"There’s a big affinity between music and math,” says Alan Lord, who celebrates the early Montreal punk scene in his riotous memoir High Friends in Low Places. "Listen to Bach. It sounds like architecture."
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“We were weirdos who managed to find each other.”
Alan Lord is speaking of a small but vocal young generational cohort — restless, disaffected, plain bored — that found common cause in the liberating Montreal punk scene of the late 1970s and early ’80s. It’s a time and place he celebrates to great effect in High Friends in Low Places (Guernica Editions, 337 pages, $25).
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The city, it may surprise some younger readers to discover, was slow on the uptake when it came to the punk revolution. Earlier scenes like progressive rock and the tail end of hippie culture hung on much longer in Quebec than in the rest of Canada, to say nothing of New York and the U.K.
“Montreal was 10 years behind,” said the ebullient 68-year-old from his home in Villeray, where he lives with his partner of 34 years and their 21-year-old son. “We — and when I say ‘we,’ I mean the punks — felt like aliens.”
For all the local flavour of the story Lord tells, you needn’t have been “there” to enjoy his book, any more than you need to have been in San Francisco in 1967 or Paris in 1927 to appreciate memoirs of those scenes. Bohemias are essentially timeless, and Lord is good at capturing the heady but volatile cocktail of idealism and nihilism, as well as the exhilaration that comes with the personal and collective seizing of the day. Works like High Friends are invaluable; without them, crucial currents of non-mainstream social and cultural history would be largely confined to the fading memories of the surviving participants.
Experience as a punk singer, guitarist, songwriter and scene-maker indirectly set the young Lord on an anarchic odyssey that eventually encompassed time as an event organizer and promoter in avant-garde literary and visual art circles in the U.S. and Europe, and — concurrently, remarkably — a career as a prominent structural engineer. (Two landmarks built on his watch are the Biodôme and St-Jacques Bridge, spanning the Décarie Expressway.)
Countering the common retrospective notion that punk and its surrounding scene were inherently violent, Lord chooses the macro view.
“It was fairly aggressive, yes, but I wouldn’t say it was violent. It was just a reaction to the capitalist economic system. Me and my friends — well, most of them — were working class. The struggling class.”
Lord’s class consciousness and social justice instincts were incubated the honest way: he grew up the son of a cab-driving father and homemaker mother in Rosemont.
“There was a lot of dysfunction in the family,” he said. “If someone asks, I say ours was a broken home that somehow stayed together.”
When punk’s presence started being felt in 1976, Lord — a Rolling Stones fanatic as a teenager — found that its appeal was equal parts visceral and intellectual.
“Hearing the lyrics of (the Sex Pistols’ 1977 song) God Save the Queen, the intelligence of it, that’s what really fired me up.”
Returning for the moment to the subject of engineering, it has to be said that very few other punks, if indeed any, have pulled off Lord’s double duty.
“You have to understand that there’s a big affinity between music and math,” he said. “Listen to Bach. It sounds like architecture. A lot of my musician friends were math whizzes. And of course, you need to be good at math to become an engineer.”
Even so, what Lord achieved can be hard to wrap one’s head around. It’s as if Joey Ramone also happened to have overseen the construction of the Guggenheim.
“I’m sure there were people who thought, ‘Oh my God — this weirdo, this freak, building bridges?’ ” said Lord. “Well, let me assure you that, on the job, I was very conscientious. I always got down to the brass tacks. If a civil engineer makes mistakes, people die.”
Lord shrugs it off when complimented on his unstinting work ethic — the internal combustion that enabled him to complete his university studies and launch his breadwinning career even while maintaining a prodigious social (and, ahem, recreational) profile.
“I was a working guy,” he said. “To feed myself, I had to work. All the time.”
Lord is a cancer survivor. The diagnosis three years ago and subsequent treatment were factors in his decision to retire from engineering. (The condition is now in remission.) Today, while still passionately engaged with life and music — he and this reporter had an emotional commiseration about the recent passing of guitarists Keith Levene and Wilko Johnson — he has no trouble accepting that his public rocking days are behind him.
“It’s expensive to make music, and even if you do, people won’t pay for it anymore,” he said. “Besides, I don’t want to be up on a stage with a guitar at my age. I’d look stupid. Let’s let the kids do it.”
Asked about possible regrets, Lord’s thoughts quickly went in a certain direction.
“Do you mean did I mess up my life with punk? That’s a question that used to occur to me, I’ll admit. I mean, I could have gone to MIT. Why didn’t I try for a career at NASA?”
For Lord, an answer, and a moment of epiphanic affirmation, came when he and an old friend watched Christmas With the Sex Pistols, Julien Temple’s documentary about the band’s 1977 benefit concert for the children of striking firemen.
“(My friend) told me, ‘Watching this validated all the choices of my youth,’ ” recalled Lord. “I thought, ‘He’s right. It was all worth it.’ The life of an engineer is not exciting enough. For me, punk was a life-changer, and not just in itself. It led to poetry, to art, to adventure. And it all sprang from being excited by God Save the Queen.”
Lord knows
The wide-ranging life recounted in Lord’s new memoir has seen him cross paths with the great, the good and the notorious. Here are some of them.
William S. Burroughs
Lord met the éminence grise of American underground culture at the writer’s 70th birthday party in New York in 1984. The two having hit it off, Lord served as Burroughs’s press agent for a 1989 Montreal gallery show, landing the writer on the cover of local arts weeklies Mirror and Voir in the same week. (“I was very proud of that.”) He was also granted access to Burroughs’s legendary Lower Manhattan “bunker” apartment in the converted locker room of a former YMCA. “That was like being allowed into the secret chambers of the Vatican.”
Herbert Huncke
It might be difficult to picture the sepulchral American beat poet, heroin addict and Mayor of 42nd Street hobnobbing at Montreal’s alterna-rock hotbed Les Foufounes Électriques. He was, after all, born in 1915. But he was there, and Lord was there with him.
Mario Campo
The Québécois poet, who died in 2006, was a close friend of Lord. Little read outside select circles, he has nonetheless left a lasting influence. “To me, he was as significant as someone like Lou Reed,” said Lord. Along with an array of like-minded secret heroes, Campo’s presence in the book is part of a parallel-world Hall of Fame; Lord has provided links to steer readers to their works. “It was important to me to pay tribute to these people. Montreal isn’t only Leonard Cohen.”
Ivan Doroschuk
The future Men Without Hats mainstay was a friend of Lord when both were scuffling young musicians. The connection gave Lord entrée to a side of Montreal he’d never seen. “I thought, ‘Wow, so this is what the inside of Outremont houses looks like!’ ”
Les Colocs
Nearly all Québécois music fans of a certain age will recall the beloved Montreal band’s 1995 hit Bonyeu, an anthem for underdogs written by Lord with lyrical contributions from Les Colocs’ leader, the late André (Dédé) Fortin. The song has become embedded in local folkways to the point where it is now included in a CEGEP-assigned literature textbook. “One time I stepped into a gas station dépanneur and the song was playing (on the radio),” recalled Lord. “Four or five patrons were either singing along or humming. I left with a big smile on my face.”
AT A GLANCE
Alan Lord will read from High Friends in Low Places at Expozine’s 20th-anniversary gala, Friday, Dec. 2 at 7 p.m. at Anteism, 435 Beaubien St. W. For full information, see the event’s Facebook page.
ianmcgillis2@gmail.com
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