Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

When they were sixteen, in high school, Lefebvre and his buddy Robb Lucy would steal Lucy’s mom’s car and bomb around the neighborhood. They’d slip it into neutral, silently wheel it out of the driveway, and then siphon gas from another vehicle. That way, Lucy’s mom wouldn’t wonder why the fuel indicator was low.

Lefebvre remembers another friend, Scott McGehee, who in the middle of eighth grade moved to San Francisco but came back for an Easter visit. When Lefebvre saw him he was holding a bag of stuff that looked like “green shit.”

“You gotta smoke this stuff, Johnny, it’s really funny.”

That’s when Lefebvre started smoking dope. He was fourteen. He’d meet his friends at the old Palace Theatre, on Eighth Avenue between First and Second Streets SW, on the south side of the street. In those days it was still legal to smoke inside the theater. To Lefebvre, this meant he and his buddies could smoke hand-rolled cigs at the Palace and nobody would know the difference. What’s that funny smell? Don’t know. “Then Robb would say something like, ‘These crackers taste dry,’ and ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’ We’d all laugh as if it was the funniest thing we’d heard all day.”

There were others, including a couple of Lefebvre’s cousins, who were into the green shit. And there was a girl from school who went to San Francisco for a visit and returned with a Jefferson Airplane seven-inch single. Lefebvre remembers thinking how unusual it was to hear this strange new hybrid of folk and rock coming out of Haight-Ashbury, flown 1,500 miles northeast across the Rockies directly to his hometown. Being a music fanatic, Lefebvre watched this shift from simple, straight pop to baroque, turned-on rock, and it fascinated him. He recalls,

It was a great time to grow up. I remember lining up at the store at Glenn’s Music in the Bay Parkade in 1964 because the new Kinks record was coming out. Or there was this new band called the Rolling Stones. I listened to Buddy Holly records at my friend’s place, but the first record I bought was “Time Is on My Side” backed with “Congratulations” by the Stones. And the other record in 1964 I really remember was “Downtown” by Petula Clark. You know how your record player would have that tall spindle? We’d stack up forty-fives and have dances and parties. Del Savery and Mike McCool would sit on the couch and say, “I’ll kiss any girl.” Then the girls would line up and kiss Del and dance to songs like the Ventures’ “Wheels.”

Then bands started playing early Beatles songs, Wayne Fontana songs, all those Carnaby Street pop songs, at the CYO, the Catholic Youth Organization. The Electric Prunes and stuff like that started happening in 1966. Soon even the Beatles got turned on — those were wonderful days.

Wonderful summers, too. In seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, 1964–66, when Lefebvre was thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, he participated in a choir program. Every spring Father Joe Toole, at the cathedral in Calgary, would choose a dozen boys to take part in a summer music program in Toronto. Lefebvre was flown in and stayed downtown, near Church and Queen Streets, along with some other kids from boys’ choirs. By day they were participants in St. Michael’s Cathedral Choir School, a five-week summer liturgical music camp. He sang in both the boys’ choir and the men’s choir. There were maybe twenty boys and twenty men in all.

Lefebvre learned a great deal about music during these three summers, about structure, about harmonized and contrapuntal melodies, and about playing the organ. “We were steeped in some spine-tinglingly beautiful music — Renaissance polyphony, Palestrina. It’s a fucking shame that some people are Protestants,” says Lefebvre, “because there’s a really good book of music out there that they would never get to hear.”

Church music was one part of Lefebvre’s musical education; the other was learning on his own. He had always fooled around with either his or his sister Anne’s acoustic guitar, and he’d been taken piano lessons since the third grade. He studied piano through first to sixth grades before quitting when he was twelve. When he was seventeen he picked it up again. The electric guitar came afterward, as did faking his way through Bob Dylan and Neil Young songbooks on piano. One thing he discovered through this long process was that the guitar was primarily a percussion or rhythm instrument, whereas the piano to him seemed to contain infinite melodies. Not that the guitar didn’t — it just didn’t present itself so easily that way.

Church music had an additional function at summer camp in Toronto: an alarm clock. “The beds at St. Michael’s School were in a big auditorium,” Lefebvre says. “On the stage was a big pipe organ. On the wings of the stage were the bunk beds. Guys would start practicing organ and the first time slot was 6:30 in the morning. Guess what? You woke up because it was right there.”

While daytime hours were spent drawing on the well of Catholic liturgical music, nighttime was a different story. Lefebvre would climb out the window and head for the real music action. “We’d stack up pillows in our bunk beds and sneak out to Yorkville,” he explains. “You’d walk out onto Yonge Street and Sam’s would be there. There would be all of these wonderful forty-fives. I remember distinctly walking by this club, just about a block down from Dundas Street, called Le Coq d’Or (the golden rooster).” Lefebvre looked in the window and saw a picture of Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks. If he’d been able to sneak in, he would have seen the Band in a small club prior to backing Bob Dylan on his 1966 world tour.

Lefebvre continues,

We’d head up to Yorkville, walk up and down the street, and look at the go-go dancers in the cages at the Blind Onion and the Riverboat. You could listen through the door and Gordon Lightfoot would be playing. I remember thinking it was completely ridiculous that those coffee houses would charge you two bucks for a Coke when you could get one for fifteen cents in the store. So we’d just sit out on the street watching the go-go dancers. It was so dreamy, man, this whole world I had no introduction to except through music — and that my mother didn’t know a thing about. By then I knew who Leonard Cohen was, who Dylan was, and all the pop bands, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who — all that was happening by 1965. God, it was an amazing time to be a kid.

At the end of the last summer, when my mom finally came to get me, she got really mad because I hadn’t gotten my hair cut all summer. She made me get it cut. I knew then and there that they were all wrong and I was right. So I went on to smoke pot and drop acid.

Lefebvre was consistent about hair length. It was a declaration of war: he wasn’t going to cut it for anybody. “He’s been like that since he was twelve years old,” confirms his mom. Long hair meant everything, and a quick spin through the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tune “Almost Cut My Hair” reinforces how a head might think: cutting your hair meant giving in to the straight world. Mind you, growing your hair also increased paranoia, as when David Crosby sang about looking into a mirror and seeing a cop car. But Lefebvre and so many other guys in the counterculture thought it worth the risk. Louise was bothered by the scruffiness, but she was also sympathetic. She thought some authority figures took it too seriously. She says,

When I went to see him in Toronto, the director of the choir asked to see me. John was not cutting his hair and he was sneaking out to Yorkville to go hang out with the hippies. This priest was so upset that he frightened me.

John’s hair was the length of the Beatles’—that’s not long. That priest, I thought after, You’ve got your head in the wrong place here. You shouldn’t be criticizing a young man for that . But yes, John shouldn’t have been sneaking out.