• From a career touching on four decades -- '60s-'90s
• The first Compact Disc release by a Western Manitoba Act
• 24 original songs written, arranged & produced by Bill
• Alan Clark of Dire Straits played keyboards on 7 songs
• 12 songs recorded in London, Newcastle & Durham, England
• Released to commemorate the 24th Anniversary of their restaurant
• SOO'S - in downtown Brandon, Manitoba***

SUE-ON
• Born in China but smuggled out to Hong Kong during the Communist Revolution and emigrated to Canada at age 10
• Youngest of a 70-year-line of Choy family chefs in SW MB
• Brandon University Graduate B.A. - B.Ed. (5 yr)
• A high school English, Geography & Home Ec. teacher
• Instructor in Brandon University's English for Academic Purposes since 2003
• Restaurant owner/manager & entrepreneur
• Black Belt Karate instructor & student of Tai Chi
• Featured in countless shows and recordings on vocals, drums, percussion, piano, synthesizers

 
 
 
 
 

BILL

• Born and raised on a Manitoba farm near Strathclair
• A veteran of over 30 years in the music industry: stage performances, guitar, vocals, songwriting, management, record production, promotion, etc.
• Writer/arranger/producer of over 50 original songs
• University graduate: B.Sc.(Honours), B.Ed.(5-year), M.Ed.
• Thirty years experience in teaching high school geography, English, computers, music, science, history, business
• Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brandon University since 2001
• Student of the martial arts - Black Belt in Karate
• An inveterate collector: 10,000 shows from the Golden Age of Radio, 4,000 video tapes (classic movies & TV, music, etc.), books, magazines, comics, antiques, music, show business memorabilia

 
 
 
 

BILL & SUE-ON

• Entertainers of the Year Award - Presented by M.A.C.A.
• A 40-year partnership in marriage and show business
• Parents of 3 great kids: Ja-On, Robin and China-Li
• International tours: Canada - USA - Great Britain
• Countless venues - from country halls to grandstand shows, military bases, local & network TV & radio, rodeos, film, night clubs, discos & country/western clubs in England, political rallies, recording studios...
• Co-owners/managers of SOO'S Restaurant in Brandon for 10 years
• Professor and Instructor at Brandon University

Blackpool's grown-up toys

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SAIL ON 747

This is a Rock-a-Billy flavoured song. My first exposure to rock 'n' roll was through the Memphis Sun Records artists: Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis - The excitement generated by these early rockers has been a major musical influence.

The idea for the song came during a long wait at London's Heathrow Airport during a work-to-rule strike. Sue-On was pregnant with our first child, Ja-On, and we perhaps were a little nostalgic and homesick after having toured for seven weeks in a foreign land. It had been a very successful tour highlighted by the recording of five sides in a London studio, but we have always been 'homebodies,' - a defence, I guess, from the craziness of the road. It was approaching harvest time on the prairies and we were looking forward to experiencing our unique fall rituals and even seeing the stubble fires which light up the night skies on every horizon. We had loved the experience of this, our first tour of England - the Newcastle Brown Ale, the ocean, the history, the Geordies, football, housie, BBC, Blackpool...everything - but it was time for homefires.

The song was recorded three years later at Guardian Studios in northern England. This 24-track studio is set up in two adjacent row houses on High Street, in the tiny village of Pity Me, just outside the beautiful, historic City of Durham. The studio was a labour of love and brain child of owner/engineer Terry Gavaghan who saw it as a means of getting 'off the road' while still staying in the music industry. He invested the money he had saved touring as lead guitarist for the Carpenters - here in this quaint little Yorkshire village. This choice of locale was perhaps not as unusual as it might first appear as England's Northeast is saturated with clubs and musicians.

We later performed Sail On at the Manitoba Association of Country Artists (MACA) Awards ceremonies where we were backed by a large stage band complete with fully-charted arrangements - quite a contrast to the small combo approach we took on the record.

