Festivity, legal or illicit, has always been part of Montreal’s psyche

Juan Rodriguez

March 2012

While Montreal has given the planet Céline Dion, Leonard Cohen, Arcade Fire, Oscar Peterson, Mordecai Richler, Cirque du Soleil and UbiSoft, the city’s so-called seedier side predominates. Montreal’s century-long reputation as Canada’s “sin city”—a wide-open place where you can enjoy any vice, proscribed or not, day and night—has been hard to shake. Not that it especially wants to.

While the city is no longer as wildly licentious it as was during Prohibition or the ’40s, a more mainstream atmosphere of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll blankets the downtown area.

Women strut their stuff more boldly than in any other Canadian city—bared cleavage and tight derrières and legs galore; indeed “the women of Montreal” has become a cliché, a selling point for ogling visitors. (Ooh-la-la!)

As for booze and other drugs, there’s a brasserie or bar on virtually every downtown block, and with them are pushers of more illegal fare. Where once there were rivalries between gambling moguls, they seem almost comic compared with the brutal drug gang wars that have beset Montreal over the past decade or so.

Today Montreal is branded as a city of festivals—the Montreal International Jazz Festival is the world’s largest, the model—but festivity, legal or illicit, has always been part of the collective psyche.

Montreal’s Gayety Theatre was the headquarters of stripper Lili St-Cyr, who was one of Montreal’s main cultural attracts. Photo: Weekend Magazine, photographer unknown; Wikimedia Commons

A recent report that discovered Montrealers work only 80 per cent as hard as Torontonians was not greeted with embarrassment but, rather, hailed as indicative of the citizenry’s “joie de vivre.”

Thus, beer is a huge part of that psyche.

It’s the city where the Molson family became a powerhouse, especially because of its association with the Montreal Canadiens; a cup will set you back $10 at the Bell Centre.

Chansonnier Raymond Lévesque’s lament, À Saint-Henri, conveyed the working-class context for the brew, in which “bière” rhymes with “misère.”

Yet it’s a far cry from the woolly war years, where servicemen were on the prowl in “cherchez la femme” mode. In 1944, the downtown area around Ste. Catherine from du Bullion to Stanley was proscribed out of bounds, declared a state of emergency because of sexually transmitted diseases and whatnot.

Others who escaped to our city included Frank Sinatra (left) and Dean Martin.

Montreal was where Frank Sinatra escaped in the early ’50s, when his career had hit rock bottom, to while away the wee small hours over his doomed love for Ava Gardner, after playing at the Bellevue Casino on Ontario St.’s strip of gambling dens and brothels.

Café St-Michel and Rockhead’s Paradise, the two beacons of Montreal’s Little Harlem district, on opposite sides of Mountain and St. Antoine, featured elaborate floor shows and, if you slipped the maitre d’ a fin, a lot more.

The city never slept, dating back to when it was a Prohibition Era magnet. Hello Montreal, a 1928 dittie (words by Billy Rose & Mort Dixon, music by Harry Warren), put it this way: “Speak easy, speak easy / And tell the bunch / I won’t go east, got a different hunch / I’ll be leaving in the summer and I won’t be back till fall. Goodbye Broadway, hello Montreal.”

“The scale of Montreal’s nightclub industry during its peak in the late 1940s and early 1950s was staggering,” writes John Gilmore in Swinging in Paradise, his definitive history of jazz in Montreal.

“Musicians swear there were literally hundreds of clubs in the city offering some kind of show.”

“You could literally play two jobs a night, from 9 to 1 and then 1 to 5 or so,” Paul Bley told me in 1978, over a smoked meat at the late, lamented Ben’s, torn down a couple of years ago to make way for some postmodern office tower, the kind of style every city has now.

The city even made it into a fabled Lenny Bruce routine in which he played a second-rate comic, Frank Dell, who longed to play a “class joint,” the London Palladium: “I can’t keep going back to Montreal!”

Bruce played the old Gayety Theatre (now the prestigious Théatre du Nouveau Monde) in the city’s red-light district near St. Laurent. The usherettes might not have understood Lenny’s spritz, his bits, but they handed him expert stand-up sexual favours.

