Ah, 1970...

 

​(c. January, of which an audio recording survives) we were taken on a field trip to the CBC television studios, then located on Cité de Harve. There was another trip (or the same one?) to the main branch of The Bank of Montreal in Old Montreal, where we saw the vault and a gold bar (the guard joked that we could take it if we could carry it).

 

February 8th I saw 'The Magic Christian'. (Ringo Starr was on 'Laugh-In' at this time).

 

I saw Bill Cosby live at Place des Arts (in the late sixties I listened to his comedy albums). He had a TV show at this time, he played a highschool teacher.

 

I hung around briefly with Brad Porter.

 

There was a partial eclipse of the sun on March 7th.

 

I read 'The Godfather' sometime this year.

 

I took photographs at school on March 25th (called 'Camera Day', it was the one day they were permitted).

 

The Beatles broke up in April (the news was anounced on the 9th). This was hard for me (and Sheila too. She and I were together a lot at school and if things had been different she would have been my first girlfriend. She and I had an imaginary rock band, called 'Group', heavily based on the Beatles. 'Group' took on a reality (the leader was George London, sort of my straight alter ego. George was cool, a great musician, and totally irresistible to women (in a 1970 style of course). The band had an entourage of girlfriends, of which Cyn was the evil blond girlfriend of George (here read Cynthia Lennon/Yoko) and in a way Sheila's alter/rival ). We'd do drawings of them, Sheila drew the girls and I the boys.

 

I also had a secret code alphabet.

 

Without the Beatles I needed a favourite band, and one was available: Led Zeppelin. I'd first heard them on night at Mark Curley's in early 1970 (in the dark, when his parents were out, we'd run around the house with the lights off). The song was 'Whole Lotta Love'.

 

My father had to hear the new music I was listening to, and 'Whole Lotta Love' was it. The break in the song, “Was that about drugs?” he asked...

 

On April 13th I went to my first rock concert; Led Zeppelin at the Forum (1). I didn't know tape recorders were forbidden, so I carried my cassette recorder openly and no one noticed. The tape still survives (the best moment being Robert Plant stopping in mid-wale and telling the crowd to shut-up, sit down and stop acting like school children). This is my first audio record, other than fragments from early 1970, having received the recorder.

 

 

 

 

I watched Nixon's speech of April 30th about extending the war into Cambodia, and remember the news reports of Kent State on May 4th.

 

In May I was stopped for shoplifting Paul McCartney's solo album from Eaton's at Fairview, an event that was so terrible I never did it again.

 

Also in May (or June), Sheila, Diana and I saw 'Let it Be' (2) at the Dorval theatre. (Later I was lucky enough to get the first release of the album, which included a book of b&w and colour photographs). Again in this month it snowed briefly one lunch hour at school. At this time was the protest against grape growers in California.

 

 

 

 

June 9th I brought my cassette recorder to school, this is the earliest surviving recording of friends (as opposed to the recording from January).

 

This recording show something that had developed among us: Sarcasm

 

My first drawing with a date on it: June 18, 1970.

 

School ended June 19 with a party, and we got out around noon.

 

I now realized what an experience (since February) I'd just been through, and how much was lost by not recording it. Because of this I began a journal on June 30th, 1970.

 

 

 

1. Estimates of the crowd that night range from 17,500 to 18,000, which was a record. The band took away $93,000.

The Montreal Star gave the show a bad review...

 

2. I saw the film of John Lennon and Paul McCartney doing 'Two of Us' on the Ed Sullivan Show, done to promote the "Let it Be" album, probably in May.

 

 

 

Yours truly c. January 1970