Robbie Robertson’s Tailor

According to my father, it was Harold “the Colonel” Kudlets, a talent broker in Hamilton, Ontario, who brought Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm up to Canada. Kudlets, a Glasgow-born Jew, knew Charlie Halbert, an agent down in Helena, Arkansas, who’d sent Conway Twitty up north a year earlier. In the spring of 1958, Kudlets booked Hawkins and his band, The Hawks, into Hamilton’s Golden Rail Tavern, and later, at two spots in Toronto: Le Coq d’Or, on the Yonge Street strip, and the Concord Tavern, located farther west on Bloor Street.

The Concord was the toughest bar in Toronto. To be a waiter there you had to also qualify as a bouncer. In his memoir, Testimony, Robbie Robertson remembers Big Lou, who manned the front doors and “whom everybody was fond of unless he had punched you in the face and thrown you down the stairs.”

Jack Fisher owned the Concord. He was one of the few men in Toronto at that time with a licence to carry a handgun, a snub-nose .38 to be exact. When fights got out of hand at the Concord, he would fire warning shots above the brawlers. In a 1967 CBC interview, Ronnie Hawkins said he was used to that sort of scene. In the deep South he had played what he called “the skid-row circuit,” sleazy dives where patrons carried knives and guns.

Fisher had his suits made at Sherman Custom Tailors, a shop started by my grandfather Sam during the early days of the Great Depression. The business was eventually taken over by my father and his two brothers Willy and Solly. When Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm showed up at the Concord their stage suits were worn out. “Shiny in the ass,” Jack Fisher noted. He brought the boys down to my father’s shop and paid for their new suits. My father remembers the first time they came in. It was the summer of 1958 and Hawkins and Helm wore shoes without socks. He measured them up and when they returned for their try-ons, he noticed they wore no underpants.

“Hillbillies,” my father called them. “Good musicians, but real hillbillies.” On Ronnie’s invitation, my father and uncles would go to hear them play a few times a year. My father was a big band aficionado. He had stacks of old brittle 78s and a large collection of LPs featuring Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Artie Shaw. He would return from an evening of listening to Rompin’ Ronnie’s rock ’n’ roll, and tell me, “Not my kind of music, but they put on a helluva show.”

Ronnie Hawkins was a loyal customer. Still, my father felt he took chances when he dealt with musicians. He liked to tell the story of Joe King (Grubstein) who fronted a local group called The Zaniacs. Joe owed my father money for the suits he’d ordered. When my father went to collect from him at his room at the Edison Hotel, Joe got wind of it and as my father was climbing the steps to his room, Joe King was scuttling down the fire escape.

When Ronnie brought his band down the following year to make new suits, he had taken on the 16-year-old Robbie Robertson. By 1961, the band also included Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson, all from southwestern Ontario. Later on, in the mid-’60s, as The Hawks (soon to become The Band) made more money, they went to the more stylish and legendary Lou Myles, who was considered the premier clothier in Toronto; his clientele included Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Muhammad Ali. But when The Hawks were playing their hearts out every night at the Concord, my father’s tailor shop was (excuse the pun) a perfect fit.

When I hear The Band’s “Life Is a Carnival,” or think of the cast of characters in “The Weight,” (Crazy Chester, Carmen, Luke, etc.) I am reminded of Sherman Custom Tailors. The place was, besides being a thriving business, a magnet for misfits. There was toothless Wild Bill, the thin denizen of College Street, who swept the floor and ran errands for my father; muscular Marvin, the delivery boy who could tear a Toronto white-pages telephone book in half; Maxie the mortgage broker, who used the store as his “office” and paced nervously by the wall phone while puffing on a cigar; and Henry Suchow, the pickpocket who wore a French beret. Each day he’d come and try to hawk what he’d stolen while riding the downtown buses and streetcars.

Hey, buddy, would you like to buy a watch real cheap
Here on the street
I got six on each arm and two more round my feet
— Lyrics from “Life Is a Carnival”

What did The Hawks see when they entered Sherman Custom Tailors? On either side hung suit lengths, 75 in total. Ronnie and the boys could run their fingers over mohair, serge, flannel, nap, hopsack, and twill. They could marvel at the various patterns: houndstooth, herringbone, birds-eye, sharkskin, pinstripe, chalk stripe, check. If nothing in those suit lengths appealed, my father would lug out heavy sample books from the back room and explain that the satin came from jobbers in Montreal; the finest Harris tweed came from Leeds and the Hebrides.

My father wore his measuring tape like a thin prayer shawl, draped around his shoulders. After taking the measurements he’d fill out the order sheet. Pleats or no pleats? Cuffs or no cuffs? Western-style pockets or slant? Loops for a belt or suspenders? There was a small change room and a triple-sided mirror into which an assortment of figures, most of them awkward and disproportional, stepped. It was not uncommon that a customer, gazing at himself in the mirror after the suit had been finished, would offer vague complaints.

