2. steel town

Simply Saucer, John LaPlante (aka Ping Romany), Edgar Breau, Don Cramer, Kevin Christoff / press photo

Edgar Breau: We lived in Guelph for about three years because my father was a guard at the penitentiary there. We came back home to Hamilton because my mom couldn’t handle being away from the old Steel Town.

About 1971, even ’69, when I was in high school, I was a pretty avid record collector and I met somebody who was also a big record collector. We were both into a lot of the British bands like the Soft Machine and the early Pink Floyd and the Yardbirds and American bands like the Velvet Underground and Moby Grape.

This guy I met, Paul, was a keyboard player. I had a Fender Telecaster and I was kind of a budding songwriter. So we started playing together and we met some other people that were also your record-collecting types.

David Byers: I met Paul Collili and Edgar Breau on January 8, 1972 at a party that was given by a guy that worked at a record store in downtown Hamilton. The store was kind of a local hangout for offbeat musicians and offbeat characters.

I remember the date because it was strange. It was the weekend after New Year’s and I thought, It was just New Year’s Eve the week before. Why have a party? And I remember that Edgar, Paul and I each brought about three or four albums with us and we kind of dominated the record player.

Edgar Breau: David Byers was also a songwriter. He was into stuff like Terry Riley and the Velvet Underground and Dutch bands like Savage Rose. The three of us started playing together and we added some electronics.

David Byers: We found a rehearsal space and that was up on the Hamilton Mountain. It was like a small, dance hall–type of thing called Wright’s Music Centre. It was a combination music store and where you’d put receptions on and things like that. So we were able to rent that but our biggest problem was that we had to leave a lot of our equipment there, like the big amplifiers and things like that. Paul was the keyboard player so he couldn’t tote his organ back and forth. We found that was a big problem because we were worried about it being stolen.

So we did that for two months in the fall of 1972, and then after that I found an apartment above a store, so we moved all the equipment there and used that as a rehearsal space until the spring of 1973. Then by that time John, Ed’s foster brother, joined.

Edgar Breau: We had somebody called Ping [John LaPlante] who had been influenced a lot by Eno and Stockhausen and Sun Ra. He happened to be my foster brother as well. My family had taken him in, and his sister, actually. So he was kind of the electronic side of the band.

I had a theremin at the time so we had a six-piece band. It was really highly improvisational and experimental and loud.

I read Kerouac and all that, and I thumbed out west and had my own Canadian On the Road experiences in ’72. I had a sidekick and we were on the TransCanada Highway going across the country to Vancouver and back and had all kinds of experiences on the road. When I came back I was pretty immersed in all the counter-cultural things that were going on.

There was a writer that wrote for Fusion magazine by the name of Wayne McGuire who really influenced me. He was interesting because the kind of music he listened to was John Fahey and Robbie Basho, John Coltrane, Yoko Ono, Sun Ra, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges. He read medieval authors like Wolfram von Eschenbach. It was just a huge kind of mix with him. Also he liked the Inklings, which was that whole C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, English writers he admired, along with some really cool musicians. He was somebody I really admired because he wasn’t the predictable anti-Western cultural thing that was going on at the time. He was more nuanced and he had a broader appreciation of things.

I started reading a lot of the writers that he recommended and listened to the music. I always kept that in my musical tastes. I liked that kind of blend of the avant-garde that’s traditional. Even in those early Saucer days I was listening to folk music. And it was exciting to be doing something musically that was experimental.

Kevin Christoff: I met Edgar I guess through his brother Paul. The way that came about was we were all at school together. I guess a couple of my friends found themselves in a class with Paul. One thing led to another, they started talking about music – Syd Barrett and the likes.

Edgar Breau: I was a chartered member of the Syd Barrett Appreciation Society in the early ’70s. I was the first Canadian member. I think one of the first American members was a guy called Craig Bell who eventually ended up playing with Rocket From The Tombs. We used to correspond way back then, so it was an exciting time. I’d have to say it was that excitement, that’s what turned me on.

