodically. Sometimes she used to call me when she needed money, and I would always give her money. As long as I know she's not using it for drugs. I don't know who she is today. I think that after she and I parted, and she went on her way, I think that she got lost along the road, and she may well be lost today, I don't know. She lives in Vancouver now. She was in the sex trade business; she was a urinatrix, she was peeing on rich men. I don't have a problem with the sex trade. I couldn't smooch a woman who was having sex with other people. It would give me discomfort to know that somebody else was intimate with my sweetheart. But I wouldn't have a problem if she was peeing on them. I did a painting of her peeing on a rich guy. We had a good laugh about it — she said her biggest expense is water; but she told me, and I quote, "I have not learned to poo on cue." She's silly, she's funny, but there's a real sadness to this story. She'd be 40 or 41 now.

SHE IS

NOT A M Y T H

I don't believe you can go back to anything, and I don't reminisce in my mind about that. But if someone has a huge impact on your life — like your parents, or your brothers, or your sisters, or your lovers — they alter you for life. I don't dwell on the impact she had on me, but right now I'm acknowledging the great impact she had on me, in making my life so much richer and helping me become less of a jerk. She educated me. She's not a predictable person. One day she'd get dressed and she'd look like a tomboy or a dyke. The next day she'd look like a thousand-dollar-an-hour hooker. You'd never know what she was going to look like. She was silly and funny, and we made each other laugh a lot. She was probably the only person I've ever had in my life

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who really made me laugh; I know I make some people laugh, but she made me laugh. I am changed as a result of being loved by her and loving her. We had differences, and we had difficulties, because she was so strong. I think I'm attracted to very strong people, very smart. Although she had hardly any formal education, I think she only got as far as Grade 10 or something, she was very very self-educated, very smart, wise, motivated, creative, politically charged. She was my hero. To say that of a much younger person speaks about her, as well as it speaks about me, I guess. I looked up to her. She was inventive. She was kind. I just admired her enormously. I don't think I had anywhere near the effect on her that she had on me. She was a hard worker. She was difficult. She was one of the finest people I've ever met in my life. I still think about her, I'll never not think of her. She was just a great example of why humans don't have to be assholes. She was so good to me. And no-one influenced me and inspired me and supported me like she did, I don't mean economically. I have never received a lot of encouragement for what I do. And it's tougher when you don't. I've been making records now since 1968, and I'm telling ya, no-one could give a fuck whether I do or I didn't, for the last 10 years. It gets tougher when you're older — it doesn't get easier.

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Women Are the Only Hope The world is in such a mess now. There will never be leadership from men, because there are too few men who think like David Suzuki. So we're fucked. The only hope is women; I really believe it. By using technology to communicate with one another, women can start to change the world. They should make use of everything that connects people — the Internet, telephones, televisions, writing, singing. Women have to somehow unite and take control of the world. And the only way they can do it is by withholding sex from men. That's the only way you can control men, is to not allow them access to you unless they behave right. These are not original thoughts. If women were to band together and control men in this way, it would be at the risk of their own well-being, because the men would go around raping everybody. So women riot only have to become strong, they have to be protective of each other and they have to be aggressive. Well, that's an awful lot to ask overnight. But it's gotta happen soon. Mothers are less likely to build bombs and drop them. Women are less liable to want their children to go to war. Women are less likely to knowingly pollute where they know their children are going to have to live. I wrote about this stuff; some of my records that were released commercially spoke about these things. But even when the most read, or most seen, or most heard artists communicate their views, the world really doesn't take them too seriously. What the world takes seriously is greed. Letter to the Toronto Star, March 6, 1993: Now that a wise judge has ruled that women may bare their breasts without fear of being burdened with a criminal record, it seems one more layer of hypocrisy has

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been stripped (no pun intended) from the entrenched inequality between men and women. Let's hope women en masse bare their breasts across the nation, every March 1, to celebrate this worthy decision. Gwen Jacob and the Guelph Five deserve national respect.

WORKING

WOMEN

I have a series called Working Women, which is over 300 portraits of women. When did you start? Well, I can say I started to paint it consciously, and talk about it, in 1982. But I think it came as a result of being involved with Annie Smith. I painted Annie in '85 as a Working Woman. How she was treated at her job, and what she went through, really altered my perspective. I was involved with the sex trade business before I even met her, because I did some shows with strippers. But when you live with a stripper, especially someone who you look up to highly — It made me realize that women are always going to be eighth-class citizens. Most women have to do their jobs way better than men, or they have several jobs. A lot of women raise children, and have other jobs outside of raising children. I don't really think of myself as a feminist, just an attempted egalitarian. But I realized so clearly, as a result of my association with Annie, that there has to be somebody saying something about it in art. I also have a song called "Women Are the Only Hope." I really believe that the world is dominated by men — I mean, it's no secret, it's not like I've found something new. I've painted, now, hundreds of paintings of these women. They do every job a man does. The only thing a woman can't do on this planet is produce sperm.

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The Art Bank of Canada bought some of the first paintings. One of the first of the bunch was a woman named Vicki Gabereau, who's now a TV talk show host. Back then she had a radio show on CBC, so I did her as a CBC Radio Host. The government owns that painting. Early on I also did a woman who had written a novel, I did a stripper, I did a waitress at Yuk Yuks. I started off doing pretty small paintings; now, the average would be at least 24x24 but often 30x36. All the Working Women are painted head and shoulders, straight on, clothed. Even the people who work in the sex trade. I decided that everybody was going to be basically on the same footing. They got bigger as I got more confidence, but also as I got a little more loonage, because the supplies do cost money. I never got a grant for the Working Women, ever. It is a real commitment of love. I've done about 300, and I've got every kind of job, except I don't have an astronaut. I don't have an undercover cop, but I have a private detective, I have a police person, I have a retired major in the airforce who flew CF-18s. Construction people. I mean, women do everything. I have a fighter, lawyers, I have a judge, I have doctors, I have everything. Letter to the Toronto Star, February 25, 1990 Madame Justice Bertha Wilson's Will women judges really make a difference? is a rhetorical jab. When half of the judges (and legislators) are women, then and only then will there be true representation of the society we pretend is egalitarian. I'd love to see what happens to wife beaters, child abusers and rapists in a world where half the judges were female. Similarly — if women had a real political voice in Parliament, I doubt we'd be wasting taxpayers' money on another abortive abortion bill.

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A Working Woman After I left Mainline, years later, in '78 or so, I periodically would jam with Ted Purdy. He was studying law, and living with a woman who was also a law student at the time. Her name was Denise. She started out as a secretary to some politician in Ottawa, then she decided she'd become a lawyer. Denise left Ted, and I left Ted on a business level, but Denise and I continued to speak, in a regular way, and we would periodically have dinner together. She got herself a new man in her life, whose name was Bill, Bill has since passed away. Bill was a cop. And he was a decent guy. When you meet anyone who's decent, it's great, but if it's a decent cop it's even better, because I think that it's tough being a cop. My former sweetheart Viddah's mother's husband is a cop, and he's a racist. Cops are a problem, or they can be. Gradually Denise went from becoming a lawyer to becoming a lawyer in public service, so she worked as the Counsel for the Women's Directorate of Ontario. Then she became a crown prosecutor. And I said, "Denise, you've got to become a judge." I've been publicly saying all along, until half the judges are women, there's gonna be no justice in this land. Half of all the positions of power in our society should be held by women. Otherwise you get what we've got, which is a very lopsided world. So 1 advocated and pressured her to become a judge. She's been a Superior Court judge 3 years now. She came from out of nowhere. Noranda, northern Ontario. And Denise is decent. She's straight, she's nuts but she's nice nuts, and I admire her.

What's your title, exactly?

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JUDGE DEMISE BELLAMY: Justice of the Superior Court of Justice, that's what it's called here. Tell me how you first met Joe. I was going out with someone who had been in a band with Joe. They had had a falling-out, then they got back together again somehow, around 1978.1 was in my last year of law school. We would go over to Joe's place, we would talk about recording, music and whatnot. I went to the recording studio and watched music being made. It was on vinyl records then! They would start early in the morning and go on until quite late at night, so I saw Joe for days on end, all day long. And then when this guy and I broke up, Joe and I maintained a friendship. What was your first impression of him? Well, he was a pretty bizarre-looking guy. He didn't look like the people I went to law school with, let's put it that way! His head was shaven and he had a beard. And he was a big guy. He had big chunky gold rings on, one was an M, for Mendelson I guess, the other one was a maple leaf. He always had a huge glob of different colours of paint under his left arm. It turned out that he wiped his paintbrush under his arm as he painted. So he had this kaleidescope of colours under his left arm, on whatever shirt he was wearing. (Now he has paint over everywhere, but at the time it was primarily under his left arm.) And when he stood, because I'm so much shorter than he is, he would get down to my level by doing the splits. He'd stand there and move his legs further and further apart until he'd get to my eye level. He still does this. At the beginning it was a bit disconcerting, actually, to see him do this, but now I kind of like it, because it is easier to talk to someone who is at your eye level than someone who's towering a foot and a half over you. Even now, he calls me and I say "Oh hi Joe," and he says "Oh! You recognize my voice!" Hello, I should think so! I've known him for this long. And

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he's got a very distinctive voice. A big voice. Except when he's singing, then it's often a very gentle, soft voice. He has told me that he "advocated and pressured" you to become a judge. For a long time he was always nagging at me to become a judge. I've kept a lot of things that he had written to me over the years, and I have all kinds of letters saying, "Hurry up and become a judge! When are you going to become a judge?" He has a different sense than I do of what being a judge is, of what sort of power you have. His view is that I should be on the Supreme Court of Canada. He's very ambitious for me. He reads the newspapers cover to cover and sends me clippings. Things that he's read about that he thinks I should do something about, or that I should be aware of. Or if he sees my name in the paper, he'll cut it out. At his request, I send written copies of my decisions to him, and he always writes back. Sometimes he says, "Oh that's great, you really obviously thought about this." Other times he says, "I didn't understand a single thing, what a load of garbage, no wonder you get paid this. I'm glad I do what I do." And sometimes he says, "I can't believe you even came to that decision!" Without ever having seen the witnesses, or anything like that. I think that he would be better off asking why I came to the decision that I did, as opposed to being so explosively negative. He holds very strong views on things. He and I have disagreed a number of times. At one point he used to say, "Cigarette smokers should have to eat their butts." It's a great catchy phrase, but, you know, some people are seriously addicted. They have a problem, a medical problem. We'd talk about that, and I'd say, "Those people who have a serious medical addiction, should they have to eat their butts while they're trying to quit smoking?" How far do you take it? Because he does tend to see things one way or the other, and not much in the middle. He tends to form opinions right away.

