Through most of 1968, Skip Prokop’s band The Paupers had been touring with new bass player Brad Campbell as they were making their way through recording and releasing their second album for MGM Records called “Ellis Island.” But Skip was getting a taste for session work and expanding his musical horizons beyond a 4-piece rock and roll ensemble. It was leading him to decisions that would change his life and Canadian music forever…
Yeah, yeah, it’s been a week since the Saturday Night Live (SNL) special, and Bob’s given his views on the pros and cons. But I’m still thinking about what the show meant to me, in its heyday, and occasionally, since.
There’s a great time wasting pub game on social media quite popular with my music friends whereby you assemble the ultimate supergroup featuring your favourite musicians past and present.
Back in 2007, Pop Culture Press magazine asked me to conduct interviews for their Summer of Love Issue which featured the forty years which had passed since. I interviewed Bob Segarini (The Family Tree), Peter Albin (Big Brother), Tracy Nelson (Mother Earth), Dehner Patten (KAK). I also interviewed Gary Duncan, legendary guitarist for Quicksilver Messenger Service). It was a dream come true. Quicksilver had been my favorite of the San Francisco bands, the epitome of what I thought psychedelia was all about. Gary was very gracious and forthcoming when we talked and the result was one of my personal favorite experiences in all of my writing. So pour a cup of coffee or pop a cold one. If you’re not among the biggest Quicksilver fans there are, you are about to learn more about Gary Duncan than you thought you would ever know.
After reading what I consider Cam Carpenter‘s best column ever this past week (if you missed it, read it here), I could not help but look back over my years in the business. The big difference between Cam and myself is that I spent all of my years on the bottomside, i.e. retail, and started those years looking longingly at the labels, hoping to score that most wonderful and elusive job in A&R (Artists & Repertoire— the people who spend ungodly amounts of time listening to live tapes and demos and sucking in smoke in scuzzy bars looking for that next big thing in music). Cam did that.
Boy, did Bob Segarini get the gears moving in my head with his recent column about The Doors and Jim Morrison. Very few people who spent a couple of decades in the music business didn’t have their brushes with greatness, as some scribes tend to call them. I guess greatness is one thing to one person and another thing to another. Wait a minute… guess? Of course, it is. I am learning that as I interview various rock musicians for history pieces I am writing. Ask five members of a band about something thirty or forty years ago and you are as likely to get five different answers or pictures as you are to get a perception of what really happened.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 