Peak Month: September-October 1988
7 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #20
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com “Out Of Touch”

Innocent 3 was comprised of Kelly Brock on lead vocals and Karen Campbell on backing vocals. Kelly Susan Brock was born in 1967. Brock was the lead vocalist for the Vancouver cowboy-punk band Lost Durangos with Greg Potter (guitar, vocals) Paul de Boursier (drums), Matt Rickson (bass, vocals) and Buck Cherry (guitar, vocals). They released an album in 1986 titled Evil Town. Karen Campbell born in Owen Sound in 1970. She was a child actor on TV commercials. At the age of ten she was featured in a commercial for Swiss Chalet. For ten years she was known as the ‘milk girl’ on Canadian dairy ads promoting milk consumption. She appeared in her first film, The Newcomers, when she was eleven. When she was seventeen she was photographed for Vogue Magazine in Monte Carlo. Subsequently, she was featured in Harper’s Bazaar and Elle.

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#651: The Touchables by Dickie Goodman

Peak Month: March 1961
7 weeks on Vancouver’s CKWX’s chart
Peak Position #3 on CFUN
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #60
YouTube.com link: “The Touchables”
Lyrics: “The Touchables”

Richard Dorian Goodman was born in Brooklyn in 1934. His father, Saul, a Russian Jew immigrated to the USA. Saul’s brother Herman already lived in America. It was Herman who told Saul to tell the folks at Ellis Island that your surname is Goodman. No one in Dickie Goodman’s household ever learned what his father’s surname was back in Russia. The family lived in Long Island in the town of Hewlett. On July 8, 1947, the press reported that U.S. Army personnel had recovered a “flying disc” in the Roswell Army Air Field near Roswell, New Mexico. There were reports of people interviewed who had handled the debris from the flying disc. And some people said they saw aliens. Dickie Goodman was 13 and the story made a strong impression on him. In 1955 Dickie Goodman was studying for a Law degree and writing songs on the side at Hanson’s Drug Store at 51st Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. He got acquainted with another struggling artist named Bobby Darin who ended up living in the Dickie Goodman’s parents home for a spell. In early ’56, Goodman had a song he wrote titled “Why Should We Break Up”. It was recorded by the Sonnets, a doo wop R&B group from Harlem.

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#652: Have A Drink On Me by Lonnie Donegan

Peak Month: August 1961
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKWX’s chart
Peak Position #3
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #72
YouTube.com link: “Have A Drink On Me”
Lyrics: “Have A Drink On Me”

Anthony James Donegan was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1931. His dad was a violinist in the Glasgow-based Scottish National Orchestra. Donegan became a fan of swing jazz and country music as he grew. When he was fourteen he got his first guitar. In the late forties “Tony” Donegan had learned how to play the banjo. Bandleader Chris Barber heard Donegan and had him audition for his Trad Jazz band. Tony Donegan played with the Trad Jazz band for a few years until he was called up for National Service that included three months of military training. While in the National Service in Southampton, England, Donegan played drum in Ken Grinyer’s Wolverines Jazz Band. In 1952 he began the Tony Donegan Jazzband. On June 28, 1952, Donegan’s band opened a concert for Lonnie Johnson at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Johnson was an American jazz and blues singer and pioneer of jazz guitar and jazz violin. Tony Donegan decided to bill himself as Lonnie Donegan in tribute to Lonnie Johnson.

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#653: Sand Storm by Johnny & The Hurricanes

Peak Month: February 1960
9 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN’s chart
Peak Position #7
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com link: “Sand Storm”

John Matthew Pocisk was born in rural Ohio near Toledo in 1940. He learned to play the saxophone. Poscisk formed his first band while he was in high school. Subsequently, he formed a band in October 1957 name the Orbits. The name was taken from news stories about the Space Race between the USA and the USSR that began in the mid-50’s. On October 4, 1957, the USSR had a successful launch of Sputnik 1 which was the first space craft to orbit the earth with a human on board. The Orbits were based in Toledo, Ohio. They developed a following and were soon noticed by talent agents who heard one of their demos. The Orbits were approached by Harry Balik and Ira Micahnik of Artists Inc. in Detroit. Balik and Micahnik managed Little Willie John and the Royaltones. and taken under the wing of management who had their name changed to Johnny And The Hurricanes. Johnny Pocisk was billed as Johnny Paris while performing with the Hurricanes.

