Mike and Gary

The “against all odds” theme is a useful literary device. It comes with its own built-in dissonances and easy resolves. 
It’s the minority kid from a broken home, getting his degree in medicine. 
It’s the diminutive teen bullied because of a speech Impediment who shows up at the school dance with the hottest cheerleader in the squad. 
Or the perennial loser who finally, at age 70, sets out from Nova Scotia, intending to row a boat across the Atlantic, his need for respect superceding common sense.
There’s great room for ironic twists as well: 
A man is down on his luck, barely able to feed himself and his cat, buys a lottery ticket with his last dollar and wins a hundred grand. For dinner, he has filet mignon and the cat has caviar. The next day, he grabs a bus up to Casino Rama and loses it all. 
“Against the odds” is the basic archetype for just about every sports story… 
A group of football misfits become a “Cinderella team” and win the series after a charismatic new coach takes over. 
Or it’s the final play-off game of a hockey series. The home team’s star is injured late in the third period and carried off the ice. The visiting team ties the score with 10 seconds left, forcing sudden-death overtime. Meanwhile, the injured star finds out he has a broken foot. He asks the doctor for some freezing, chases two or three oxies with a double shot of vodka, and scores the winning goal. 

Enough BS, get on with the story

My tale has nothing to do with sports. There are also no life lessons in it.
It’s just a story about two kids from Erindale High School, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.
They beat the odds.

Dwarf Tossing

I met Gary Craig the first week of school in September 1968. He had the same home room as my close friend, Marty. Gary was diminutive. He hadn’t yet had any kind of adolescent growth spurt. Marty called him “Squirrel”. He quickly grew as tall as me, maybe taller, so the nick-name didn’t stick.
Marty and I were both a year older than him, which is a big deal when you’re 14. 

The Equalizer

We remained casual friends, which just means saying hello when passing in the hall. Later, in the twelfth grade, we started hanging out because of the music.  By that time I had already been in a few bands that were locally successful. In those days, I was a guitar player. 
Gary had spent the last 2 years practicing the drums for hours and hours a day. I’d heard him play a few times, and I was impressed. 
At this same time, I was reinventing myself. I decided to make keyboards my main instrument. This required its own obsessive practice. 

Chasing the Dream, Not the Money

We listened to records, particularly the progressive rock just pouring out of Britain and the fusion jazz-rock of the US. We talked frequently until 2 or 3 in the morning about bands we’d seen or a new record we were excited about. The conversations included beer and cannabis comments like: Why can’t it be us doing that? 
There was a very good reason why: Every son of a bitch and his sister in Canada and parts of the US with a guitar, portable organ, or a set of drums was moving to Toronto (it was a vibrant scene here in southern Ontario), trying to do the same thing. And a lot of them were damned good players. 
My father was a huge influence. He had played professionally off and on for twenty-five years. Sometimes his bands would rehearse in our living room. His idea of encouragement was simply to not discourage but he did try to instill in me an awareness of the pitfalls, deadends, and the unscrupulousness of many in music management. And overall, what was expected of a professional musician.
He had endless stories about the music business and a sad opinion or two about the demise of the big bands and how The Beatles’ music only worked when somebody else, like the Melachrino Strings, for example, played it.

Gary was over to the house a lot in those days, and I’m sure he absorbed some of my father’s showbiz ethos.
I have a separate post about my Dad and his music. Look it up. It’s called The Legend of Orm.

Fish or cut bait

By our senior year, I had my mind made up. Sink or swim, I was going to give playing music a shot as a career.
In January 1973, I quit school and began working full-time. It was the midnight shift at a company that printed the daily Toronto Sun as well as a slew of Toronto area community newspapers. My plan was to save enough money to buy the necessary equipment. 
Within 14 months, I quit my job and joined a full-time band.
Gary did the same thing a year later in 1975, and by the summer of that year, we were in a band together, backing up a Jamaican singer named Jay Douglas. 
It was the whole ’70s deal. We wore matching suits. The polyester they were made from had a feature we called “memory odor”. As if deep in the DNA of the suit, there was a BO record of every time it was worn.
The music we played was top 40 covers, which in that era mainly meant Disco. There was also a pinch of Gospel and a tbsp of Reggae. It was a good band that lasted 5 weeks, including 2 weeks in rehearsal. Apparently, the other players had only agreed to do this gig if it stayed “in town”. The manager and the leader wanted to take it on the road. Jay probably wanted to ask Gary and me to stay and rebuild the band, but we didn’t give him a chance. We had a huddle and decided to look for something else. Something with profile.