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He does. And we've had many conversations about that For example, at one point he was completely in favour of capital punishment for anybody who kills anybody else. So I said, "Does that include the battered woman who, after 30 years of physical abuse, finally can't take it anymore and snaps and kills her husband?" "Well, no ..." He'll sort of back off a bit, and have trouble figuring out what the dividing line. But his intentions are good. He means well. I understand what he's saying, that generally we don't want people to kill each other, and if they do, then maybe this is something that society should do. He has a very catchy way of framing things. I was looking at a letter he'd written me, in which he said: "Christmas was a potluck of hypocrisy." Well, that's an interesting way of putting it. And he says, "TV is healthy for those who are healthy." If you say, "Hi, how are you, Joe?" he'll say, "I'm normal." I'm not sure that's true! Or he'll say something like, "Well, I live in a democracy, I have a lot to be thankful for." And I'll think, "Well, that's true, actually, and it would be nice if more people felt that way." Instead of saying, "Well, my head hurts again, and blah blah blah." Sometimes I'd say "Hi, how are you, Joe?" and he'd say, "Well, I'm poor but I'm normal." I used to try to find ways to help him out. Sometimes I would buy his paintings. I've kept them all — I like his work. But I didn't always have that kind of money. So I would buy him stamps. I'd buy him maybe $50 worth of stamps. Fifty dollars would go nowhere towards painting, but he could do a lot with $50 worth of stamps! That's a lot of letters to the editor! I remember, when Ted wasn't well at one point, Joe sat down and wrote him a list of all the things he had to be thankful for. And this list went on and on and on. Arid they were all wonderful things, and very simple, like: "Be grateful you live in a democracy," How many people, when they're feeling depressed, think, "Man, am I glad I live in a democracy!" It's not the first thing that would occur to most people.

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No, but it is for Joe. Or, "At least I'm healthy." Or, "At least I can get fresh vegetables." Or, "I can order a pizza if I want to," or "I have my liberty." All these simple, positive things. He's good for me as a friend. I have a lot of pressure in this job, a lot of stress, and Joe has a way of bringing everything down to a basic level. He reminds me of what we're here for, what human beings are supposed to be doing. But sometimes it's hard. If I'm really tired, Joe's hard to be with. He sometimes says things that maybe I don't want to hear, maybe I'm not in the mood to have that interactive kind of conversation that you have to have with him. You can't have a lazy conversation with Joe. He can always tell if I'm moving off mentally somewhere else, and he'll say "Well! Can tell you're not interested anymore!" Then I feel badly, I feel like I hurt his feelings and I didn't mean to. I asked him to speak at Bill's funeral, and he moved people to tears. He had this whole thing prepared that he was going to say, and then instead he just stood up and talked about how he respected Bill and wished he'd

Drawing from a letter to Stan Joskowitz, December 16, 1986.

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been his neighbour. Bill was a police officer, and I think that a lot of people perceive Joe as being anti-police, and so they were surprised. They would never have thought that this police officer would know somebody like Mendelson Joe, let alone know him well enough that Joe would come and speak at his funeral. In his painted attire. He says that he was really impressed that Bill was able to remain honest as a policeman. That's right. He felt that Bill was an honest guy, and he respected him very much for what he did. The risks that he had to take in his job. Joe is very, very pro-police. Way more than anybody would suspect. He's actually a very law and order kind of guy. You know - people who put cigarette butts on the street should have to eat them, [laughs]

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Don't Smoke Around Joe! Both my parents were smokers. I'm convinced that's why my sister and I have respiratory problems. I never smoked cigarettes, ever, except once when I was maybe 13 and I was experimenting, as kids do. I recall my parents saying, "If you're going to smoke, smoke in the house — it's okay." So I tried it. When I started to try to inhale — 1 couldn't figure out why you would do it. I said to myself, "This makes no sense." So I didn't start. I managed to set the couch on fire, though. Letter to NOW, December 11-17, 1986: Re: the whole smoking issue: Let this old fart clear the air (no pun intended; fun intended): Since we live in a free society, everyone has the right to smoke and get cancer. Non-smokers equally deserve the right to avoid smoke and cancer. Smokers who pollute non-smokers' air (including fetuses) are simply inconsiderate, often ignorant, carcinogenic slobs; agents of death. Finisky. Next.

DR. PHILIP BERGER: I think he's one of the first performers to successfully convince a bar to have a totally non-smoking concert. And this was long before it became standard in society. When was this? In the mid-'80s. Unbelievable. It was a typical smoke-filled bar, and it

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became a smoke-free environment for the evening. He was way ahead of the times. And he was doing what I think it takes to get people to stop smoking in certain areas, which is to change social standards and behaviors. We've done it through legislation, largely, but he did it through his own behavior. By setting an example. Yeah. I mean, now, it's standard, but then it was almost unthinkable to have a musician of his stature to have a concert with no smoking in it. In a bar. I think he was wearing a t-shirt saying No Smoking, or something. STAN THE FAN: It was at the Roxy, a little club, I think on Isabella Street — one of those little streets off of Yonge. It might've been a gay club or something; there seemed to be a lot of gay men there. Joe wouldn't play anywhere unless it was nonsmoking. He got a reputation for doing that. He was a nonsmoking advocate before it was fashionable to be one. I'm a nonsmoker, so I was quite happy with that. DENISE BELLA1MY: This is a card that he used to give out. We'd go to dinner together, back in the days when there were no non-smoking sections in Toronto. If someone nearby was smoking, he would go up to them and he'd put this card down: "I suffer from acute asthma. Your cigarette smoke is triggering an asthmatic attack. This is not a joke." He wanted people to stop smoking around him, and I think he decided that this was a way of asking that was less offensive, less scary. Because he is a big guy, and he looked so bizarre, with paint all over his left arm, usually wearing shorts in the middle of winter - if he came over to your table and said, "Would you mind not smoking?" I think some people found him a bit threatening. Or thought that he was just weird. BOB WISEMAN: I often think about one time when I was walking down the street with him, and we walked into a bakery. This was long before the kind of nonsmoking rights came about that exist now. You know Joe's very

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allergic to cigarette smoke, he makes that well known to all. I think there may have been a no-smoking sign in the bakery, but a guy was having a cigarette while he was ordering something, [laughing] So Joe walks up to the guy and gives him a card — a card that's already manufactured, that he carries on him, with a little explanation about how he's allergic to cigarette smoke. And shortly thereafter he turns to me and says to me something like, "Was there anything wrong with that? Did I do anything wrong by doing that?" — looking for confirmation that he was not in the wrong. It was many things at once: it was funny, and sad, and truthful, and weird. It's true, he's allergic, and why not say something? Of course, the guy kept smoking, and just looked at him like, "Fuck you."

CHAPTER SIX

JOE

AT

LARGE

(1982-present) I actually would be happy if I could just sell enough art to survive, and have a record deal so my music would sell enough that I'd get to go like this [stomps foot] on a semi-regular basis, as opposed to once a year at the Music Gallery. I will not play in bars. Even though people have offered me large amounts of money, I won't urinate on my art. I don't want to play to drunks. I only want to play to people who are sitting in seats and who are there for one purpose: to hear me do my little dance.

How do you know Joe ? BOB WISEMAN: I was curious to meet him. There was a guitar store on Harbord that still exists, called Ring Music. They don't usually sell CDs or cassettes, but one day I noticed they did have his cassettes. They stood out from the crowd because they were all hand-done, hand-written, and it was kind of cute and funny, and they had his postcards too. I don't think lots of people bought them, but eventually I bought a cassette called Not Safe. 112

THE CHOCOLATE MEANING

HEAVENLY GARLIC

THEY DON'T MATCH

I REMEMBER DARYL

NO EXAGGERATION COLLECTION OF AIR FARCE PRODUCTIONS

THANK YOU SERIES

RAINY MONDAY

GWEN COLLECTION OF GWEN SW1CK

MUSICIAN FROM THE WORKING WOMEN SERIES

JUNE CALL-WOOD FROM THE WORKING WOMEN SERIES

CLAUDIA

UPHOLSTERER FROM THE WORKING WOMEN SERIES

ROSALIE BERTELL FROM THE WORKING WOMEN SERIES

URSULA'S FAMILY

YAMAHA IN THE KITCHEN

MULRONEY HEARD BUSH CALL HIMSELF AN

ENVIRONMENTALIST SO, HE, MULRONEY DECLARED HIMSELF ONE TOO

GLIB FASCIST COLLECTION OF BOB WISEMAN

HYPOCRITE

SAD PIG

THE HUMIDITY AFFECTS ME

Joe in his Ossington studio with one of the "LIARS" paintings

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And I loved it, really loved it. There were some politics in the lyrics, and it was offbeat, it was unusual. I knew he was a bit famous in Toronto, but I didn't know for what — I'm from Winnipeg originally and I moved to Toronto in the early '80s, so I wasn't around when McKenna Mendelson Mainline were popular. In the '80s there used to be a magazine in Toronto called Nerve, and I asked them if I might write an article about him. They were into it, and so I called on him, He was living on Ossington, between Queen and Dundas, right next to an auto place with a big Michelin sign. You know the Michelin Man, this big guy made of tires? It was funny — it was kind of a caricature. I'm sure I'm not the only person who found that kind of cute. I was in the band Blue Rodeo at the time, and I was already unhappy and was planning to leave. It was exhilarating to meet someone else who had been in a band that was popular, who'd had some experience with that kind of music business success — playing to lots of people night after night, being on TV, flying around different places — and who was disappointed with the experience, and had some insight into it So our friendship began there. I was working on a record too, and I had him play bass on a couple of things on it. Then for the next record, I wanted

Drawing from a letter to Stan Joskowitz, 1986.

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to have an invented corporate sponsor. I mentioned that to Joe. He's very quick, you ask him something and he has an answer right away. Within about three days he sent me a letter with 40 imaginary corporate names that he had thought of. One that resonated with me was Lake Michigan Soda, so that was the one I used.

