Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

If you were a musician on Yonge Street in the 1960s, chances are, you had your suits made by Lou Myles and your hair cut by Sandy Bozzo. Together with his brother Frank, Sandy began cutting hair not long after arriving in Toronto as a 14-year-old from Cosenza, in Calabria, Italy. Born Santino and Ignazio, the brothers set up shop in 1958 at 413 Yonge. For the next 63 years, Frank and Sandy cut hair, always on Yonge Street—and, for 40 of those years, always on the east side of Yonge, between Gerrard and College.  Sandy’s first experience with show business was the day two boys from Arkansas sauntered in, looking to get a wash and a haircut. “We told them, ‘We can cut, but we can’t afford...

Blue-eyed soul was the term coined in the 1960s to describe the sound of the rhythm-and-blues stylings of excitable white boys. The most famous exponents were America’s Righteous Brothers, the Young Rascals and England’s Spencer Davis Group, with vocalist Stevie Winwood. One the world’s best blue-eyed soul singers has always been Canada’s John Finley. As a member of Toronto’s r&b heroes Jon and Lee & the Checkmates, Finley caused a sensation in the mid-’60s with gut-wrenching, sweat-soaked performances and hyper-adrenalized emotion in a voice that held audiences spellbound as he soared from hushed stage whisper to rafter-shaking scream.  With the Checkmates, Finley was a dominan...