Men Without Hats

  

Beyonce - to my ear - owes one to Outremont's Stephen Doroschuk and his brother Ivan Doroschuk of Montreal's Men Without Hats.

Here's my Men Without Hats update: Stef is still around Montreal, living out in the hills somewhere. Ivan Doroschuk left town to open a bar in Victoria, BC. He sorta dissed Montreal in an interview, expressing unpatriotic disdain for snow, which was a cruel jab at Bonhomme Carnaval, an old friend of his from the Pop Goes the World vid.

Stef was a good scorer at road hockey, a real cherry picker tho. Very affable guy. He loves it when I needle Ivan.

Another Hat, named Alan McCarthy, went to Westmount High School, he was a bit older than me. He tickled a mean piano. He died at age 37. It's a saddening thing. You don't hear much about him and I always wondered what he died from.
   Another brother Hat Colin Doroschuk I knew in the early 90s, he's outgoing, sweet, good father, with a lovely wife who was good at softball.
   Ivan had a few years with no cash coming in due to record company squabbles. He lived on Walker in St. Henry where hangers-on would constantly ring his doorbell and recommend he revive his career by going on comeback European tours with Kajagoogoo, and so forth. He considered returning to university and attended for a bit but decided against it. He married a youngish blonde girl who seemed like a wee bit high maintenance. I saw them on the metro about a decade back. He was sporting a gorgeous vintage blue leather jacket with a big Fleur-de-Lys on it. Ivan was friendly but shy. She was sitting ignoring everything but her stupid book about goblins. I also dropped into a Toronto nightclub around 93 where Ivan was wearing the same jacket and doing a remixed version of his hits. It sounded great.
   Speaking of local musicians moving to Victoria, the somewhat less shy-fellow local rockabilly musician Peter Sandmark (another excellent guy and good father) also moved to Victoria about two years ago after bagging a couple of hundred thousand lucky bucks by selling the Monkland Village home he'd bought cheap just before the boom. I love the guy but on one of the coldest days in the city history, a day when the frozen mud stuck up like stalagmites, Peter explained how he wanted to save the planet by barely heating his home. Yikes! Maybe warmer climes were his destiny.