“Something’s not right.”

“What’s not right?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

Met with such ontological despair, my father would call his top tailor, Vince, from the back of the shop. Vince would assess the fit and in a quiet voice say, “Maybe I can take in a little here.” After one customer left, I recall my father saying, “Get that. The guy’s a hunchback, and he expects me to make him look like Gary Cooper.”

Over the mirror was a large mural, painted after the Second World War by a recently arrived refugee who needed a suit but had no money to pay for it. My grandfather bartered the suit for the mural. In one section, a man in a mocha brown double-breasted suit held a set of binoculars close to his chest. In the background, jockeys in billowing blouses of pastel yellow, orange, and green rode sleek, elongated racehorses. The man’s suit was an advertisement for the tailor shop, with the jockeys and horses an homage, perhaps, to Degas.

When you stepped into the back of the shop you entered yet another world. On the right were towering wooden cribs stacked with bolts of cloth. There was a rack where large garment patterns, the colour of dried blood, dangled like sides of beef. On the left was a long cutting table and underneath, huge cardboard cartons for the scraps of discarded cloth. This is where my uncle Willy, a cutter, wielded his shears. The wall above the cutting table was plastered with pages torn out of girlie magazines. My uncle curated these, changing them on a monthly basis. As the years went by, the photos became more and more risqué, though there was one photograph that my uncle never took down. It was a black-and-white publicity shot of a famous stripper and was signed: To the Sherman boys, love, Chesty.

According to my father, Ronnie and the boys liked to linger at Uncle Willy’s gallery:

If I were a barker in a girlie show
Tell ya what I’d do, I’d lock the door
Tear my shirt and let my river flow
— Lyrics from “Jemima Surrender”

At the very back of the store you’d hear the Gatling gun clatter of the Singer sewing machines. You’d hear Jewish and Italian tailors conversing in broken English. By their elbows were small boxes containing waxy tailor’s chalk, Gillette razor blades, an assortment of pins. The sleek, triangular head of my grandfather’s 1930 press-iron reminded me of the head of a prehistoric pterodactyl that I’d first seen in my children’s book on dinosaurs.

The shop’s informality was typified by the three cats my father kept and which he allowed to roam freely. He’d named them, Shvartz Katz, Rabinovitz, and No-Neck, and they were as quirky as some of the clientele. When my father and my uncles stroked their backs, they would meow in unison.

Toronto was filled with musical cats in those days. The Hawks were key players in a scene happening in the taverns along the Yonge Street strip between Gerrard and Queen, only a 10-minute streetcar ride from my father’s store. At the Brown Derby, the Silver Rail, the Zanzibar, and Friar’s Tavern you could catch performers such as David Clayton Thomas of Blood, Sweat, and Tears fame, Robbie Lane and the Disciples, The Sparrows (later Steppenwolf), the Mynah Birds with Neil Young, and the incomparable soul singer Jackie Shane. Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks had a permanent gig at the Hawk’s Nest, which is where my father would go to hear them.

In the early ’60s an entirely different scene was slowly developing in the city’s Yorkville area. At coffee houses like the Purple Onion and The Riverboat you could hear Joni Anderson (later, Joni Mitchell), Tim Hardin, James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot, Buffy Sainte Marie, and Ian and Sylvia. Yorkville became “hippie central” with head shops and vintage clothing stores.

Musicians didn’t adhere strictly to the cultural division. For instance, Gord Lightfoot played Yorkville and Yonge Street, as did Neil Young. But the audiences were markedly different. As Robbie Robertson said, “The people who watched us weren’t the sort to sip cappuccinos.” My friends and I read Camus and hung out in Yorkville every weekend. We thought of the Yonge Street crowd as uncouth. Those red-lit, red-carpeted taverns were situated next to stores selling kinky lingerie and skin magazines. Greasers in their souped-up Chevy Novas liked to lay rubber on the street.

When Bob Dylan, a performer from the Yorkville side of things, arrived in Toronto in September of 1965 and hired The Hawks as the backup band for his upcoming tour, he ended the great divide, amalgamating the Yorkville folk world with Yonge Street’s kingdom of rock. This blend would result in the most dynamic music of the next decade.

My father saw Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm as gifted “hillbillies,” but one wonders how they saw him. When they first brought their young guitarist, Robbie Robertson, to the store, he had recently been told by his mother, Dolly, that his biological father was not Jim Robertson, the man they’d been living with, but a Toronto Jew named Alex Klegerman, who had been killed in a highway accident before Robbie was born. She introduced Robbie to his father’s brothers Morrie and Natie. Robertson spent considerable time with them and their families and so the Jewish vibe of my father’s tailor shop, where English was interspersed with Yiddish, and sarcasm reigned, would not have been foreign to him.

Years later I asked my father if he had known the Klegerman brothers. “They dealt in fake and stolen diamonds,” he told me. “They did much of their business in Holland. I remember, one of them wound up in prison.”