The Gayety had been headquarters for stripper Lili St-Cyr, who, with her diaphanous bathtub, was one of Montreal’s main cultural attractions across North America.

Dean Martin fit right in: mooching his way along the city’s nightlife.

“He was a very hard-to-get-along-with type,” recalled Norm Silver of the legendary Esquire Show Bar on Stanley. “He was into the sauce in those days, always asking the staff to buy him a meal or a drink, getting loans without paying them back, generally taking advantage of people.”

A sign that city hall was eager to clean up the city’s image came in the mid-’70s when police raided the Esquire and removed its liquor license for allegedly allowing prostitutes to hang out there.

“It’s hypocritical,” cried Norm Silver over his last remaining bottle of whiskey. “Look across the street, what do they advertise? Topless!”

Now places like Wanda’s, near the Crescent glitz strip, make every hour Happy Hour with “danseuses exotiques.”

Then again, why pay good money when life on Montreal streets is so much more, uh, vivid.

Masters and masterpieces ride together at the reins of Kent Nagano

Juan Rodriguez

October 2011

For years to come, Montreal’s new symphony orchestra hall will be synonymous with the lithe, elegant man who was arguably its prime mover: conductor Kent Nagano.

The Californian maestro took over the reins of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra six years ago, after being snubbed by the New York Philharmonic because of what some observers believe was his proclivity toward new-world adventure over old-world bureaucracy, and has brought an unimagined international profile to the city’s bastion of high musical culture. The Big Apple’s loss turned into Montreal’s gain.

When the opening night reviews came in, New York Times critic Anthony Tomassini pinpointed the Nagano effect: “Sometimes a music director’s artistic vision and personality just fit with a city and its orchestra … [Nagano], still youthful and trim at 59, seems to be a high-culture rock star here. He has worked tirelessly to enhance the profile of the orchestra as a true Montreal institution.” He achieved this by first going to the Chamber of Commerce, before the provincial cultural ministry, to get Montrealers believing their city was a “star on the rise” and the MSO was playing an important role in its dynamism.

Finding harmony in his immediate environment—whether it be Munich or Montreal—is Nagano’s key to making his orchestras an integral part of the community. And not just on-stage: So there’s the glamorous maestro in tuxedo occasionally leading MSO soloists in rendering O Canada before Canadiens games at the Bell Centre, or visiting a centre for troubled teens (in perfectly faded jeans, his preferred attire), or plunging into a Québécois TV talk show.

I was lucky enough to witness Nagano up close and personal in the 1990s when I lived in Berkeley, California, where he got his start conducting the university town’s “little symphony that could,” and, over the years, continued there despite being in demand through the larger concert world. L.A. Times critic Mark Swed called his loyalty to Berkeley “unprecedented in the modern age of conductor careerism.” He did it “virtually for nothing,” Nagano said, but “almost for everything.”

It’s this attitude—albeit now as a high-priced classical star—that he brought to Montreal, reflecting his belief that “music nourishes a community’s soul and has a direct correlation to the quality-of-life issues we so cavalierly toss around. It’s not a purely empirically measurable aspect, such as affordable housing or number of parks. But there’s a profound sense of fulfillment in communicating through music those parts of us that are at the essence of humanity.

“We human beings have an exasperating need to classify and cubbyhole, which means there’s pressure on you not to experiment,” he told me. “An orchestra is a human phenomenon. You have to make an effort to avoid the routine. If you do one thing over and over again, then the senses become dulled.”

Thus he began the MSO season with the granddaddy of all symphonies, Beethoven’s Ninth (“Ode to Joy”), and followed up a few days later with the sumptuous if thorny Turangalila Symphony by the great French 20th-century composer Olivier Messiaen. In his last full season in Montreal, Nagano seems intent on demonstrating the range and ambition of the city’s cultural pearl.

It helps that Nagano is a born communicator, the antithesis of aloof, sometimes imperious conductors who typecast themselves as guardians of high culture lording it over the rabble. A lithe figure with high cheekbones and square jaw framed by a Prince Valiant hairstyle, he takes the stage with a serene stride that’s as purposeful as it is elegant. Call him a cool breeze, befitting a Californian who seriously loves surfing, martial arts and fast cars, and Nagano rolls his eyes at the image (“classical music’s hot new conductor dude,” as People magazine once dubbed him).