Kevin Christoff: That prompted Paul to mention that his brother had a band and that they were needing a bass player, and my buddies suggested me. Basically that’s how that happened. I met Edgar about a week or so after that at my first audition.

When I met those guys they were into listening to Hawkwind, Savage Rose, that kind of thing. I think just by and by I started learning a lot about the music that they were playing and it opened up a whole vista for me. I stuck I guess, you know?

There were not demands, but I do remember my first visit with them and Edgar turning to me – I’ll never forget this, actually – he told me that he wanted the bass to sound like I was walking through a wet field of tall grass. And I thought, whoa, ha ha ha, I can’t imagine this. But I did my level best and it was that kind of thing that spurned me on.

David Byers: At that time this apartment rehearsal space was too small. We had so much equipment and it wasn’t a very big apartment to begin with, so I found a loft down in the centre, right smack in the middle of downtown Hamilton, a third floor loft. I decided to give up the apartment and live in the loft and we would be able to keep our equipment there.

Kevin Christoff: When I first joined, I don’t believe that they had a name. I was pretty new with the band and I sort of found out about the name, I wouldn’t say accidentally, but we were all hanging out and the two of them, it might have been Ed and Dave, were talking about, “Well, is this the name we’re gonna stick with? Is Simply Saucer the name?” And I remember thinking, What? Simply what? I’m sure a lot of people had a similar reaction to the name. Of course now I think it’s a great name.

It’s a hybrid. It’s a combination of ideas that came from Ed and Paul. Paul at the time was a big Pink Floyd fan, particularly of their early years. The Saucer half of it came from the Saucerful of Secrets LP, and I think Ed at the time was a fan of Elton Dean and a band from England called Just Us and I think he added the Simply as a nod in that direction.

Edgar Breau: We had just gotten the idea of automatic music – “Let’s just make music that just happens and we don’t have to be there.” We had two audio generators and a theremin. We had all the amps up full and the guitars through echo chambers and fuzz distortion units. There were two electric guitars, we had a bass and we had a sax feeding back and the mini Moog and we just jacked it up.

Kevin Christoff: I just laid my bass up against the amplifier I was using and that was my contribution.

David Byers: We were really into ambient sound and whatever strange, long, drone-y feedback things we could make. So we decided to turn all our amps up and the guitars up and the electronics, and Paul put some bricks on his organ. We tried to get the loudest, strangest sound we could, so we did.

Edgar Breau: It got so loud we just ran out of the room.

David Byers: So we left and went down – we were on the third floor – we went down and locked the door.

Kevin Christoff: That’s part of the eye-opening experiences of Saucer. That’s just not the kind of thing that I did in my basement groups.

David Byers: We just wanted to walk around a few blocks. This was right down the middle of a commercial part of Hamilton and it sounded pretty strange, but we loved it.

Kevin Christoff: All the windows were opened and we just strolled around downtown. It was great fun checking out the reactions and all that. Yeah, it made one heck of a racket I’ll tell ya. Everybody’s looking like they’re expecting UFOs to land any second now and we were just kind of digging the whole thing, ha ha ha.

David Byers: But after a while we thought, Oh we better stop. Too many people were starting to notice.

Edgar Breau: We got about a block and a half away and it was still really, really loud and when we got back there were cops there; there were two cop cars in the alley.

David Byers: Lo and behold, in putting the key in the lock I broke it. I think we had another key but the tip of the key was still in the lock. At that time we were panicking and the police and the fire department eventually came and they were able to fish that little part of the key out. I had to run upstairs and pull all the plugs so they wouldn’t realize what was going on. We just told them we had left one amp on.

Edgar Breau: David ran upstairs to turn it all off because he thought maybe we were going to get fined or something like that, and the key broke in the door just prolonged it. One cop looked at us and shook his head and said, “I haven’t heard noise like that since the Second World War.”

