Ringo, Django & My Dad
by Paul Myers
(Originally published in Maura Magazine, and the author thanks Maura Johnston for her expert editing and for publishing the original in her excellent magazine).
I came of age in the 1970s, and my deep childhood connection to the music of The Beatles remains unbroken well into my adult life. This bond goes even deeper because both of my parents were born in the Beatles’ hometown of Liverpool; my father shares a birthday (July 7) with Ringo Starr. Not only were their two birthdays inextricably linked in my mind when I grew up, I can still recall the long-distance phone calls with my aunties and uncles, all of whom spoke with heavy Liverpudlian accents. The Beatles, for me, were family.
The story of Eric Robert Myers, my dad, begins in Liverpool in 1922. Dad grew up in a proud working-class household and bravely answered the call to fight Hitler in World War II before coming back to The Pool, ready to take whatever life would hand him. As it turned out, this wasn’t much. In 1956, after attending night school, he packed in his dead-end job at the Dunlop Tyre factory and ran away with his wife Bunny to America — which, if you were English in the late 1950s, meant Canada.
Post-war Toronto wasn’t exactly a city of gold in those days, and dad often remarked that parts of the main drag, Yonge Street, weren’t even paved when they stepped off the train in 1956. Still, the relative prosperity of a town that had never been ravaged by Hitler’s rockets, as Liverpool had, and the abundance of like-minded British expats made it feel a little less alien. At least you could get a decent cuppa tea.
In Toronto, dad was a salesman; at various times, he peddled insurance, encyclopedias, and Better Business Bureau subscriptions. He was a man of few comforts. One, maybe two, warm beers on a hot day, televised sports, and The Goon Show or Bob And Ray on the radio. Although they were already too old to be in the Beatles’ target demographic, my parents liked the boys who’d made Liverpool proud, whose tunes were easy to love and who seemed to recognize the English music hall DNA in their melodies.
Dad was, however, prone to mood swings and would boil over. When his beloved Toronto Maple Leafs lost the hockey game, which seemed like always, he’d go into a miserable funk that permeated the household and threatened to steal the joy out of dinnertime, Christmas or my birthday party.
I eventually learned that music never failed to be a bridge between an angry father and a confused son; the Beatles worked like audio Prozac on him. This was a pretty neat trick to know as an awkward boy just getting used to his own emotions, let alone the complex emotional pendulum of an adult.
While the Rolling Stones were officially unwelcome on the family record player, my folks had no trouble gifting me Beatles albums. One year, we were caught up on back catalogue and it was time to get Abbey Road, which had only been released one month before my ninth birthday. My only birthday request that year was to be taken downtown to Sam The Record Man, a three-story palace of vinyl on Yonge Street.
I can vividly recall sitting in the front seat of dad’s Pontiac as he drove down the Don Valley Parkway. On the way down, CBC Radio were featuring tracks from Abbey Road. “Come Together” played, and as I stared at the dashboard dials, I struggled to make sense of the lyrics.
“Dad, why is he singing ‘Hold you in his armchair, you can feel his disease’?”
Dad kept his eyes on the road and opened his mouth before he realized he didn’t really know either.
“Well, um, they take drugs. It’s probably a druggie thing.”
“Oh,” I nodded, wondering if “a druggie thing” meant that the Beatles had had too much cough syrup or one too many Bayer Aspirins. Those Beatles sure were complicated.
We parked and walked over to Sam The Record Man. We found Abbey Road in the front racks, but instead of proceeding to the cash register, Dad wanted to go upstairs to the jazz section, whatever that was.
I had never been upstairs before. I didn’t even know Sam’s had a whole floor just for jazz records; I don’t think I really knew what Jazz was at that point.