“Everyone who attends a concert goes to discover something unknown,” Nagano said, “and that shared sense of discovery is what makes live music so extraordinary. If you go with an open mind, the opportunity for discovery and tremendous emotional reaction can be more invigorating than you could possibly imagine. It’s the opposite of cynicism.”

The critics agree. “His music-making is voluptuous and passionate,” wrote F. Paul Driscoll of Opera News, “always alive with spontaneity and a sense of occasion, but scrupulously refined and immaculately pointed. It’s an intoxicating blend of glamour and serenity.” Nagano is a “dazzlingly theatrical musician who can electrify an audience,” according to the L.A. Times’s Swed, “a bold visionary as well as a cautious, conscientious, meticulously elegant musician.”

Music, Nagano told me, embraces four elements: “The vast range of emotions, the deep spiritual connections we have, our tremendous intellectual capacities and the physical abilities we have to feel so many stimuli.”

He said he dedicates “long periods of gestation for studying the repertoire that I’m currently performing. I try not to have things be a quick study. I love the chance to look inside and analyze and deconstruct and reconstruct, search and research these great masterpieces, to go into deeper levels of discovery.

“The overwhelming reason we dedicate our lives to music is because we firmly share a belief in the mysterious, powerful, benevolent force of live performance of great repertoire.”

In 1989, he took over the Opéra National de Lyon, derided as a mere “provincial” organization by the Parisians who run French culture (and where I met up with him in 1995). Quickly his landmark recordings—Prokofiev’s The Love of Three Oranges, a French-language Salome by Richard Strauss, and the premiere of John Adams controversial The Death of Klinghoffer—won prestigious Gramophone Awards, and Grammys.

He oversaw the renovation Lyon’s opera house, its interior dramatic black, with custom-crafted moveable acoustic-baffles covering the walls, much like Montreal’s new hall. (Midway through his nine-year tenure he was named an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters, France’s second-highest civilian honour.)

When in 1995 he brought the Lyon orchestra to the Bay Area for a two-week American debut, Time magazine raved: “Now U.S. audiences are getting a look at the next great conductor.” The greatness arrived. And Montrealers are that much richer for Nagano’s presence.

Canadiens’ legacy has become an albatross upon the current edition

Juan Rodriguez

October 2011

I know it’s perverse, but I spent the entire summer waiting for October to roll around, so I could get back to following the Montreal Canadiens, as I’ve done since 1956 (when I was 8). In fact, as the years roll by, my passion for the team grows—and so does my frustration.

For in my inaugural season, les Habitants won the first of an unprecedented five straight Stanley Cups; the spell was broken in 1961 (by Chicago). Until then I thought the Canadiens were supposed to win every year, by divine right. The reality was a crushing blow to me.

They righted themselves, winning four championships in the ’60s and six more in the ’70s (including four straight starting in ’76), the heyday of Guy Lafleur and Ken Dryden. Since then it’s been largely one disappointing season after another, as they’ve failed to live up to their own legacy. Their preponderance of Cup victories in those three decades really did make them “nos glorieux.” Today that term is more often used with irony if not outright sarcasm.

Twenty-five years ago, the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup (their only championship season of the 1980s), and the most hallowed team in hockey has managed to win only once since then.

It should be admitted that the Canadiens’ legacy of the glory years has become something of a shroud or albatross upon the current edition; it’s nigh impossible to match that level of excellence. Those great years established Montreal as the hockey capital of the world, where expectations remain high—perhaps unrealistically so in this age of parity and free agents. The Detroit Red Wings, an arch-rival in the ’50s, has displayed the kind of excellence, year in and year out, over the past decade that Montrealers once took for granted.

So often over the last two decades I’ve watched them with the wish to change channels and “return to those thrilling days of yesteryear,” which exist now only as memory (or on DVD packages). Most of the 17 players whose jersey numbers the franchise has retired—the most of any pro sports team—played during those three glorious decades.

