Every RPM Canadian Content #1 single discussion thread 1964-2000

What is it about Canada and the reluctance of some companies, at the time, to add music publishing info? Here's the US label for comparison . . .

. . . and the picture sleeve accompanying the record:

The line spacing of the 6 point type seems to suggest its release was around the same time as that of the second single by a Southern California band - "Light My Fire" by The Doors.

 

At #6 on July 8, it's the final chart appearance from the Townsmen with a cover of the Rockin' Berries "He's In Town" (#84 on the big chart). The original isn't on youtube, here's a version from a 1992 reunion:



Here's the nifty B-side, "Back Yards"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc4TWKmW7so



The band would release one final single in 1969 on Polydor, "Rocking Chair" b/w "The Jar" (neither side on Youtube).

 

At #13 on July 8, the final single from the Quiet Jungle, "Too Much In Love" b/w "Everything". It would not make the top 100.



B-side
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQYE3f-RwJ4

They would release one final album:

 

Thanks for the info!

Odd that it's mono on my CD of the album, while the rest of the album is stereo. It's also mono on The United Artists Collection.

 

Now here's a strange one. The Guess Who, having become convinced that there's a gaggle of record companies that want them, try to get out of their contract with Quality Records. So they sez, "what if we make a record that's so bad that Quality will release us from our contract? It's a can't-fail plan!". They head to Gar Gillies' Garnet Amplifier shop to record a cover of Steve Lawrence's "Pretty Blue Eyes". Burton Cummings sings through a trumpet bell, Gar Gillies plays trombone, Garry Peterson is on Coke bottle and electric drill.



When it comes time to send the results to Quality, it suddenly occurs to the band that there be some legal problems, so they record a straight version and send both off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ2Q06hLEjA



The single peaks at #2 on the Canada chart and #48 on the main chart the week of July 8. And they make two more singles for Quality. Here's a live version of "Pretty Blue Eyes":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8qJMvfXyEo

 

Do folks still do farmer caricatures on Canadian TV? It was a staple of CND 'humour' back in the day.

 

I will be mentioning this single in passing on Thursday, but "willful sabotage" is one of two theories out there as to why they would commit this atrocity. The other is that they were trying to ape then-current hit "Winchester Cathedral". It's not that far out a theory; if you listen to the two back to back, there are certainly stylistic similarities. The Guess Who were busy at the time trying to sound like everybody (did you know they covered every single track on Sgt. Pepper?)

In any case, Randy firmly subscribes to the sabotage theory, which is horse's-mouth, so let's stick with it. Here he is in his own words from Vinyl Tap Stories:

This was the worst record of all time by the Guess Who, trust me. We’d recorded some songs in England that we thought were pretty good, so we wanted to break our contract with Quality Records Canada and sign with someone else bigger. We thought we’d record a song originally done by Steve Lawrence called “Pretty Blue Eyes” and do it really, really badly. Our plan was to send Quality something that was so bad they’d say to us, “We’re never going to release this and you’re off the label.” So we went into Gar Gillies’s Garnet Amplifiers shop on Ferry Road in the St. James suburb of Winnipeg. Gar made all our amplifiers for us. Gar had an old Robertson tape recorder with two inputs and we had a couple of mikes. To make it sound really bad we had Burton sing through a trumpet bell so that it sounded like a megaphone, and instead of a bass drum we had a Coke bottle and someone blowing into it going “Whoooo.” It was like a jug band. We had a real cowbell in there and guys moooing. For the cymbals Gary used an electric drill that went Rrreeeeerrrr! Rrreeeeerrr! So it sounded like Boom Boom Rrreeeeerrr! Burton Cummings did his best Walter Brennan impersonation from The Real McCoys TV show and those old cowboy movies. We recorded it with this crazy stuff, and the middle is just a train wreck with all these noises and Gar Gillies playing trombone.