And we're standing up for Rock 'n' Roll

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One Night Stand

This is another of our autobiographical efforts - written during a rather laid-back and reflective mood. Although we tour far afield most summers, the remainder of each year is spent playing one- nighters. The experiences we have shared while performing in a different town every night has developed bonds with which only musicians can identify. The fact that we are married has seemed to intensify marital bonds as well. Our closest lifelong friends have always been musicians and some of our most cherished moments could only have come about through our performing experiences.

Dovetailing other careers with our music has been the source of some frustration over the years - family and teaching careers have always come first. This has meant that we have not always been able to follow up music opportunities, but the moment we step on stage, any stage, the rush of performing kicks in -- a cure-all for all maladies.

One Night Stand was recorded at Impulse Studios at Walls End in Newcastle-On-Tyne, England. The studio is located close to the eastern limit of Hadrian's Wall - a wall built by the Romans to keep out the wild Scottish tribes. The wall was not too successful in holding back Scots from the studio ... we invaded successfully, as did quite a number of Celtic groups, such as the Chieftains, who use the studio regularly.

These Newcastle Sessions came about at the end of our second tour of Britain and resulted in 14 songs for Album #7. One Night Stand was culled as a single and was our first charted song to break the Top 10. We eventually performed it on the CBC network-televised Canada Country Music Week concert at the Winnipeg Centennial Auditorium - backed up with a 20-piece orchestra. Our fondest memories of this event, however, centred around our backstage bull sessions with fellow entertainers George Hamilton IV and The Family Brown, swapping stories about performing in England. 

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BYE BYE JA JA

I wrote this one just near the tail end of the Disco phenomenon - in fact, the original title was Disco Stomp, but I have adopted the subtitle since the Disco fad mercifully has fallen from favour (even though live DJs with their dead music have survived and have greatly reduced the number of venues for live bands).

Since Sue-On and I had just backed Barry Forman on two fiddle albums and we had just finished an album of our own Cajun songs, it seemed natural to combine all these influences. The song has a "what if...?" premise - what if a John Travolta-type denizen of Regine's and Club 54 were transferred from the New York disco scene to a backwoods, bayou town in Louisiana?

While writing this I repeated the hook "Bye Bye" so often that it found its way into our toddler-son Ja-On's vocabulary. For months, the last words we heard as we left to play nightly gigs were "Bye Bye Da Da". His constant input on this one was such that I just had to use his name in christening the song's main character.

Curiously, despite the Cajun theme and all the Cajun-style music we have done, this song features no fiddle. We recorded it in Durham with the English show band, Desperado and there was a shortage of fiddlers in the area. However, later in this session we did attempt a 5-string banjo imitation on a synth for the Eagles song Take It Easy - but that's another story. 

HOLD ME DARLIN'

This ballad is just an old-fashioned country love song I wrote to show off Sue-On's gutsy emotional delivery. It came out of the Durham/Pity Me sessions with Desperado. Their drummer had some trouble with the country 3/4 rhythm so Sue-On moved into the drum booth to do the drums - nothing new for her as she has done drums on about half our records. The curious thing about the studio drums is that they had been purchased in England from the estate of the late Keith Moon of the Who - the studio piano also had some claim to fame, being the French upright used on Elton John's Honky Chateau album...Oh, the stories they could tell.

Hold Me Darlin' first appeared on Album 9 - On Stage in England. In answer to DJ response we later released it as a single.

CHORUS: 

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MONTANA

We have spent many summers touring Western USA and Canada - performing with American acts on grandstands at rodeos and State, Provincial and County Fairs. Many acts were from Nashville but the ones we found most interesting were the variety acts from California. Our US booking agents were the Bardines who were veterans of the last days of Vaudeville, so it was not surprising to find a multitude of fascinating, experienced acts on the bill. We rubbed shoulders with, and took show biz lessons from, magicians, ventriloquists, comedy pickpockets, trick cyclists, dancers, standup comics, tenor banjo players, chorus girls, singers, acrobats...the gamut. When we were not listening to inside stories about Greats such as Bob Hope, Ed Sullivan, and the Marx Brothers, we basked in the aura of enthusiasm that surrounded these seasoned entertainers. All of this played out against an almost incongruous backdrop of the 'wild west.' Inexplicably this, coupled with my love for geography and heritage, seemed to pull me back into the traditions of the western setting we were touring - hence this song.

