by cart_machine » Wed Jun 08, 2022 6:25 am
This is from Tom Keyser's column, Calgary Herald, May 17, 1987.
cArtie.
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Real Roy's flipside is playing managment material
It's been years since the Beatle Bus last bounced over the pitted backroads of my brain, but when Roy Hennessy landed in Calgary a few weeks back he plugged in a long-neglected, electronic memory circuit.
Hennessy's over 40 now. The new general manager of XL Radio, he has evolved into a corporation man on the Moffat Communications Ltd. team. Hennessy's one of the suits now, which I guess reflects a natural order.
Eventually, Dr. Johnny Fever has to grow up, trim his moustache, wear fine worsteds, and turn into the Big Guy.
In 1965, though, Hennessy's evolution was in a primary stage. Then he was Real Roy, 24-year-old Boss Jock, one of the best of the rap-happy, gimmick-mad rock deejays who strung a lifeline between us and the rock'n'rollers whose lives we followed the way raggy-cuffed penny investors follow the stock quotes.
It was a golden age of deejay madness, at least in Vancouver where I grew up. CFUN had a lunatic named Mad Mel, whose daily show began with an announcer telling Mel it was time to come out of his cage.
CKLG, Hennessy's bailiwick, took a mousey nerd of a kid who hung around the station, fed him raw meat, dubbed him Stevie Wonder, and turned him into a slathering, shrieking, on-air blitzkreig.
Then there were the promotions. Like the Beatle Bus.
A seat on that bus was maybe the only thing I ever won, and the memory is still sweet, like yet another listen of She Loves You.
Had someone offered me a choice, when I was 15, between lighting George Harrison's Woodbine or rescuing my grandmother from the jaws of death, I would have started rummaging for a match.
Our crowd was mad for the music made by British invaders like the Beatles and Stones. Then, too, we envied their sex appeal. Against all odds, we wanted to be Beatles.
The girls we knew were suckers for Liverpool accents. 'Til then, rock singers had always spoken in Memphis drawls or dull-edged monotones hatched in Midwestern wheat-fields.
We listened and learned until most of our group could serve up a passable Liverpool "scouse," to be implemented when meeting new females. Unbelievably, it worked some of the time, and the accents helped four of us win CKLG's Beatle Bus contest.
We taped an ersatz Beatles' press conference featuring our fake accents and sent it to CKLG, Hennessy's station, as our entry. Hennessy and the Boss Jocks liked us so much they invited us down to record some Coke commercials, one or two of which made it on the air.
I still remember phoning Hennessy a couple of times to badger him because he forgot to include my name when he announced us as winners.
On August 22, 1965, we sat through two shows of the Vancouver premiere of Help, the Beatles' movie, at a downtown theatre. Then we climbed on the bus to the Portland, Ore., Coliseum, next stop on the band's North American tour.
I found out later quite a few memorable things happened that day.
In the wee hours, Paul McCartney was visited by vice detectives in his Minneapolis hotel room. The girl he was with, said a police inspector, "didn't look 16."
En route from Minneapolis to Portland, one of the engines on the Beatles' plane caught fire. Allen Ginsberg came to Portland that day and wrote a poem kidding the Beatles for singing "some tearful memory song ancient two years."
And I learned that, despite my linguistic gifts, I could never compete with the Beatles for the affections of the clear-eyed girl.
She had azure eyes, deep and blue, kind of shy and otherworldly. Mature reflection tells me they must've been tinted contacts, but I spent the whole bus trip gazing into her blue glass.
Real Roy Hennessy was on that bus, and my buddies, but I remember her. The concert was short—20 minutes—and when she got back on the bus afterwards, she was crying.
When I got off the bus in Vancouver, Miss Clear Eyes shed not a tear, and a glimmer of understanding dawned. It seemed to take more than fake accents and fond dreams to make a Beatle. It took a while, but I came to grips with it.
I decided to become Woody Allen instead. Vice cops hardly ever bang on his door.
So, Roy Hennessy, welcome to Calgary, and thanks for the memory. Sorry about all those phone calls.
