Uranus the Band.....Interview Part 1

Uranus Interview

Uranus was a local band from London Ontario, that had the extraordinary luck of timing and talent to achieve a top 10 hit on AM radio across Canada in 1980. They were around prior and during the musical upheaval of the new wave/punk era and didn’t fit that or the previous arena rock era. They were a rock’n’roll combo and liked it that way! As drummer Dexter Beauregard summed it “They (Uranus) could have been the Bare Naked Ladies, they had a million dollars, and all Frank (singer Frank Ridsdale) wanted was 5 Bucks!!!”

We’re going to start this, with a rundown of how each of the members of Uranus (Frank Ridsdale on guitar/keys/vocals, Jerry Fletcher on bass, Jack Whiteside on guitar/vocals and Dexter Beauregard on drums) got into music and met prior to the forming of Uranus. It’s a neat overview of the musical landscape in London from that era and gives you an idea of how influential music was. We’re going to start with Frank Ridsdale.

Frank Ridsdale picture by Robert Deibert

WW: What got you into music in the first place?

Frank: Well it was my brother that got me into it, cause he was 5 years older than me. He was always into stuff way ahead of me. So he was in a blues band in 67 or 68 and he dug Dylan and stuff from Britain. So he would teach me some chords on the guitar. So I started when I was about 11 years old. But I’d always been attracted to any kind of music and we always used to have a piano in the house and stuff like that. My brother got to see Elvis on TV, he remembers my father saying to my mother ‘that guy’s hopped up on something Marg’…laughter…

So I was too young to remember that but I remember the Beatles coming on and stuff like that. So he was hooked around that time.  He went out to get amplifiers and guitars and stuff when he was about 15 or 16.  Right away he started showing me stuff, chords and stuff. And I was way ahead of all the other kids in the neighbourhood as far as guitar was concerned, and even music. So for grade 8 graduation we did The Stones ‘Get Off My Cloud’ and ‘I’m A Man’, which is kinda funny, a bunch of 13 or 14 year olds playing that. That’s how I got into it.

WW: Did this band have a name?

F: Ya, it was called The Clutch. But our grad 8 teacher, he was a square. And everybody in the class knew we had a band. And he said, ‘we want talent for this grade 8 graduation, we don’t want any of this rock’n’roll stuff, we want people to play the piano or tap dance and stuff like that’. So I looked at the drummer and we thought we’re sunk. And then the other grade 8 teacher was progressive, and he said ‘we can have the tap dancing stuff and the classical piano playing, but I think we should go for some of this new stuff, some rock’n’roll’. And the other teacher starts nodding his head, and I’m thinking, you hypocrite. And that’s when I lost all respect for all teachers.

So he cut us off, we had 2 songs and people went crazy, the parents and everything, they just went nuts. We got the big standing ovation. But the square teacher cut us off.

WW: So was it at that moment in your life that you realized rock’n’roll was the way?

F: Oh ya, for sure, for sure. I thought people that didn’t like it were phony, like that bastard, the teacher. And then grade 9 we went on to soul bands. We had the Soulvation Army as a band. I played trombone in that. We did the steps with the horns and all of that. It didn’t last very long. We had this singer that had all of the accoutrements of soul singing. He sanded down his shoes so he could spin. And he had the look and everything. We practiced up in this guy’s bedroom, it was a big bedroom, we had a big band. We had 2 drummers and they shared a cymbal in the middle, so they used to both (makes cymbal smashing noises and laughs) and did the same, they were in unison, which I thought was really cool. The singer would be in the closet and he’d come out spinning like crazy and he’d go up to the mike stand and he’d have this great scream and then he couldn’t do any of the singing and didn’t know any of the words or anything like that… laughter…So we never got off the ground, we never got a singer…And then I changed to bass, because I remember the bassist in the soul band said ‘trombone, I don’t know’ and I said ‘I play guitar too…’. And he says ‘as soon as soul music goes out, you’re sunk, but everything uses the bass, every band in the world’. So I thought about that and took up the bass at that time. So the 2^nd year in high school I switched over to bass and we got into some blues bands and stuff like that. There were a couple of bands that I was in, Backtracking Blues Band and Bacon Fat. That was in 69 or 68…So then in 70, 71 I quit school and we were in a band and we thought we’d move to Toronto, when I was 17 or 18. That was Bobby Mitchell and The Southside Boys, the second incarnation of that band, there was the first incarnation with Jerry Fletcher, Dancin’ Dave Currie, Rudy ‘Sowbelly’ Green and Matt Campbell on drums. And they sort of disbanded and we joined, when Jerry was in the band, we thought we’d just take the name cause they had this great poster. That was when I was 18, and we started playing at The Vic (Victoria Tavern) in the basement and I played piano in that too.