This was the Guess Who trying to get out of our recording contract. So we recorded it and prepared to send the tape to Quality Records. But we didn’t have any money in case they decided to sue us, so we had second thoughts about sending it in. We chickened out. So we recorded a good version without all the nonsense and sent both to them. They liked the good version and released it with the bad version on the B-side, and it made the charts across Canada. In the end we failed to break our contract with Quality Records.

One thing Randy gets wrong, as far as I can tell, is the a-side/b-side placement. But I might be wrong about that.

 

The "screwing up in reverse" principle at work again, I see . . .

 

I still have the copy I got for Xmas way back then.

 

Wow. I'm pretty sure I had that Snoopy album.

 

53. I'LL FORGET HER TOMORROW
by WITNESS INC.
#1 for 1 week: July 8, 1967




​

Note: this single had a picture sleeve, black and white, that's visible through this link. I guess the website doesn't allow hotlinking. Or at least, I can't make it appear in the page as anything but a broken link.

The songwriting team of Ben Wagman and Thomas Jefferson Kaye are responsible for a smattering of songs, including the country-rock rewrite of this song called "I'll Be Leaving Her Tomorrow", which features on a 1973 album by Kaye himself. This particular ditty seems to have been recorded by two different groups in 1967: Saskatoon's Witness Inc. and Baltimore's Tommy Vann and the Echoes (where it was the b-side of their cover of Manfred Mann's "Pretty Flamingo").

Which version was the original? Well, here's a bit of Sherlock-level sleuthing for you. First of all, it seems to me that there is only one country where parents are likely to name a child "Thomas Jefferson". And secondly, speaking of parents, there's this: I am constantly taken by the fact that my Toronto-born-and-raised daughter pronounces the word "tomorrow" in a way that has always struck me as American (and contrasts with how I say the word, despite her living her whole life with me). This song rhymes "sorrow" and "borrow" with "tomorrow", and the Baltimore boys pull off the rhyme with no difficulty. Witness Inc., on the other hand, manage to break the rhyme by pronouncing the three words differently: the prairie boys sing "sorrow" and "borrow" in what is considered a 'typical' Canadian accent yet pronounce the titular "tomorrow" in a way generally considered American (I could write an essay about how Drake, Justin Bieber, Alessia Cara, Shawn Mendes and the Weeknd each have hit songs that pronounce "sorry" as "sari").

They might have picked up the pronunciation in New Mexico, where this, their début single, was allegedly recorded. The producer wasn't Norman Petty, however, but the mysterious "William X", who a later edition of RPM will identify as the group's manager. Whether he's influenced by the Nation of Islam or he's the tenth in a line of Williams, I'm not sure.

I described Witness Inc. above as being from Saskatoon. While that's as true as anything else, the band seems to have called every major city in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta home at varying points in its rocky existence. The Witness Inc. discography numbers only ten sides over five singles, all available on Youtube, a mixture of covers and originals by bassist Allen Ayers, some pretty deeply psychedelic and mostly really quite good. We will be hearing from them once more in 1967. Despite their Apex contract seemingly concluding in 1968, the band lumbered through locale changes, a dizzying number of band member changes, and name changes (dropping and resurrecting the "Inc.") until 1976, at which point lead singer and only constant member Kenny Shields took some key members and formed Streetheart. We will be hearing from Streetheart eventually. Many, many months from now...

SUR LES PALMARÈS DU QUÉBEC: Since RPM's French-language chart has died, we ought to return to Michel Gignac's reconstituted Québec-based Francophone charts to get a look-in what was happening in the Québécois music industry in the first half of Canada's centennial year.

Starting in July and moving back, we start with a faithful translation of Herman's Hermits' "There' a Kind of Hush" by Pierre Lalonde, whom we've previously met. His version, "Donne-moi ta bouche" maintains not the meaning of the original but instead that sibilant consonant in the title that gives the song its hook. He held the number one position together with non-Canadian Petula Clark. all the way back to May.

