A Classic Tale

In late spring of 1970, I was looking to either join or start a band. I was a guitar player, with the switch to playing keyboards still far from my mind. 

A drummer friend of mine named Jonas Mayer (we called him Joe in those days) asked if I was interested in starting a band.  He knew of a singer named Pete Piette who might be interested. 

We had a friend who was considering putting together his own band. He was going to name it after a character in the wildly popular series, The Lord Of The Rings. Well, sort of a character. I’m referring to Tom Bombadil’s pony, Fatty Lumpkin. Neither Tom nor Fatty made it into the much later movie trilogy. 

Joe loved the name, and later, after I had agreed to join the project, we bought the name from our friend. The price? A bag of weed.

We added the S to Lumpkin for some reason that I don’t recall. Perhaps we thought that after we were big and famous,  a small change in spelling would protect us from being sued by the Tolkien estate.

Joe’s father owned a business that supplied an industrial laundry company with the towel dispensers that were in almost every public and work-place restroom in Canada. This business required having a warehouse to store them. Joe’s father was okay with him using it on weekends for rehearsals.

Having a place to practice was a big deal, and Joe artfully used it as his ace card to sell me on the idea.

The warehouse was fifteen kilometres from the subdivision where we both lived, but that didn’t seem at all like a big problem. We just needed to find a bass player from our area with a car. 

We placed an ad in the Dramatic Musical Talent category of a major Toronto newspaper. A bass player who had just recently moved to Canada from London, England, responded. His name was Dave Hill, he lived near us, and he had a car!

So, almost every Friday and Saturday night during that summer and fall of 1970, Dave would pick us up and drive us to the warehouse to rehearse. 

At some point during the summer, we acquired a keyboardist named Steve Farthing. He was a conservatory-trained pianist whose parents had gifted him with a Hammond organ. Unfortunately, he wasn’t really able to get his head into three-chord rock, but he was a good-looking kid, and we sorely needed a sex symbol. 

The Tangled Webs We Weave

At the beginning, there were two obstacles to any kind of progress. One was keeping Pete, the singer, interested enough to attend the rehearsals, and the other was that, as a unit, we sucked. 

But Joe began to develop the kind of entrepreneurship (fictional hype) that would end up defining us. He and I realized we were mired and spinning our wheels, so he came up with the idea of advertising for a manager. 

The ad read something like, “Manager needed for established band. Salary and commission for the right person.”

For the sake of perspective, you should know that I was seventeen and Joe was fifteen. Just two kids starting a timeline of bullshit that extended for about fifteen months and led to some surprising successes and one monumental failure. It became a modern-day Aesop’s Fable or, if you like, a real-life example of The Peter Principle. You can decide.

A young man in his early twenties named Terry answered the ad. When he found out that the “salary” thing was just a way to attract attention, he wasn’t at all put off. In fact, he seemed to admire the ruse. He was a bullshitter himself. Claiming to be a radio announcer from a station in Detroit on some kind of sabbatical or something, he even had a fake demo reel of his ‘show” that we fell for. He had some experience in radio, that was true, but it was as an ad salesman for a small market station in Oakville.

Building Suspense

Hiring him turned out to be the cure for our inertia. He lit a fire under us as we put together enough material for a couple of sets. He placed an enigmatic ad on a Toronto rock station with a soaring hard rock riff we didn’t write or play. A commanding ethereal voice said simply: 

“Fatty Lumpkins will blow your mind. Booked exclusively by North American Talent at 439-xxxx”.

The response was interesting. It worked in a way we didn’t expect. No one was calling the 439 number. Instead, they were calling the radio station, wondering what a “Fatty Lumpkins” was. After a couple of weeks of this, we were asked to do a special live interview that would include our recorded music. One problem… we didn’t have any recorded music.

So we called a special emergency rehearsal at the warehouse. Terry had a two-track reel-to-reel tape machine with a couple of Radio Shack microphones, and we recorded ten minutes of some god-awful piece of shit we had made up (‘written’ is far too dignified) that included, among other tasteless things, a droning, endlessly sleepy guitar riff and a flute solo that passed more wind than notes. 

Half An Hour They’ll Never Get Back

On a drizzly Tuesday evening, armed with the toxic tape and filled with a bravado-like confident arrogance, we showed up for our thirty minutes of radio domination. 

Following a cringeworthy interview in which the DJ/announcer clearly didn’t like us, they played the tape. 

I’m surprised it was allowed to continue until its excruciating end. The people at CKOC must have thought they were the victims of a joke. A radio version of Candid Camera, maybe, or an attack by a rival station.

Outrageous it was, to be sure, but it must have appealed to some skewed demographic (likely brain-addled hippies stoned on a particularly potent Acapulco Gold that was going around) because we got some bookings out of it.

These were the kind of gigs that paid what the established bands (some with Canadian top 40 records) were getting. 

A Truly WTF Moment

One weekend in early 1971, we played two high school dances and grossed $1100.00. That was big money in the seventies. The next weekend we had a business meeting at the warehouse. After an hour-long discussion concerning unreceipted expenses that had allegedly been accrued by Terry over a two-month period, my share was about enough to buy a pack of cigarettes. At this same meeting, we fired Dave, the bass player. I liked him, but someone (no names) didn’t care much for his playing, so we unceremoniously dumped the guy who for five months had been our uncomplaining chauffeur. 

A Brief Period of Stability

We found an excellent replacement from the Park Royal area of Mississauga named Butch Cook. In terms of musical ability and experience, we weren’t in his league, but he cheerfully took the job, and we were a better band for it.

I still wonder what Pete, our singer, thought when we decided to hire a second vocalist. His name was Glen. I have no idea what made us think we needed him. I was already singing some lead and harmony. 

No Question, Now We Were Going To Be Stars

In early March of 1971, Terry brought the tape recorder back to one of our rehearsals. With just two microphones and no ability to overdub, we recorded a song I wrote with some assistance from Pete called Lover Lover. It was catchy, had three-part vocal harmony, and was around three minutes long. Perfect for radio play. Terry decided this was our ticket to success. With just the tape (it hadn’t even been pressed into a record!) and some bombastic hype, he somehow managed to get us a spot on a very influential music show hosted by Robin Seymour on CKLW TV in Windsor, Ontario.

Despite the Canadian call letters, CKLW radio and TV were essentially US media. They aimed their broadcasting at the lucrative southeastern Michigan market, which included Detroit. They are often credited with helping launch Motown Records. They were one of just a few of what we called “cross-over stations”. Because it was required to play a certain amount of Canadian content, quite a number of artists and bands from Ontario got valuable US exposure.

In addition to the show, Terry set up a concert in Windsor that he advertised and promoted with his own money. The idea was that the TV show would inspire a couple of thousand curious young people to attend the next day’s performance. 

So one sunny spring day in early April with barely enough money for gas, we loaded our gear into a couple of station wagons and headed down Highway 401 for Windsor. 

Other than the floor director getting ticked at Glen, insisting that he spit out his gum, we thought the show went well. 

The next day was the concert, so we checked into a motor hotel in which a couple of rooms had been reserved for two nights. Terry had talked the manager into waiting to get paid. We ate some sandwiches someone had the foresight to bring. Funny, although we had no money for food, there was a case of beer and a bag of weed. Priorities.

The concert was a disaster. All of three people showed up, and they had complimentary tickets. Depressed, broke, and wallowing in teenage angst, we had no choice but to skedaddle back to Toronto. We stealthily snuck into the hotel, grabbed our belongings, and left without paying. 

To be continued…….

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