WW: So is this where you first met Jerry Fletcher (bass player for Uranus)?

F: Ya. We used to play at this place on Adelaide St, there was this practice place and it was owned by Phil Murphy Sr (big band leader). And he would rent out rooms for bands, that’s where I met Tim Woodcock and those guys too. They used to have a band there. And then Jerry, I always thought that Jerry was a really good bass player. And I was playing bass at the time too, and I thought I could never be as good as this guy. He was light years ahead of me. So I thought I’d give up the bass cause I could never catch up to him, cause I always liked to be the best. So I thought I’d played piano before and I could play blues piano and there wasn’t too many of those kinda people around, so I started playing piano. So we had a blues band and we all moved to Toronto and we had Rudy ‘Sowbelly’ Green, Alan Candy, Dan Haugh was on drums and Jerry was on bass and I was on piano. And we all moved down to Toronto except for Jerry, he wanted to stay here and go to school at Western (University of Western Ontario in London). About 3 weeks after we moved down, the band disbanded….laughter. We took a year’s lease on a house. So I stuck it out in Toronto, Rudy moved back.  And I tried to get a band together with Dan and he got into another band. And I was almost going to get a band together with Mike Pickett (award winning blues artist), he was a blues harmonica player. We’d try to get some people together, but he didn’t like them and I didn’t like the people that he liked, so I just ended up working in Toronto for a year and not playing much. And that’s where I met Jack Whiteside (Uranus guitar/vocals) and Cam Marshman (Also from London, he ended up in Toronto rockabilly band, The Bopcats, among others). Jack was friends with Dan Haugh so he’d come over to our house, we had a big house, with a big kitchen in the back. So then those guys started hanging around, and I started to get to know Cam. And I bought this little tape recorder and Cam and Dan and I would do our own kinda thing. We’d start to make up songs in my room and record them and do funny stuff. And I did that a lot with Cam, cause he was sorta open to things. But I never knew Jack and John Mish, they were in a band called Choker in London first, in 68 or 69. I remember seeing them and I thought that they were a really good rock’n’roll band. They had Paul D’Angelis on drums, Head they used to call him, and the front man BJ, Wes Moreland and Cam played bass, John Mish played guitar and Jack played guitar. I saw them at Victoria Park once and I thought that they were really cool. They moved to Toronto too, a year or 2 before we did and they lived in Toronto for the longest time and I thought that they were sorta seasoned guys. And then they started practicing at our place, cause we didn’t have a band. And then I moved back (to London) in 73 or 72, and then I got a place on Lorne Ave, near Adelaide with Jerry.  We just had a little place and I had a piano in there. So then we got into forming other blues bands just to play around, but Jerry got into the Little Boy Blues Band (not the band from Chicago with the identical name, but the London Ontario based band). He was one of the founding people in that band, that was a band with Jim McLain on guitar, Jerry on bass, Bill Leigh, a guy from Hamilton played harmonica and sang, can’t remember who played drums, and then it was Dexter (Beauregard, drummer for Uranus) on drums.

WW: So that’s how you met Dexter?

F: Ya, Dexter drummed in that band. He was this young kid from Chicago and he was incredibly young, but he was really good. He was a wild little fucker. That was about 1975.

