I'd been pretty poor since leaving school and my ten years in Quebec City were no different. But I didn't care because I had time for my hobbies and I travelled (hitch-hiking) for four months every summer. Travelling, like music, was a religion, and the world was my cloister.
I'd occasionally scour the second hand record shops and add an album here and there. I'd brought all my records from England so my collection dated back to those original Alice Cooper albums. There wasn't much to buy: the seventies were over. Punk rock had started a revolution in the music industry. The new mantra: no talent required. With most of the old bands gone, second-hand stuff from the 70s was all I was really interested in. And it was in Quebec City, en bass ville, that I picked up a used copy of Arthur Brown's amazing and now impossible to find Faster than the Speed of Light.
Everything changed when I started at Sainte Lawrence College. It was like my High School all over again, but now I was old enough to enjoy being famous and not worry so much about being odd. I knew I was odd. There was nothing I could do about it. At times I thought my oddness was my greatest strength, other times my greatest weakness. What I did know was that my weirdness was actually attractive to certain members of the opposite sex.
I soon discovered I liked studying. The big surprise to me was I turned out to be smart. I was especially amazed when i read Plato and chuckled at his genius while other students hated every word of every page. I remember one of the philosophy teacher's there. He was a dedicated environmentalist before it became a catchword. He was smart and he was interesting. He was also the only teacher to give oral exams, two by two, privately in his office. With classes up to 30 students, this was no small task. After my oral he gave me a 98% final grade. He was known to be a hard grader, and 70s were the best you could hope for. I knew he liked me. So I went to see him and asked him to lower my grade because I thought some small favouritism was at play. It was probably just a grandstanding gesture on my part, but he lowed my grade to 94%. Bastard.
So any way, my lonely days now seemed over, even if that kindred spirit was as illusive as ever. And then I started at Laval (French) University and even fell in love briefly with Donna Lynne.
I ditched Laval after a year because I'd rather study in a ditch than in that incestuous den with their conglomerate of incompetent anglophone teachers.
And i wanted to go to a real English University. It was at that time that i started to go out with Nicole. She was young. Her parents were religious fanatics. It was more madness. We moved to Montreal. I started Concordia University and we got married. It was more madness.
So Nicole was my second wife and another French Canadian. She liked some interesting music, Quebecois Harmonium, for example.
It seems inevitable now but it seemed impossible then. Nicole left me. I fell into a terrible depression because her heart was so sweet.
And during that year I obsessively wrote songs about her and about losing her. Collectively they are called Madness and Melancholy and they are all here.