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#1411: I Can Make It With You by Jackie DeShannon

Peak Months: September 1966
5 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #10
1 week Up ‘N Comers
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #68
YouTube.com: “I Can Make It With You”
Lyrics: “I Can Make It With You”

Sharon Lee Myers was born in Hazel, Kentucky, in 1941, a town on the Tennessee and western Kentucky border. When she was only two years old she received her first vocal training. By 1947, she was appearing on a local radio station as a child country and western singer. And by 1952, Sharon Lee Myers was hosting her own radio show. In 1954, with the family farm posing mounting challenges, the family moved to her mother’s home town of Aurora, Illinois, a seven hour drive north of Hazel. A year later, when she was in 8th grade, the family moved to nearby Batavia, Illinois. Her dad became a barber and young Sharon got instant recognition in the local paper. A headline in on May 5, 1955, in the Batavia Herald read “Sharon Lee Myers, Only 13, Is Talented Batavia Vocalist.” The paper enthused, “Though only 13, the youngster can boast almost 11 years of voice training and experience and in the past she has toured most of the south making personal appearances. Also she has sung on radio with a rhythm band for 2 years and has appeared on television 3 times.”

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#654: The Little Girl I Once Knew by The Beach Boys

Peak Month: December 1965
7 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #3
1 week ~ C-FUN Twin Pick Hits
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #20
YouTube.com link: “The Little Girl I Once Knew”
Lyrics: “The Little Girl I Once Knew”

Brian Wilson was born in Inglewood, California, in 1942. In biographer Peter Ames Carlin’s book, Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, he relates that when Brian Wilson first heard George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” it had a huge emotional impact on him. As a youngster, Wilson learned to play a toy accordion and sang in children’s choirs. In his teens he started a group with his cousin, Mike Love and his brother, Carl. His named the group Carl and the Passions in order to convince his brother to join. They had a performance at Hawthorne High School, where they attended. Among the people in the audience was Al Jardine, another classmate. Jardine was so impressed with the performance that he let the group know. Jardine would later be enlisted, along with Dennis Wilson to form the Pendletones in 1961. The first song Brian Wilson wrote would become “Surfer Girl.” A demo of the tune was made in February 1962 and would go on to be a Top Ten hit when it was released a year later in 1963. However, their first recording was a doo-wop-surf tune called “Surfin’” in October 1961. It was released in November ’61 on the Candix Enterprises Inc. label. The surprise for the group was that the record label had changed the group’s name from the Pendletones to the Beach Boys. Consequently, as each time the record was played by a DJ in America, radio listeners were being introduced to the Beach Boys. The name Pendletones was now history.

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#655: On The Beach by Cliff Richard

Peak Month: September 1964
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN’s chart
Peak Position #6
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com link: “On The Beach”
Lyrics: “On The Beach”

Cliff Richard was born Harry Roger Webb on October 14, 1940, in the city of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, India. In 1940 Lucknow was part of the British Raj, as India was not yet an independent country. Webb’s father worked on as a catering manager for the Indian Railways. His mother raised Harry and his three sisters. In 1948, when India had become independent, the Webb family took a boat to Essex, England, and began a new chapter. At the age of 16 Harry Webb was given a guitar by his father. Harry then formed a vocal group called the Quintones. Webb was interested in skiffle music, a type of jug band music, popularized by “The King of Skiffle,” Scottish singer Lonnie Donegan who had an international hit in 1955 called “Rock Island Line”.

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Peak Month: January 1992
12 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG’s chart
Peak Position #9
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube.com link: “Say You’ll Be Mine”

Camille Henderson was born in Vancouver, BC, in 1970. From the age of ten she was a working actor in film, stage and TV. At the age of fifteen she starred in the Canadian film directed by Sandy Wilson titled My American Cousin. She played the role of Shirley, a preteen girl. Her father, Bill Henderson, was a member of the Vancouver Sixties band The Collectors. He continued with most of his bandmates as they morphed into Chilliwack in 1970.
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#1498: 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.

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#657: Sea Of Heartbreak by Don Gibson

Peak Month: July 1961
8 weeks on CKWX’s Vancouver Chart
Peak Position ~ #3
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #21
YouTube.com: “Sea Of Heartbreak”
Lyrics: “Sea Of Heartbreak”

In 1928 Donald Eugene Gibson was born in Shelby, North Carolina. His family was poor and he stopped attending school in grade two to help out his sharecropping parents. He developed an interest in music at an early age and was inspired by recording artists like Tennessee Ernie Ford. Don Gibson began performing at local clubs before he was 18. In his late teens he held down a number of jobs including a as soda jerk, baby diaper deliveryman and dishwasher. A friend came home from Paris, France, after World War II with records by the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. This enhanced Gibson who began to experiment with different styles by his mid-teens. In 1946, he became a regular with the Tennessee Barn Dance in Knoxville, but things weren’t what Gibson expected. The fans wanted old-time country, not Gibson’s brand of crooning. He hung on to the radio job but struggled on $30 a week earned playing beer joints.

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