THE LOST H O N E S T ED P R O J E C T "Honest Ed" Mirvish once called me up because he wanted me to do a mural on one of his buildings. I made a counter-proposal, which would have changed the profile of himself and his enormous real estate development downtown. It would have put him on the map internationally in a way that he couldn't have imagined. It was a great idea . . . He wanted me to paint something on bricks, a big painting, on a wall of one of his buildings at King and John. I thought the idea of having a mural on a building would be good. And I knew what to do right away. I was going to do a big tit — a big nipple — or a big rabbit. I have a rabbit fixation. But I think that the nipple would have been the one to go with. I said to him, "Nothing lasts very long if you paint it on bricks." I wanted to make something that would last. So I said, "I'd love to paint a mural for you. But I have an idea, where you can use all these buildings, and here's my idea." I have to say — I'm going to pat myself on the back right now. That idea was fucking genius! "Not only would I like to contribute a work," I said to him, "but I would like you to commission other artists to make paintings. You would own the originals. And we would have these paintings blown up" — because there are technical facilities to blow things up, there are actually places that do this,

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make giant versions of paintings — "and we will have giant reproductions painted on aluminum, using the paint they use on jet airplanes, which is called epoxy paint." Epoxy paint doesn't deteriorate with weather. That's why jet airplanes, although they go through the air at high speed, and they're subjected to high friction, all the elements, their paint lasts quite well. So once all these different artists had produced these small paintings and been paid for them, Honest Ed would have them blown up on aluminum using epoxy paint. Then he would mount them, with aluminum frames. The frames wouldn't have to look like aluminum, they could look like wood, they could look like no frame. And then these giant paintings would be installed on these brick walls, creating Honest Ed's Giant Outdoor Art Gallery. Think of it! Think of a giant abstract painting on one building, a rabbit or a nipple on another building, a landscape on another building, a nude on another building. I wanted to foster other artists, not just rne. All Canadian art, by the way. He'd own the originals, he'd also own the giant copies, and the copies would be transferable when the buildings were knocked down. They would last for a long time. I said to him, "If you do this, if you put these Canadian artists on your buildings" — I gave him a whole list of names of people, some of whose works I hated but I thought they would make it interesting — "you'll be on every art magazine cover in the world!" All the tourists would come just to see this giant outdoor art gallery, all the tourist material about Toronto would mention it. People would walk down the street and see these framed works of art that looked like legitimate works of art, but they'd be like 20 feet long! They'd have the same colours as the originals, they would look like real paintings. There'd be a different one on each side of each building and each strut. I think I said maybe 12 or 16 paintings. It would make for a vast visual richness, and it would be totally uncommercial — there would be no selling of products, none of this cutesy-pie conventional

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stuff. Very clearly a gallery of art. It would be expensive to produce, but when the buildings came down he could put them somewhere else. They'd last: for probably twenty or thirty years — that's a long time. Whereas if you paint bricks, the weather does affect them, and the pollution affects them more than that. That was my idea. He thought about it, but he realized that he'd have to spend money to have them made in aluminum, and that would cost big bread. I said, "Think of the effect this would have on the city!" Instead, he built the Princess Theatre. He subsequently bought a couple of little paintings from me, but he didn't even pick them out himself. He said, "I'll pay this amount of money; pick what you think I might like." Well, that means he has no real respect for my work. He just knew that I was a local guy whose work should be seen or exploited. I think that he's both enamoured and probably a little disgusted with me, because every time he does something that is dishonest, I always send him a letter that says, "Honest Ed, what is your name? HONEST ED." The last letter I sent to him was about his hair. He's always had dark hair; he's in his 80s. I said, "Isn't it about time that you stopped dying your hair?" And he stopped. Now his hair is white. We had discussions about art. The guy definitely likes the arts, I think that he's influenced by his son and his wife. His son is an art collector. Honest Ed told me how he once made a sculpture himself, just to see if he could con people into thinking it was art, and they did. So he recognizes that the art game is a con game to some degree, and con artists always flourish. But inevitably, talented people sometimes flourish too. If you like a piece of art, that's all that matters. It doesn't matter whether it's a Van Gogh or a Van Joe.

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John Oswald is a dancer, he's a very adept recording engineer, and he's a saxophone player. He plays saxophone on "Everyone Needs a Pimp." I would describe his saxophone playing as very unusual, it's eccentric. He doesn't play it in a conventional way. He plays it as a spontaneous, intuitive kind of thing that happens to be a saxophone, but could have been anything. I don't remember exactly how we got into doing a performance of Swan Lake together, but we did. This was sometime in the '80s, at the Music Gallery. Back then I was a lot heavier, so it was really grotesque to see me dressed up as a swan. I had wings and a tutu. Part of being a performing artist, for me, is you can play. It's just silliness. Sometimes it's done with other people. I love working with John.

JOHN OSWALD' One of us, I don't remember which one, initiated this thing where the two of us were going to do a show together. We really are different, artistically. I mean, Joe describes the form of music that I'm involved in, improvisation, as mostly wanking off — a bunch of guys onstage without prior organization. And that lack of prior organization is something I really like. It's like a conversation. So although there was mutual appreciation of what we had done as individuals, there was that large gap between what he does during a performance, which is play songs, and what I do during a performance, which is: anything can happen. And so we tried to plan things so that I would be able to shine at what I can do and he would shine at what he can do. Joe sang his songs and played guitar, and I worked as a performer, and almost like a video director. I looked at the performance of each song as if it was a video: what can we do to make it different? I remember we had Joe all tied up with string for one song, like a puppet. Or it might have been that I was tied up with string. I think we were both tied up with string, in fact. Strings were going up and — oh, I don't know. It was the "They Will Take Your Pants" song about lawyers. I think my pants were

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pulled down by the string, or something like that. He would try to play the guitar, and his arm would be pulled by these hidden puppeteers. There were strings attached, as there are with any sort of engagement with lawyers. The feature of the evening was Swan Lake. I did something with Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake music. The idea was to take something that would normally be a full evening of ballet, and present it in 5 or 10 minutes. We choreographed this whole thing where Joe would be the swan, and I would be the prince. The plot was: I was a hunter, a fairly drunken hunter, and I was out drinking beer and shooting things. And I see this swan — Joe, who, like some people who unfortunately don't have legs and work the streets a lot, was on a little dolly, so he could kind of float around onstage. I think we had waves, so you couldn't see the dolly. He was pulled onstage by yet another string. He had a tutu, which was spread out on the surface of the water, and I guess some sort of plumage. We worked out a bit of ballet-like choreography for him. So, the hunter-prince sees the beautiful swan, and immediately falls in love. I can't really remember whether I shot Joe and then fell in love, or whether I fell in love and then accidentally shot him. But it was a real Romeo-and-Juliet kind of story: the swan dies, Joe's lying on stage, and I in my misery drink a lot more beer and pass out on top of the swan. My head is on his stomach, then he reawakens and sees me — it's just like Romeo and Juliet. The Music Gallery has a staircase, and I in my drunken state climbed up the staircase at one point to commit suicide. Then I slid down the bannister and wound up on the stage again. I managed to blow a button off my rubber wading pants when I was sliding down the stairs. The audience seemed to like it. We had to do lots of bows. Laurie Brown was there, I think City-TV was shooting a little bit of it. I remember noticing, as we were doing our bows, that she was crying, and I don't know if it was so funny that she was in tears, or if it was so sad . . . I think Joe was surprised that I could be so goofy.

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PATRONS Have you ever had a private benefactor? Yes, I have. I was the beneficiary of the Latner family. A former friend, Susan Stock, introduced me to an art lover whom she used to babysit — Joshua Latner. This was about ten years ago; he was in his mid-20s. He came and saw my art at my place on Ossington, and he dug my art and bought some of it. After a while, he bought quite a bit of it, and so did his brother Stephen, and so did his father. Eventually, they decided that they would support me. It was $250/month. It sure helped, but it would have helped more if it was $500/month, to be frank. I'm just saying that $250/month doesn't take you anywhere. It wasn't very much support, but it helped. They gave me $250/month for about 3 years. And they must have bought between 20 and 30 Joe paintings. I am indebted to them. I will say this, I made sure that I would never feel like I was taking their money and not giving them something. They never asked for anything, but I did a large portrait of the father which, when I figured it all out, more than balanced the books on their generosity to me. They are true patrons, and they were generous to me. They were supporting somebody that they believed in, because they really love art. That's one thing about Mr. Latner, and Joshua; they love art. I was so lucky to have met them. I don't think people who buy my art are helping me, by the way. I think they're customers. I appreciate all customers. But when people give you $250/month and they don't expect anything back, that's a different kind of relationship. I have myself been the benefactor of many artists; I've always helped artists when I've had extra money. I got a big grant in '91 — a senior grant, to paint the Liars series. An A grant — $32,000. It doesn't get better than that. That's the last grant I got. When I got that, I gave a lot of money away to other artists. Thousands of dol-

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lars. I had a right to. They were never going to get grants, and they were strugglers, just like me. The difference is that I got the grant. But some of the people who have been recipients of my philanthropy have agreed never to tell. Because real philanthropists don't tell you how much they've given, and to who.

A FIGHT Have you ever been in a fight? It was in the late '80s, maybe 1990. It wasn't really a fight. I was riding my bike, and a cab driver cut me off, in a big way, on St. George St. by the Robarts Library. What this guy did was so bizarre. I was going south on St. George. He was going north, and he decided to make a left-hand turn onto Sussex, which means he cut me off. Cab drivers do this all the time. But he did it at the wrong time, and he did it so fast — no signal or anything — I had to take evasive action, and wound up riding up on the lawn of Robarts Library. He just about killed me. So I went and followed him. I know this guy knew, when I stopped him, that I was the guy that he had cut off. He knew what he had done, I yelled at him when he did it. I parked my bike in front of his car, told him to get out of his car, and I hit him in the face. You know what happened? He didn't get up. And I freaked. That's the last time I've ever had any physical violence with anybody, because I'm terrified. I could've killed the guy. You knocked him out cold? No. He just didn't get up. He was alive. But for a minute there, when he didn't get up and he didn't move, I thought, "Oh shit. Now I've really done it." I should never have punched him. Before I hit him,

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he said, "I'm sorry." I was angry. I didn't hit him hard. I just gave him a smack. But it was stupid; it was wrong; it was illegal. Finally the guy got up. And you know what I said to him? "I'm sorry." But he'll never forget me. I don't remember ever starting a fight, a physical fight, in my life. I've been in situations where I've had to grab people and control them, or fight back, defend myself. That hasn't happened in a long time. As a kid, I was beaten by bullies, and being a Jew 1 was occasionally persecuted. And when you're in a band, there are always people who come up and want to fight you, especially when you have to play bars. But generally speaking, I would talk my way out of anything. I don't want to have fights with anybody, ever! You get hurt.

ALZHEIMER'S Mumsy started showing the symptoms of Alzheimer's when she was in her mid-70s. Around '86, '87. She started putting things away in the wrong places, for example she'd put away food where you put hardware. And she'd leave the stove on, which she would never do before. Eventually, she was diagnosed. We discussed it with her. She understood what it meant, but she was in denial, as most people are. My father was also always in denial about my mother's Alzheimer's. It was horrible. He knew she had Alzheimer's, but he never was kind to her. He kept persecuting her because she couldn't remember things. He'd persecute her! It was very twisted. One of the things I did for my mother, that made me very happy, was I made drawings of the appliances and where they would go, so she could match up what something looked like to where it should be put away, like food in the refrigerator. I'd draw a picture of a fish and put it on the fridge door, so she'd know the fish would go in there. Eventually, that became meaningless.