* * *

David Byers: We used to go see the New York Dolls on probably their first tour outside of New York. It was a thrilling experience. They were quite something for their time. The audience was very small. I think we’d also seen Iggy and the Stooges there and it was great. Those were great concerts. We didn’t know what to expect.

Captain Crash: Things were pretty staid, but when the New York Dolls played on the corner here at Spadina and Dundas at the old Victory Theatre in Toronto, that was an awakening.

William Cork: I saw Iggy and the Stooges at the Victory Burlesque in 1973. I was walking down Spadina and they have this particular breed of mutant in Michigan, the Psychedelic Ranchers. They’re like these seven-foot-tall hippies with straight black hair going down to their asses. So I met one of these guys on Spadina Avenue and got to talking to him and he asked me if I wanted to buy some acid. So I bought three hits of Window Pane from him and slammed them all into my face and he went, “Holy shit, man, did you do all of those?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “What are you gonna do now?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Why don’t you come and see this band? Actually, their singer Iggy set me up out here to sell acid to people coming into the gig.” And I said “Yeah, okay,” and I went in there.

I realized on these three hits of Window Pane that I had never seen a rock ’n’ roll band before Iggy and the Stooges. They were what the Rolling Stones should have evolved into.

Kevin Christoff: I never really got too much into the Dolls for some reason, but I saw the Stooges at the Victory Theatre. That was the Raw Power lineup and Iggy did his thing, jumped into the crowd.

I think we were already there in terms of being influenced by it. We listened to a lot of spacey stuff, a lot of weird things: Arthur Brown, Galactic Zoo, all that kind of stuff. But I remember on the turntable almost constantly was either Raw Power or the first Stooges album or the Pink Fairies or something like that. So when we went to see the Stooges it was like preaching to the converted. We already knew and we were there just to see the man in action.

The concert notwithstanding, Iggy had a big impact I think on a portion of our sound, as did Lou Reed and Syd and all those kind of things. You kind of go through influences and we were heavily influenced by a lot of that at the time.

* * *

Edgar Breau: I remember one night the six of us all got bottles and were just banging on bottles for an hour. There was this Terry Riley composition, “In C,” that sounded like bottles. We were trying to duplicate that. We were listening to a lot of Krautrock in those days. There was a lot of experimentation. It was important. When we rehearsed we improvised a lot.

In the early days we’d do really long songs, twenty-minute songs. But the six-piece band never played anywhere. We didn’t seem to get hired.

David Byers: For a university town, Hamilton still is a dire cultural place. There was no scene happening. There were no bands playing, as far as to our knowledge, the type of music we were trying to achieve, and there were no places to play. We occasionally had people over because the loft was a pretty big space, so I think there were times we had small groups there but we never played outside the loft at all.

In the fall the lease came up so we had to move. At the time I decided to leave the band. I had my reasons. Paul also quit that same day; I don’t know why, I didn’t discuss it with him. So that was the end of my tenure with the band, although we parted on good terms.

It was only natural for the band to evolve into one person, which was Edgar. He had the vision. In the beginning it was a collective and then it focused into Edgar’s vision, which I’m totally in agreement with. That’s the way it was supposed to be.

Kevin Christoff: Everything coincided. We were practicing down on King Street, downtown Hamilton, and Dave and Paul leaving sort of coincided with us getting new digs on Kenilworth Avenue and I guess that’s where the story really starts.

This new space was affectionately called The Office. It was an old pet shop that was just up for rental. It was around the end of ’73 that we got that place and found ourselves as a four-piece and we started. Eddy at that point was, and probably remained, the primary source of material. The songs, although they had an electronic slant to them – obviously Ping played a really big part in the sound in the early days – but there was a lot more emphasis in songs themselves, and it kind of just sort of developed from that point on.

Edgar Breau: I lived right in the practice place where we rehearsed at first. I slept on a quarter-inch piece of foam. I didn’t have a bed or a couch or a shower or a bath there or anything. It was a pretty primitive place to live. The walls were painted black. I would just write all day long. People would bring me meals. I was really focused on music and wrote most of Cyborgs Revisited in that little storefront. That’s where most of it came from.

