Canadian Pop Music in the 60's documentary
bassie
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tonight on CBC. Guess you need sattelite if you're elswhere._____________________________________________________By GUY DIXON Monday, January 30, 2006 Posted at 3:36 AM ESTFrom Monday's Globe and Mail It's the height of the 1960s. Tucked inside The New Penelope, a basement coffeehouse in Montreal, The Guess Who are watching a small-town Ontario singer perform a 60-minute set of his own songs. There are only 50 people in the audience, but Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman are envious and keep nudging each other, saying, "some day that'll be us."Bear in mind, The Guess Who at this point is already a promising singles band, on the cusp of rising as high as most Canadian groups in the sixties could dream. But the figure performing has already hit something higher artistically. The singer is Gordon Lightfoot.The two-hour special Shakin' All Over: Canadian Pop Music in the 1960s is filled with such pivotal moments and musical connections weaving together early Canadian rock and folk, from Buffy Sainte- Marie to Steppenwolf. Writer Nicholas Jennings and director Gary McGroarty have fulfilled every pop historian's dream by digging out forgotten footage and creating a beautifully concise, music-laden special airing tonight on CBC Television. It's the sixties Canadian rock scene at its groovy, uninhibited peak.So much came out of what many must have considered back then to be utterly innocuous stuff, such as CBC's teen pop show Let's Go. The house band, when the show was taped in Vancouver, was The Classics, a fairly traditional R&B group. That band then blossomed into The Collectors, helping to establish Vancouver's 4th Avenue psychedelic scene and clubs such as The Afterthought and Retinal Circus. L.A. beckoned, and The Collectors became a success there too with a big billboard on Sunset Strip. By the end of the decade, the group reinvented itself yet again as Chilliwack, a staple of Vancouver rock in the 1970s.But more than just rock genealogy or a nostalgic walk through Dad's LPs, the music represents not only the birth of the Canadian rock industry, but what it was to be young and alive in the 1960s -- if not today."[We] really didn't want to make this an oldies show," Jennings says. "We wanted to make it clear that these songs have a life. There's a legacy there which resonates with people no matter what age."The little history of CBC's Let's Go had other historic offshoots: The house band for shows taped in Winnipeg was none other than The Guess Who. By the second season, the CBC producer of the show agreed to hear some of the band's own songs and, if he liked them, to let them play them on air. One was These Eyes, which went on to solidify The Guess Who's career and open the door a little wider for countless other Canadian bands. Take The Staccatos. The Guess Who were asked by Coca-Cola to write and record half an album (sold for 10 bottle caps and $1, Bachman said), as part of a rock-oriented promotion. The Staccatos wrote the other half. That group later became the Five Man Electrical Band and penned the major 1971 hit Signs, an immediately recognizable song programmed into everyone's DNA, whether you recognize the title or not.But none of this cross-nurturing compares to the exchange of ideas and band members in Toronto's Yorkville and Yonge Street scenes. The message in Opportunity, the headstrong hit by Mandala with the late guitar great Domenic Troiano, seems so prophetic now.From Yonge Street and what was then called the Toronto Sound -- a mix of rock and soul (and small traces of reggae given the Jamaican influence in Toronto) -- came such powerhouse acts as Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks, which (minus Hawkins) became The Band, David Clayton Thomas, who went on to join Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Toronto's hugely popular, scream-inducing band Jon and Lee and The Checkmates, just to name a few.From the coffeehouses of Yorkville came bands such as Neil Young's early group The Squires, The Sparrow, which would turn into Steppenwolf, and the high-voltage psychedelic group The Paupers opening for Jefferson Airplane and utterly stealing its spotlight. There was also the harmonic, Summer of Love-imbibed Kensington Market, managed by Bob Dylan's Albert Grossman. A clip of the band features the two legendary Toronto singers Keith McKie and Luke