Jerry Fletcher picture by Robert Deibert

Now we talk to Jerry Fletcher (bass player) and find out his musical beginnings.

WW: What got you into music?

Jerry: When I first started getting interested in music, it was because I heard the music on the radio, this would be about 1963 and I had a good friend whose name was John Cotton. We couldn’t play any instruments, so we made guitars out of cardboard and we designed them ourselves and painted them and they were pretty crazy looking guitars and we would play air guitar. We were 11 or 12 I guess, and we did that and it was the radio (that got my musical interest). And I started buying records and I had a sister who was a coupla years older who was also into music at the time. She was an influence as she was buying records before I was. Cool records, Bo Diddley, Bobby Bland and stuff like that, so I heard that stuff when I was 14 or 15 years old, so I knew who Bo Diddley was. In fact Bo Diddley’s ‘Roadrunner’ is one of the first licks that I learned on the guitar. It was pretty straightforward, I could figure that one out…laughter…The Rolling Stones and The Beatles and The Animals and all that stuff. I was just the right age to get completely sucked into all of it, grade 5, grade 6, it was just so huge! Me and a lot of my buddies just got into it big time. But we were just goofing around, I was too much of a kid at that time to really decide that I wanted to play guitar.

WW: When and what was your first band?

Jer: Like I said, I just goofed around without really paying attention to what I was doing, like you had to get a guitar and after a couple of weeks you can sorta figure something out of it, even if the guitar isn’t tuned properly and that’s where I was at. It was just another toy that you played with. Then I met a guy named Dave Currie and got into a band with Dave Currie, Matt Campbell, Rudy Green, Ben Webster and myself. And some of these guys could really play. Matt Campbell was a really good drummer and Dave Currie was a really good guitar player and I wasn’t there yet. I had enough natural talent to figure out, after awhile, what I had to do to keep up with these guys. I think we were called Fletcher’s Trolley when we first started playing.

It was not named after me, Fletcher’s Trolley is some sort of gizmo that’s used in a physics experiment and Dave Currie, who was a pretty sharp guy in school and physics, thought that would be the name of the band. That was really the first band I was in. And that band turned into a band called Bobby Mitchell and the Southside Boys. We were pretty good, now I’m talking grade 12 or 13. There were a lot of good bands around at that time, this would be the late 60’s. I grew up in Byron (suburb of London Ontario) and there were a lot of people in Byron who could really play. It gave you something to shoot for because you knew what a live band was supposed to sound like. I heard a lot of live music when I was a kid. I was playing bass at the time which I did for a lot of years.

WW: So you played in a band with Frank prior to Uranus?

Jer: Ya, I remember the first time I saw Frank. Well, when I was in Bobby Mitchell and The Southside Boys, and we got some gigs, and we used to play in a place, I think it was called the Mayfair Room, it was where Fryfogles (a major club for touring bands for many years) was later, on Dundas St, across from Scotts Corners where the Galleria is now. Somehow we got a gig there, we used to play high schools and stuff like that, so we were not bad, pretty decent actually for the time. And Frank had a band, I think they were called Backtracking Blues Band at the time and I remember seeing them at the York Hotel (later to become Call The Office). It was Frank playing bass, his brother Jim was singing, Al Candy played guitar, Rob Wilmot played harmonica and Vinny Waldis played drums and they sounded really good and they were a blues band. I remember at the time, they really sounded proper, like they had the blues thing down really good. So that’s when I first ran into Frank. And then about a year later I was in a band that practiced at a place called Sounds Unlimited and Frank was in a band that practiced there. This was a house on Adelaide St, near Oxford. It was cool. It was a little house that had 3 or 4 rooms that you could rehearse in. So you’d rent a room cheap, we were in high school so we didn’t have much money. They also gave lessons and stuff there.