The stairs creaked as we approached the great, jazzy beyond. Up there, the sounds became quieter; the tasteful honk of reedy saxophones punctuated the swishy sizzle of brushes on drums. Solemn, solitary men — older men — flipped through the record bins with focused intensity, deep in the familiar search mode of the vinyl connoisseur. The man behind the counter, who appeared to be drinking a small glass of scotch, had a bulbous red nose and a five o’clock shadow. It was noon. Dad asked the man for something called Django Reinhardt and the man nodded his approval and dutifully lead us to the appropriate section.
Jango Rine Heart? Was that even a person? Dad told me that he’d recently been listening to the CBC and that they had played a song by Django’s Quintette Du Hot Club De France, and it had reminded him of being stationed in continental Europe during WWII.
He was excited. Up until now the only records I’d ever heard them play in the house were by Charles Aznavour or the Broadway cast of Camelot, starring Robert Goulet.
We headed to the cash register, both of us thrilled, and sped home on the Parkway. When we got there, dad was gracious enough to let me, and my two brothers, put on Abbey Road first. The lads had become men, and I felt a little intimidated about how much there was to listen to. Still, we all agreed, it was the best music we’d ever heard.
Then it was time for Django.
First, Dad went to the case of six warm bottles of Labatt’s 50 Ale and, after tearing apart the cutlery drawer looking for the bottle opener, snapped off the top of a stubby brown bottle. After placing the needle down, he returned to his armchair and, following a brief bit of crackling, the room filled with the signature swing of Reinhardt’s guitar and Stephane Grappelli’s violin. I thought I’d hate it (the dude on the cover looked old), and I didn’t know what exactly was happening, but I could see why Dad was so into it. I felt like I was having my hair cut off and had discovered new contours on my skull.
But most of all, I remember watching Dad clutch his little brown bottle as a faraway look in his eyes said, “You have reached the mind of Eric Myers. I’m not here right now, I’m in the south of France, please leave a message at the sound of the fiddle.” He was half-smiling, half trying to solve some torturous riddle. I now know that look to be what adults call “melancholy,” that bittersweet nostalgia that is at once reassuring and mildly tormenting. I bonded with Dad that day in a way I hadn’t before.
Years later, I began playing in my own teenaged bands. We covered Rush, KISS, BTO, Zeppelin — all the suburban rock touchstones, none of which did the trick with Dad. As the new wave began, he tolerated my XTC and Talking Heads records, mocking David Byrne’s yodeling vocal style in a way that suggested that, at very least, he was amused.
But at least he was listening.
Every year, on the 7th of July, those This Day In Rock History columns would report Ringo Starr’s birthday and my thoughts would turn to dad and the Abbey Road trip.
In 1991, Eric Robert Myers passed away from complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
Per his wishes, we had him cremated and took his ashes back to his beloved city of Liverpool, then chartered a private boat to take us out into the Mersey River (the same river made famous in Freddy And The Dreamers’ “Ferry Across The Mersey”) and scattered his ashes there.
I rented an acoustic guitar for the ceremony and elected to play a Beatles song, John Lennon’s “In My Life,” as my older brother committed the first scoop of dad’s ashes to the river.
As the ashes hit the water, they made a kind of sizzling swoosh, which punctuated my singing:
“There are places I’ll remember….”
SHHHHH! (the ashes hissing in the water)
“All my life though some have changed…”
SHHHHH!
After I took my turn, the ceremony came to an end and, as we turned back to the Pier Head, I spotted a seagull flying low in the wake of our boat, at a respectful distance. I also heard the distant rumblings of thunder. The poet in me would like to think that the bird was there to guide Dad’s spirit to some kind of afterlife, and that the thunder was the creaking of heaven’s gates opening wide to receive him. But no, the pragmatist and science fan in me knows this is bullshit, and that the bird probably just mistook dad’s powdery ashes for food falling from the boat and that the thunder simply meant that we had better wrap up this little party and get back to shore before the rain came.
“I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before…”
The Beatles had connected us once more, and as I contemplated the Liverpool skyline, I was grateful that music had built such a sturdy bridge between a father and a son, and from Liverpool to Canada. Eric Myers had come full circle.
“Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I’ve loved them all.”
