Alan Brown on having long hair and playing music at a love-in

In this interview excerpt, Alan Brown, former band member of the popular band The Sidetrack, remembers the danger of having long hair in Montreal in the 1960s and the violent episode at the earlier love-in on Mount Royal.

Transcription:

Louis Rastelli: We found a few years ago, a film reel, a silent film reel of you guys playing on Mount Royal during some sort of a love-in or something.

Alan Brown: I remember that!

Louis Rastelli: It says ‘C- Fox presents a Love-out’! It wasn’t a love-in, but it was, you know, it’s a love festival.

Alan Brown: Yeah, yeah, I remember playing there.

Louis Rastelli: Now, the funny story is that it seems like there were some real love-ins or hippie parties on Mount Royal that were busted up that summer. Somebody remembers the horseback –

Alan Brown: They called that the Tam Tams and it went on for years and years.

Louis Rastelli: Well, the Tam Tams continue now, but it sounds like –

Alan Brown: Well that was the beginning of them, in my mind anyway. 

Louis Rastelli: Do you remember any such event where the cops had broken it up?

Alan Brown: Well, yeah, I remember. So after the first summer, I went back to McGill and I was approached by this guy called Michael Malice, who was a doctor who had decided to not be a doctor and be a poet instead, and Leonard Cohen was putting his poems to music and so Michael Malice wanted me to teach him how to play guitar. Which was sort of a lost cause, but anyway… He told me that the police had ridden into… had decided they had to break up these meetings on Mount Royal, and had gone on horseback and were hitting people with their nightsticks and hitting them on the kidneys and stuff like that, which just outraged him as a doctor, you know, that they would do that to people.

But yeah, you have to understand this was… if you walked out down the street in Montreal with your hair not in a brush cut, and maybe touching your ears or going over the back of your collar, you were looked on as some sort of scary freak. And, you know, you were in danger from the police. You were in danger from people who were affronted. I was attacked several times on the street. It was pretty scary.

And we went to New York in ’67, and I came back to Montreal, maybe a year later for a visit, and by then, everything had changed! It was the style and it was, you know, everybody had long hair, it was perfect (laughs). But we loved New York, because when you went to New York nobody would look at you, you know? In New York people were so paranoid in those days that they, you didn’t, you didn’t make eye contact with people on the street and hence you were not harassed.