So somehow members of the 2 bands amalgamated, I can’t remember all the details, so I ended up in a band with Frank, this was probably about 72, I’m guessing. I can still remember the first time we got together, I thought Frank’s band was really good and it was really what I wanted to play at the time. It was a really good match up for me. It seems like we used to play down at the Vic Hotel almost every week, we’d play a Friday or Saturday night and this went on for quite awhile, throughout one whole summer at least and maybe more. So that’s how I ran into Frank, cause Frank lived in a different part of the city from me, I was in Byron and he lived over by St Joe’s Hospital, so we wouldn’t normally have crossed paths. So that’s where we first started playing together, he was playing piano at the time.

WW: So with that band, you moved to Toronto?

Jer: Well they all did, but I didn’t. I went to university for a year, but that didn’t work out. Then after that year, I got a job working for my dad’s construction company for a year and worked in Northern Ontario, which was kinda cool. I spent a summer in a small town north of Sudbury and we bunked out at a motel and at the motel there was a bar that always had a band. Which is when I got exposed to a lot of country music, there was always bands coming in and that’s where I first got exposed to Hank Williams and Merle Haggard.. So this is 73 or so. It’s kinda funny because, I think the space between when I first met Frank or even first got serious about playing music which was probably 71, and then I went on the road with a band called Little Boy Blues Band with Dexter about 73. So that’s only a space of a coupla years so a lot of stuff happened for me in that space of a couple of years. The difference between being 18 and 20 or 21 is huge.

So I went on the road with a band and played lots of blues which was the thing that I was really into at the time. I like to listen to other kinds of music, but that’s kinda what I was really into. So that’s how I met up with Dexter.

Dexter Beauregarde unknown photographer

WW: And now we talk to Dexter (drummer for Uranus), what got you into music in the first place?

Dexter: I was born in Blind River (Ontario) but due to family problems and things like that, I ended up with my grandparents in Chicago when I was one or 2. At age 8, cousins, my cousins lived in the same neighbourhood and we had a really tight neighbourhood, they’re getting guitars and I wanted to be part of it. So I got a nice Rogers snare drum, took lessons down there, Austin Academy of Fine Arts. I loved playing drums, even at that age. My mother was a waitress, she’d leave at 3:30 in the afternoon when I got home from school, gone all night, she worked Conrad and Hilton and shit like that in Chicago. So I was alone all night with my kid brother and not much to do when you’re stuck in the house. So I’d turn on the Motorola and play along with the radio.

WW: So let’s talk about some of your early bands prior to Uranus.

D: I’m not even going to get into the American bands, we’d play clubs down there in Chicago as a kid and I wasn’t even supposed to be in them. I was trying to do high school, playing till 4 in the morning. They’d still serve me my drinks back in the dressing room…laughter, but I was out on the street a couple of times at 3:30 in the morning and the cops pull up and would go ‘what are you doing out here?’. And I’d say ‘I’m playing in a band’ and they’d say, ‘get back in the club’. But a number of groups down there, lots of studio time. I really enjoyed studios down there and that was my first inkling that I really loved music. I know I’m dating myself, but back then, they used to make something called an acetate. You’d go in the studio and they’d burn you a record right there, you’d see the grooves being cut and it was so cool!!! Brought it back to high school and said ‘Listen to this!!’ But early bands in London, there was just one, Little Boy Blues Band.

WW: So you came right from Chicago into that band?

D: Pretty much. My grandparents told me they were moving back to Canada, because my grandfather retired and they wanted to move back, home country, right? They said ‘come back and try it, cause you’ll be alone down here’. Cause all of the family was going this way and that way. So they moved up here and I was at a high school dance and there was The Little Boy Blues Band. And it just turns out there was a drummer named Randy Coryell, who was a marvelous, marvelous drummer and he was leaving. And the kids from the town that I was hanging out in got me up on stage and I did a couple of songs with them, and then they set me up for an audition a few months later. So I came to London and auditioned and boom, I was in, I was just 17 going on 18.

WW: Any idea what year that might have been?

D: 74, 75. So a couple of years, 2 and a half years with those guys. And the first 8 months was with Willie Leigh, and then TimWoodcock got into the scene, cause Willie was going back to school to be a chemist.