Previous to that, we have a faithful translation of Elvis Presley's "It's Now or Never" - or, rather, I should say a translation of a translation of the old Neapolitan folk song "O sole mio", appropriately enough since its singer, Tony Massarelli, was Italian born and raised but started a musical career in Québec in 1961 and maintained it until 1969. His version is called "Ce soir je pleure". Intriguingly, before that, we have the trio Les Milady's (the apostrophe is part of the name), who are sisters Andrée and Hélène Levasseur of Shawinigan and Denise Biron of Trois-Rivières. The recording is a translation, not renamed, of Nancy Sinatra's "Sugar Town". If you have nothing else to do for the next three minutes, I highly recommend watching the video I've linked here. It's... it's something.

Previous to that is "La Manic" by Georges Dor, and if you've been wondering when the Québec songs are going to sound like Québec songs, I would suggest... here. A song-poem by a singer-poet, it is very much on the chanson style we'll be hearing for years to come. The Manic of the title is the Manicouagan, the massive hydroelectric project built in the 1960s on the site of one of the world's largest asteroid craters. The singer is one of the workers tasked with building the project, begging his loved one for news from the more civilised, less boring parts of Québec. It's a good partner to "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" in 1967, and if you want, you can hear Leonard Cohen covering it on Youtube.

Previous to that, we have "Le p'tit popy", a take on James and Bobby Purify's "I'm Your Puppet" by les Chanceliers, the band that would give Québec and the rest of Canada Michel Pagliaro, whose parallel francophone and anglophone rock careers have continued down the decades to the present. And two final songs to mention: "Je t'aime, je te veux" by Johnny Farago, a literal translation of an Elvis Presley song whose title you can guess, though he seems to skip "j'ai besoin de toi".

And finally, in the year of seeming Guantanamania, two more versions of the Cuban song "Guantanamera" are atop the charts. One, by the multilingual Greek legend Nana Mouskouri, doesn't interest us. The other version of "Guantanamera", by Nanette Workman, is of interest to us due to Workman's birthplace of... er, Brooklyn. No, it must be the community where she grew up, which was... well, Jackson, Mississippi. In fact, as of the recording of this song, Workman had spent only a few months living in Québec and singing in the language she had no ancestral connection to. Yet in her varied and bilingual recording career, she has continued for most of her life to be based in Québec. So she counts! You can also hear her singing backup on the original studio recordings of Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and "Honky Tonk Women".

 

Pacemaker has issued an excellent but very short CD containing everything The Witness Inc. released. Its eleven tracks include both sides of all five singles plus a 'hidden' bonus track (an 'alternate take' of one song).

Witness Inc. - The Singles - Pacemaker Entertainment

The CD's notes solve a couple of the mysteries. "I'll Forget Her Tomorrow" is described as a cover of 'an obscure song by an obscure blue-eyed soul Baltimore band called Tommy Vann & The Echoes'. The notes claim that it was actually recorded at Kay Bank Studio in Minneapolis, 'where The Guess Who recorded their landmark album Shakin' All Over'. The tape sat 'on the shelf' for six months before their manager, William Tenn, got them a contract with Apex.

In spite of reaching #1 on the 'Canadian Hits' chart, "I'll Forget Her Tomorrow" only got as high as #45 on the main RPM 100 chart, its only week in the top 50.

 

At #13 the week of July 15 is the second single by Edmonton's Willie & The Walkers with "My Friend" b/w "Is It Easy To See (Lovin' Me). It would not make the Top 100. This one is on Youtube courtesy of...Nor-Va-Jak Music.

 

Now going from Edmonton to Calgary, at #2 the week of August 5 is the 49th Parallel with "Laborer" b/w "You Do Things".



Here's the B-side
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U48m1WwUGrc

It would hit #1 on CKXL (Calgary), #3 on CJCA (Calgary), peaking at #45 on the big chart the first week of September. It would be released in the U.S. as well on RCA Victor, and in, of all places, Turkey.



As mentioned, the band came from Calgary and were formerly known as Shades Of Blond.




Just as there was a trend in the U.S. at this time of naming bands after historical events and dressing the part (Lewis & Clarke Expedition and others), it was also the case in Canada: 49th Parallel, British North America Act, United Empire Loyalists, The Northwest Company.