Kevin Christoff: “Illegal Bodies” was one of the very first songs that Ed presented to us when we settled into Kenilworth Avenue. “Bullet Proof Nothing” was another one. They all came in pretty fast succession. There was a real burst of creativity once we got settled in.

I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way, but it was sort of the liberation of having the band paired down to a smaller lineup. It made the material come forward quicker, I think. A lot of songs ended up being dropped in favour of new material because the newer material was more representative of us at the moment.

Edgar Breau: I remember we rehearsed on Christmas Day one year. It was pretty well every day of the week that we would rehearse. It must have been hard, I guess, for the rest of the band, but most of the time they’d show up.

Kevin Christoff: It was, “Go and have Christmas dinner and enjoy yourself, but be here for seven thirty,” ha ha ha, and we did. The music in the band meant quite a bit to us. I would say right from that point on, we rehearsed every day without fail.

We were staking our turf musically, I guess. There wasn’t anybody in Hamilton really playing or listening to anything remotely like we were, or so it would seem in the mainstream, let’s put it that way.

Edgar Breau: It was one of those in-the-wilderness experiences, similar to Rocket From The Tombs in Cleveland. I think they had the same kind of feeling that it was kind of isolated. The early band especially, when we were doing the electronic stuff, the audiences were at times puzzled by what we were doing. We emptied a few places out when we started.

Kevin Christoff: It’s pretty accurate to say we were determined that people were going to like us for what we were, rather than what we should be.

Our first gig, we featured a song, and it may have something to do with the fact that we didn’t really have a whole lot of material, ha ha ha, but we did one song for, oh, about thirty-five minutes.

Edgar Breau: We did this one song called “Noise” that was twenty minutes long and it was just noise, electronic noise and feedback.

Our first gig ever was in an Anglican church hall and we were doing really experimental stuff. It was in the east end of Hamilton and all these fights broke out. It was kind of like a riot going. The police came and they were hauling people out of there.

Kevin Christoff: Obviously this song had various parts and at one point our drummer got out from behind the kit, wearing a top hat if I recall, and was manically playing a violin. I don’t know if it can be akin to performance art, but we were definitely still in that phase of doing exploratory kind of things.

This was 1974. It’s pretty hard to imagine what venues would support the kind of music that was being put out by us at the time.

Edgar Breau: We got thrown off the stage at this place in Oakville called the 707 Club. They just kind of bodily threw the drummer off the stage and kicked us out. They pulled our plug and then the bouncers picked the drummer up and threw him outside. The electronics player had come onstage in a scuba diving outfit and I don’t think they could understand what we were doing.

Kevin Christoff: We played some very, very … well, the places themselves weren’t strange, but they were strange in light of what we were. We played high schools. Not so much in Hamilton. Hamilton always was a tough place for us to get work.

We acquired a manager. It was a guy who kind of knew the other guys, Ed and Paul and Dave. He ran a record store in Hamilton. That seemed to be a natural place to meet people. This fellow offered to manage us, and he did. He mounted a couple of – it wouldn’t be accurate to call them tours; we ended up doing a lot of one-nighters and one-night stands in places like Hawkesbury, Carleton Place, St. Catharines, Smiths Falls, Kitchener. A lot of out-of-the-way places.

Edgar Breau: We played Carleton Place in the early days and we pretty well emptied an arena, but there were a few people left that said they loved us.

Kevin Christoff: I think this might have been in Pembroke. We were hired to play this teen dance. It just didn’t wash. Everybody basically walked out on us but we kept on playing.