We tried to convey some of the Montana Big Sky feel through some unusual studio effects which included flanging the strings and fading the ending with a lonely wind effect.

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SHELTER

I have the good fortune to be able to write love songs for my wife - after which I can hear her sing them to me every night... nice work if you can get it. This was such a song BUT the setting for the creation of the recorded version of this ballad could hardly be called romantic.

After finishing our first tour of 30 one-nighters in the Northeast of England, our English musician friend Mick Sandbrook drove us down to London which was experiencing the worst heat wave and drought of this century. What was normally lush greenery had been scorched brown and wilted and buildings which held a standing boast that they needed no air conditioning had become unbearably stagnant.

We picked Gooseberry Recording Studios from an advert in the British rock paper Melody Maker. The ensuing telephone conversation clinched the deal as they swore that their studio was always cool and their previous cliental included such clean-cut groups as the Sex Pistols. On the first day of the session we lugged our gear down to Bromley Station in Kent and boarded a train that took us to Charing Cross, London. We sweated across to Trafalgar Square where we hailed a cabbie who mistakenly drove us half-way across London because he couldn't cut through our 'Canajun' accents.

Eventually, we found the Soho studio... it was an underground studio - literally and figuratively. In stunned amazement we dragged our equipment through a sidewalk manhole and down a ladder into a dark, damp...but cool...converted cellar and coal bin. The advertised 16-track recording console had only 13 working tracks and most of these were usable only with the help of chewing gum, rubber bands and constant spraying and banging. I squeezed into a tiny closet with my acoustic guitar and a studio mike to isolate my playing from the sounds that our keyboardists Kevin Pahl and Alan Jones were able to eke out of the beat-up piano. The session drummer and bassist were good - in fact, I have since seen their names on many movie and concert credits out of England - but our session was constantly interrupted as they had to climb up the manhole ladder to confer with other clients. We closed the session at 10 PM because we had to run through the streets to Charing Cross to catch the last train home to Bromley. Our engineer suggested that we might want to stay underground a little longer because there had been Tong wars and Chinese unrest on the streets above all evening. I called the song Shelter - we needed it.

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CAJUN STOMP

Throughout our first decade of recording, I wrote many cajun- flavoured songs. One reason for this was to feature our bassist, Barry Forman, who was also a champion fiddler. Another reason, however, was that such tunes lent themselves to an exciting stage presentation in which we could feature Sue-On's driving backbeat on drums. All this was done about 10 years before this southern-style music really caught on - maybe we should have hung in there a little longer. The song did win some money for us though, in the American Song Festival contest out of California.

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FREEDOM TRILOGY

We based this song on some old folk music themes. Previous to the recording session we had done the number as an acoustic-backed duet - usually at folk concerts or for small gatherings. Thanks to Alan Clark's synth arrangements and the temptation to do layered vocal overdubs, the finished recording differed considerably from our stage version.

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LADY LUCK

This effort was the culmination of a joint international project. We spent a week in Durham's Guardian Studios with Desperado, a Middlesbrough-based English show band. After pooling our efforts on the backing tracks, we each did our own version of the final vocals and mix. The result was that they had songs to release as singles and we had enough originals and covers for a complete album. I felt that we needed synth arrangements and since our regular keyboard player, Kevin Pahl, couldn't accompany us on this third tour, I hired one of the musicians whom we had met in the local clubs. He did a fantastic job for us and we really weren't too surprised when we learned five months later that he had joined Mark Knopler's Dire Straits as a regular - a job he still holds.

Desperado was comprised of Alun Edwards (vocals, congas, percussion), Mick Sandbrook (vocals, bass), John Whittingham (vocals, guitar), Colin Bradley (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Paul Duckers (drums) - all from the Middlesbrough, County Cleveland area. Paul Rodgers of Bad Company had come out of this group a few years before.