Gibson, performing the incredible Side I Am, a song that should top any best-of-the-sixties song list, if only it had been lucky enough to get more exposure.But as some note in the documentary, it's the regional garage bands that had a sound which seems so utterly contemporary today. These were the groups that never got beyond the high-school dance circuit and small clubs despite their hard-edged sound, channelling the same blues as The Rolling Stones. Groups like: Vancouver's The Seeds of Time, Toronto's The Ugly Ducklings (said to have been Mick Jagger's favourite Canadian band), Halifax's kilt-wearing The Great Scots and especially Montreal's The Haunted.With their single 1-2-5 playing as the soundtrack, the CBC filmed The Haunted in the mid-sixties for a "youth culture" documentary called The Restless Years. For sheer sixties iconography -- the horn-rimmed glasses and overgrown haircuts, the Beatle boots, the tamed R&B raunch -- the ultra-rare clip remains Canada at its coolest."It was really important to go beyond the usual Canadian icons," Jennings says, "and to put them in the context of all the other music that was coming out of Canada in the sixties. My urgency was to find that music and save it before it's lost to the mists of time."Also appealing for its folk-rock air, op-art backdrops and Sassoon hairstyles is footage of Toronto's The Stormy Clovers performing Leonard Cohen's Suzanne. Both acts shared the same manager, Mary Martin (also credited with hooking The Band up with the newly electrified Bob Dylan). Even though some artists were recording his material, such as Judy Collins, The Stormy Clovers undoubtedly gave Cohen that extra push into what became his near mythical, late-blooming musical career.Jennings says he's currently in talks with labels to reissue the songs featured in the documentary, which would be a godsend. There are also plans to make two other films, one running from the 1970s to the rise of music videos in the mid-1980s and another from the mid-1980s until the current explosion of Canadian indie bands. In the meantime, if there was ever a CBC special to tape, Shakin' All Over is it. The footage is as valuable as the dimming memories of the long-disappeared Yorkville and 4th Avenue scenes, while the music only gets better and better over time.
Comments
Dude from Simply Saucer played in Montreal last night.
Hehas a solo CD out, doing folk music these days.
I hear he will put together a band a record a new record, but it's not gonna be Simply Saucer.
i caught the second half after project runway...
mixed reactions...
i watched a show on Russian Mega-Mansions.
Mixed reactions here, too.
I guess they did OK with presenting as wide a variety of music as is possible in a couple hours. Nice spotlight on the psyche scene and the Quebec scene. Too much Anne Murray, too many talking heads when archival clips would have been worth their 1000 words, and a big thumbs down on the clips of contemporary stars doing "tribute versions" of classic tunes. That was so unnecessary!
Overall tho, worth watching to see brief clips of bands like Kensington Market and The Collectors.
thumbs down on the contemporary interviews.. hawksley, sarah slean, chantel krapyasssack (where's derek from sum 41??? or pierre from simple plan EH!!)) etc etc.. yawn
there were also parts that made NO SENSE whatesoever... they talk about neil youngs band in winnepeg.. then he gets in a herse and a moves to yorkville toronto and performs heart of gold at massey hall and he's famous.. WTF??? that was the most assed out retelling of neils history EVER.
jian... dude this guy needs to GO... i dont care if you were in Moxy Fruvous (think a poor mans barenaked ladies only with less tunes and ACAPELLA) but why does the CBC need to keep putting his stoopid ass on TV??? as I recall his show was a rather stinky turd bomb.. oh but hey lets give him another shot!!!
the only upside was that at least stromboawfulass wasnt the host...
additionally can ANYONE explain the appeal of murray mclaughlin and ian and silvia?? oh my god!!! that shit is soooooooo bad it almso causes me to SHIVER.. murray's beard and that that voice.. ugh
other classic moments include dude talking about signing bruce cockburn on the strength of the track Musical Friends which has got to be one of the most WTF weirdo crap tunes i've ever heard in my life!!! its not till a good 20 minutes later when they finaly redeem this with some quality cockburn accoustic geetar wizardry...