More Gladtone Stories #

This is a long time ago and some things I vaguely remember. I do remember being somewhat impressed with Jerry and I think that he was the one that talked Al and Vivian into bringing me into the group. Jerry was probably about two years older than me and he was in his last year of High School. It was his guitar that I played and I also played my saxophone on some songs. Jerry was funny and would always tell me funny things. Jerry also played bass in my band as well as the Gladtones.

Being older he would go into the city to attend some of the concerts. It would be another year or so before I got to see my first concert which was The Oakridge Boys when they did gospel. Anyway, there was this one time he was at a concert and I don’t know who the main act was but the warmup act was a band called the Centurions. He brought back some records and they impressed me and influenced me in some ways just as a spoiler alert, I crossed paths with these guys from this band.

Jerry and Doreen left at the end of that school year, Doreen was the other person outside of the couple that started the group. I am not sure why Doreen left but Jerry went on to live his life in Edmonton. The band regrouped and brought in another couple from the nearby town. She was a piano player and singer and her husband operated the PA system. We also all got matching suits. I think it was that summer that I bought my own guitar which was an acoustic Yamaki guitar and put a clip-on pickup on it and plugged it into my new pyramid Yamaha amplifier. We played every other Sunday at another church somewhere so I was kept busy playing, going to school, and every so often I would write more music and perform it usually with my brother. I would say I was probably in grade eleven during this time and this lineup lasted for about a year and then we re-grouped once again.

In my last year of High School, there were a lot of things that were happening besides the regrouping of the Gladtones. John Hohal, the son of the High School principal who was a year older than me, approached me and asked me if I wanted to give guitar lessons at the Barrhead Music and PhotoShop. He heard that I could play and read music and I guess he had been giving lessons there and he was leaving to go to the University in Edmonton. I took the job and that kept me from having to go to work at the family business for that whole year. We owned an Agriculture and Car Dealership/Gas Station, and I never liked working there. I would rather be teaching others how to play the guitar. The new lineup involved bringing in Marlene who was my age and grade from the German church of our denomination. She became the piano player and singer and another newcomer to our town, I think her name was Sharon Tate but I could be wrong as an additional singer and Al mixed from the stage.

I was unaware of Marlene until she joined the Gladtones and we did the usual of who our teachers were from grade one. Turns out we were in the same class only once, and that was in grade one. She also confirmed for me that this was the only class room that had its own restroom right in the back of the class. I would tell others about this and they didn’t believe that this was so. After that, we were never in the same classroom again. By this time the Gladtones also got a van and we traveled from church to church during the weekends, every other Sunday. That summer we had a tour lined up going into the Northwest Territories for two weeks. It was a fun trip and we had just a few stops. The first one was in Hay River, where by coincidence my Cousin was working for the summer. He and I would be living together when we both left for Edmonton. After that, we went to Fort Simpson where we put on a Vacation Bible Camp for the kids in the area and we played during the evening. I wasn’t involved in the Bible Camp so I had some time to explore the little town and in fact, I bought my first Chicago cassette there that got me inspired about the kind of band I wanted to put together. In the van, there was a cassette player and we had headphone jacks wired in the wall so you could plug in a set of headphones and listen to the music that was playing. I got to play my tape several times and studied the sound of Chicago. This was 1974, so this was probably Chicago VII which was recorded in the Caribou Ranch Studio in Nederland, Colorado. This was the first album that was much more jazz-influenced than their previous tracks. The studio, which I loved the concept of and I think I had dreams about a place like this, on a horse ranch with a Studio. The Studio was owned by their long-time producer James William Guercio.

The pastor at Fort Simpson was also a gifted radio engineer. He and his wife were from the UK and he was at one time part of a pirate radio broadcasting network. At the time only the BBC could broadcast radio and anything they did not find appropriate to play could not get played and that especially included any religious programs so they put together these ships that would sail around the UK and broadcast their signals. He also made a big impression on me and even lent me some early audio engineering magazines that he had and encouraged me to pursue my desire to produce music in a studio setting.

We went on to Yellowknife and I think we got to stay in the parsonage of the church as they had no pastor at the time. While we were there I had a birthday, I had just turned 18 and they surprised me with a Birthday cake and my cousin came up from Hay River to Yellowknife. This wasn’t like a cross-country big-time tour, but it was an interesting experience. During the summer they have days of 24-hour sunlight. We were there in August so they weren’t quite that long but it still produced a lot of heat and some of the biggest bugs I had ever seen. We had to drive with the windows closed so Al had rigged up a makeshift air conditioning system that worked pretty well. We had a five-gallon pail filled with ice and water, an electric fuel pump, and a small radiator with a fan. The fuel pump would take that ice-cold water and push it into the little radiator and then the water would flow back into the pail. This worked great until the fuel pump died as they were never designed to be running constantly like we had been doing.

On our way back from our tour, we stopped at Grand Prairie for a Sunday service. People from the church were inviting us to different homes for Sunday Dinner. The pastor of this church was once a pastor at our church many years ago. I think I was eleven or twelve so he would have been the pastor that presided over my young brother’s funeral. Anyway, there was a family that I had never heard of who was quite familiar with my Dad and his family. Turns out he was a cousin of my Dad and so they insisted that I come to their house for Dinner. He told me all the stories about my Dad that he never shared with us. These were the things that he got into trouble with like drowning a chicken. I am sure that there were other stories but that is the only one that sticks in my mind.

After this tour, I knew that I wanted to pursue a music career more specifically music production, and that would begin in a recording studio. I also knew without a shadow of a doubt that I wanted to put together a band that had a brass section. The dream was that this band could be used as the studio band when the need presented itself.