Adam Mitchell was an integral new addition to The Paupers on lead vocals and rhythm guitar. Bernie Finkelstein had come on board as manager and wasted no time getting the band signed to MGM Records stateside. It was a springboard for what was to come. Bernie wanted to showcase the band to their new American label. It meant heading to the USA.
Skip Prokop and The Paupers were well on their way with a record deal on Red Leaf Records, songs on the radio, and a foot in the Yorkville coffee houses. It wouldn’t be long before the band was highly in demand and craving bigger and better rewards.
In 2012 I took on the task of interviewing internationally renowned drummer Skip Prokop on what we thought would be a quick set of sessions to lay down the most interesting stories from his impressive career as drummer for The Paupers and Lighthouse with side projects involving Peter Paul & Mary, Janis Joplin, Mama Cass Elliot, and Mike Bloomfield’s ‘Supersession.’
Bill King is a Legend around these parts. A man of NBA qualifying height who is himself, a top of the key 3-pointer whose skills range from Band Assemblage, to Composing and Arranging, to Husbanding a bright, wine-loving, tolerant woman of limitless good humour and Sire to an equally talented and skilled Son, to Step-Fathering a plethora of tiny fur-covered Yappables, to Author, Photographer, and Archivist of Soul and Groove, Nature and Architecture, Enabler of Song Singers well known and not, Producer of fine Musical Moments both onstage and in studio, and a Master of the 88 Keys of Life, on which every piece of music in the Known Universe can be accessed or added to if one is in possession of the skill it takes to coach the notes out of the Ivories and into the Ether.
That’s Bill in a nutshell …and my longest Run-In-Sentence ever ….
IRWIN CHUSID (author, Songs In The Key Of Z):
Outsider music is a slippery genre. It’s musicians who tend to be self-taught, untrained, working certainly way outside the channels of mainstream music. There are very important qualifications; they are sincere about it. They mean it. They’re not doing it to be funny. They’re not doing it to be outrageous. This is a sincere musical expression. Wild Man Fischer in many ways is a poster child for outsider music.
People are fascinated by Lists. Just one more oddity we share along with the obsession we all have of being unable to stop ourselves from posting an opinion about things we know little or nothing about on Social Media, and waiting until you are in the front of the line at Burger King before deciding what you want, thereby pissing off every person behind you in line who knew what they wanted before they walked in the front door.
He was one of a kind.
A sweet, talented, sensitive man, whose height and width reflected the enormous heart that dwelled within. His love of music, musicians, family, friends, and this country of Canada needed a vessel large enough to contain it, and Kelly was blessed with a heart big enough to contain it all with room to spare.
A summer, probably around 1982. A small town – might have been Guelph – and a touring rock band from Toronto with time on their hands ….
I was losing sleep writing about The Five Crazy Assholes (Our Personal Tour Name, and how we refered to ourselves more often than not), when I was gifted with a copy of the fan magazine this was originally printed in…and PLEASE, I cannot find the PM with your name on it and you deserve credit for this, even though I used the old, weathered scans of my copy when I couldn’t find yours, so get back to me and I’ll insert your well deserved credit. Okay…where was I…oh yeah, Yellowed with age and at wonky angles, I did what I could to make it presentable because you deserve to read this account because it was written by two eccentric and incredible dear friends who are no longer with us…although I keep them close to this day. More next Friday, but I need all you Wacker Friends and Fans to follow the directions at the end of the column….
The phone rang for quite a while before I realized it wasn’t part of a dream I was having, but actually ringing in the Real World. Its insistent clatter, sounding more like a fire alarm than a phone, woke me from some quality REM sleep and a dream I do not recall except for the dim memory of naked hippie girls with flowers in their hair and sex on their minds, all dancing before me in a sylvan glen surrounded by a stand of Giant Sequoias in which, besides the lovely bevy of lustful chickies named Moonbeam, Sunflower and Debbie, there stood a Pink’s Hot Dog Stand and Tony Curtis’s limousine. Go figure.
Too tired to be angry and unable to open my eyes just yet, I groped around in the bed’s headboard until I located the source of my sudden departure from Heaven and wrestled the receiver from its cradle, pranging my wife on the head with the damn thing and waking her up as well.
It was 7:00 am. October 4th 1970 Continue reading
Bullseye Records of Canada
