Mynah Byrd, O Mynah Bird, I was lonely as can be.
—“The Mynah Bird Song,” by Colin Kerr & Rajah (1965)
Rick thrived on imitation during his early years in Canada, so it should hardly have been a surprise when the owner of a shop near Yorkville that sold mynah birds, among nature’s greatest imitators, offered to sponsor the musician and his band the Sailor Boys.
Colin Kerr, an oddball Toronto entrepreneur, had been telling people for years that when he had been playing golf in India during the 1950s, he had sought help for his under-par performance from a local mynah bird named Rajah who was said to grant good luck to all who sought it out. (Its nine-year-old owner supposedly managed its affairs.) Kerr became so infatuated with the bird’s ability to attract luck, he said, that he purchased it after the boy died of leukemia, brought it back to Canada, and opened a store devoted to selling its cousins to what he hoped would be grateful Canadians.
Unsurprisingly, Kerr’s condition for financing the Sailor Boys was that they change their name to the Mynah Birds. Eventually, he asked them to imitate their black-and-yellow namesake by dressing in black Beatle boots with yellow heels, black pants, black leather jackets, and yellow turtlenecks, all of which Kerr gave them.
Kerr further extended his brand, opening a three-story club in Yorkville and calling it the Mynah Bird Club, where the band soon began performing. Shortly thereafter, Kerr required the band to imitate the Beatles—whose name, of course, imitated the name of one of the Mynah Birds’ favorite foods—and insisted that all the band members sport Beatles-type haircuts.
Fully aware of the tendency of Beatles fans, mostly young women, to scream out “The Beatles!” and chase that band whenever they saw them, Kerr took the Mynah Birds to Eaton’s, Toronto’s largest department store, and paid a mob of girls to meet them there. On cue, the girls shouted out “the Mynah Birds!” and chased them out of the store and into the band’s waiting limousine, preventing it from moving until the police dispersed them. Kerr repeated this trick several more times until it began happening naturally.
Kerr’s methods may seem comical, but they gave the Mynah Birds a boost. The publicity resulting from the girl riots enabled Kerr to negotiate a record contract for the band with Columbia Records of Canada. After weeks of rehearsing, the group cut two tunes for its debut 45 single. A fanatic brander if there ever was one, Kerr insisted one of the tunes be named “The Mynah Bird Hop,” an R&B belter on which Rick shared vocals with Livingston. The B-side was the tune “The Mynah Bird Song,” a soulful, calypso-flavored ballad. Both songs’ lyrics glamorized mynah birds, with “The Mynah Bird Song” containing such lines as “Mynah Byrd, O Mynah Bird, I was lonely as can be,” delivered with great emotion.
Very few copies of the record were sold, it never hit the charts, and nobody reviewed it. But to support it when it was released in early 1965, the band appeared on several Canadian TV shows, including Hi Time and Mickie a Go-Go. On Hi Time, Rick sang “The Mynah Bird Song” to a blind mynah bird perched on his hand while it defecated on his palm and dug in its claws. He told other interviewers that the bird defecated on his shoulder on another occasion. Laughing about this shortly before his death, Rick said, “I used to sing to this blind mynah bird that would shit on me onstage. It was a kind of sick situation.”
As part of Kerr’s campaign to support the record, the Mynah Birds also performed in four sold-out shows at the Colonnade Theatre in downtown Toronto. A few more gigs followed, but by then Kerr was becoming discouraged with what he saw as the band’s unprofessionalism (they often tried to shuck their Mynah Birds outfits or “forgot” to take the real mynah birds on the road). To show them the kind of comportment he favored, Kerr sent them to Montreal’s Esquire Show Bar for three weeks. There, they were the supporting band for a group that one former Mynah Bird, musician Richard Grand, describes as “well-rehearsed, well-dressed young ladies who delivered a perfect Motown sound.”
Once away from Toronto and Kerr’s supervision, Rick led the band away from Mynah Birds tunes toward the music he favored: rock ’n’ roll. According to Grand, the audience was shocked when the young ladies took a break and the audience was suddenly confronted by Rick and the Mynah Birds’ full-throated Rolling Stones imitation. But many women in the audience found Rick attractive. According to musician Nick Balkou, “When [Rick] smiled, it was very charismatic. He just lit up the room. It was very endearing, especially for the ladies.”
At this stage of his career, however, by most accounts, Rick ignored the few groupies the band attracted. Musician Chris Sarns, who shared a room with Rick on another Mynah Birds tour shortly thereafter, says Rick didn’t have any sex that Sarns was aware of during the entire time they were on the road. “I had a girl one night and Rick [in the next bed over] had to pretend he was asleep,” Sarns says. “But he himself never had a girl during the whole tour.”
Meanwhile, it was becoming obvious to Rick and his fellow band members that they were not exactly taking off as Mynah Birds. They finally dropped Kerr as their manager in late 1965 when he told them to increase their resemblance to real mynah birds. To do so, he suggested they cut a V in the hair on the sides of their heads to more closely resemble the natural “hairstyles” of their avian models.
Undeterred, Kerr went on to expand the Mynah Bird Club from a musical venue to a pornography palace, first by hiring young women to dance topless in his club and silhouetting them in the club’s window. Later he added body painting, X-rated films, and a chef who cooked in the nude.