It was while recording the vocal tracks for this song that we were drawn into the realm of the supernatural. The hour was late - around midnight at Guardian Studios, Pity Me - the bed tracks were in the can, and we had just removed the drums from the isolation cubicle which was to double as my vocal booth. Sue-On had gone across the street to make a telephone call while Terry, Alan and Mick sat staring at me through the control room glass, waiting for me to sing along with the backing tracks of Lady Luck. Part way into the song there was a brilliant flash of light around me and someone turned off the 24-track recorder. Wondering what the problem was, I looked inquisitively toward the guys at the console. They had strange looks on their faces and I heard Terry's voice over the cans, directing me to come in. My first thought was that something had happened to destroy the master tape. Terry phoned his neighbour friend while I tried to get Mick to tell me what had happened. The neighbour rushed in saying, "She's back!???" All three in the control room had seen a brilliant light radiating from a negative image of a small person standing close to me. Terry explained that years ago a young girl who lived here in this row house, the one that he had converted into his studio, had run out into the path of a lorry and had been struck down. They carried her into this room and had laid her dying body on a sofa in the same area as the vocal booth. The ghostly image of this girl has appeared frequently, usually in conjunction with some calamity - in this case her visit must have been brought about by my singing. Stories about the 'ghost' (Guardian Angel?) abound and her picture is displayed in the pub down the street. I suggested to Terry that he should include the story in his advertising, but he seemed very reluctant - in fact, he was afraid it would drive away business. I saw no ghost but I did see a brilliant light...and the shocked and frightened looks on my cohorts' faces. 

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FARTHER AWAY

I wrote this one under pressure. One of the sponsors for our first tour of England was the Traynor Sound Equipment Company of Toronto, who were trying to promote their sound equipment in England. Upon our arrival at Heathrow Airport we were directed to pick up the gear at a music shop in Bromley, Kent. Here we found a grand old house near the station which offered overnight bed and breakfast lodging. We were so fond of these digs that, after our six week tour in the north, we returned to this B&B for R&R. Since we could commute easily to London by train, I impulsively booked studio time in Soho...the only problem was a lack of material to record. Shortly before we left Canada we had recorded enough original songs for Album 6 and all I had left were scraps of unpolished song ideas in my head. Our room opened onto a gorgeous English garden where I immediately started to bounce song ideas off Sue-On. After we came up with something akin to music, the four of us - Kevin, Alan, Sue- On and myself - threw together some hurried arrangements which we hoped would cut down on studio time. We eventually recorded five songs at the session of which three, Farther Away, Shelter and Al's While You're Away, appear on this CD album.

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CHINA LADY

Here's another one from our concept album, Prairie Saga. We assembled our regular Canadian cast of characters to record this one at Century 21 Studios - a very up-to-date facility housed in a converted synagogue in Winnipeg's North End. This entourage was made up of musician friends we have worked with for many years: Alan Jones - Blinded as a child in wartime England physiotherapist, songwriter - trying to get some kind of an oriental sound out of the massive Yamaha studio organ... Kevin Pahl - daredevil cropduster and musician extraordinaire - striving to get a vibes/celeste-like sound out of the Fender Rhodes... Barry Forman - fiddler, car dealer and former teacher - thumping away on bass... Sue-On and I were singing while playing drums and guitar. Meanwhile, engineer John Smith - who had worked with the Beatles at Abbey Road and had received a credit on their double White Album - tried to pull it all together in the control room. Also sitting in at the console for this session was another musician friend - Kerry Morris - pilot, hang glider, computer systems analyst - who joined us a few years later as our regular bassist and drummer.

China Lady may not have much to do with traditional Chinese music but we had a lot of fun with it. Normally our relationship with oriental culture is much more serious. We have a deep respect for oriental art, music, traditions and martial arts. Our living, recreation, and work areas are all adorned with Chinese art and furnishings, of which the Chinese moon door on the cover of the CD is a good example. This appreciation of 'the East' has carried over into other areas as well. As a family sport and discipline we study Wado Kai Karate - a style developed by Supreme Instructor Masaru Shintani, 8th Dan - and under the instruction of Sensei Bruce Dunning, we have both achieved the rank of 1st Degree Black Belt.

