Can-Con 45 Of The Day - September 21

[radiofan]

Today's Can-Con 45 is from 1973 .. From Kitchener, Ontario it's Copper Penny and "Sitting On A Poor Man's Throne" ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMD0kRTyq5s

[jon]

Have to credit the late Gord Robson with introducing me to this great, great song. He played it a lot on CHQT at his last gig as Program Director.

[Richard Skelly]

Interesting to see this Sweet Plum release. I remember Sitting On A Poor Man's Throne also getting Canadian release on the CHUM-owned MUCH label. Similar to Michel Pagliaro whose marvellous English-language rock recordings also got issued on MUCH.

Just guessing. Perhaps Sweet Plum--linked to A & M Canada--emerged to reissue this Copperpenny disc to greater success. That would've given MUCH a second opportunity to recoup their investment by licensing out the master tapes. As they did for some early April Wine recordings which went to Aquarius in Canada and Big Tree stateside. Indeed, it was Big Tree that released Sitting On A Poor Man's Throne in America.

Formed in mid-60s Kitchener, quintet Copperpenny was initially signed to Columbia Records Canada. By 1969, the group was on Nimbus 9 as that Jack Richardson-controlled label expanded its roster in the wake of global success for The Guess Who.

[paterson]

Sweet Plum is a bit of a head scratcher. 12 of Sweet Plum's 16 releases have a connection to MUCH Records/Productions. I always thought that Sweet Plum was probably owned by MUCH. Sitting On a Poor Man's Throne was released twice in 1973, first on the MUCH label and then on Sweet Plum (both versions were distributed by London Records.) Later material on Sweet Plum was distributed by A&M, but MUCH had also moved distribution to A&M late 1973 into 1974.

April Wine never appeared on the MUCH label even though the first three albums were produced by Much Productions and the band was signed to MUCH. All of this material, singles and albums were on Aquarius.

MUCH artists like Sea Dog, Mantis, Tony Kingston and of course Copper Penny all had releases on Sweet Plum as well as MUCH. Most of these were not re-releases of material like Sitting on a Poor Man's Throne. Could it be that MUCH was experimenting somewhat to see if their artists would have more success on a secondary label that was not so closely tied to CHUM radio? The logos for 1050 chum and MUCH records are very similar.

Just thinking out loud here but would other broadcast groups that were in direct competition with CHUM stations across the country have some hesitation programming music from a label which was owned by this competitor? I am not implying this was rampant but it might have been potentially an issue and possibly MUCH was testing to see if it made any difference to the acceptance of a song. Sitting on a Poor Man's Throne had more success on the Sweet Plum label but I don't know if there was much of a gap between the two releases.

I was wrong about Pagliaro being the only MUCH artist to have international releases. As Richard Skelly mentions above, April Wine had material released in the US and some releases on the PYE label, and Copper Penny also had releases in the US. In fact Sitting On a Poor Man's Throne received a lot of airplay on CKLW and was picked up by various US stations in the mid-west.

[paterson]

Richard Skelley might be the only person that will find this interesting. I was on discogs website earlier and I noticed that the serial number for both the MUCH and Sweet Plum releases of Sitting on a Poor Man's Throne by Copper Penny are the same. Both versions have the Sweet Plum serial number SPL 9914, so this makes me think that the MUCH release may have been printed in error. This single will be a collectors item and could be quite valuable. In fact any release with the MUCH logo is hard to find and eventually will be worth a few bucks.

This furthers my belief that Sweet Plum was a secondary label and owned by MUCH. Also found out that they had another secondary unit for the french market in Quebec with the Fleur label but only released 3 or 4 singles and one album. All of the various labels were originally distributed by London and later moved to A&M. Much International also released some material in french and english but seemed to be licensing releases from other companies. So in reality Much Productions released about 70-75 singles and albums during the four and a half year existence as a production, record and publishing company.