The Outsiders’ Bond

So there we were, two underage kids, sitting on the steps outside a licensed nightclub in the Toronto suburbs, commiserating about how we didn’t fit in.

Here’s one about the birth of a lifelong friendship.

I was 16, and my friend Michael Phillip Wojewoda (whom we all knew simply as Mike Phillip in those days) was a local 14 year-old kid who went to a different school than me. We’d met because he had been setting up the kit for the drummer in my basement band, Nighthawk. Sometimes, when our drummer Stephen was late for practice, Michael would jump on Stephen’s kit and jam with me. I liked his feel for the kit, and he seemed to appreciate my preference for the slow lead guitar lines of Jeff Beck, and in no time we’d become friendly, talking about deep album cuts and assorted trivia related to, and involving, the making and recording of music.

As I’ve written previously, Nighthawk was my proper introduction to being in a gang, albeit a safe and creative gang dedicated to making music not mischief. When we weren’t at our practice space, which was the backroom of a Lutheran church (the other guitarist, Dave was the son of the pastor there), we would wander through nearby Fairview Mall. More often than not, we planted ourselves in seats at The Counter, the mall’s coffee shop that advertised a “bottomless cup” of coffee. In the summer, when school was out, we would put The Counter to the test, draining cup after cup of endless refills, all day, until we were either ejected or stumbling out and shaking from the caffeine overdose.

That was during the daylight hours; the suburban nights offered different promises. After every Sunday night band practice, most of us would pile into a couple of cars and head over to the local McDonalds, where I’d have a small order of fries and probably a Coke and we’d all shoot the shit, going over our big plans for someday going pro and becoming rock stars. Whatever that was.

At the time, legal drinking age was 18, which the province of Ontario called The Age Of Majority. I don’t believe anyone in our social clique was old enough to drink legally, but those among us with any facial hair at all (“peach fuzz”) would attempt to get served at local restaurants and, if we were bold enough, actual bars. As such, the conversation at McDonald’s frequently turned to the subject of which establishments were the easiest to enter without serious scrutiny of one’s identification. Since we lacked neither the guts nor the smarts to source out fake I.D. at this time, it was always a gamble to see if any of us could survive the gatekeeping bouncers of a particular licensed establishment. If you got in, you didn’t go back for your less fortunate buddies, who were left to go home or head to Tim Horton’s Donuts, which never closed.

On one particular Friday night, we assembled at 7 p.m. by the yellow plastic coated railings at Fairview Mall before proceeding in two cars down to La Paloma, a local basement bar and disco out by North York General Hospital which was popular with nurses and med students and famously lax about checking for I.D.

Now, despite our misplaced disgust for disco at the time (forgive us, we were teenage rockers in the mid-1970’s, and as the ridiculously reactionary T shirts of the day stated, Disco Sucks!) we had decided that we could endure the dreaded four on the floor beat in pursuit of underage alcohol. The plan was afoot.

We were accompanied by Brad, Gary, and Rob, who were also entrusted, like Michael, with setting up the band’s gear every Sunday for band practice. Laughably, in hindsight, we referred to this crew as our “roadies,” despite the fact that we were never destined to hit any such road, unless one counted this disco outing as a road trip. I recall squeezing into Gary’s cramped Ford Pinto, along with Nighthawk leader Dave, the oldest among us, and his slightly younger girlfriend, Linda, whom we all loved.

As Gary parked the car, I was already feeling anxious about the mission for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the thought of getting caught and possibly arrested. I always thought I was about to get arrested for something in those days, and as a result, I was the least likely of any of us to break the law. I’m convinced that this fear lead me to never purchase even one joint let alone do anything like drop acid, snort cocaine, or do heroin, and I now consider this a blessing since discovering later in life that I have a highly addictive personality, which became a problem with alcohol, Diet Coke, and the one vice I still haven’t kicked, coffee.

The other reason the La Paloma expedition was so fraught for me was that I just didn’t feel cool enough to pull it off, and I feared that my visible anxiety would be the tell that got us all busted. I was practically telegraphing my disqualification both legally and socially.

Michael, on the other hand, had always seemed to me to be the coolest among us. Somehow above it all. He was younger than most of us, but his extrovert tendencies, resourcefulness, and thirst for knowledge (pre-Internet, when one had to really crack open a book, watch public television, or read (and comprehend) magazines like Popular Science, Psychology Today, Omni or National Geographic) made me hold him in high regard.

Now, what I didn’t know at the time, which seems obvious to me now, was that Michael was overcompensating with us older kids because he too wanted to belong. At least that’s how I saw it, and maybe I’m projecting, because I definitely wanted to belong. It’s not that I wanted to be like the normal kids, I wanted to be myself, but I still wanted them to think I was cool.

The others approached the door to La Paloma and seemed to breeze into the place. Dave had advised me against making any eye contact with the door guy, he must have known my personality would give me away. I was chatting with Michael as we approached the door, trying hard, too hard, to not even look up. Michael went first.

“You got I.D.?” the door man asked. I honestly don’t think the guy cared if it was authentic identification or not, he just needed to see enough to clear him of liability. Michael did not, and the door man took one look at Michael’s young face and denied him entry. As he backed up and turned around, I must have had a pang of empathy seeing the dejected way that he pushed past me, because I looked up at the bouncer and said something to the effect of “This place sucks anyway, I’m outta here!”

I ran to catch up with Michael and was surprised to see that this coolest of dudes seemed truly dejected. Sitting there on the concrete steps that lead up to the disco, we both became quite emotional about it. I vividly recall the humid night air and the ever-present low roar of the nearby sixteen-lane Highway 401. The purple floodlights that illuminated the smokestack of North York General Hospital seemed at that moment reminiscent of the blacklight bulbs they sold at poster shops and head shops downtown on Yonge Street.

“You okay, man?” I asked.

“It just sucks,” said Michael, realizing he had to pull himself together.

“Well, I didn’t get in either,” I said, “So let’s just hang out here.”

And thus began a friendship that endures to this day.

Over the course of that evening we talked about nerdy things and the nuances of record production, or the way some singers “double-tracked” their voices, or how Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins and Ian Anderson all appeared to have certain similar vocal tics. We did somewhat comic impressions of these singers, and we laughed a lot. In fact, we laughed at so many of the same things, and generally got into what we were each saying, that we kept talking for a long time that night. Over the course of that evening, I learned a lot, absorbing much of his massive reference level knowledge. I don’t think we ever hung out with the band much after that night, and soon, even Nighthawk confirmed my outsider fears by conspiring behind my back to oust me from the gang. After that, I only really kept in touch with the singer, Peter Debbert, a David Bowie fan who always seemed hipper than the others anyway. Soon, my social life would radically change, I would hang almost exclusively with Michael and his friend who also became my friend, Dan Derbridge, and the three of us became a tight trio of fun, friendship, record collecting, cultural criticism, and coffee drinking.

The prog rock winter had thawed into the punk rock summer, and everything changed again. Soon, Michael and I would form our first band together, Space Invaders, and play our first professional gigs for paying customers.

But it had all really started because two outsiders stayed outside and decided they were cool enough to hang out with each other.