By Nancy Dorrance
with photography by Ian MacAlpine
Just like Mick Jagger, Kingston musician Jerry Mercer is an aging rocker with energy to burn.
At 86, he’s actually four years older than the strutting frontman for the Rolling Stones. And, truth be told, he looks younger. “Mick’s led a different life than I have,” Jerry notes diplomatically, with a twinkle in his eye.
Another connection between the energetic octogenarians is that they’ve shared the same stage, twice. The first time was an intimate club setting in Toronto, where Jerry remembers dancing on a tabletop with Maggie Trudeau; and the second was before a packed Buffalo stadium of 80,000 screaming fans.
If you search online for video clips, you can see and hear a younger Jerry perform with legendary Canadian rock group April Wine. At first, it’s hard to reconcile images of the intense, hard-driving drummer with this laid-back senior citizen who plays ukulele in a weekly jam session he helped initiate at his east-end Kingston apartment complex.
How did an IBM programmer who never studied music end up setting the beat for one of Canada’s most popular rock bands of the 1970s and early ‘80s? And what motivates him to keep making music now, . . .