Jean Beliveau’s jersey hangs at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. Photo: Michael Barera

The first writer of any persuasion I followed regularly was Red Fisher, then the hockey reporter for the Montreal Star; I still follow him in the Gazette, have even worked with him. Once upon a time there were three English-language papers to fill pages on Canadiens exploits. The best was the tabloid Montreal Herald, with photos by the legendary David Bier and diagrammatic arrows pointing to the trajectory of the puck (usually whizzing by an opposing goalie).

I am a pre-expansion (pre-1967) boomer. There’s a huge disconnect between the old six-team league, in which teams played each other 14 times over the season—giving blood-and-guts gravity to the meaning of the word “rivalry” and every game was a serious affair (even against weaker teams)—and today’s league (offhand I couldn’t tell you how many teams there are).

Of course, back then the Canadiens had first choice for acquiring the services of French-Canadian players, leading to the phrase “The Flying Frenchmen.” And so my favourite player was tall, elegant, smooth-skating Jean Beliveau. There was Maurice “Rocket” Richard, in the twilight of his career (ending in 1960) but still capable of the drama that made him the league’s most explosive player, and his little brother Henri, the “Pocket Rocket,” who virtually defined how a little player could compete in the league. Not to mention Bernard “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, who invented the slap shot. Claude Provost started out as a checker (playing against Gordie Howe and opposition’s other best players) and blossomed into a scorer. Finally, the team was backstopped by the slithery Jacques Plante (“Jake the Snake”), who revolutionized goaltending with his mobile style and was one of hockey’s keenest analysts ever. (Bar none, the best goalie I ever saw.) Yet, the appellation “Flying Frenchman” was ultimately a misnomer. How about Doug Harvey, Tom Johnson, Dickie Moore? The Canadiens always had a blend of the two official language groups—until now, that is. Of course, today’s game is infused with European players.

The closest the current edition has to the speedy francophone archetype is David Desharnais, who broke in last season and could be a key to the team’s fortunes this year. The other “big little guys” are anglos: Michael Cammalleri (my current fave, as much for his intelligence as his opportunistic style), Brian Gionta and Scott Gomez. Add the more sizeable Tomas Plekanec (whom others around the league will tell you is among the best two-way player in the NHL), newly acquired Erik Cole (a natural scorer once he’s around the net), Max Pacioretty and Andrei Kostitsyn, and you have the makings of a dynamic nucleus that could carry this team a long way. If goalie Carey Price has the kind of season we know he’s capable of (logging a league high 72 games last year) and this team may indeed match the best les Canadiens ever had, talent-wise.

At least, that’s the theory—or, perhaps a better way of putting it: Hope springs eternal. The legacy of the Canadiens’ historically proven greatest teams—which those of us of a certain age had the pleasure of watching—will allow nothing less than ultimate victory.

Finally, a trick question: What’s the best game I’ve seen Montreal play? That’s an easy one. It was during the 1977 season—and they were playing against each other at a practice. Speed to burn.

“Lose the pipe” and other lessons I learned from Mordecai Richler

Juan Rodriguez

September 2011

“Take that pipe out of your mouth—you look ridiculous!” Mordecai Richler barked at me during Happy Hour at Ziggy’s. “You look like I did when I was 14 and trying to act like a big shot.”

I almost felt like saying “Yes, sir!” because when Richler said something it stuck. What I thought was a novel attempt at quitting cigarettes stopped there and then.

Although another iconoclastic Jewish writer, Norman Mailer, was my first inspiration to write, Richler was closer to home. Reading The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was something of a Montreal rite of passage. Through his non-fiction—as observant as he was contentious—I was impressed that a Canadian could be an “international man of letters” —such was this nation’s lamentable inferiority complex at the time.

He could inspire outrage with his opinions. While he loved Montreal, that didn’t stop him from criticizing his own Jewish community or, for that matter, the city at large: He derided our own fabulous Expo 67—our entry into the Big Time—as “a good-taste Disneyland.”