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Years ago, I invented a gibberish language called Krasti-Posti. It's a pseudo-Slavic, pseudo-something language that I just make up as I talk. If I'm standing in a line, and someone butts in in front of me — which doesn't happen, but if someone dared — and I don't want to get into a fight with the person — instead of speaking my mind in English, I might say something in Krasti-Posti. They wouldn't understand what I was saying, but they would understand the tone. So if I didn't like something you were doing — if you were treating your child with disrespect, for example — I'd say, "Krapasti! Kradnacka! Krisni be va prosnya! Krasna!" Something like that. It's convincing, because there's bluster. In the end, when you speak Krasti-Posti, you better be ready to die. Over the years, I developed the language. Now it has probably 30 sentences. It's all in how you say it. I could just take your hand and say, "Krasna . . . " It's all how you say it. I used to use it, amongst other things, as a test to see where my mother was at, as she deteriorated. With Alzheimer's, you can tell what a person's state of mind is if you apply the same question or test at different times to see how they react. Before she had Alzheimer's, and then even in the early stages of Alzheimer's, I used to amuse my mother by speaking Krasti-Posti. In the beginning, every time I spoke Krasti-Posti to her, she'd just about pee herself. For some reason, she thought it was funny. But eventually she didn't know anymore what was going on; she didn't laugh anymore. Eventually she became a vegetable. For approximately two years, she just sat in a chair and drooled. Was fed. Babbled. It was very, very demoralizing.

DEATH

OF

PARENTS

My father died at the end of June, 1992. It was the coldest June I can remember. He died from bone cancer, after about six weeks in agony.

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It was really bad. I painted him during that time. We didn't communicate much, he was drugged most of the time. But we never had much communication of any real sort anyway. He was a small-1 liberal who voted, I think, pretty much NDP. I'm sure I got a lot of my sense of social justice from my father. Not from my mother. I think he was a very frustrated guy, and he took it out on his family. And when he would drink, he was a very embarrassing person. Of course my mother was too, when she drank. They were both closet alcoholics, they drank every day. Even when I tried to build something with him, near the end of his life, when I knew that that was the time, if ever there was going to be any kind of resolution between us — there never was. Mumsy died in 1998, also at the end of June. She died after 10 years with Alzheimer's. The last couple of years she was in a total vegetative state. Horrible. My relationship with my mother was much better than it was with my father. About 25, maybe 20 years ago, I remember having a conversation with her, in which I made her a promise that if she ever became a vegetable, which she did, that I would kill her. And I broke my promise. I felt terribly guilty because I didn't kill her, because I'm a coward. I'm not afraid of killing somebody for the right reasons, but I don't want to go to jail. I betrayed a promise to my mother, and I believe a promise is not to be broken. She was of sound mind and body when she asked me to kill her if she ever got to be the way she was. I'm for euthanasia, as you might think. But I'm very conscious of the fact that it's a dangerous thing, euthanasia, because to trust doctors is like trusting Mengele. He was a doctor. So you cannot trust a doctor any more than you can trust a drug dealer. You have to have some sort of system, laws, something in place to prevent people from becoming wholesale murderers. That's the problem with euthanasia. But I'm pro-euthanasia, and I'm definitely pro-suicide. Jack Kevorkian deserves a Nobel Prize, in my opinion. One of my

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letters to the editor says that. He's a hero! He's trying to be helpful to people. That's what a doctor's supposed to do. To our knowledge, he's never done anything to be cruel. Courageous, smart, wise; I've nothing negative to say about that guy. Letter to the Toronto Star, June 14, 1990: Dr. Jack Kevorkian is a humanist and a hero. His so-called suicide machine is the most valuable invention of the 20th century. Kevorkian should be given the Nobel Prize. I only hope I have access to this profoundly genius invention when my time comes to vacate these sad premises.

OSSINGTON, VIDDAH, AND THE HOUSE LARRY BOUGHT What was 138 Ossington like? It was a large storefront. I always go to the ground floor, because I've got this fear of fires. And I also had the basement. But it was a real dump. There were holes in the walls. The building was poorly maintained by the old man who owned it, who lived above me. And rats! Lots of rats. I caught one of them and put him in the freezer so I could show people how big you could get a rat in Toronto. I lived in 138 from 1981 to 1994. Poverty.

DAVID WILCOX: Early in the '80s, Joe and I both shaved our heads. These days every other guy you see has a shaved head, but in those days it was quite rare. He was painting me in his studio on Ossington, and a

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professional nurse came by, a middle-aged black woman, who was going to do some health care for the man upstairs. She knocked on the door, and these two guys came to the door with shaved heads. She looked like a community health worker who had seen a lot of life, you know, as I'm sure they have, but she was still quite surprised. She probably thought she'd stumbled onto a cult or something. I'd visit him there, and he would make a salad called a Mendelsalad, and it would be very good, but I remember him making it in a garbage bag once. It was a clean garbage bag, but it's still a strange sensibility.

In the early 1990s, I lived with a woman I'll call Viddah. I loved her, she was a very big love of my life. Having painted and loved many women, I've learned that abuse is really common. This woman had been significantly abused as a kid — horribly abused psychologically by a misogynist father and misogynist brothers. Some abusers become abusive when they grow up. I was sometimes verbally abusive of Flea, my wife, and I know now it's because I was verbally abused. Viddah had bouts when she would be abusive towards me. Immediately after the first time she did it, she called the abuse hotline to talk about how she had just been verbally abusive to me. So she herself knew she was doing it. She had had lots of shrinkage, and she and the shrink concluded that there was not much more that they could do. I honestly feel sorry for people who are that fucked up. Viddah's not a psychopath, which is a different kind of abuser. A garden-variety psychopath abuses everyone who crosses their trail — they don't know it though, and that's their problem. Viddah isn't; she knows right from wrong and has a conscience. I recognized her abuse for what it was right away, but I felt so stupid for having tolerated it over and over. Stupid people repeat themselves, right? Well I had repeated myself with her. Once is enough, twice is terrible, three times you've gotta go away. And I

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finally did. When she was abusive of me the last time, that was the last time, and I left her, and that was it. That hurt me. It wasn't that the abuse hurt me, it was that I felt that at my age — I was already in my 50s — I should have been wiser. 1 felt stupid. So I was definitely a very hurt, vulnerable child at the age of 51. I met Larry Solomon as a result of my support for his organization, Energy Probe. My involvement with that group goes back probably 20 years. It does the work that governments should be doing. It probes energy, but it also probes all kinds of things relating to how we are destroying this planet. My interest in Energy Probe arose because they were the only group that I knew of, outside of maybe Greenpeace, who wanted to expose the nuclear industry, and the fact that nuclear power amounts to death. They were specifically an anti-nuke group. Their methods and mine are different; 1 think they thought I was nuts, at first, Solomon and his co-worker Norm Rubin. Nonetheless, when I offered them art to raise money for their organization, they accepted it. So I became a big donor, and they raised a lot of loons. I've given them a lot of art. They've probably made more than 50 grand from it. The last large series I gave them was to fight the Nuclear Liability Act, which is a federal statute which essentially protects the nuclear industry from liability beyond 75 million dollars if there's a nuclear mess. 75 million dollars doesn't buy anything. It could pay for maybe 30 houses in Forest Hill. So that means that the nuclear industry — in this province, what's now called Ontario Power Generation, used to be called Ontario Hydro — is basically without liability if something goes wrong. What's left is the federal government, and what could the federal government do if we had to evacuate Toronto and never return? So if Darlington has some sort of major malfunction, and if the wind blows toward us, which it normally doesn't — you can say goodbye to Toronto. When I knew I was leaving Viddah, I searched for a place to live. I mentioned this to Larry, and I asked him if he knew anybody who

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would be sympathetic to an artist with a very low budget; he didn't. At the time, I was the most upset I've ever been. For a 50-year-old man to realize he has made foolish decisions because of his heart — I was very upset, and I was depressed. It was the only time in my life where I felt like people could see that I was so upset. You could tell that I was on the verge of tears. I didn't realize this when I spoke with Larry. But a couple of days later, he called and said that he and his wife, Pat Adams, would like to buy a house for me to live in. I said, "What?" I couldn't believe it. Can you imagine someone saying, "I'd like to buy a house for you?" He explained it to me; he said it would be any rent I could afford to pay. And so I moved into the house they bought. In 1999, my mother died, and I inherited some money. I immediately put the rent up. They said, "Well, if you have money, why don't you buy this house?" I bought it from them. Now I'm selling it. I never sought anything from them ever, and it's interesting how, when I was broke and very vulnerable, they helped me. It means that these people really have valued me. We had dined periodically, socialized; Larry and Pat had met Viddah too. But I didn't consider myself to be close friends with them at all. Then they kept inviting me over for dinner — and they still do, a lot.

THE

ENVIRONMENT

We're just screwing up everything. The people who are running the governments have children; they don't give a shit about their children. You don't have to be too smart to see that the temperature of the fucking planet is changing. You can't mess with Mother Nature, otherwise she'll urinate on you. I don't think we can reverse the problem now. We cannot get rid of nuclear waste and all the problems that have occurred as a result of it. We have the highest concentration of nuclear plants in the world

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right around here. We have Darlington, which is the largest nuclear installation for generating electricity in the world. Next to it, we have Pickering, which is also a large installation. We also have Bruce station, which is also large and is not working right now but is definitely a big mess. Even when these plants are shut down, they'll still be generating radioactivity, they will have to be literally entombed. And the waste products will not go away, they will not break down for hundreds of thousands of years. So we're in deep shit. And the use of fossil fuels is heating up the world, which means some cities — like Manhattan — will be underwater, possibly in your lifetime, not in mine. At some point the water level has to rise, because the ice melts and if the ice melts the water rises. And all this radioactive stuff is going to get into the freshwater water tables of the world. Not to mention all the other chemicals that we've polluted with. Letter to the Toronto Star, November 29, 1986: David Israelson's column about the failure of Canada's anti-nuclear crusaders makes me sad. Israelson tells it true. Canadians, particularly Ontarians (where nuclear energy flourishes and expands), are as blind as any sheep can be. I'm sad because we possess the freedom and machinery to halt the madness (nuclear energy) yet most of us sit by and trust the politicians. I am sad because 1 see futility instead of hope and no god nor invention will save us from our own blind greed and apathy.

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A Fellow Activist I met Philip Berger because he was dating my cousin, whom I have no interest in whatsoever. A few years later, he dumped my cousin, and we became friendly. He is also my physician. I would say he is probably the most honest person I know. If you talk to Philip he will not bullshit you. But he's more socially ept than me. I don't ept too much. What I love about Philip is, he treats everybody the same. All his patients get treated the same. A huge amount of his practice deals with people who were drug addicts, disadvantaged people, and people with AIDS. He is also, now, Head of Family Medicine at St. Michael's Hospital, and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto too. Philip is a very decent man. He's got all these hats, but the bottom line is: he looks after people.