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CHINA SONG

This one I wrote with considerable help from Sue-On - if you listen closely it should be easy to pick out her contributions - I am not exactly fluent in Chinese. From our first meeting I have been constantly amazed at what this person - my soul mate - is capable of achieving.

Sue-On was born in southern China but her family lost everything there during the Communist Revolution. At age two she was smuggled out of China with a neighbour family and lived with her grandmother in Hong Kong until the rest of the family were able to follow. Eventually, at 10 years, she and her mother were allowed to join her father in Canada. She mastered English and adapted to the new culture while working in her family's restaurant. After we married she joined me in performing on stage - singing, and playing drums and keyboards. She then completed University (BA, B.Ed) and worked as a high school teacher as well spending time as a Field Supervisor for the University of Manitoba and Brandon University - all this while maintaining a frenetic performing schedule and raising three kids. When we took over the long-established Choy family restaurant - SOO's in Brandon - she added the role of restaurant manager and entrepreneur to her slate of accomplishments. Not the least of her achievements has been her ability to put up with my idiosyncrasies through all these years.

It is ironic, considering all the trouble Sue-On's family had in getting out of China that, for a while, Beijing became one of our largest radio audiences. Sue-On's brother-in-law, Wai Kai was captured by the authorities after having paid to be smuggled out of the country by boat. It was 17 years before he was able to join his wife and daughter in Canada. After coming to Brandon, he stayed in touch with a friend who had been assigned the job of music programmer for Radio Beijing. When China relaxed its ban on 'things Western,' there was a great thirst for music from America and some of the first imported tapes they heard were ours - Choy revenge?

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JOHN CAMPBELL - PIONEER

My great grandfather came west in 1878 with his family and possessions to homestead a tract of land south of the Little Saskatchewan River Bend settlement - near the present location of Strathclair. We still maintain a home on this homestead site. This song was written as a tribute to those early pioneers. Besides trying to express our love for this area where my ancestors sank roots so long ago, I was also trying to show how much I feel we owe to our heritage.

Any fiddle you hear on our songs has been done by our favourite fiddler - Barry Forman. Barry and I met in University and we have shared many a stage and travelled many a mile together. When Barry finally got around to recording some fiddle albums, Sue-On and I were honoured to be asked to play drums and guitars on his sessions. One of these albums featured his nine-year-old son Kent, who later went on to play violin in symphony orchestras all over the world. Barry doesn't play as much now - he devotes 25 hours a day to his family, aircraft, and car dealerships - but it's always a pleasure when he is able to find the time to join us on stage.

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HARVEST

The lyrics pretty well tell the whole story of this song. We were trying to create, on record, a bitter-sweet feel akin to the moods of Autumn. If we succeeded in this I believe we owe it to Sue-On's wistful interpretation and also to the piano effects achieved by Kevin Pahl. Kevin joined us while he was in my grade 9 class at Strathclair Collegiate. We were amazed at his singing and playing abilities, even at that early age. Later, he also excelled in a flying career. At one time he was working part time in his family businesses, giving flying lessons at the Brandon Airport in afternoons, playing one-nighters with us, and crop dusting in the early mornings and evenings. Many times we would arrive back home around sunrise and shake him awake so he could make his way to his plane to work at spraying a grain field all morning.

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MASSACRE

Both Sue-On and I are high school teachers of geography and English. One reason for the creation of Massacre was to show students how native Indian place names have enriched our North American landscape. In addition to serving as a tribute to those who came here generations before my ancestors, I felt that the writing and recording of a song using colourful Indian names was an excellent way to enhance my teaching. As you can hear in the lyrics, I tried string together the fascinating names of Indian tribes in a lyrical and rhythmic way.

Coincidentally, nearly everyone playing on this session was some sort of teacher by profession. Besides Sue-On, Barry and myself who have all taught high school, there was Kevin Pahl - a flying instructor, Kerry Morris - a computer instructor - and Larry Clark - a University prof.

