#1432: Audience Reflections by The Painted Ship

Peak Month: May 1967
7 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN ALL CANADIAN TOP TEN chart
Peak Position #3
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com link: “Audience Reflections (From Polyanna’s Dreamworld)”

In 1965 a local Vancouver band emerged calling themselves The Wee Beasties. Co-founder, William “Bill” Hay told It’s Psychedelic Baby Mag in 2011 about how the band began. “I met Rob Rowden at the University of British Columbia. I was writing a lot of poetry, mostly bad, at the time. Rob was playing in a commercial R&B band. We became friends over the period of a few months and I told him that I was thinking of starting a band. We talked about it. I warned him that it would be unlike anything that he’d done previously.” Bill Hay got the name The Wee Beasties from 17th century scientist, Van Leeuwenhoek, who looked through a microscope at one drop of water and found it teeming with microscopic life. Leeuwenhoek called the microscopic life – microbes – the “wee beasties.” However, the band changed their name before they began performing. The new name was The Painted Ship.

Continue reading →

#1434: Don’t Cry For Me Babe by Marti Shannon

Peak Month: September 1966
6 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #26
4 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN ALL CANADIAN TOP TEN chart
Peak Position #3
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com link: “Don’t Cry For Me Babe”

Mary Rosalie Bryans was born in Washington D.C. in 1942. She grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her dad was on the Royal Canadian Air Force. After graduation she joined the Royal Canadian Navy and was stationed at HMSC Cornwallis, near Digby, Nova Scotia. A classmate of hers, named Sheila, wrote online in 2010, that Mary Bryans “was a Rebel with a capital R and was always going against the rules. Her father was at the base one day and had their photo taken together. Him in his Air Force blue’s and she with her navy blue’s. She said at that time that they were always butting heads.” Bryans was later stationed in Halifax by 1962. While she was in Halifax she bought a Gibson guitar and went to the Candlelight Lounge where she would play and sing. In 1965, when she was 23, she appeared on the CBC TV show Let’s Sing Out. She was billed as Marti Shannon.
Continue reading →

#1435: I Can Only Give You Everything by The Haunted

Peak Month: January 1967
5 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN ALL CANADIAN TOP TEN chart
Peak Position #6
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com link: “I Can Only Give You Everything”
Lyrics: “I Can Only Give You Everything”

Jurgen Heinz Peter was born in 1942 in Glabonz, Bohemia, in what is now part of the Czech Republic. When his family moved from war-torn Czechoslovakia to Montreal, one of his new friends in high school was Glen Holmes. Years later, Holmes recalled, “We did sensible (?) things like riding on his Ariel Motorcycle in mid winter and in his ’59 blue Ford Thunderbird convertible sometimes with the top down (in winter more sensible stuff). Somewhere in late 1962/early 1963 Jurgen and I decided that we wanted to form a band so we did.” Peter played guitar and Holmes played bass. In 1963 Jurgen Peter stood in for a local Montreal band named the Blue J’s. In 1963 Peter and Holme, formed The Haunted. Bob Burgess was the lead singer and Al Birmingham played lead guitar. But within the first year Glen Holmes left the band.
Continue reading →

#1433: Fisherwoman by The Collectors

Peak Months: September 1967
4 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #15
5 weeks on the CFUN ALL CANADIAN TOP TEN
Peak Position #2
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “Fisherwoman”

The Vancouver rock band The Collectors, was formerly named The Classics who were a Vancouver group led by Howie Vickers in the mid-60s. The Classics were part of the regular line-up on Let’s Go, a show on CBC TV. Though the Classics released several singles the group needed room to grow and reformed as The Collectors. They would become one of the most innovative of Vancouver’s recording acts through the rest 60s. In the spring of 1967, Vickers was asked to put together a house band at the Torch Cabaret in Vancouver. Along with Claire Lawrence on horns, they recruited guitarist Terry Frewer, drummer Ross Turney and Brian Newcombe on bass. Within a couple of months, fellow Classics member Glenn Miller replaced Newcombe on bass and Bill Henderson, a student at UBC, replaced Frewer on guitars. With Vickers now handling vocals, their sound changed from doing covers of R&B tunes to psychedelic rock. This led them to gigs along the Canadian and US west coast. Their strongest fan base in America was in California. There audiences welcomed their complex arrangements mixed with harmonies and extended solos and musical ad-libs.

Continue reading →

#1422: Hard To Cry ~ Northwest Company

Peak Months: July & August 1967
10 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN ALL-CANADIAN TOP TEN chart
Peak Position #3
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com: “Hard To Cry”

The Northwest Company was a band in the Fraser Valley from the town of Haney, about 25 miles east of Vancouver. The bands members were bass player Gowan Jurgensen, lead vocalist Rick McCartie, lead guitar and vocalist Ray O’Toole, rhythm guitar player Vidor Skofteby and on drums and vocals, Richard Stepp, who was a teenager in Sicamous, British Columbia. Before moving to Vancouver in his late teens, Richard Stepp had been a paid musician in two Sicamous area bands called the Esquires and the Rebels. McCartie had been lead vocalist, and Richard Stepp the drummer, with the short-lived Vancouver band, The Questions, in 1965-66 (a group that won the Battle of the Bands in 1965 at the Pacific National Exhibition). The Northwest Company was originally named the Bad Boys. This was named after The Bad Boys Rag Shop, a trendy clothing store in Vancouver back in ’67. However, CFUN deejay Tom Peacock, encouraged the band to come up with another name that wouldn’t strike fear into parents of the groups female fan-base. It was Gowan Jurgensen who suggested to his bandmates the North West Company, based on the Montreal fur trading business founded in 1789. The band agreed, but distinguished themselves from the fur trading company with “Northwest” instead of “North West.”
Continue reading →