Can-Con 45 Of The Day - October 26

Can-Con 45 Of The Day - October 26

Postby radiofan » Thu Oct 25, 2018 9:12 pm

Today's Can-Con 45 is from 1965 .. From Vancouver, it's Terry Jacks & The Chessmen and "Love Didn't Die" ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT-tKCm3uzQ

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Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who couldn't hear the music.
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Re: Can-Con 45 Of The Day - October 26

Postby Richard Skelly » Fri Oct 26, 2018 2:26 am

Somewhere out on the Net is a delightful, super lengthy interview with Terry Jacks from a few years back. Alas, I did not bookmark it. Covering all phases of his career, it included his reflections on The Chessmen.

By now, most Jacks aficionados know that the initially all-instrumental group played, without a drummer, the frat house circuit at UBC. Both band founder-guitarist Guy Sobell, rhythm guitarist Terry and other members were enrolled at the university. Even when the first of several Chessmen drummers signed on, the band recorded an instrumental, Meadowlands, for its first single in autumn 1964.

Terry, however, was concerned his merely competent rhythm playing might make him expendable. So he bore down on writing and singing originals to safeguard his position. The Way You Fell, released in March '65 on London Records, was the band's first vocal release. Between that 45's success on Vancouver airwaves and a fortuitous link up with Brenda Lee's manager--the late Dub Albritten--the boys got a contract with Mercury Records.

But there was next to no advance money. So it was a long Greyhound bus trip that got band members to their first Mercury sessions in Nashville with Jerry Kennedy. Just before leaving Vancouver, Terry was dumped by his girlfriend who had thought she'd soon be hitched to Terry the architect-in-training...and not a musical vagabond.

Despite the anger and urgency of Love Didn't Die, that quasi garage rock song was not apparently based on Terry's romantic humiliation. However, in the lengthy interview mentioned above, Terry did reveal that right on the bus, he began channeling his wounded feelings into a song that would take two or three more years to fully complete. Written from the perspective of a heartbroken narrator on a long bus trip, it was eventually titled That's Where I Went Wrong. And became the fourth single for The Poppy Family. Sung by Terry's then-wife Susan, it was the followup to million-selling Which Way You Going Billy.

As for Love Didn't Die, it was released in November 1965. It didn't chart stateside. But Mercury was impressed enough that The Chessmen were able to fly from Vancouver a few months later for their second and final Mercury sessions that resulted in their band swan song What's Causing This Sensation.
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