We enjoy doing this song on stage - and I guess the performances which stand out most in our memory where the times we sang it in the back-to-nature setting of the Boggy Creek Call of the Wild Country and Bluegrass Festival. We were quite involved in the event for many years, both as performers and organizers and it was quite a shock when it all came to an abrupt end following the sudden death of Lewis Kaselitz. Lewis, his wife Linda and their kids emigrated to Canada from Tennessee with the dream of starting a southern-style music festival in Manitoba. Finding a suitably scenic area south of Swan River, near Boggy Creek, they cleared land and used some of the logs to build a lodge. Next, they levelled an airstrip and then went about realizing their dream of bringing in the best country and bluegrass acts on the continent. It was a real treat working with artists such as Doc and Merle Watson, the Whites, the Kendalls, John Anderson, Little Jimmie Dickens, the Family Brown, Kitty Wells, Wayne Rostadt...each year saw an even more impressive roster. The dream died, however, when Lewis succumbed to a massive heart attack.

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IN SADNESS

This was one of the first originals with which we had critical success. Soon after its release, we were thrilled to read a long glowing review in the BMI trade magazine out of Toronto. Most artists thrive on feedback - good and bad - and we were no different...it let us know that perhaps we were on the right track with our music. This was the first oriental-flavoured song I wrote for Sue-On.

This is a novelty song about our stage exploits and the experience of performing 30 years worth of one-nighters. It was recorded during our Newcastle sessions in England. This studio, like so many of the places we played in England, was inaccessible in the extreme. We had to pull our gear up many flights of stairs and through a seemingly endless number of doors because the facility was situated on the upper level of a large bingo hall complex. After surviving this ordeal which anyone in his right mind would have left to roadies, I returned to re-park our Ford Transit van only to find that the meter maid had decorated it with a parking ticket - to add infuriation to fatigue.

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STRANGER PLEASE

There's really not much I remember about this one, other than we had just pushed and pulled - shoved and slid - huffed and puffed a Yamaha Grand into our Maple Grove Studio. My first exposure to music came from listening to my mom and dad having jam sessions around the Heinzman - the thrill of hearing, and later making this homemade live music has never left me. Not surprisingly then, I was glued to this new toy for days and Stranger Please is one of the songs that came out of my internment.

Because our recording career goes all the way back to 1970, I would like nothing better than to go into a '90s digital studio, complete with banks of synthesizers and improved production techniques to re-record songs such as this one.

A major contributor to our early recording sessions was Larry Clark who was teaching at Brandon University at the time. He arranged the piano, organ and vibes parts which beefed up our sound immensely. Larry went on to become Brandon City Planner but eventually, growing weary of city life, he, Linda and the kids moved to the Manitoba's Whiteshell where he is currently employed as a Forest Ranger. It turned out to be a wise move because while sitting up in his lookout tower, he composed a couple albums of novelty campfire sing-a-long songs. He recorded this material under the name Uncle Smoky and the record was released very successfully across Canada by RCA. But remember...you heard him here first folks!

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TWO LOVING ARMS

This is another of the early originals we recorded at the old original 8-track Century 21 studios on King Edward Street in Winnipeg. We were one of their first clients - in fact, I remember nailing up some last-minute acoustic wall material to get the place into operation. The studio was conceived and operated by two sets of brothers: the Hildebrands, John and Harry - and the Paleys, Ron and Ted. These guys had recorded and toured in the '60s as Ronnie and the Eternals. We had first met them when we were both booked for the first year of the Morris Stampede.