WW: So you would have met Jerry in Little Boy Blues Band…

D: Ya, ya, that was a great band! Little Boy Blues Band was a great great band. So Woodcock took over the front position and we carried on, local stuff and all the universities up and down the 401, even Ottawa. And it was a good gig, we had regular bookings, like every 5 weeks at the El Mocambo (Toronto), the old Fryfogles club, every 5 weeks the Firehall. We nailed it down, that was when clubs did 5 or 6 nights a week and then your matinee, so you made a living. You didn’t need $500 a week to live on, you could get by on $200! 

Jack Whiteside picture by Robert Deibert

WW: And now we talk to Jack Whiteside (guitar and vocals), what got you interested in music?

Jack: I was thinking about this, and there’s some really, really important songs to me and they seem to be from 1960, 1961 when I was about 10 years old. So I was really into the radio, into the music before I ever started playing guitar. And we would listen all the time, and my buddies, we would play DJ and stuff. Duane Eddy was the first guy that got me into wanting to play guitar. But I had to wait for my family.  Back in those days, the late 50’s, they’d come around to your house, the Ontario Conservatory of Music, they would knock on your door literally. And they’d say ‘what do you want? You can take piano, accordion, guitar you had 2 choices, Hawaiian or Spanish’. They tried accordion with my brother but that didn’t take. Then they skipped over me and they went to my younger sister with piano and that didn’t take. And I’m rubbing my hands together, itching for guitar. So I took some lessons. I was about 12 and they start teaching you all this old timey stuff, standards and stuff. And the teacher was this little old lady, Edith Hill Adams She was a fairly famous guitar teacher, she taught Tommy Hunter (famous Canadian country music star that had his own weekly television show on CBC), that was her claim to fame. She was great, and she would write out the music right in front of you, all the notes and quarter notes. And you’d try to get through it…’pling pling etc etc’. And when the lesson was over, she’d play it like (Plings super fast). After awhile, I was still listening to the stuff on the radio and I said ‘I wanted to learn some more modern stuff, rock’n’roll’. So she gave me some Johnny Cash and Elvis. I wanted to play electric guitar but my folks would never spring for one. But when I finally got one, you know what you do, I’m in like grade 9, 14 or 15 by this time, but anybody that you knew that played guitar, you’d just get together with them and you’d pick their brains or just steal what ever they knew that you didn’t know. You’d learn and vice versa they could take it from you. And a lot of the guys who were playing guitar in those days, this is before The Beatles, before the (British) invasion, they were greasers, hard rocks, ducktail guys and they’d be playing guitar. And I’d put that together and that was great, cause I would always look up to those guys, the greasers. They were always getting into trouble and shit. Well I thought that was a good thing to get into music, you don’t have to fight or drive a car or hot rod.

WW: So when did you get your first band going?

