- Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s by Stuart Henderson
Reading this book reminded me of Longfellow’s lines: ‘When she was good, / She was very good indeed, / But when she was bad … ’ Henderson’s account of Yorkville in the 1960s is, at times, quite good. There are, however, other times.
At his best, Henderson combines a scholar’s curiosity, imagination, and enthusiasm with stylistic flair. He describes coffee houses and biker bars, drug use and the mobilizing panache of the Diggers, and the clash of wills that pitted long-haired, bell-bottomed hippies against city councillors and the ‘law and order’ brigade. Iconic figures of Canadian folk and rock and roll, and venues like the Mynah Bird and the Riverboat which nurtured them, are illuminated. So, too, are the awkwardly designated ‘identity categories’ that blended into and out of one another in Toronto’s short-lived, late-1960s Village scene: hippies, greasers, bikers, and weekenders.
Developers took the cultural capital of this bohemian adventure and reduced it to the glitter of conspicuous consumption. Property values soared; alternative faded. Those wanting an explanation of this political economy of gentrification will have to look beyond Henderson’s account, which explores the material transformation of Yorkville lightly at best.
The strength of this study is its accent on the cultural. How Henderson does this, however, is not without problems. He imposes a soi-disant politique on what he sees as the essence of Yorkville, hip performativity. Making the Scene embraces hip because, supposedly, this term captures the [End Page 573] fluid nature of Village relations. As ‘an umbrella term’ covering ‘particular forms of popular dissent,’ hip is for Henderson an inherently ‘politicized’ subject. This hip, he insists (ad infinitum) is always performed, constituting an authenticity of ‘living otherwise.’ This contrasts with what Henderson suggests is ‘overtly politicized’ behaviours and practices, what we might now call activism, involving an explicit attempt to intervene in, and change, civil society. This opposition, never substantively addressed theoretically and articulated so lightly that it has an almost subterranean character, nonetheless orders a part of Henderson’s interpretive narrative.
Performance trumps politics. Henderson glorifies ‘the ashes-in-your-mouth hunger of junk-starved street life.’ He revels in Yorkville’s aesthetic angst. Quintessential sixties politicos, self-proclaimed New Leftists, do not warrant quite the same enthusiasm: they were animated less by the attractions of hip performativity, more by the radical sensibilities of the era. Henderson discusses his interviews with these and other people, declaring that he has ‘attempted to leave out or downplay any self-aggrandizing and any unhelpful invective.’
This statement struck me as odd, until I made my way through the book. Committed leftists sometimes find themselves painted into particular corners by Henderson. When pioneering 1960s Canadian feminist Myrna Wood talked to Henderson, her reflections on the Yorkville scene took a critical turn. She stressed the illusions and individualism that, for her, made ‘hippie radicalism’ something less than a laudable challenge to conventional power and its capacity to oppress and exploit. Henderson likens Wood’s assessment to a kind of political movement ‘vitriol’ that privileged ‘class’ over ‘youth-based’ protests. He then quotes Judy Perly, now an entrepreneurial patron of folk music. Perly’s views of a political ‘intelligentsia’ that represented ‘a real antithesis to the Yorkville scene’ are heralded as ‘perceptive’ by Henderson. The lefties were just ‘stultifying and enervating.’ When Perly declares, ‘Political people were … horrible. They were going to change the world, and be very authoritarian,’ these words of assessment carry no rancour. They just are.
David Depoe, a central figure in Yorkville’s political scene, built on his experience to help found the Canadian Party of Labour in 1969. Henderson wrongly states that Depoe joined the Communist Party. This may seem a small matter in the grand scheme of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but the difference between the CPL and the CP was, in 1969, central to an understanding of a part of the politics of youth rebellion in this era...