In the High School Halls
“What can this thing be that I’ve found?”
In the High School Halls
It is the first day of a new semester, at Fisherville Junior High, in the Willowdale district of Toronto. For the arriving class of 1964 everything is very new and unfamiliar, including most of the other students. In the melee of sights and sounds, eleven-year-olds Gary Weinrib and Alex Zivojinovich are just two boys among the many, working their way towards their first ever history class. Gary hides his trepidation with a quiet calm, a focus on getting there, while Alex’s quick mind is churning as he takes it all in, seeking an opportunity to cover his inner fears with a joke, a sideways observation, an ice breaker. He doesn’t need to – his brash paisley shirt is message enough to those around him. The two boys enter the classroom together, but they don’t say hello. For now, each is satisfied with a glance, the quick scan that takes place in a moment. One nods at the other as they pass the door and familiarise themselves with the surroundings of their new classroom.
Over the weeks that follow, Gary and Alex get to know a little more about each other. They don’t become pals straight away: Alex is a little too outgoing, too maverick for Gary, who prefers avoiding trouble to making it. Over time however the pair develop a mutual understanding, crack jokes and discuss shared themes such as music and sport; girls have yet to make an impact on the pre-teens. While Alex is taking viola lessons and Gary is learning piano, the boys agree that the guitar is the coolest instrument of all. Later, they discover that they were born within four weeks of each other, Gary on 29 July 1953, and Alex on 27 August.
Neither has any reason to imagine that they will be spending a large part of the rest of their lives together.
When Alex was five, his father suffered a back injury which brought an abrupt end to his working in the mine. There was nothing else keeping the Zivojinovich family in Fernie, so Ned and Mellie decided to move to the more cosmopolitan Toronto. They settled in the aptly named Pleasant Avenue, Willowdale, a tree-lined suburban street that was a far cry from the hardships of the North. Ned and Mellie took on a number of jobs to pay the rent, including (for Ned) plumbing and working as a boiler engineer. For Alex, the move meant starting a new primary school and having to speak English. “I wasn’t totally non-English speaking,” he recalled, “But it just wasn’t important.” Until he started to make friends with English speakers, that is – across the road lived John Rutsey, also born in 1953, who became a firm friend. By the fourth grade they were going to the same school.
Round the corner from Pleasant Avenue lived the Weinribs, Manya and Morris. Gary’s Jewish parents had somehow survived the horrors of Nazi-occupied Poland, spending four years in a sequence of concentration camps before their release from Bergen-Belsen and Dachau (respectively) at the end of the Second World War. Like many of their peers, as the shadow of post-war communism loomed in 1947 they chose to brave the New World rather than trying to rebuild their shattered past at home. Originally heading for New York, they took a detour to Canada because “someone said it was nice.” It was – very nice in fact. Determined to make the best of the move, on arrival Manya changed her name to Mary and decided to set up a variety store, selling everything and anything from coat hooks to casseroles, bringing in enough money to support a growing family – oldest child Gary, his brother Alan and younger sister Nancy. Little has been said about Morris, but it is known that he played the balalaika, an eastern European folk instrument based on the lute.
Gary’s primary school years were spent at Faywood Public School in Downsview, on the other side of Toronto’s Jewish district. At Faywood he became good buddies with a young Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas. Already the pair were reputed to be writing comedy scripts, but Gary found himself turning to music. “I feel like it kinda chose me, in a way,” he remarked. Gary had impressed his parents at an early age by picking out Nancy’s practice pieces on the piano after listening to her playing. Of course, nobody expected him to be a musician when he grew up, least of all himself – Gary wanted to be a scientist. Wishing the kinds of lives on their children that they had been denied, his mother and father willed him to be a doctor. All the same, Gary badgered his folks for piano lessons of his own. Meanwhile for Alex, the pressure to take up music came top down, first with viola lessons. How many 11-year old boys do you know that choose to take up viola?
Where Alex was up front and cocky on the surface, Gary was introspective and shy. When the pair first became acquainted, neither expected to become close friends. Before long however, music became the fellows’ mutual companion, and each found in it an outlet for their individuality. They each took particular inspiration from the UK Blues Invasion, comparing notes on performers such as Cream and The Yardbirds. Music was their first love, as Geddy put it, “My entire pre-adolescence and adolescence were spent with headphones on.” If the name sticks…
As quickly as he could, Alex extricated himself from the viola and set about badgering his parents for a guitar. His wish came true on Christmas Day 1965, when he unwrapped a “Kent”-branded Japanese import, classical guitar. Meanwhile Gary had borrowed an acoustic from a neighbour, and was starting to pick out chords and play along to the radio. Alex could barely wait for the new semester, the first of 1966, taking his new guitar into school as soon as he was allowed. From this point on, breaks between classes were spent sitting on the low walls outside the school, strumming tunes and picking out new songs, much to the delight of their friends and the disdain of their enemies (though, they conceded, it was rather cool!).
Alex and Gary’s shared experience may well have led to the discovery of an equally shared determination, a joy in taking up a challenge and meeting it, driven by the work ethic that had been part of the furniture in both their houses. One school friend, Steve Schutt (who later became a national hockey player), recalled later: “You could tell even then, even before they were doing anything, that they were looking for something to pour their energies into.” The idea of guitar lessons was floated by both sets of parents but neither boy considered it seriously; “I thought it was all ‘Mary-had-a-little-lamb’ stuff,” said Alex. Catalysed by the guitar, the relationship between the pair developed without ever becoming an imposition.
It wasn’t all some idyllic musical adolescence, however. For Gary, 1966 was marred by the death of his father, who had never fully recovered physically from his four years of internment. At the age of 12, Gary found he was the man about the house. It was time to grow up, and fast.
There was no one record that made Alex want to take up the guitar seriously, more a combination of Jimi Hendrix and The Who, his opinions cemented by Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. “I loved what he represented,” Alex remarked over thirty years later. “I loved the looseness in his playing: it was structured, yet it walked along an edge, I found that so full of life and so exciting.” The idea of dancing along the tightrope of structure, matched Alex’s world view – fitting in was fine, but he could never resist expressing his individualism. Gary’s motivations were different: where Alex saw guitar as a basis for experimentation and discovery, Gary found playing guitar was a way to calm his nervous disposition and helped him build his confidence. As he said: “Music was the thing I always came back to as something I felt I could do.” Working in his mother’s shop, before long Gary saved enough to afford a guitar of his own, “a cheap acoustic with palm trees painted on the front.” Meanwhile Alex wasn’t going to let his Kent classical guitar prevent him from following his electric heroes. Ever the improviser, he made repeated modifications, not least he sought to provide amplification by working the needle from his record player into the guitar’s body. Eventually (and perhaps unsurprisingly) he broke the guitar, there’s only so much Polyfilla even a cheap musical instrument can take.
Gary and Alex might have jammed together at school, but outside, they went their own separate ways. For Alex, this meant teaming up with his closest friend and neighbour, John Rutsey, something he had done since he first unwrapped the Kent. John had gone for the drums, borrowing a set before his parents found him a second-hand kit. Alex and John spent many hours practicing together in John’s basement, joking and dreaming about what might be to come, playing the same half dozen songs over and over. Eventually they started to accept invitations to play at basement parties of their friends and neighbours.
It would have been rude not to.