And Wash Behind Your Ears

We began talking about what it might take, other than being a good player, to get the big gigs. There was always the trite self-help crap like “go the extra mile” or “don’t burn your bridges” (both being good advice, but as abstract as Picasso). 
More practical were things like: Don’t party every night, show respect to band leaders and managers, don’t get your girlfriend pregnant (a real show-stopper), and shower from time to time. 
But how, really, in a world with just a few jobs and thousands of hopefuls, do you make sure it’s you that drops when the big guys shake the musician tree?
I didn’t know. I still don’t. But what was obvious is that first,  you have to get into that tree. 
It doesn’t hurt to know what you’re aiming at. At the time, two organizations in Canada were head and shoulders above anything else in terms of class and profile. 
Gordon Lightfoot and Anne Murray. 
Back in the day, the major newspapers had what were called “classified” ads. Buy, sell, help wanted, etc, were just a few out of dozens of categories.
The Toronto Daily Star had a category called “Dramatic Musical Talent”. I was in four bands from 1974 to 1976, and three of them were the result of following up on those newspaper ads.
After Gary and I decided to look for something else, we checked the classified ads, and I found something interesting. 
“Atlantis is looking for a keyboard player. Must be able to travel” 
I recognized it immediately as a band that had been together in one form or another for several years. This qualified as “Profile”, if only in a local context. But that was enough for now. I went to an audition and was hired

Some say There are No Coincidences

The bass player, Brent, was Shirley Eikhard’s brother. When the whole band, minus the front people, was fired from Atlantis four and a half months later, he recommended me to his sister, who was looking for a piano player. Now that was serious profile.

Playing for Shirley was pivotal in my career in that it got my name around town.
It was sporadic; she’d go a month or 6 weeks sometimes without working, making it tough sometimes to pay the rent. Still, I spent five years with her and got to know some important people in the Canadian music scene. 
We couldn’t afford to keep a full-time band, so every time there was a tour, we found new people. I eventually became the person responsible for hiring. 
In December of 1977, a ten-city tour for Shirley in eastern Canada was announced. It was to begin the first week of January, so I had a month to hire and rehearse a band. That’s a tough call at any time of the year, but Christmas? I was going to need some serious luck. And I got it. 
In the last year, I had lost touch with Gary, but I knew he’d be perfect for the gig. So I gave him a call.
For 20 minutes, we gossiped about mutual friends, discussed health issues, bullshitted about all the girls we were dating, etc. Finally, I got to the point.
“I know this is a long shot, but are you available?”
“For the right thing………what have you got?” he asked.

“I’ve got a tour with Shirley coming up soon and so far I only have two musicians. me and Shirley.”
It was unnecessary to remind him that this would look great on his resume. 
He mentioned that if I were to spend two weeks looking for a guitar player and a bass player, that would leave just two of the busiest weeks in the whole year to organize some rehearsals. He was less than enthusiastic about my chances. It was the equivalent of blowing the idea off and wishing me luck. 
But the stars aligned, or the ship came in, or the universe smiled, or some damned thing, and Gary said, “I know a couple of guys that are probably available, I’ll call them.”
Before the day was out, we had a band. Paul Corbett on guitar, Bob Wilson on bass, Gary on drums, Shirley, and me. 
It was a good band. We were ready for the January tour, and Shirley had enough work to keep us going until April. 

If you don’t want me Honey, don’t shake my tree

If Atlantis was my pivotal gig leading directly to Gordon Lightfoot, then the equivalent for Gary was Hungarian-Canadian punk new wave singer BB Gabor. He had a Canadian top 40 record with “Nyet, Nyet Soviet” and a Juno (our Grammies) nomination. The soundman in that band later worked with Anne Murray.

A few years after we’d both gotten into the musician’s tree that the big acts shake when they need a player, I landed the gig with Gordon Lightfoot. 
The confirmation came on December 23rd, 1980. I called Gary Christmas Day to tell him.
Exactly two years later, on Christmas Day 1982, Gary called me to say he was Anne Murray’s new drummer.

I spent forty-two years recording and touring with Gord and his band and we still tour as a “Legacy” act. 

Gary spent a couple of decades with Anne Murray and now tours with acts like Jann Arden, Tom Cochrane, Bruce Cockburn and records in Nashville.

We’ve both turned 70 and we’re still in the music business.

Note

The picture at the top was taken in my living room on Christmas Eve of either 1978 or 1979. The one with the skinny tie in the middle is me, Gary is on my left, and the guy with the beard on my right is a friend named Greg Preston.