J: First band, probably when I was about 15, 1964 or 65, something like that. I was getting this reputation for being a hot shot guitar player at the time. Cause I would just practice all the time, that’s all I did, playing The Stones over and over, learning the licks. Then you finally meet some guys and you get in a band, you’d say garage band now, but back then it was more like basement band. I don’t really think anybody really rehearsed in a garage, it’d be too loud, you’d get complaints. You’d have to find somebody’s parents who were cool enough to let you practice in their basement. And it was like, you knew a guy, ‘I’m the lead guitar player cause I know the most’, and the next guy, he would be the rhythm guitar player and the guy that knew the least would be the bass player. And you’d have 2 or 3 guys going through one amp. You’d just trash around trying to play the stuff that you like. The first band I was in was called the Grapes of Wrath, obviously there was another band called that later on. This was 1965, we never played out, still in the basement. And then a couple of other bands and I remember playing at high school one time, on stage with another band, doing like Hendrix and Cream stuff, faking the Hendrix stuff mostly. (laughter) The Clapton stuff I could do, but faked the Hendrix stuff. Then, this is the dividing line, you’ve got to get out of the basement eventually, and you go downtown and you play in a band that actually plays gigs, and dances. It’s like an initiation into a special club and somebody heard about me. I think it was actually Doug Varty, he was one of the earliest guys I played with and he went to Beal (local high school) and he knew my brother. My brother said ‘my brother is a hot shot guitar player’. And then I went downtown and tried out, and the band was called BJ Franklin and the East West Project and where we rehearsed was at Thee Image, downtown, it was a nightclub run by Nick Panaseiko (legendary local promoter) and these other guys, on Richmond St, right across from Carling St., just north of Dundas. And so I had to go downtown and audition and all this. And they accepted me and I was in, and then you have to join the union, get somebody to sign you in. And that’s the joke of that day, you’d have to have this contract, and it would be this long (holds arms apart) and it would have 30 or 40 names on it cause it’s based on the big band. 5 guys in the band and you’ve got space for 25 more names. And the leader gets double, right? In the lineup of the band in those days, you had a front man, and you had a lead guitar player and generally an organ player, not 2 guitarists, bass and drums. A 5 piece band with a front man and we were doing a lot of soul stuff, all the bands were doing soul in those days. Otis Redding and ‘Try A Little Tenderness’ and stuff like that and the Mandala was a big thing and everyone idolized Dominic Troiano (Mandala guitarist, went on to the Guess Who and many others). So that was 1968 and I first started playing some gigs. It was great, I was 17 and I was going downtown every night and fuck the homework, we gotta practice and we’re smoking hash from a pen barrel and laughing your ass off and playing tunes.  That band was around for awhile and that kind of morphed into Choker.  I had a buddy that I grew up with, John Mish, we went to high school together and he was like the king of guitar players. He was a better guitar player and he was ahead of me and he could pick up all The Who, The Yardbirds and that stuff and he moved to Toronto. My brother and him moved to Toronto in like 69 and I wanted to get more into the rock’n’roll and get away from the fucking organ for one thing and basically we fired Doug Varty and replaced him with Mish. But we had to move to Toronto to do that which we did, so then the lineup was me and John Mish, 2 lead guitar players that just thought we were hot shit, Cam Marshman on bass, BJ, Bruce Westmoreland, they called him BJ Franklin, his manager gave him this name, when we were the house band up at Thee Image.

We chose to take the (band promotional) picture by a junk pile just in back of where we were living. But you can see, we were way too grungy. They gave us the shittiest jobs. But what highschool is gonna hire these guys when they see a colour picture?  Laughter!

But at that time, all the Toronto bands had the shag haircuts, like The Lords Of London, they had the boots and we couldn’t afford it. We couldn’t afford clothes, we just went on with what we were wearing, we didn’t have any stage clothes. We would practice all the time, we wrote songs, we were really tight.

WW: Anything recorded by this band?

J: We went into the studio quite a few times, we had this manager, Wyn Anderson and he was like a dealer, an entrepreneur but shady stuff. A really good talker, really good on the phone and he would get us all this time in the studios, and then just not pay for it. So then you can’t get the masters, you get the experience, but you don’t have anything to show for it. We did some really good stuff in the studio and there’s one thing, an acetate of one song we did at Fanshawe College, actually. Win had connections with Tom Lodge (Radio Caroline DJ in the 60’s, founder of MIA program at Fanshawe College). And we were probably one of the first rock’n’roll bands to be recorded there, that program was just starting there (MIA). But it was an acetate that you are only supposed to play once or twice and we played the shit out of it.