 

And of course in the 80s there would be another Canadian band named after a line of latitude of particular interest to Canadian-American relations...

 

Thomas Jefferson Kaye is well known to Byrds fans, or more appropriately Gene Clark fans, having produced the cult-classic No Other album.

P.S. Liked the William X musings

​

 

Or fight.

 

We now return to saga of the Big Town Boys. Or should I say B.T.B.-4, because that is now their name. ("We're not boys, doggone it! We're men!"). "Do It To 'Em" b/w "Sparrows And Daisies" would hit #3 on July 15, #61 on the Top 100 the next week. It would be a hit in Vancouver (#12 on the C-FUN chart) but not chart in their home town of Toronto.



The B-side:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLCV0kCXPds



It would receive an UK release (on Liberty) in the spring of 1968, and later in the summer in Germany (Ariola, with picture sleeve).



Do It To 'Em by B.T.B. - 4 –

We'll hear more from them with their next single.

 

And here is their next single, "Jack Rabbitt" b/w "Tell Me", #4 week of August 12 (#60 on the big chart the last week of August). In a reversal from their previous single, it made #30 on Toronto's CHUM chart while failing in Vancouver.



B-side:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61ZO5oIhQr8

And that would be it for the Big Town Boys, or B.T.B.-4. Or would it?

 

Mike Lewis left the Big Town Boys in the mid-1960s, in order to study music in West Germany. He moved a long way from the music of his earlier career, as he became involved with the Wired project along with such avant-garde figures as Karl-Heinz Böttner and Michael Ranta (released in 1974):
New Phonic Art 1973* / Iskra 1903 / Wired (4) - Free Improvisation

He would release the LP Wuschel in 1971 (produced by the legendary Conny Plank), and would appear on Josef Anton Riedl's 1972 self-titled musique concrète album.



Around this time, Lewis was commissioned to write music for an event connected with the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. As part of this he was given the opportunity to record an LP. While on vacation back in Canada, Lewis contacted former Big Town Boys Tommy Graham, Peter Collins and John Morton to be a part of this project. They went to Germany and recorded an album in the spring in Hamburg, produced by Conny Plank. It would come out in 1973 under the name of Moosknukkl Groovband.





The band played some cultural events at the Munich Olympics (being mentioned in the Official Report). Afterwards, all the members except Lewis drifted back to Canada; he would follow them in 1975.




Moosknukkl Groovband

 

Moving into the #1 spot on the RPM country chart for a three week stay on July 8, 1967, is Johnny Clark with his self-penned "It's Just About Over". This appears to have been an entirely self-financed endeavour. Johnny Clark formed his own label, his own booking agency, and his own publishing company (all with Montreal addresses, whence I gather he hailed).



He also placed at least five advertisements in RPM over a period of just seven weeks. I trust it was sheer coincidence that he received this writeup in RPM the same week that he paid for a full-page ad (in what was still only an eight-page publication).

 

I have one Witness Inc. single. However, we're about a year - and a few more singles by them - away from getting there, so I'll hold off on specifics until then.

 

At #5 the week of August 5, it's the Five D with "Running 'Round In Circles" b/w "Get Out Of My Life Woman" on the Ottawa Sir John A. label. It would spend two weeks at #72 in the Top 100.



B-side:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvl39aWSzdg

After this release, the band would move to Toronto with dreams of hitting the big time. We'll know if they did with their next single. It will chart, but how high?

 

A lot of times it's written that The 49th Parallel changed their name to Painter in the '70s (signed to Elektra), but I think that's oversimplifying... there are some members in common is more like it, it's a little bit like trying to say Brave Belt was The Guess Who.

Moosnukkl Groovband? What the...?

 

I was just listening (courtesy of citizenfreak, which is a hell of a Canadiana rabbit hole) to a different partially-Canadian Krautrock band called Emtidi. Funny. I'd never hear of any Canadian links to the Krautrock scene, and now here are two. Great stuff.