Legendary rock promoter's crazy story about sex and drugs in Montreal in 1957

Simon Napier-Bell, best known as the swinging London hipster who managed the Yardbirds in the 1960s, has a crazy story about being in Montreal in 1957. 

Napier-Bell is now 84 and sharing stories about his life on a Substack site and one of those involves his attempt to join a band of black musicians while he was staying i town. 

He wrote this around 1979 and describes it as a "composite."  

Here it goes: 

“Aged 18, I was planning to be the new Chet Baker. Or was it Miles Davis? I can’t remember now. But either way, my ambition was to be a great jazz trumpeter. That meant living in America but since getting in was next to impossible I settled for the next best thing which was Canada. And in April 1957, the day after my 18th birthday, I arrived there, trumpet in hand, ready to blow my way to the top.”

He first came to Toronto but then followed a tip to come to Montreal and work with a musician named Little Lord Leroy. This is surely not a real name, as Napier-Bell either replaced the name or forgot it. I'm trying to figure it out. Suggestions welcome. 

Napier-Bell got Leroy’s address from the musicians union and took a series of buses to get to the ranch outside of town. 

“In a corner, two men dressed in leather were deeply engrossed in the studs of each other's jackets. By the fireplace, another couple were lying half undressed on a white rug, sharing a joint and large portions of each other. In front of a tinted mirror, three girls were practising some sort of dance. And sitting on a settee by the door were two neatly dressed young men holding instrument cases.

Then, like champagne from a shaken bottle, Little Lord Leroy sprayed into the room. `Hey, man,' he shouted at one of the studded leather couple, 'will you jus' take off that bad-ass jazz and put on one of Little Lord Leroy's records.”

Napier-Bell describes a little sexual debauchery in the home and then says the group took off to a club in downtown Montreal he calls the Eighty-Eights. Napier-Bell told me in an email that he just used that name because he forgot the real name of the club but I would imagine it’s Rockhead’s Paradise, although it could be several others. 

“I went with Leroy himself in his white Cadillac. I'd never been in one before and Leroy could tell. He put the radio on, snapped his fingers and flashed his rings. ‘D'you know how to roll a spliff? There's some real bad grass under the ashtray. And there's some whiskey in the back too, and some glasses. Why not pour us a couple of shots?'

By the time we reached Eighty-Eights, I was sinking fast. I remember Leroy's arm round my shoulder as he guided me through the doors into the glossy darkness. Then there was black music and silver shafts of light, dark corners, multi-coloured cocktails, and everywhere the hip talk and smooth movements of all those black guys.”

So in this description Napier-Bell implies that he had been drugged, although perhaps he was simply exhausted. Not sure. 

“I'd never met a lead trumpeter from any of the great bands and I wanted to ask a million questions, but I could hardly keep my eyes open. Leroy put another cocktail in front of me and after a couple of sips I simply dozed off.

I don’t know how long I was asleep for - I was in a dream - I was in a fantastic carriage being driven through space. We arrived at a palace in the sky where I was carried to a golden bed by black angels who started undressing me, teasingly brushing away my clothes. Then…

I had a sudden burst of sobriety. I was lying on a bed with my shirt undone and my trousers half off, and in front of me, with a nasty, leering smile on his face, was Little Lord Leroy. Naked.

His bulging black stomach fell down over a sharply erected, pink-headed penis. And it waved at me menacingly, like a cobra preparing to strike. As I slowly sat up, it twitched.

I grabbed my trousers, leapt off the bed and ran. Out of the room, down the stairs, along a passage and somehow, I don't know how, I found the door and got out into the street.”

I ran for quite a while before my legs started giving way. Then I sat on the kerb and panted for breath.

It seemed I wouldn't be playing in Little Lord Leroy's rhythm 'n' blues band, after all.”

As said earlier, Napier-Bell describes this story as a "composite." In another email, he explained. 

Ever since I wrote it, the story is stuck in my mind as the real thing. But I think - while the basic tale of trying to get a job with a bandleader and ending up drunk (or drugged) in his bed, may have been one event - finding myself in a palatial room with a load of black guys, and visiting a club with them, might have been another. In my mind I remember all the individual parts quite vividly, but I think it mightn’t have happened all on one evening like that.