We played the whole night, and at the end we noticed at the far end of the gymnasium were about three or four people just leaning up against the wall listening, and then they started walking towards us. It was like that scene out of Clockwork Orange. They came up to us and said, “You know, people in this town don’t know anything, man. You guys were just great. You were awesome.” So it made your night, and I mean that, because when you’re doing something like that, it’s rewarding that you reach somebody. Everybody else in the room hated us, but these three or four people dug it.Edgar Breau: Our manager, Rick Bissell, was an old style manager. He would do everything for you. He would sell ice to an Eskimo. He called this high school and they said, “We’re looking for a band that’s appropriate for a high school prom.” And he said, “Yeah, Simply Saucer.” He told them we were just a perfect compliment to that evening.

Kevin Christoff: We promptly cleared the place. It was a little demoralizing.

Edgar Breau: I remember I was on my belly, screaming into the microphone, and after our first set the principal of the school came into the dressing room. He was almost to the point of tears saying, “Can you guys play something that we know?” Rick would always promise the world and we went out there and did the same thing all over again.

They did that snake dance where they all line up, so they seemed to be having a good time by the end of it. That’s the kind of gig we did in the early days. They were kind of bizarre.

Kevin Christoff: The Office was quite a scene. We met a lot of people. We were right off the street, so we were easy to find. There would be a knock on the door and there would be some people saying, “Oh jeez, we’ve been passing by here for six months listening to you guys and we’re just curious what’s going on in here,” that kind of thing. We attracted a lot of attention, as you probably could guess.

Actually, one night we were playing, going full throttle for a good hour and a half or so, and we decided to take a break and walk outside. Our practice space was right across the road from two pretty popular bars at the time, and we were faced with a mini riot. There were paddy wagons and cops everywhere and people getting arrested and taken down on the street. It was a huge brawl that had erupted in one of these bars, and here we were supplying the soundtrack to it. It must have been kind of weird if you’d happened to be on the street, watching this take place, to have Simply Saucer supplying the vibes to it all.

* * *

Edgar Breau: Our manager took us over to the Lanois studio in 1974, where Danny Lanois and Bob Lanois were working out of their mom’s basement. We were one of the early bands that they produced there.

Kevin Christoff: That was really special. None of us had ever done that before and, of course, working with Daniel and Bob Lanois, although then they were just a couple guys, in retrospect it’s another level of significance.

Bob Lanois: Simply Saucer came in just before I started building Grant Avenue Studio.

We had been working with Raffi before that. As a matter of fact, when I did Saucer it was actually at the tail end of the basement studio time. We had already been going at it for a few years and when I did Saucer, I already had in mind plans to make a move to the big city of Hamilton.

At that time we were in Ancaster. We were in just a plain little house in Ancaster in the basement, right below my mother’s bedroom. Drums are not her favourite instrument.

When Saucer knocked on my door I guess I was just ready for them and we went nuts. I took it seriously. At the age I was at, I forget how old I was; I think it was somewhere around twenty-four years old. I was kind of primed to just really live it.

But they just kind of showed up. I didn’t know a whole lot about their music or about them, but as I might have done in other cases I just gave them a good set-up so they could do their stuff. That’s all, really, so that they could really bloom and be themselves and yell at each other in front of me if they had to and all that stuff. So I think they just felt at home, they just did what they do, and I just got it on tape.

I was a real freak myself at the time. I guess I still am, sort of, but I was a full-blown freak then and so I think I fit right in to their band.

I think without realizing it I like anything that’s different, and I suppose I was a little bit musically sheltered to tell you the truth. I’m not sure how open-minded I was musically, and frankly this may have been somewhat of an education even for me. So I was really learning as we went, and it was very exciting because I find the learning process for anything a very alive feeling, and even today I’m that way. So I think something new was being revealed to me and I think I was loving it.

What I remember is that they were typical young guys kind of being a bit rough with one another. Serious, and kind of a little bit somber. It was not a giggly, silly atmosphere. There wasn’t a lot of humour going on. They had to be in a slightly darker mood to pull it off and so they kept that demeanor, and they were probably those kinds of people, anyway.

I think they were borrowing from, and they were adding their huge, original slant on music, but they were not doing a parody of anything and that suits me just fine.