Robertson’s mother, Dolly, was a Mohawk, from the Six Nations Reserve in southwestern Ontario. On weekends she would take him to visit her relatives there. Robertson was impressed with his uncles’ storytelling prowess and musicianship. They were the ones who encouraged him to take up the guitar and who offered advice: “Be proud you are an Indian, but be careful who you tell.”

Robertson learned to apply the same caution in revealing his Jewish roots. In one of the more poignant moments of Testimony, he describes driving to a gig in Hamilton. He’s telling Levon Helm about his Jewish father and uncles. Ronnie Hawkins is asleep in the back of the car. Helm exclaims,

“Oh, man”—you’re Jewish? How about that!”

At that moment, Ronnie rustled awake. “What, who’s a Jew? Let me check and make sure I still got my damn wallet … You better pull the car over and shake him down.”

“Aye, aye, Ron,” said Levon. “Next chance I get, I’ll turn his pockets inside out.”

“Bad enough he was a redskin, now he’s a Jew on top of that.”

“I’m afraid so,” I laughed. “Yeah, you could say I’m an expert when it comes to persecution.”

Testimony shows Robbie Robertson possessing a remarkable, self-protective mechanism whereby he would turn potentially painful incidents into positives. He ends the chapter telling the reader that being “looked at differently” gave him a certain prestige. He believed it drew his bandmates closer.

Hawkins’ response might be seen as the typical antisemitism of a small-town Southerner. In interviews, he never uses the words “Jew” or “Jewish.” The terms obviously made him uncomfortable. He always substitutes “Hebrew,” which may have sounded more dignified to his ear. In a documentary on The Band, Hawkins calls Robertson’s father “a Hebrew gangster.”

Late in Hawkins’ career, Sony released a best of Ronnie Hawkins album “Can’t Stop Rockin’.” At that time my cousin Jamie Greenspan was working for Sony. One evening he drove Hawkins to see Bill Clinton, his fellow Arkansan, who was giving a UJA address at Toronto’s Hummingbird Centre. On the way, Jamie asked Hawkins about my father and uncles, and he described them as “Hebrew gentlemen of the highest order.” When he introduced Jamie to Clinton, he said, “I’d like you to meet Jamie, a Hebrew of the highest order.” When Jamie asked him about Robbie Robertson, Hawkins said “The Hebrew side manages the Native side and the Hebrew side is doing quite well.”

You can read that in different ways, of course. Is he implying that the Hebrew side acts as a superego restraining the Native (id) side? Is he implying that the Hebrew side exploits the Native? There’s a YouTube video of Bob Dylan discussing Ronnie Hawkins: “He looks like a shitkicker,” Dylan remarks, “but he speaks with the wisdom of a sage.”

The last time my father made suits for The Hawks was in late 1961. They were strapped for cash and made a modest down payment, promising to pay the remainder within the year. They were struggling to make ends meet. If you’d told them that in nine years, they’d have their faces caricatured for the cover of Time magazine, they would have thought you were crazy. In four years, Bob Dylan would fly into Toronto and sweep them away, like a genie, to places they had only dreamed of. A few years after that they would hole up in the storied pink house in Woodstock and develop a sound for the ages.

My father’s business would also prosper for the next 15 years. Men wore suits for work and for going out and custom-made suits had not yet been outflanked by those you could buy off the rack. But things rapidly changed, and the end of a centuries’ old tradition was noted on Sept. 25, 1977, when The New York Times ran an article titled, “The Vanishing Custom Tailor.” By the late ’80s, my father and his brothers made only the occasional suit. Their dwindling business depended on selling cloth to itinerant Italian, Portuguese, and Jamaican tailors who would then sell to the immigrant communities. It was heartbreaking to go into the empty store and see the Sherman brothers sitting in chairs once reserved for waiting customers, talking about the old days.

The Band’s end date came around the same time. On Nov. 25, 1976, they gave their final performance at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. The years after their breakup were marked by acrimony, drug addiction, and suicide, though it’s notable that Robbie Robertson weathered his post-Band years far better than his bandmates.

There is a coda to this story. My father had a ritual when he came home from work each day. He’d remove his fedora and trench coat and wash his hands before he would come into our den where we had a built-in stereo system and above that, a built-in bar. My father would pour himself a shot of Seagram’s Crown whiskey. Sometimes, he’d toss back two, depending on the degree of aggravation the day had brought him. In July of 1968, Capitol Records released The Band’s Music From Big Pink and I bought a copy after hearing a few tracks at a friend’s house. I was playing the record and had the album cover open, next to the bar. My father, after throwing back a shot, glanced down at the photo of the guys he’d known as The Hawks. He did a double take, as they now had beards and long hair and country clothes.

“Don’t tell me those guys made it,” he said.

“It seems so,” I answered.

“How do you like that?” he said.

He shook his head from side to side.

And then he said,

“Those guys still owe me money.”