Do you remember meeting Joe? PHILIP BERGER: I think it was 1976. I met him in the Manulife building, when he was still married. He remembers much more than I do, he claims I was quite provocative and challenging to him and very argumentative, very leftist. I do have this memory of him walking out into the hallway of the apartment, down to the exit, in his typical outfit, shorts and cowboy boots, waving goodbye. We tend to have brief, very intense conversations, usually on the phone. And dinner together maybe once every month or two. I haven't had cause to recently, but I used to go and protest in the streets. Joe would often accompany me. I used to protest against a neoNazi white supremacist group called the Heritage Front. Aside from the Anti-Racist Action Group, there weren't enough people taking action against them, as far as I was concerned. At the Simon Wiesenthal Jewish

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conference on American neo-Nazism, the Heritage Front demonstrated there was about 60 of these rowdy, mostly young men and women with boots up to their knees. I went out, and Joe came with me out with me, and we both stood there with signs. Joe said he came out to protect me, but he understood that there was an important principle at stake: that we should have the right and freedom to protest on any street we wanted to, and not be intimidated by the presence of others. We also once held a two-person demonstration at police headquarters. This was in the early 1990s, after Bob Rae tried to introduce holster rules for the police, and 5000 police demonstrated at Queen's Park, and a black citizen with a placard was singlehandedly protesting against the police, and the cops beat him up. It was right on TV, it was outrageous. The protester had a sign saying, "Stick to your guns, Bob," so I made the exact same sign and went right to the police headquarters. And Joe came with me. Joe also had his own individual demonstrations against politicians, and against nuclear power, and I would join him in solidarity. So it was often just the two of you on the street? Yeah. Sometimes my causes, sometimes his own. He'd try to get other people to come. I think June Callwood actually showed up to one of his demonstrations at the art gallery. He had another one against David Peterson at Queen's Park. What kind of reaction did the two of you get out there? At the Heritage Front, there was one other person, a very straight-looking Jewish guy. He was outraged that there were only three of us; he was saying, "Why isn't anyone else out here demonstrating?" I said, "Well, go ask the Jewish community." I guess they were afraid of a confrontation. At other demonstrations, like the police one, did people come up and talk to you?

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Yes. And we behaved responsibly. We're not stupid. We're not going to be provocative. When people ask why you're there, you say why you're there. If they try to provoke you, you ignore them. Joe has said that you and he occupy the same ground politically. He's told me that this is important to him when making friends; people he respects are generally people who share his values. Part ot the benefit and the beauty ot any friendship is that when you have discussions, you don't have to go over all the premises and presumptions — they're there already, so you can penetrate to the core of the debate. The only thing that I remember that we did disagree on: You might think it's shocking, but I believe in God. He's totally dismissive of that, and contemptuous of it. That's interesting. And yet he tolerates you anyway. Well, I mean, how can you be friends with someone whose views are totally identical to yours? We've had discussions about it, and i think he's astonished by it and surprised, but he accepts it. Also about assisted suicide, which he would be in favour of; I'm not going to get into all the details but we have some disagreement on that. We had a recent discussion about why sick people cling to life. I was trying to explain to him how you can't underestimate people's will to live — how they will cling, at all costs, to living, no matter how debilitated they are. His view is that, first of all, he's not going to get anywhere near that point — he'll cut out long before he ever gets to a state like that. And he says the only reason people cling to life is out of dissatisfaction. They feel they've failed to enjoy life fully before they got sick, so they hang on in the hopes of getting opportunities to make more of their lives than they've made in the past. I think that might deserve some credit, but I don't think that's the entire explanation. He believes that very, very few people have goodness in them, naturally,

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internally. I don't quite agree with him on that I say to him, "What about people who live in middle-class areas, have boring jobs and maybe unhappy marriages, but do volunteer work at the food bank maybe once a week? It's a good thing to do." His test is, "Well, are they going to do the right thing when they start rounding people up and putting them away in a camp somewhere because they're Native Canadian, or something like that?" That's his test of goodness, which is a severe test. In a sense he's correct, but I personally am not going to wait for that test. I don't accept that there are so few people who have goodness in them. He talks a lot about lying. He believes very few people are fully honest with themselves, and that those who are, are more satisfied in life. I think he's right about that, actually. He's completely comfortable with himself, including with what he recognizes as his weaknesses. That's another thing that's unusual about him. He does seem to have this view of people as being very dishonest to each other and to themselves, dissatisfied with life, corrupt - it seems a very cynical and misanthropic view. And yet at the same time, a lot of the activism that he does has to do with helping people. This seems an inherent contradiction; what do you think it comes from ? Where's the contradiction? Why should he be helping people if he thinks we're terrible? Why would he be protesting in support of people whom he mostly holds in contempt? I think it's part of being vigilant and defending the freedom of a liberal democracy, which he benefits from. I mean, in many other countries he'd have been shot dead by now. When he's opposing racism, opposing autocratic rule, opposing the vicious government that we have in Ontario, I think in his view he's protecting his own freedom as well as other people's. But I think part of it also is because racism, in its extreme, will lead to the enslavement and death of people, and he believes he has a duty to

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oppose it, as everybody does. As he once said: "It's in our job description as citizens." He has a strong sense of duty. What can I say: I like him, I love him. He's fearless but not stupid; he understands a lot of issues. Could you define, in your words, what you think his politics are? Where does he fall on the political spectrum? I think mostly on the left, but mixed. I think other people, if they knew his political views, would define him on the left, but I don't think he'd define himself that way. I think he looks at what in his view is right and proper, and comes to a determination and a conclusion. So to say he was left-wing would give a misleading impression of who he is and how he thinks; he won't be pigeonholed into any kind of ideology. He does not spout a party line. Absolutely. No, he does spout a party line: the Mendelson Joe line. Joe is rigidly principled, and most of the time it's a very good thing. He's uncompromising, which I think is also good. Stubbornness can be a very good characteristic. I wouldn't expect anything less from him, but I think that it might have prevented a full flourishing of his artistic career. I just feel that it's too bad in a way, because I think he'd be more accepted and listened to more widely if he played the game a little bit. But on the other hand, it's hard to balance sticking to your principles and playing the game. I do it, but I have to — I work in a very establishment job. That's the difference between him and me — he does not have to do it. He works on his own, he's accountable to himself only. I have accountability to all sorts of people. It does compel an accommodation to systems, an adjustment which he doesn't have to make. He has chosen not to make that adjustment, if you see what I mean. / think I do. It seems to me that both kinds of people are absolutely

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necessary for any kind of change to take place: the rigidly principled people, and also the people who are willing to compromise and discuss. I think at a gut level he finds compromise too disgusting. I think it's his nature. It just makes him sick. He's moving out to the woods, he says because he doesn't want to be around humans. It fits. I mean, I'm sort of upset about it, because I'm going to miss him. He says that's crazy because we don't see each other that often, we talk a lot on the phone, but there is something different about knowing that the person is physically in the same city as you. My kids always accuse me of mimicking Mendelson Joe. It's true, some of his phrases really rub off: People will say, "How are you?" and I'll say, "Normal." That's his phrase, not mine. Or, "How are you?" "Average, thank you." There is humour in that, he's making a point. Sometimes if you asked him, "How are you?" he used to answer, "Obese." I think he's a very funny guy. I've seen him in concert, and he's had me howling in laughter at his commentary about humans. Just the way he sometimes makes fun of himself, but in making fun of himself brings out a point about human nature and behaviour. He points out people's foibles, their weaknesses and contradictions. He's also an incredibly shy guy, at a personal level. Which is why he doesn't socialize in groups. He came to one party I had at my place in the early '80s — that was the last time. I don't even ask him anymore; I would, but he won't go and it's an imposition on him.

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1 35

Artists Against Racism (AAR) I believe that irrational hate is a mental illness, just like the worship of God, but much more negative. The problem's never going to go away, and AAR allows artists to participate in the fight against it. In 1992, Lisa Cherniak wrote an article in the Globe and Mail about racism, and I read it, and I thought she did a good job, so I wrote and encouraged her. As a result, we met. She's a freelancer. She's in her mid-thirties, but she sounds like a 12-year-old if you talk to her, and if you meet her, she looks like a 12-year-old. But she's got the heart of an angel, and she's got giant ovaries. They must be hundreds of pounds each. She is a very driven, sweet, smart woman. She had an idea to make an organization to fight racism. I think she originally wanted it to be Corporations against Racism, then she realized no corporations could care less, unless it's good for business. But then she said, "How about Artists Against Racism?" I agreed. She did all the work. All I did was tell her how to do stuff, like how to manipulate assholes to embarrass them into doing what you want them to do. I was sort of like the director of her energies. I started her off by giving her money, and connecting her with powerful people who would give her money. I knew a lot of other people who are pop stars who I thought might support AAR by lending their names to it and making donations. Some of them did. Some of the first supporters whom I solicited helped us enormously. Raffi, children's entertainer, has been very good to us and very supportive. He has helped us with money, and his name. I think his first donation was a grand. That's a lot of money! Neil Peart, the drummer from Rush, was amazing. He's very very supportive of this. Neil is a huge advocate of my art, he's bought a lot of my paintings. He's very respectful of my work. He immediately coughed up loonage for AAR, and has been very helpful towards AAR as a prominent guy.

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Mendelson Joe, by Tony Jenkins

Other people helped too. Now, all kinds of mainstream people have come aboard. People from all over, internationally, like Britain, the U.S. It becomes a conformist thing: everyone wants to join your club. If you call the AAR 1-800 number, you'll get all kinds of pop stars talking for AAR. Phil Collins is on there now. I did the artwork for the original poster. The slogan, which I think is great, is Lisa's. That poster has been disseminated all over Canada, and is probably in most schools in this country, most libraries, and most prisons. For a while I was a director and very involved, but I had to stop

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because I didn't agree with what Lisa was doing in some respects. I cannot be involved with people who are pissing on my advice. But I'm very proud of AAR, I'm very proud of the involvement I had. AAR is very much an international organization now. Lisa runs the whole thing. She's a total pain in the ass, and I respect her enormously. She's heroic, she's conscience-driven, and because of what AAR has done, she has changed Canada. The AAR poster, and the stuff which she largely created, is all across Canada. She did it. One person!

