Raised on Rock and Roll, stories from the days when rock was young. In this episode, four little stories from what was being called the folk revival of the nineteen sixties.

Len Udow

I had a group called the Wayward Four…

– Perfect name.

I played guitar. And we had three other singers. And some guy joined us later and played banjo. And we were doing a kind of a Brothers Four kind of a – you know, or Kingston Trio. Anyway, we ended up on a TV show called The Talent show, I think, the CKY Talent Show. And this was early 60s. And we won. Like we were the champions for that year. And we were asked what we would like for a prize, and we all elected to get curling sweaters…

Bobby Stahr

– When did you start, or did you start, to think of music as your career?

It’s never been a career, it’s a lifestyle. Right from start. Once I started playing guitar I knew I’d be doing that in my life forever. There was never any doubt about it. But it was never a career. It was just what I did with my life. I’ve already played guitar for an hour, hour and a half, earlier today… 

– A lifestyle choice. What does that mean? Tell me what that means to you. 

Well, if I can't bring my guitar, I don't want to be there…. How’s that.

– That’s perfect.

Like my guitar is part of me. If I want to take it, I will. And if you don’t want me to take it, I won’t go.

Rick Neufeld. I'd been writing songs and songwriting was still – you know, ‘singer songwriter’ in the early 60s was still a bit of a novelty. And I never was a great guitar player, or singer for that matter. But people like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen proved to me that you didn't necessarily have to be if you could write a song…

In my hometown, some of the rockers ,like Winnipeg’s own favourite son Neil Young, were exploring acoustic folk music.. And some of the folkies (under Bob Dylan’s shocking turnaround) were going electric. If you were just discovering it, Winnipeg was a pretty great place to experience it. No matter which camp, or which part of the city – or in Rick Neufeld’s case, which part of the countryside, you came from…

Rick Neufeld My Uncle Henry played the guitar and, and his sister, my aunt, sang with him. And they would sing in church. And, and yet it wasn't, they weren't singing hymns. They were singing sort of less churchy songs. And that caught my attention, although I did always enjoyed singing in the in the choirs. But that got me interested in wanting a guitar and somehow I got a guitar and then learned how to play it to some extent. And then when I got to the University of Manitoba, studying architecture, I started playing in coffee houses and you know, church basements, the Home Street United Church basement…

I did not enjoy being driving that tractor all day. I mean, I screwed up so bad. I would get to the end of a field and I'd be daydreaming so much about being on second base against the New York Yankees or, or whatever my my fascination was at the time, I would go through fences, I would tear up hydraulic hoses. I was a terrible, terrible slave on that farm as an eight, nine year old boy. And all I ever wanted to do was go, and get out there in the world and my uncle Henry's guitar. I don't know, I just saw that as a, as a signal that that's that's something I would do.

And back then in the coffee house scene, I remember Mr. Bojangles and Little Bird Come Sit Upon My Windowsill, Jerry Jeff Walker songs that I would do. Eve Of Destruction was one of the first songs I remember doing. And then mixing my own songs in.…

I must have just written Moody Manitoba Morning. Because it was after I got back from that trip to Europe trip. And before I headed back to Montreal to work in a record store there and basically where my publisher lived, and he just wanted me in the proximity and, and get me to good writing habits, working habits because in Manitoba, it seemed I was a little bit too sociable in that scene.

In Europe Rick befriended another Canadian traveller. They travelled together till they ran out of money and headed back to Canada.

His name was Richard Hahn. And he said his father was in the music business primarily as a jingle writer. He wrote off he wrote all those like Dominion, “it’s mainly because of the meat”, and DuMaurier, “for real smoking pleasure”, “drive in at the sign of the big BA” – like all those hits from back in our era, on the radio, advertising. And he was getting into music, into producing music. He was tired of the jingle business. And so when we got back to Canada – we barely made it to to Montreal with what we had left. – after getting a flight from Scotland in Newfoundland and getting from Newfoundland to to Montreal – and I played Bob some of my songs, and he was from Saskatchewan.