A flood of memories of Mordecai recently enveloped me when I read, back to back, two books on him: Mordecai: The Life and Times, by Charles Foran, and The Last Honest Man, Mordecai Richler, An Oral Biography, by Michael Posner. The first follows Richler’s life virtually month by month, while the second hones in on his personal proclivities (he was a man of habit and loyalty), as related by friends. The books made me glad that I chose the writer’s life, despite the anxieties (where’s the next idea coming from?) and insecurities (money), because, it turned out, he shared them, too.

I met him in 1968 when I crashed an exclusive “creative writing” class he gave for about a dozen students at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), his old alma mater. His first question to us was whether we had read Fowler’s English Usage or Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. No one had, it turned out.

“Well, how about Dostoyevsky?” Again, nada. Five minutes into the course and Richler already looked exasperated.

Somehow I became a favourite student. It certainly wasn’t the short story I penned, some elliptical romance that he politely said “didn’t really hang together.”

Maybe it was because of my chutzpah at crashing his course even though I had already dropped out of the university during my first year—publishing my own little “alternative” magazine and getting rejection slips from numerous publications before I started placing articles on pop music and the nascent Youthquake in the Gazette.

Pop wasn’t his bag, but he seemed at least somewhat impressed by my penchant for searing the counterculture’s sacred cows.

I only saw him erupt once during the course. One student had delivered a 320-page manuscript—a novel—to his home. He slammed the tome on the table and warned, “Never, ever, do this again!”

At the end of the course, he invited his students to a cocktail party at the baronial house he was renting in Westmount. He told us he expected us all to imbibe, because that’s what writers did. (At that time, the strongest liquid I drank was tea.)

When I told him I planned to spend six months in London in 1969, he said, “Call me up and we’ll have a drink.” I remember leaving with quite a buzz on—from the gin and tonics surely, but probably more from being in the company of the great man himself.

Although he later confessed that it was ridiculous to “teach” writing—you had to nurture it yourself, through reading and studying and just plain living—that didn’t stop him from later accepting a lucrative position at Carlton University in Ottawa. After all, it was tough for a writer to help raise five children in the style to which he was accustomed.

In London, summer of ’69, I eagerly devoured Cocksure, Richler’s most ribald (i.e. dirtiest) book of all. For sentimental reasons it remains my favourite, probably because I read it in the large metropolis within which it was set, meeting its author there and, the capper, London being the scene of my first little journalistic triumphs.

That summer I sent back several large essays to the Montreal Star and got paid handsomely for them ($300 went a long way in those days).

I would read the printed product in Canada House while waiting for my own clipping to arrive by mail. Part of my deal (more like a dare) with the Star was that if I scored an interview with the Rolling Stones, I would get the job as the paper’s first full-time pop music critic.

Through sheer luck—Brian Jones quit the Stones, thus necessitating a press conference announcing his replacement—I got the interview, which the Star parlayed into a three-page spread, complete with illustration by Aislin.

Richler kept his promise of a drink (or two) at his favourite Sloane Square watering hole, and was impressed by my scamming the job at the Star. I felt a glow within me sitting in the wicker chair opposite my hero—I was already telling war stories! I was now a full-time member of the newspaper trade, an enterprise Richler loved.

Over the coming years we’d share the same friends and colleagues—editors Ian Mayer and Doris Giller, sportswriter Tim Burke, political reporter Hubie Bauch, and of course that notorious man-about-town Nick Auf der Maur.

I’d bump into him at Expos games, I’d see him at Ziggy’s or Winnie’s. He had the same crooked welcoming smile he greeted me with in London, but wasn’t a huge talker. I tried to steer clear of Quebec politics (the infamous sign law, requiring English lettering half the size of the French, really didn’t bother me).

One of the last times I saw him, there was a discussion among the gang about some picayune thing, and when I cracked, “It must be the French-Canadians’ fault,” he simply lifted his eyebrow. Better to talk about hockey.

Sometimes I just stared and gazed at this man with the leonine mane —in older age he really did look like a lion—and felt the world was a much better place with him there (and his reality checks).

Although he had a deep affinity toward Montreal and Jewish culture, he said he didn’t want to be known as a “Jewish writer” or part of a “special nation” (Quebec within Canada). He wanted to be known simply as a man among all other men. His iconoclasm was morally based and, as such, he was above all a humanist, warts and all.

In other words, a real mensch.