LISA CHERNEAK: I wrote an article in the Globe and Mail on antiSemitism, because David Irving, a Holocaust denier, had tried to get into Canada. Joe wrote me back and sent me a bunch of postcards. I thought that was kind of cool, because I got a hate letter from someone else, and then somebody who I'd heard of sent me postcards and a letter. I called him up just to thank him for the postcards. We had this 10-minute discussion on social issues, and I realized how passionate about it he was. I've come across very few people in my life who sound like me when they talk about these issues. So we met, and we talked about the issue of racism. At the time, all this stuff was going on — hate groups were forming youth groups in schools, and there were all these different racist events. So I came up with the idea of creating something that would oppose that pamphletting and recruiting, and that would have a permanent presence in schools. Initially the idea was just to have a poster campaign, not a full organization. Joe's a unique person. There's not too many other people who would have just hopped on board with me for a cause like racism. He gave me $300, without even knowing me, to start it. He believed in me and trusted me. He says he can recognize people from their writing. At first, it was going to be Corporations for Harmony. I was trying to get all these corporations signed up, and I wasn't getting anywhere with that. But Joe got me a couple of people signed up right away - Raffi, and Neil

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from Rush. And so then it dawned on me: I gotta change the name. We only had artists, and we were trying to reach youth. By April, after getting no corporations on board, the idea came to me: why not call it Artists Against Racism? Bob Wiseman was also a big help in getting started, just because he told me to buy a directory of music managers. If it wasn't for him saying that, AAR might not exist right now - at least, it would have taken longer to get started. I designed the poster, and Joe painted it, which is surprising when you think about it - I mean, it's rare that an artist would collaborate to paint someone else's idea What he painted was different from how I'd .imagined it, but it worked out well. It was a bunch of people standing on a globe, against a blue background. There was a guy who looked Jewish, so I asked Joe to put a kippah on the guy's head. And Joe goes, "I never let anybody tell me what to do!" But he didn't say it in a mean way. Then he goes, "Because I respect you so much, just this once, I will do this." It was pretty funny, because I barely knew him at that point, and I had thought, "No big deal, I'll just ask him to change a couple things." I didn't think anything of it. I just figured we were working as a team. You can do that with a graphic designer. But I guess you don't do that with artists. What kind of guidance did Joe give you? He gave me advice on how to deal with people. I was trying to get people in the music industry involved, and so I was working with a bunch of big egos, which I'd never done before. It was pretty intimidating. He had a lot of experience in the music industry already, so he knew what it was like. Sometimes I'd get incredibly frustrated. I often would wonder why I was spending hundreds of hours trying to bypass managers who seemed to care primarily about money. It was especially frustrating when racism was in the news everyday — sure there's lots of causes coming to them, but racism was in the front of the news and it was a crisis point. The managers are just so annoying sometimes! I would call Joe up, and he would just calm

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me down and tell me not to worry, it would all work out in the end. And he was right about that. The people who just wouldn't help us, sometimes I really wanted to give them hell. Joe felt the same way, but he'd tell me, "Don't worry, it's okay, just bypass the managers who don't care, and go onto the next. Persist and you will succeed, there's dozens of fish in the sea and we'll find the right ones." Although at first it sure seemed like there weren't a lot of right ones out there! Joe went away that summer, he went up north camping. Nothing much was really happening. And then Gordon Lightfoot's manager called me one day, and said a bunch of racist stuff. I was totally outraged, I was so sick of people spewing racist comments and thinking they could just get it out in the consciousness and perpetuate it. And I was thinking, "I really want to say something. What would Joe do?" Because, you know, there's the side of Joe where he's calm and collected and reasonable. But there's also a point at which Joe wouldn't take it anymore. There's the other side, that would just go after people and let loose. He's had his moments. So I thought, "Which side . . . ?" I decided people should know about racism in the music industry. So I phoned the Globe and Mail, and I told one of the columnists what this guy had said. She said, "Okay, I have to check with him to see if he said this." So for the next two days I waited while she tried to get in touch with him. Then she called me back and said, "He said the same things to me!" I was so relieved. She wrote a column about it, and it ran on the front of the entertainment page. After that, Lightfoot's manager was calling me nonstop, asking why I called the Globe and Mail, but I didn't even return his calls. I was kind of worried because I thought, "Well, I hope Joe's not upset if he doesn't agree with what I did." Even though he wasn't my boss or anything, I didn't have to do what he wanted, I didn't want to upset him, because I respected him and he had helped me greatly. But when he came back, and I told him, he wasn't fazed at all by it; he wasn't even surprised. I guess he knew what Gordon was like from past dealings with him. And then suddenly, within the next week, all these authors, like

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Margaret Atwood, started signing up. All the literate, intelligent people, which I guess is not a surprise when you think about it. I got them before most of the musicians. Joe told me that you've had disagreements about how the organization should work. I think in a way he wanted to protect my vision and his vision. He just didn't want me to lose control of the organization. He wanted it to be just his ideas and my ideas, and he was afraid other people coming in might change that. I think it was his lack of trust of people; he doesn't like most people. Joe and I are opposite in that way — I love working with people, I like working with teams and getting other people's ideas. And what he didn't understand is that if you're a nonprofit, you have to have a board of directors. You have to have at least three people, you have to have elections, or you can't get a charity number. So I had to include other people; I didn't really have a choice. I had faith that it could be done that way, with a board. I had people on the board who really share the same vision. And I really believe that democracy works, and that it has to extend to the running of organizations the same way it does to the running of governments. Besides, with just the same two people, after a while you run out of ideas. You have to be ready to adapt. It's working out really well. The people on the board of directors are really great. The people I ask to run for the board are people who I know are creative, and who I trust. Basically the board is there to decide on financial matters, but I try to get their input in other ways. I know Joe is still a supporter of what MR does. He bikes around and walks around a lot in our T-shirt. He has several of them, and he's turned them all brown, he wears them so much. I believe in serendipity, I think I was meant to meet Joe, this was part of the plan for both of our lives. He has helped me so much. In my eyes, he was like a best friend for a few years there, and I'm sure he'll always be there for me, as I will be for him. 14O

CHAPTER SEVEN

ALIEN

LIFE TODAY On average, I paint 5 days a week. I paint more than anybody I've ever heard of. I have a lot of work. I'm chronic. It keeps me healthy. I have a lot of freedom. I don't have children, I don't have a wife. I don't work for other people. I chose, a long time ago, to immerse myself in doing only my own thing. I'm a diabetic; I diagnosed it myself in 1991. It's genetic. I have no problems from it, because I'm very careful. There are 2 types of diabetics; I'm type 2, which means that if I'm careful with diet and exercise, I won't suffer symptoms. I did suffer from it, but I don't now, because I've lost a lot of weight. Since diagnosed I've lost 50 pounds. I was always exercising, but now I exercise more. I exercise twice a day. In the morning I do 45 minutes, including 500 situps. (I started out with doing 5.) Every day, never miss a day. I also do boxing exercises, which includes kicks, blows into the air. And yogalike exercises, stretching. I used to be a runner, I don't run anymore, my knees are screwed up. Running on pavement is no good for you. At night I do more boxing stuff. I started to dramatically change my eating habits about 1990. Now I hardly eat any meat; I'm not a vegetarian, but almost. No

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cheese, nothing with sugar. Mainly fruit and vegetables. I'm in better shape than I've ever been in my life. My reflexes are way quicker at 55 than they were at 45. My life is going through a change. For the first time in my life, I'm not stressed by economic problems. I'm selling this house, and when it sells, I will move north. I'm leaving Toronto for a whole bunch of reasons: I feel like I have done an enormous amount of work here, and 1 have been basically ignored and dismissed as an artist, in terms of both my music and my painting. The key to success in art and in performing is schmoozing, and I don't schmooze. The air quality here is affecting my health, psychologically and physically. I want to live where the air smells good. And I don't want neighbours. I want to live where no people can build near me; I will live in the centre of a plot of land. I don't want to live on a lake, because the moron count goes up like crazy in the summer. Sea-doos, radios, skidoos in the winter — I don't want any of that in my life. I'm allergic to cigarette smoke, cats, and racists. Do you want to become a hermit? Well I already am a hermit. I'm reclusive by most people's definition. I make money when I sell art. If I sell one painting, I get, say, $4200. So if I sell a painting a month, I'm doing okay. But sometimes I sell nothing for 6 months, and then I sell four paintings. So it's a very insecure life. I tell people, if you're painting for the money, you're going to have a bumpy ride, unless you conform and do abstract kaka-ism. So my income now is still fairly low, but because I inherited some money, I would never apply for a grant now. I think anyone who has money and who applies for a grant is a fucking scumbag. I don't think anyone who has money should be asking the government for any assistance.

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How do you feel that your painting style has evolved since you began? Well, if you do something enough, you start to become more confident. When you teach yourself, you really find your own way. So I really have developed my own style right from the beginning, I didn't emulate anybody. I've taught myself technique, I know how to do the job. But technique doesn't mean much unless you have something there to start with. I've always been undaunted — I'll paint anything. My art is about clarity, truth, which includes everything from ecstasy to ugliness to beauty. I try to paint all of it, because I guess that's how I think. I'm going to do one concert at the Music Gallery every year there till I die. I love performing, but I only like doing it where people don't smoke or drink.

JOE

ON JOE

People often see you as a Peter Pan, eternal child character. Respond to that. People say that I'm silly, and I'm a boy, and I'm an adult, and I'm an ogre, and I'm a variety of things. I take it as a compliment. I don't really take what people say to me too seriously, unless it's someone that I respect. If Ralph Nader says something to me I'd listen, and I'd take him seriously, especially if he was giving me a criticism or something. I'm not deep, my philosophy is very straighforward about everything. But I recognize, when you play music, it's a sacred thing. I believe that life is sacred, and it's very sacred to me because I've worked hard to earn my freedom, so I could behave in a silly way. I think my music's unique, not only because I express myself about

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a lot of subjects people won't touch, but because my stuff is humorous. Humour doesn't seem to have much of a place in pop music. I think my stuff is riddled with it. I'm not a joke-teller, but I'm silly. It seems to be in everything I do. I think humour is the centre of the soul, by the way. Humour tells you everything you want to know about somebody. It tells you who they really are. You don't look in a person's eyes — you just ask them what's funny. Then you know who they are. You cannot tell from looking in my eyes whether I'm a good man or an evil man. But you could tell from my sense of humour, if you were to analyse it. What's funny to you? The natural silliness of people, their lust for accumulating things. I find humour in the ugliness of life. There's humour in my pain. When I was being abused, I made paintings of myself being abused. I try to look at everthing and find some way to laugh, because if you can't laugh, it's going to be a bumpy, bumpy ride. What do you believe in? I believe that history has shown — from what little I know, and from what I see all around me — that humans never stop degrading one another, and degrading their children, and raping their wives, and doing horrible perverted things to anything and anybody, whether it's the dog or their mother. It never stops. So therefore, whatever faith I had in people when I was a boy, I've lost quite a bit. I'm a rabid sceptic. But I have faith in some humans — I actually do. I am not a cynic; cynics are impotent; they're passive aggressives. I don't God, period. Just think of all the delusion I've just set aside! I'm totally suspicious of all religious people. I just think the God game is the biggest mindfucker of humans there is. Some of the God

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gang will say, "Well, we do good work," but I think anyone who diverts people from taking responsibility for their actions is not doing good work. I believe I'm responsible for what I do, and I believe that God is the same as the tooth fairy.