And he was so enthusiastic about my simple little songs, because he related to them. And I went back to Winnipeg. And when I got back, there was a letter from him saying, you know, I'm going to be producing this album by a band called The Bells. If you can write something we'll get them to record it. And so I wrote Moody Manitoba Morning and sent it to him… And the Bells somehow as a B-side had a lot of radio performances out of it at a time when Canadian music was being promoted, to be played. And I'm not crazy about the version they did, but hey, it was it was a hit. So suddenly, I was a songwriter, an actual songwriter. And that was the beginning of that…

Len Udow I'm one of the lucky people. According to one of my neighbours, he was a neighbour and he came up to me said, you know, you're one of the few people that actually made a living, or survived, being a folk musician. But I never thought of myself as a folk musician. I just sort of seeped like water into all these different crevices, you know. I mean, I was trying to be more mercurial than anything, because I knew I had music in me, but I had to try different things, and see where I could fit in.

For singer-songwriter Len Udow, trying different things came naturally. It’s what he grew up with…

I think I had a pretty complicated childhood, musically, because my mother and my aunt and my uncle were supreme beings, musically. Opera, as well as the American standards – so there was a bit of jazz, there was a bit of folk, and there was a bit of what’s called Yiddish.  And my mother sang opera with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. And as a child, I went to rehearsals, and I was fascinated with the kettle drums and, and seeing this room full of fabulous music. So I don't remember a light ever going on, because I don't think light ever went off. I think I was surrounded by such passion and dedication and commitment. And it was the daily expression in our home.

Because I mean, look, opera is in itself, it's a European culture, it’s a folk culture, that entered my parents lives along with the American Songbook. What was entering into my life was Odetta, Leon Bibb, Pete Seeger. My mother was buying their records. I was hearing the you know, the Kingston Trio. I remember being fascinated with Greenback Dollar, it was a tune that they did. ‘Some people say I’m a… Others say I'm no good.’  

And of course, I'm playing guitar at this point – that my father bought me. My father bought me a guitar from Eaton’s. It was a plywood thing. It had a lady doing a hula, and a little pond, and a tree, a palm tree, and it was awful. The action on it was so bad. And I played with my thumb, I didn't have a pic. And I would bleed, and my hand would be so sore. And… ‘Some people say I’m a… – and I’m into this… I used to do the Ox Driver Song, which came from Australia, with that thing… Anyway… And eventually he bought me my Martin guitar, that I still have today.

Sometime around 1963, Len brought his beloved Martin with him to the city’s hippest coffee house. It was called the Fourth Dimension.

It was an old nightclub that my grandparents used to go to with a bottle of wine under the table, during Prohibition, and it became a folk club. and you were charged 25 cents an hour to sit and maybe you order a coffee, and catch the the whatever, whatever the the main, the main act was, usually, it was part of a circuit that was Thunder Bay. Winnipeg and Regina.

 It was a black box. Black. Black walls, black floor, black furniture. And it had a little stage with very minimal lighting. It had a nice sound system, I think. And it had an espresso machine. And they made, I don't know, some kind of primitive food, I guess. So I would go in, and I would be one of those patrons, I guess, when I first began. But I never expected that I would play there, until I realized that anyone could play there on a Sunday. So I guess I was talked into going with my guitar by someone who was already going in, and I performed, and then I sort of got a toehold that way. At the Four D, and then I started being asked into the back room, where you could go and play and be with some of the traveling musicians that came through.

These were exciting and inspiring times – meeting all these musicians, hearing their music – and so was the 4D itself. It was way across the city from Len’s West Kildonan neighbourhood. That was part of its attraction.

West Kildonan had its own city hall, its own mayor, its own police force. So did St. Boniface, so did St. James. So until it was amalgamated into one city, it was really a city of separateness, you know, separate parts. 

I was at that point in which it was starting to become