Gary Pig Gold: At the risk of sounding at all overblown or even pretentious, I’d really equate that half-hour recorded at the Lanois’ Master Sound studio to Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions.

It really is that preposterous, and incongruous a project for its time and place. Not to mention, especially in retrospect, bravely historic. I guess it’s only too bad that there were no Sam or Dewey Phillips, not to mention Colonel Tom Parkers, in Hamilton in 1974.

Edgar Breau: Rick took the tapes from those sessions and got turned down. He went to all the major record companies in Canada with the tapes we made with the Lanois brothers and he could not get anybody to put that thing out, so it kind of really hurt because we had such high expectations … Rick did everything he could.

Kevin Christoff: Rick organized these little jaunts here, there, and everywhere. He would put together, on occasion, package deals where we actually played a handful of gigs at high school gyms and this is really kind of funny when I reminisce about it now.

John Balogh came along through Rick I think. At the time, I guess John was a bit of a promoter and what have you, but he was also a stand-up comedian along the lines of Cheech and Chong. It was druggie-type humour. He would go onstage and he would open up for us by delivering a performance of his various stories and situations and he would be followed by a folk singer.

This girl named Melinda would get up onstage, God bless her, armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar and sing. She wrote a few songs and then she’d do some Judy Collins and stuff, and then on would come us. So it was an interesting package. That’s how I remember John Balogh coming into the picture and I’m sure it was through an association with Rick, because Rick knew a lot of people in those days.

John Balogh: We didn’t have agents and managers back then so we were friends in this little community. There was a chap out of Burlington by the name of Rick Bissell who had promoted a few shows in and around town, so obviously every band and would-be comedian and roadie and everybody would have been stuck to this guy like the human tick just because he was somewhat in it; he was on the inside, we were on the outside.

So somehow we convinced this poor guy to put together a tour. I would have been the emcee, and then we would have had Simply Saucer on the bill and there were a few other unknown artists. There was Melinda Madden and there was another band I think. I never heard of the other ones after that. Maybe everybody married and lived happily every after.

Back then, there were no clubs like we have today where bands can go and play all the time. This was pre–all that, and Rick went out and sold this show, or this revue if you will – it was like a two-, three-hour show – to high schools.

So we were touring with bands and with people like myself who people had literally never heard of – ever, ever, ever heard of. And then when the bands get onstage: Simply Saucer’s music was like Pink Floyd, LSD; it was a creative endeavour. So if somebody like my mom and dad were in the audience, they would have looked at each other and said, “This guy’s on dope,” and walked out.

Simply Saucer would be playing and they’d finish a set – one song might have been a half-hour long – and then the song would finish and this is what you’d hear: nothing. Because people didn’t know whether they were supposed to clap or whether they were supposed to yell. They heard the band; they didn’t know if they liked it or not. It was new and they just didn’t know what to do – to clap, to cry, to throw something.

We toured like that probably for about a year, year and a half with Saucer. There was like this three-hour tour that we did. It should have been called the Gilligan’s Island Tour. But this guy Rick – and I don’t know if he was an armed thug or how he talked these high schools into booking this entourage – but I must say the guy had it down; he was pretty polished.

He was probably a short-hair and had a nice suit with some cologne so he’d go in and tell you how great the bands were, and nobody had any idea that there’d be some Moog half-hour solo by Simply Saucer, because back then stuff like that was unheard of. Like I said, end of the song nobody would know whether to laugh, clap, leave, or wait to see if there was another song coming. And he slugged it through. He would have been a pioneer. He was a promoter before I was a promoter.

People used to tell me, “You’ll never make a living in the music business. This is Hamilton. What are you, nuts?” Well, thankfully enough, we were nuts. Because if we had have been conformists like everyone else, instead of sitting here speaking to you today, I would be across the counter from you saying, “Would you like double cream in that?” Or, “Was it Export A or du Maurier?”