DAVID WILCOX; There's a word I invented. He doesn't know it, but he's going to find out now! "Mendelecture." He can tend to do that at times. Be a little didactical. As a person, he has an integrity that I deeply admire. I think he's hard on people sometime who may not have the strength of integrity that he does. I mean, I know he's very down on people who do commercials. If musicians go and play on a beer commercial or a bank commercial, he tends to be hard on that, I think. He had the integrity to live in poverty for a long period of time, though he isn't poor now. And more power to him. But not everybody can do that. But there were other people I have known who may not have had that choice, who may have had families and things like that.

Has he changed a lot over the years? Is he a very different guy now? JIMSY MANNING: No. He's the same as he ever was. His hair is greyer, but I think that probably, comparing him to other people that I know, I would say he's changed less than is typical. He has a persona that has been pretty steady for many years.

STAN "THE FAN": They did a call-in show with Joe, maybe five or six years ago, on City-TV. They called it The Joe Show. It was really good. One guy phoned in and said, "You're always talking about people being hypocrites. I notice you ride a motorcycle with your short pants on. Isn't that

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dangerous and irresponsible?" And Joe said, "I'm a hypocrite. Thank you. Goodbye." And he hung up on the guy. And that's the famous way that Joe deals with people who try to embarrass him that way. He just says, "Okay, so I'm a hypocrite." SUE: It's the best answer, rather than trying to lie your way out of it, or something. Some people try to impress him, and then that turns him off. There was one time we were visiting him, we were in front of his house, and this guy walking down the street recognized him, and tried turning on the whole charm schtick. And with most people that probably would have worked. But Joe just turned and silently went back inside. Didn't want to talk to some phony — that's how he saw the guy. The guy might have been nice, but because he was trying too hard to impress Joe, he came across as a phony. STAN: I thought the guy wasn't that bad. He was trying hard to show Joe that he liked him, and Joe was a little rude to him. Joe is an alien, you know that. It's hard to understand how to take him sometimes. And that time, he turned off a potential fan. To me, if I was his promoter, I would have said, 'Joe! This guy, even if he's a phony, he likes your stuff, he's a fan." Even if he'd just sort of said, "Yeah, okay, sure, I'll give you an autograph." Otherwise, the guy could go around saying, "I met Mendelson Joe, and he was really mean." It's word of mouth, right?

MOSES ZNAIMER: He's obviously what we, in our production universe here, would call an original. I've actually got a series that tries to define that idea, and Joe qualifies. He's developed and projected and sustained an eccentric personality in the face of a society that extols individual action, but does its best to try and crush it. Society succeeds in most cases, so on the rare occasion that some personality survives, when we see we haven't killed them, we tend to then pay them some respect. Originals are people

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who have sustained their difference and developed a body of work; it's not about being a flash in the pan. There are eccentrics who last the typical Warholian 15 minutes, but Joe's been out there a long, long time. He is, in the truest sense of the word, uncompromising. He hasn't done what most people do over time, which is caving in various ways — trying to find more steady work, falling in love, getting married, starting a family; giving in to the record company, takin' that shower,.. stopping calling the people around him who want to help him "pimps" — a stupidity that he insists on. He's not the easiest guy to get along with or love. He has this way of making it difficult for people who like him.

BOB WISEMAN: He sets a very high standard of living up to the truth of matters, within and without, at all times. I'm not sure if Gandhi could meet the standards that he sets. I think his style with people and with the world limits how many people will enjoy his company. Some folks, I think, would just call him eccentric. Lots of folks will shrug him off because they don't want to deal with his confessional, confrontational, up-front personality. I don't find that stuff such a big deal. The core of the man is very interesting and very important to me. He's significantly more sensitive and committed than most people to ideas that are beneficial to all of us on the planet.

OENISE BELLAMY: I think over the years, he has spent more and more time alone. I mean, he goes for days and days without any real substantive communication with anyone. He can go for a whole day without speaking to anybody — I can't remember the last time that happened to me, if ever! I suspect that largely because of that, he has become less tolerant of other people's foibles. He's not exposed to them as much.

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I've had a very dense existence. Even if I'd died ten years ago, I would have lived a very rich life. I've been very lucky. Part of being lucky, of course, is choreographing your opportunities, whatever they may be. In my case, my greatest opportunity has been that I'm not in a prison and I'm not in a hospital. I'm in this big place, Canada, that I call Spoiled Bratland. Canadians have no idea how lucky they are. When I look at the picture I've lived, it's just me coming to terms with my weaknesses, trying to figure out how to balance and not fall off.

DISCOGRAPHY

ALBUMS BY MCKENNA MENDELSON M A I N L I N E McKenna Mendelson Blues. (Bootlegged demo tape.) Paragon Records, 1968. Stink. Liberty-United Artists, 1969. Canada — Our Home and Native Land. CRT Records, 1971. The Bump V Grind Revue. CRT Records, 1972. Mainline: No Substitute (The Grand Reunion of Mainline). Taurus Records, 1975.

C O M M E R C I A L L Y - R E L E A S E D SOLO A L B U M S BY M E N D E L S O N JOE (as Joe Mendelson) Mr. Middle of the Road. Nobody Records (Joe's own label — Distribution by CRT), 1973 (as Joe Mendelson) Sophisto. Taurus Records, 1975. Not Homogenized. Boot Records, 1979. Jack Frost. Boot Records, 1980.

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Let's Party. Boot Records, 1981. The Name of the Game Ain't Schmaltz: Some of the Best of Mendelson Joe. Stony Plain Records, 1984. Fragile Man. Health Records (Joe's own label), 1986. Born to Cuddle. Recorded with the Shuffle Demons. Anthem Records, 1988. Addicted. Anthem Records, 1991.

INDEPENDENTLY

RELEASED SOLO ALBUMS

Not Safe. 1982 Women Are the Only Hope. 1992. Humans Bug Me. 1997. Spoiled Bratland. 1998. Everyone Needs a Pimp. 1999.

LYRICS

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I T H I N K I'M LOSING MY M A R B L E S (© 1969/1995 Mendelsongster Publishing SOCAN)

I think I'm losin' my marbles and I'll tell ya it's a doggone shame that there's so many deranged people they're driving me to be insane I like a little woman who loves me so fine and when I eat my honey

I take my time I think I'm losin' my marbles and I'll tell ya it's a doggone shame I think I'm losin' my marbles the doctor says I don't have too much time I think I'm losin' my marbles Ya give me pills to ease my little mind I like a little honey and I like a little cheese Chocolate's alright but don't you give me disease I think I'm losin' my marbles and I'll tell ya it's a doggone shame I think I'm losin' my marbles and I'll tell you it's a doggone shame that there's so many deranged people they're drivin' me to be sick

LYRICS

I like a little woman who loves me so fine When I eat my honey I do it succinctly I think I'm losin' my marbles and I'll tell you it's a doggone shame

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GET DOWN TO (© 1970 Halbar Publishing SOCAN) I've got to get down to get down to get down to the reasons why the world is blind, so unkind to you I've got to get down to get down to get down to the rights and the wrongs the world is blind, so unkind to you I've got to get down to get down to get down to when it's time to move the world is blind, so unkind to you

LYRICS

PEDALICTUS RAG (© 1970 Halbar Publishing SOCAN)

I went to Australia the other night I got drunk much to my delight Everyone was jivin' naked to the toe Come on and do the pedalictus rag, let's go! Half-past three there came a knock on the door in walks The Man with a five-man corps Everyone froze, the Sergeant spoke with glee "You're all under arrest for thinking under age" The sentence was light, the fine was too I learned my lesson and swore I was through Thinking under age is a mortal sin so now I'm an asparagus and I grow tall and fat.

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SLOW DOWN

JOE

(© 1972 Megmasong Publishing SOCAN) I don't know where I'm going but you know I want to get there soon I don't know when I'm leaving so I think I'll play a country tune "Slow down Joe," she says I don't know why I'm restless I never thought to think about it much I don't know why I do what I do I guess I have a magic touch, she says "Slow down Joe" I guess I'll have a jam with the sunshine and strum a chord or two or five I don't really think it matters It feels good to be alive Slow down Joe

LYRICS

THE

CANADA

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SONG

(© 1973 Megmasong Publishing SOCAN)

It's so nice to be in Canada, Canada, Canada It's so nice to be in Canada, Canada my home and native land I have drank the waters of Lake Opeongo but not Lake Ontario, not just yet A deputy sheriff bought me dinner in Rimby* but that ain't Kettleby but it still tasted nice 'cause it's so nice to be in Canada, Canada, Canada it's so nice to be here in Canada, Canada my home and native land I have heard the news and got the Blues in Wawa and in Ottawawa and in Hull but there's one place that I have missed and I do regret it, it ain't Port Credit I've missed South Dildo, Newfoundland. ''that's in Alberta.

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THEY WILL. T A K E Y O U R PANTS (© 1974 Mendelsongster Publishing and Brandy Publishing SOCAN)

They will take your shirt they will take your pants they will steal your money if you give them a chance and I say "let 'em dance" They will violate your mind on the dotted line they will squeeze you dry until you die and maybe after there'll be laughter They will take your advance if you give them a chance they'll be "oink-oink" for more when they think that you will score because I'm a whore, ain't that horrible

LYRICS

THE NAME OF THE GAME (AIN'T SCHMALTZ) (© 1973 Mendelsongster Publishing and Brandy Publishing SOCAN)

"Patience is a virtue" I don't know and greed is the seed, it's a sickness of most men's souls but the name of my game, it's always the same the name of the game ain't schmaltz, it's results Talk is sweet but it sure doesn't pay my rent survivin' your jivin' when all my money's been spent the name of my game, it's always the same the name of the game ain't schmaltz, it's results

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HOLLYWOOD

WOULD

(© 1976 The Publishing Arm & Skinner's Pond Publishing SOCAN) I was walkin' down Vine Street takin' my time eatin' avocado and it tasted just fine Hollywood would, would you be my friend I'm so lonely, I cannot pretend Hollywood, Hollywood would would you, Hollywood be my friend There's Kentucky Fried Chicken and Chili Dogs too think I'll have a taco, no a pizza will do A pizza will do, with anchovies too I'm so lonely I don't know what to do Hollywood Hollywood would would you, Hollywood be my friend There's a '57 Chevy, it sounds real heavy A candyapple Honda makes me think of Rhonda Hollywood would, would you be my friend I'm so lonely I cannot pretend Hollywood, Hollywood would would you, Hollywood be my friend

LYRICS

I'M

FUSSY

(© 1977 The Publishing Arm & Skinner's Pond Publishing SOCAN)