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REELIN' IN SOHO

Reelin' in Soho is an account of our first recording session in London, England. As suggested in the first verse, this was the culmination of a tour in which we - The Hillmans From Canada - had played 30 one-nighters in night clubs and discos across Northern England. Many nights found us in the ubiquitous Workingman Clubs where a house band opened at 7:00 pm, followed by opening acts which usually offered variety entertainment. We would then come on for a show set, after which there would be a long break for housie (bingo) - a national addiction. After this exciting gambling break we would return for a dance set - but by 11:00 pm the dancers would call it a night since they had to work the next day. Being so used to the long drives, long gigs and late nights back in Canada, it was hard for us to wind down so suddenly and every night found us driving around looking for some place which might still be open - we met some very colourful characters on these midnight rambles. The audiences attended these clubs every night of the week and had seen it all, so it was especially rewarding to 'go down a bomb'...to 'bomb' has a different connotation there than it does in North America. It was tremendously exciting to study the dressing room walls which were festooned with pictures, cards and stickers left by previous entertainers - even the Beatles, early in their careers, had toured this circuit. These backstage walls were seldom refurbished since it seemed that the more 'name' acts displayed, the more prestigious the club. Perhaps the most fascinating venues though, were the Country and Western Clubs where nearly everyone showed up in full Western regalia - including boots, hats, gunbelts...and western drawls - Geordie cowboys.

Our strangest and perhaps most memorable night occurred at Thirsk - a village in Yorkshire. Throughout the tour, we spent most mornings and afternoons being tourists - traipsing through castles, cathedrals, and pubs and across highlands and moors. Scarth, however, offered a special reward because it is home to Alf Wight, aka James Herriot of All Creatures Great and Small fame. We visited his veterinary office and toured his small museum just down the street. Fittingly, the club we were to play was on the outskirts of town surrounded by a meadow or cow pasture. It was a 1920s pavilion-style hall. Our opening act for the night arrived late - surrounded by an entourage of people in formal wear. He was a singer who had been married just a few hours before in Newcastle. This set the mood for the whole evening - the place seemed to explode and although the club should have been emptied by 11:00, the management barred the doors to keep out the local constabulary and the party continued into the wee hours. When Sue-On wearied of the drums, a succession of people - our agent, the bartender and even the groom - took control of the sticks. Something right out of the fictional Darrowby. 

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WHILE YOU'RE AWAY

This song was Alan Jones' contribution to our London sessions - you can't help but notice his unique piano style behind Sue-On's equally unique vocals. Alan and I have known each other since the early sixties when he moved from England to Brandon, Manitoba to work as a physiotherapist. At the time, I was playing four hours of guitar solos every night with our group - The Blue Angels - so, when we heard that Alan played piano and sax, we pressed him into service to offer our fans a little musical variety and relief from Shadows and Ventures material. Following a return visit to England, he amused us with stories of an outrageous new band with a silly name and girlish haircuts that for some strange reason was stirring up quite a bit of excitement back home...the Beatles?...Nah, they could never make it here. After a year or so, we went off in different directions, but we got together some time later to record a Maple Grove album, comprised mostly of his songs, under the title FREE SPIRIT. He later contacted an Middlesborough agent for us back in England and helped us line up our first tour of England - he even went along and filled in on organ on many of the gigs.

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LISTEN TO ME CRY

I wrote this one for the Free Spirit album. Looking back on it I think the harmony is somewhat reminiscent of two of our favourite duos - the Everly Brothers and Ian and Sylvia. During the first years of our marriage we toured as the Western Union with Russ Gurr's Federal Grain troupe doing outdoor stage shows at exhibitions and fairs. Our solos went over well, but we found that duets added another dimension to our performance - and we liked doing them...we're still doin' 'em.

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BRING BACK THE GOOD TIMES

This song has a complicated genealogy. We recorded the bed tracks with Alan Clark and the writers, Desperado, during our third tour of England, but we did not have time to complete the vocals before we flew home. Due to luggage restrictions, we left the two-inch masters in England so they had to be brought over a year later when bassist Mick Sandbrook and his wife Margaret visited us in Canada. We added vocal tracks in Winnipeg's Century 21 A-Studio, mixed it at the B-Studio, and sent it to Edmonton for a Dolby fix. At this point we realized that the song was too long for single release, so we went into the editing studio with John Hildebrand to razor blade cut a verse and chorus out of the 1/4-inch master tape. John was a master at this, having done many similar edits on the K-Tel TV records. The shortened version was mastered and pressed at Columbia Records in Toronto. The single received good airplay and the since the song has never appeared on our albums, we felt it would make a suitable finale for our first all-original CD and digital tape release