So Choker, we were contemporaries of Thundermug (London Ontario band that had a huge hit with Africa in 1972) and we were just heavy into The Stones and R&B stuff, we didn’t do anything off the radio, that’s the only reason…laughter…what we looked like! These other bands are playing ‘I’m Your Captain’ and stuff off the radio and they are getting all kinds of gigs. We just didn’t do that and we didn’t jump around or anything, we just played, we were serious. We practiced all the time and they just kept sending us way the fuck up north (Northern Ontario) all the time, sleeping in a truck. But it was fun. It was a lot of fun, but you were just deadly poor, maybe $40 a week or something you could live on. I’ve got the records from those days and it was just incredible. For $200 you’d go up to Cochrane or North Bay. So we stayed in Toronto and we were just beating our heads against the wall and we lasted about 4 or 5 years. We went there June of 1970, we left town (London) with a truck full of stuff and $90 and we went to Toronto and that was it. You’d have to borrow money from somebody’s folks or something and then you have to pay your fucking union dues, then you have to pay the agents, booking agents are the worst, 15% or something and all the stupid contracts.

Choker poster supplied by Jack Whiteside

WW: So when you were living in Toronto, you ran into Frank, is that correct?

J; Ya, he was living in Toronto, this was more towards the end of, maybe 73 or 74. Choker broke up officially in 73. Frank was a friend of Cam’s. He was living on Pape Ave and he was living with some other guys and they were playing in a blues band. And he seemed to be a pretty good guy. I didn’t really meet him till I moved back to London. But before I came back to London, there was some time with Matt Lucas (American rock’n’roll/rockabilly/blues/soul legend) He’s in the rockabilly hall of fame now. He was the guy that played around the same time as Ronnie Hawkins and Conway Twitty when they came up here from the states, he was a cat from Memphis. But his claim to fame, he had a big hit with ‘Movin’ On’, a remake of the Hank Snow song. And people thought he was black. And he was playing in Toronto while I was living up in Roncesvalles.  And after Choker broke, Cam (Marshman) ended up getting a gig with Matt Lucas, as the bass player. And he was playing with this really hot shot piano player, but the piano player was leaving so Cam tried to get me a job with him. This was a real job, like 6 nighters with the band, nightclub kind of thing. I don’t know if I auditioned, but I got hired. Well I thought great, cause I’m not doing anything and not making any money. Anyways, I could keep on going on about Matt Lucas he was a real cat, he’s pretty much a first generation rock’n’roll guy and he could really sing and he was real authentic. But this was, as I found out later, this was the low point of his whole career, when we met him and we played for him. He was scrapping the bottom of the barrel just driving around with a trailer and trying to keep up. You know he’d smoke the big cigar cause he was a cat, a rock’n’roll guy and he knew a lot of people and he played the part. And he was a guy that used to drink a quart of vodka a day, but he wasn’t drinking (when we played with him) he was popping the pills. He played the drums right, just barely, he was competent enough. It was just drums, bass and guitar, quiet little stuff. But he had it down actually so he could put a pill on his drum and pop it into his mouth like that (shows hitting drum and popping pill and catching it in his mouth) and he was full of stories, womanizing stuff and all of that. Anyways, because I had to replace the piano player, because he did all kinds of Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis songs which is hell for a guitar player, but it worked out good for me, because I had to learn to play both left and right hand of the piano, so I’m playing both parts. I’m playing the bass strings and upstroking on the top strings which is still part of my style. And we would do like 5 sets a night, 6 nights a week and a matinee (Saturday afternoon). And the first set was all standards, ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’, ‘Slow Boat To China’ and just crazy stuff. And we had to wear these suits, like tuxedos, white tuxes with a little bow tie. But, every Saturday night, $175 right in your hand. If you think about it, it was a lot of money in 1974. That was really good money!

Basically we played one summer with Matt Lucas. We played half in Windsor, these funky taverns, just like the states you know. Drouillard, ask anybody from Windsor about Drouillard Road. That was like the states where they have these taverns that have battles with each other and you’re loyal to one of them. And we played up in Callander, near North Bay, it was like half and half. It was like our Hamburg or something…the trenches.

Anyways played with Matt Lucas and then got back to Toronto and moved back to London. 

Early picture of band supplied by Jack Whiteside.

In our next chapter, the guys talk about Ricky McLagen Review, Cheeseburger Deluxe and the beginning of Uranus.

Here's a link to part 2:

https://radiowhatwave.blogspot.com/2020/01/uranus-bandinterview-part-2.html