Walking over to The New Penelope

Michael Cahill was a young high school senior who was lucky to live not far from The New Penelope. He tells ARCMTL about his regular drop-ins at the coffeehouse as a teenager.

Transcription:

Michael Cahill: I went to high school in Montreal called High School of Montreal, which is right on University St. I lived downtown. My house was like a downtown central for all my friends. Everybody would meet there and then we kind of fan out from there and uh, a lot of the area we would hang out in this, in the McGill Ghetto, but we were high school students hanging out in the McGill Ghetto. We’d go to the Yellow Door, we’d go to The New Penelope. We were all, we all loved music. 

But our big thing was always to just go down to the best, when we really wanted to see some good music, we’d wait for a good show to come to The New Penelope. And then we’d just walked down there. And for me, you know, I still have these visions because I always remember that it was always night. It was snow. We had our big army coats on with hoods and we’d walk down to The New Penelope. And it was, it was, it was always hot and steamy in that place.

And everything was very black and dark and. And that was just like our great night out on the weekend. And, you know, I don’t remember all the bands we saw, but what I remember for sure, we saw The Fugs at least a couple of times and we kind of, we were groupies. So we were trying to get in behind and talk to them a little bit afterwards. And you know, these big guys from New York, that was really impressive for a couple of young guys, few young guys from Montreal.

But the music that I really LOVED was Paul Butterfield. Because to me, that guy and his band were just superb.