{"id":68731,"date":"2016-01-12T03:09:41","date_gmt":"2016-01-12T08:09:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=68731"},"modified":"2016-01-12T03:09:41","modified_gmt":"2016-01-12T08:09:41","slug":"canadian-man-remembers-jamming-with-david-bowie-as-an-11-year-old-kid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2016\/01\/12\/canadian-man-remembers-jamming-with-david-bowie-as-an-11-year-old-kid\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian man remembers jamming with David Bowie as an 11-year-old kid"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"David<\/a>
David Bowie (Photo from Bowie’s website<\/a>; Photo by Jimmy King)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

TORONTO \u2013 When Seth Scholes walked backstage to meet David Bowie nearly 30 years ago, the 11-year-old saxophone player from Kingston, Ont., was hardly aware of how the encounter would help shape his life.<\/p>\n

It was a chance meeting with one of music\u2019s biggest icons, spurred on by a story about the pre-teen in the local newspaper.<\/p>\n

When he thinks about the Aug. 24, 1987 encounter, he remembers how Bowie was \u201creally cool, in the sense that he wasn\u2019t intimidating at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was just really sincere, easy to talk to and seemed genuinely interested in me,\u201d Scholes said in a phone interview on Monday.<\/p>\n

Scholes was first discovered when a local reporter spotted him playing saxophone on a sidewalk in Kingston, where street performers were a rarity.<\/p>\n

His youthful ambition was enough to merit a short news story; he said he was raising money to buy a ticket to one of Bowie\u2019s concerts.<\/p>\n

The piece was picked up by The Canadian Press newswire and distributed across the country.<\/p>\n

Somewhere along the line, Bowie\u2019s representatives caught word of Scholes\u2019s aspirations and offered his family passes to the singer\u2019s Toronto concert. And the boy would get to meet Bowie backstage.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe asked me all sorts of questions and his sax player came out and taught me a few lines of \u2018Young Americans.\u2019 I played the best I could for him. He was pretty forgiving,\u201d Scholes recalled.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was asking what kind of music I liked listening to. I asked him what he was listening to and he told me the Sex Pistols and he told me I should check them out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought: that\u2019s good, he\u2019s staying cutting edge a little bit for an 11-year-old.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scholes had another question for Bowie: whether he preferred Pepsi or Coke.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was all this Pepsi stuff around and he just looks at me and is like: \u2018Well, Pepsi\u2019s available,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The meeting with Bowie lasted just over an hour, but the interest from Canadians stretched on for almost a year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI became a celebrity in my hometown,\u201d said Scholes. \u201cWith interviews and people stopping me on the street, and just a lot of interest in what happened to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

TV shows like MuchMusic\u2019s \u201cMike and Mike\u2019s Cross Canada Adventures\u201d highlighted him as the young kid who met the international megastar.<\/p>\n

And then it was all over.<\/p>\n

Decades later, Scholes says the encounter inspired his career. He works as a technical director at a theatre in Kingston.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt solidified my interest in entertainment and music for sure,\u201d he said, noting that while he still occasionally plays saxophone, he prefers the guitar.<\/p>\n

Scholes first heard about Bowie\u2019s death when a radio station called him while he was driving to work.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not going to lie, I cried a little bit,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat experience did project me on the path that I ended up taking \u2013 it definitely had a big impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t just meeting somebody famous.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TORONTO \u2013 When Seth Scholes walked backstage to meet David Bowie nearly 30 years ago, the 11-year-old saxophone player from …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":68733,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1482,2,106],"tags":[9636],"class_list":["post-68731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-breaking","category-entertainment","category-hollywood","tag-cp","mauthors-david-friend","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}