And that’s sort of what would have happened to us, because none of the guys from Simply Saucer or from Teenage Head or myself, none of us were Rhodes scholars. We had some artistic exploration that had to be done, and thankfully enough we lived in a country where you weren’t shot if you displayed some artistic inquisition, you know what I mean?

There was no real place here to play bands. It was a Steel City. So I went to the people that just built the Lloyd D. Jackson Square Mall in Hamilton and said, “You’ve got a four-acre rooftop garden up there, which is beautiful, with grass and trees and you can hear the wind and you’ve got a waterfall, but there’s really nothing happening and it’s not like an old stoner movie where they say, ‘Build it and they will come.’ They will not come unless you do something there. It needs some activity.”

Edgar Breau: It was fairly new, the Jackson Square Mall, right in the centre of Hamilton, downtown. John Balogh was a comic who opened for us on a tour and he booked us into that Jackson Square.

John Balogh: Everybody just wanted to work. They just wanted to play, and I just wanted to tell dirty jokes, and everybody just wanted to do what they thought they were gonna do the rest of their life, but there was nowhere to do it.

At the same time Teenage Head was just being put together, too, and everybody was sort of cutting their wings then. We would all have been sixteen, seventeen years old. As far as a music scene in Hamilton, there was none. We were the creators of the music scene, because if you went to anybody and said, “Oh, we’re in the music business in Hamilton,” they’d go, “Yeah, and on the weekends you’re at what institution?”

When you look back that far ago when I started doing the shows on top of Jackson Square, what was the reason or ideology? Well, my only reasoning then was definitely not money. My idea was I had all these friends that were in bands, but they had nowhere to play. They were always dying to fuckin’ go to Toronto. So my idea of that whole thing came about to give these guys somewhere to play so they don’t have to go to Toronto, and make it open to all ages. Because back then when I started doing that stuff, the booze thing wasn’t as big a deal as it is now.

Edgar Breau: We played I think the same day Pink Floyd played Ivor Wynne Stadium. It was in the middle of the afternoon and we had a fairly big crowd out there. Shoppers were stopping by to listen to the music. We were pretty hot that day. It was a really good gig. Some days you feel like the muse is visiting you, and that day my fingers were just flying on that fret board. We really let it rip.

I don’t know what the shoppers thought of it all.

Kevin Christoff: Somebody wrote in comparing how somebody would have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to go and see Pink Floyd, who were legendary at that time, but Simply Saucer are doing it for free and doing it better and all this stuff. That prompted a few responses from other people and what have you. We didn’t get a great deal of publicity about it, but we did get some reaction.

John Balogh: I still think to this day a good tour would have been Simply Saucer and Pink Floyd. They were happening at the same time, but Pink Floyd were commercially prostituted far beyond that of mortal men. Simply Saucer were in a league by themselves, in that the stuff that they played wasn’t as socially acceptable. I mean, London had a much larger underground, which would have afforded a band like Pink Floyd that momentum, if you will. Where, really, here we were in the city of Hamilton – the Steel City. Our strength was steel; our product was people.

Kevin Christoff: I would say one of the hardest times for the band was after the guitars got stolen. We were lined up to play at McMaster University and we had two nights. And the first night, despite the fact that we still had the electronics and so we were still pretty out there, we had a really large crowd, and apparently people were lined up to come in and see us so it was a really, really good night and the band was in good form.

And that next afternoon the guitars were stolen, but we still had a show to do. So we scrounged around and we got some substitutes, but they were very cheap instruments and we weren’t familiar with them and that night was an absolute disaster.

It was very demoralizing, not to mention the fact that after it was all said and done we had to face the fact that we had no instruments. We, being Ed and I, had insurance coverage for any kind of loss or theft with the Musicians’ Union, so it took a long time for the claim to come through. So there was a really long period of time where we didn’t have instruments, therefore we had no way of doing what we do.

We’d still all get together as if it were some ritual, but there was no music being played, no songs being written. That was a pretty bleak period. There was definitely momentum lost, absolutely.