The record should have catapulted Mother Tuckers
into stardom but didn't. Listen to the musicianship and compare it to
anything else around at the time period. They 'were' way ahead of their
time. The reason why it fizzled was one of those things you never discover
until it's long gone to late after the fact, the worst time on the planet to
discover anything of vital importance to your enterprise.
The jist is that the song has a line sic "If
it's fun you're looking for, write it down now 114'. Giving the impression
that One Ring Jane was a lady of loose morals. Nothing could have been
further from the truth. She was a girl from Winnipeg Manitoba who was one of
those rare individuals who was always trying to bring you up no matter how
down your were or even if a total stranger.
The problem was that the radio stations of the
time were still under rather severe material censorship for stuff considered
un-tasteful, and got the wrong impression about the song and hence it
received very little air play. One of those classic, 'If I could only go
back in time and do it all over kind of things as co-producer of the record
that nearly everyone has experienced at least once in their lifetime.
Another thing which need addressing is the fact
that a couple of MTYD biographies which can be found by searching Mother
Tuckers Yellow Duck in Google etc., contain numerous errors. A couple of
them claim that the name Mother Tuckers Yellow Duck had originally come to
Vancouver with a party called Kathy Kay. Not true. Kathy Kay had no more to
do with Mother Tuckers Yellow Duck than you did.
Kathy Kay was actually the teen age son of Mary
Kay of the Mary Trio Trio, circa early sixties, who didn't even show up in
Vancouver until about a year and a half after the band was already going.
The confusion probably comes from the fact that he had hung around Robin
Spurgin's recording studio on Third Avenue most of time doing his own album
while MTYD was recording their first album, 'Home Grown Stuff'.
The name Mother Tuckers Yellow Duck actually
came with the lead singer Patrick Caldwell who had come to Vancouver about
half a year before the band actually formed. The band was actually put
together quite serendipitously by myself, the manager, Cliff Moore.
I had first been introduced to Patrick very
early in 1966 about two days after he had first come to Vancouver from
Toronto. Patrick was living on a mattress under the basement stairs of a
house in the hippy district of Kitsilano at the time. He had been introduced
to me as a hip poet with something to say??
By that spring I had taken over management of a
weekend hippie dance hall called The Afterthought. Somewhere along the way I
hired Patrick and a buddy of his from Winnipeg named Donnie McDougal (later
of The Guess Who) as doormen.
I had been featuring mainly local bands, and
used to put together a hodge podge group of musicians every weekend who were
not working that weekend as the backup band under the euphemistic name of
"Don Willie's' House Band. One weekend, bassist Charlie Faulkner of another
local band called 'Medusa', did the chores as bassist.
During the following week Patrick and Donnie
invited me over to their place to hear a song they had just written together
called Funny Feeling. It was a beautiful song, so I included them the next
week as part of Don Willie's House Band and at the end of the night we just
new it was going to be a band.
I passed the Afterthought onto someone else and
came in as the manager. Medusa dissolved, and their manger, a nice gal named
Ronnie, came over for awhile as co-manager of Mother Tuckers, Charlie
insisted the drummer Hughie from Medusa come over as drummer, and after two
weeks of hard smooging, guitarist Roger Law agreed to come in as the lead
guitarist.
Roger had just arrived from the interior of BC
and had spent his first three nights in Vancouver sleeping on Kitsilano
Beach without food or cover because he didn't know a soul in Vancouver. Then
it was discovered that he could play guitar almost better than five men
combined with five hands each, and every relevant band in town was suddenly
after him.
Patrick proposed the name 'Mother Tuckers Yellow
Duck' because he had come up with it by mysterious circumstances when he had
originally been hitch hiking across the prairies from Toronto. He and some
friends had been mellowing on their backs one clear night in Saskatchewan
looking up at the stars. Out of nowhere the name just sailed through his
brain and to quote Patrick, 'And I just knew it was going to do a thing'.
Having said all this, click this
sentence for the whole story about Mother Tuckers Yellow Duck. Hang onto
your hat, it's quite a romp.