I'm I'm but I'm

lookin' lookin' for someone to love I'm fussy, yes I'm fussy fussy yes I am

I'm lookin' I'm looking for a woman I can talk with (maybe walk with) but I'm fussy, yes I'm fussy I'm fussy yes I am I'm I'm but I'm

lookin' looking for a woman who respects herself I'm fussy, yes I'm fussy fussy yes I am

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STRUGGLESVILLE (© 1980 The Publishing Arm & Skinner's Pond Publishing SOCAN)

I know a place and it's a state of mind. On any map, you can find Strugglesville If you run out of gas You can market your ass or sell all your dreams, whatever your means in Strugglesville

But there ain't no guarantee No-one says "please" in Strugglesville and fewer could care, you can do what you dare in Strugglesville At least I am whole to paint from my soul and dream my own dream and dance my own dance in Strugglesville And say what I think and think what I say I'm on my own ground, I'm on my own ground in Strugglesville

LYRICS

LAWYERS (© 1981 Mendelsongster Publishing & Skinner's Pond Publishing SOCAN)

Lawyers they're on the inside they're on anybody's side that's if you pay them Legal bumboys in jurisprudence that's greedy prudence let's make money So feed those faces fill those pockets have a nice day insulate your spirits and they'll all go away Farmers they're on the outside down by the roadside not breaking even They're feeding lawyers and politicians and physicians and musicians So feed those faces fill those pockets

163

164

ALIEN

have a nice day insulate your spirits and they'll all go away Lawyers, I'm speaking about lawyers

LYRICS

WAKE UP (© 1981 Mendelsongster Publishing and Skinner's Pond Publishing SOCAN)

Wake up, wake up it's time to open your eyes there is no-one steering the ship may capsize there's fear in your faces your jobs are in jeopardy you know that your God is only as good as a Chrysler so wake up, wake up Computers and robots they have no feelings they have no consciences they have no genitals it's all machinery so wake up, wake up Dioxin's a toxin like Richard Nixon and Three Mile Island and Love Canal but where's the love? So wake up, wake up it's time to open your eyes there is no-one steering the ship may capsize

165

166

ALIEN

IT IS YOU (©1981 Mendelsongster Publishing SOCAN) Whatever makes me tick it is you Whatever makes me talk it is you it is you, it is you, it is true Whatever brings a smile to my eyes Whatever is a hand in the night it is you it is you, it is true Whatever is the meaning of "substantial" Whatever is the word for "idealistic" it is you it is you, it is true So, whatever makes me tick it is you it is you, it is true

LYRICS

NOT

SAFE

(© 1981 Mendelsongstcr Publishing SOCAN)

I woke up this morning I turned on the tap the water it smelled like the piss of a cat so I went to the window for a breath of fresh air I started to choke it was no joke it was no joke it was not safe So I turned on the TV the message was clear a meltdown at Pickering but there's nothing to fear they say "There's nothing to fear" enjoy your beer but I say "it is not safe" They say "There's nothing to fear" really means: go to the mirror and kiss yourself goodbye because it is not safe Life used to be heaven but now it is hell When you're radioactive thank Premier Bill thank Premier Bill he was not safe

167

168

ALIEN

GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS (© 1982 Mendelsongster Publishing and Brandy Publishing SOCAN) Everybody's going 'round in circles Chasing what, I don't know where I see them staring blankly on the subway going to their jobs that bore them silly never thinking once about their freedom so precious that it is, they take for granted because they're going through the motions Everybody's rushin' off to somewhere and they rarely see the forest for the trees making lots of whoopee — it's a religion born of beer and good times — life is a commercial so emulate the style and you'll be beautiful deodorize your mind and you'll be sanitary because you're going through the motions Everybody's busy being benign never thinking twice about existence never thinking once about the other guy smoking, joking, smoking give me video give me, give me, gimme gimme Give ME as vacant as a Mila Mulroney fantasy because she's going through the motions

LYRICS

FRAGILE MAN (© 1984 Mendelsongster Publishing SOCAN)

I'm a fragile man in a fragile world near the end of time that's if you're watching the clock I don't mean to be confrontational but it's time to face this music You can take a stand or you can take a fall or demonstrate even give it all or give to no-one and lick the bag of submission like lambs to the slaughter so make new mistakes follow your instincts to load your shotgun and place it to your temple exercise your franchise and know the meaning of freedom I'm a fragile man in a fragile world near the end of time that's if you're watching the clock

169

170

TRUE

ALIEN

LOVE

(© 1984 Mendelsongster Publishing SOCAN) True love is a mingling of the spirits true love is surrender of the heart true love is a bond without the bondage true love is eternal as the stars but you cannot buy it you cannot sell it you cannot cage it because it's free (just like me) True love is a sharing of the moment true love is a giving without the taking true love is a storm that bears no malice true love is plasma of the conscience but you cannot buy it you cannot buy it you cannot sell it you cannot cage it because it's free True love is a worship of the virtues true love

LYRICS

is sunlight that never burns true love is religion at its deepest true love is a welding of the souls but you cannot buy it you cannot sell it you cannot cage it because it's free!

171

172

ALIEN

DENISE (© 1986 Mendelsongster Publishing and Brandy Publishing)

She's blonde and affectionate and anyone's friend Feed her and love her she'll be yours to the end but leave her alone when you're not at home and she'll go for the garbage like a doggie Her eyes are brown as the earth oh so sad indulge her with treats and caresses but leave her alone when you're not at home and she'll go for the garbage like a doggie Gold as the barley of Saskatchewan she's eager to please like a talkshow host but leave her alone when you're not at home and she'll go for the garbage like a doggie

LYRICS

LICK AND SNIFF (© 1986 Mendelsongster Publishing and Brandy Publishing SOCAN)

I get up each morning and I work real hard just to paint this painting the way the world is Then I write some writings and do the Joe-jobs just to get that watercress and I think of you Lick and sniff the one you love like a mango Then it's back to the saltmine at least it's my mine just to savour this freedom she keeps me hungry Lick and sniff the one you love like a mango Then I tune this guitar and make some magic yes, she soothes like medicine I am a doctor So lick and sniff the one you love like a mango

173

174

ALIEN

W O M E N A R E T H E ONLY HOPE (© 1989 Mendelsongster Publishing SOCAN) It's no secret that the human race has run its race or damn near In the name of progress in the name of security in the name of convenience Man rapes Mother and the earth is Mother there is no other mother

So if you ask me Women are the only hope If there's any hope at all So much dogma and deception and perversion Man rapes Mother Man rapes his mother and the earth is Mother there is no other mother

So if you ask me Women are the only hope if there's any hope at all

LYRICS

PHOTOS

IN

THE MAIL

(© 1989 Mendelsongster Publishing SOCAN)

A man hands me a loon he says, "I like the way you dress" as I sit cross-legged beside the envelope marked special deliv, special deliv Special deliv from beyond the beyond from Doctor Goo photos in the mail, photos in the mail They take my breath away like G-force in a steep turn photos in the mail, photos Black and white images reclining entwining romantic arms in the mirror celebrating truest of loves They take my breath away like G-force in a steep turn photos in the mail, photos Another guy interrupts me "Glendon College 1972, I paid you." I asked him, "Did you get your money's worth?" He said he did, he did as I sit mesmerized by these photos They take my breath away like G-force in a steep turn photos, photos, photos

175

176

ALIEN

E X C U S E ME (© 1991 Mendelsongster Publishing SOCAN)

Excuse me for interrupting Your perversion, your feculence but have you considered an alternative to impotence as a way of living? Excuse me for bursting that balloon that you inhabit and the security and the mediocrity all consolations for obedience to self-betrayal excuse me Excuse me but how did you lose? Was it in a convenience store or just in passing by a yield sign by the roadside of life en route to Deadsville? excuse me, please, excuse me Excuse me or, better, use me this poet is writing and it's so exciting to be angry, to be smitten by the bug of balladry so please excuse rne, excuse me, please

LYRICS

SPOILED BRATLAND (© 1995 Mendelsongster Publishing SOCAN)

October is my favourite month I'm sitting here leaves askew, people too we've got so much, so much food, so much, here, in Spoiled Bratland I've got clean, cotton socks on my feet but they don't match, they never did and a blue hole sprinkles down upon my frown here, in Spoiled Bratland but to tell the truth it's not so couth we stole it all from the native folk then we gave 'em God and liquor too now it's all ours me and you here, in Spoiled Bratland A muzzled puppy squeals muzzled puppy pain and me I pen these words again and again and again here, in Spoiled Bratland

177

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I

ALIEN

THINK OF Y

(© 1998 Mendelsongster Publishing SOCAN) I I I I

think think think think

of of of of

you you you you

every evening (almost) in the midnight hour when I wake up when I think of you, I do

I I I I

think think think think

of of of of

you you you you

in the mirror brushing teeth ascending your staircase on all fours

I do, I think of you, it's true Then I think of you in my nightmares and I think of you spewing your vitriol and I think of you and your racist mother and I think of you and your cigarette butts but, I do, I think of you, it's true, boo hoo, boo hoo, boo hoo Then I think of you as lemon pudding and I think of you in your sweaty flannel nightgown and I think of you feeding Little Pious and I think of you and your secrecy I do, I think of you, it's true, boo hoo, boo hoo

LYRICS

HAVE

A

NICE

DEATH

(© 1998 Mendelsongster Publishing SOCAN)

The evidence is clear Dog knows there's plenty to fear The scientists, they all confirm there's really nothing more to learn because humans are stupid they piss where they drink they shit where they eat and then they repeat so idle your engines idle your brains idle your consciences and have a nice death No god will save you He's just an invention by men who would control you it's called freedom-prevention freedom-prevention did I mention that humans are stupid they piss where they drink they shit where they eat and then they repeat so idle your engines idle your brains idle your consciences and have a nice death

179

180

ALIEN

So fire up the Mustang and light up a Camel rape your family and rape their future Humans are stupid they piss where they drink they shit where they eat and then they repeat so idle your engines idle your brains idle your consciences and have a nice death

LYRICS

AND YOU BECAME YOUR MOTHER (© 1999 Mendelsongster Publishing SOCAN)

When I reminisce it's true I miss performing those monthly exams and lemon puddings and garlic kisses and scrabbled competitions but then you became your mother whom you hated or so you stated When I revisit the universe of your brain and the burden you bore and the vision you lost and the knowing right from wrong You still became your mother whom you hated or so you stated Time, they say heals all wounds but not for this fingerpainter

181

182

ALIEN

So, if ever I see you on the street and you repeat your hackneyed plea know that you became your mother whom you hated or so you stated Trust is like a perfect tea cup once it's broken it's forever broken and so I mourn the loss, deep loss the love I gave the love I save from you who became your mother whom you hated or so you stated.

Nadia Halim has worked for This Magazine and The Canadian Forum, and is now a freelance editor and writer. She lives in Toronto.