Richard Baker ....

1977: How I joined Doug and the Slugs:

I was playing in dives in a semi-popular country/swing band called "Blue Northern." Wally, a.k.a. John Watson, was the regular drummer in Blue Northern, but he often subbed out his chair when the Slugs were renting a hall and selling tickets and beer. The band line-up was as follows:

Doug was the front-man/singer; John Burton was the guitarist, Drew Neville played keyboards, Dennis Henderson was the bass player, and Larry "Lunchpail" MacGillivray was the drummer.

As often as not, Larry couldn't make the gig for whatever reason. Wally always got the calls to replace Larry on drums and Drew extended to me an ongoing invitation to "sit in." As these Slug-fests usually took place on a Friday or Saturday night, I would hack my way through my country gig with some drummer who didn't know the tunes, then heave my gear into my Falcon stationwagon and show up in time for the Slugs' last set. John Burton and Drew were both pretty patient about hollering out the changes, so I got to know some of the material fairly well before too long.

This situation continued for several months, and that's how I became acquainted with Doug. When Doug and John decided that they wanted to play in public more often, they realized that some of the "original" guys couldn't commit. Wally and I were given the opportunity to join up with them sometime during the fall of 1978; then the quest for a bass player began. Steve "Bozz" Bosley eventually got the nod as the new bass player, partly due to the fact that he had an S.V.T. amplifier and SIX pars! We were rehearsing almost daily at John's "character" rental pad when our old pal, Simon Kendall, announced that he was tired of planting trees in the Kootenays and expressed an interest in joining the group. Since John, Wally, Simon and I had known each other since high school (or longer, in the case of Simon and I) the line-up looked promising. We played our first show at the long-gone Elks' Hall at the north end of the Granville bridge on Dec. 8, 1978.

The next two years were some of the best in my life in many ways. I was happily married and working my butt off, and Doug and the Slugs rapidly became one of a very select few local bands who played to packed houses five and six nights a week, leaving town only to play in Kamloops and Victoria. We made better money than a lot of people with real jobs and we had fun and we were proud. And we were good. We kicked ass and we were funny, too. The band chemistry was interesting because all the instrumentalists had already spent several years grinding it out week after week. There were many moments of brilliance on those sweaty, cramped stages even though I wouldn't characterize any of the players as a "virtuoso." The whole of what we had was greater than the sum of its parts, and the wild card in the band's hand was Doug Bennett.

Doug rapidly gained confidence while performing his songs: when I first sat in with Doug and the Slugs in a Gastown loft, he couldn't face the audience without feeling uncomfortable, a beer in one hand and a smoke in the other. By the summer of 1979, he was all over the room. John and I spent a fair amount of time playing on the dance floor if there was space. Otherwise we worked the table-tops off-stage. If we kicked over your drink, we'd get you another. We also played back-to-back on stage while Simon and Steve juxtaposed their 6'5" vs. 5'6" height discrepancy to great advantage. We wore out a lot of Belden cable while we developed our showmanship and we worked on what became our debut, and most successful, album entitled "Cognac and Bologna."

When Mt. St. Helen's erupted, the recording sessions for "Cognac and Bologna" were well under way. The band was staying in Toronto to avoid distraction, with limited success. We bunked in downtown Toronto and commuted to "Metalworks" studio in Mississauga for four weeks. You probably have the preceding information from several points of view, but I needed to reminisce my way through it to get the juices flowing

Some of my most important contributions to Doug and the Slugs recorded output are:

Cognac & Bologna

  • Chinatown Calculation: I played the rockabilly guitar riffs that intro the tune and continue throughout. For some reason, no-one can really cover this part.
  • Drifting Away: I played the tremolo guitar part and the solo. The flavour of this tune is unlike anything else we ever committed to vinyl.
  • Stay With Me: One of our "punk" experiments. I played the lead guitar on this song, and I am still convinced that it should have been in "A" rather than "A flat." Oh well...
  • Too Bad: Who could forget this one. It’s so wacky, but it works.

    Wrap It

  • Real Enough: I played the lead guitar on this one. I asked for two takes on the closing solo, but they kept the first one, anyway.
  • Wrong Kind of Right: For some reason, people remember this one. Maybe it's because Doug introduces me by name before the "guitar interlude" (turn your flanger way-y-y-y up and forget 99% of what you know!)
  • Partly From Pressure: You gotta have rhythm guitar, too. Still a classy song.

    Music for the Hard of Thinking

  • Making It Work: John produced me playing the lead guitar and the overdubbed double-track guitar on the LAST afternoon of our sessions at Water Street Sound. He steered me away from anything too fancy while the crew and engineers took our gear down around us.
  • Who Knows How: This cover of an original song was the idea of our producer, Ritchie Cordell. I played the solo at Water Street, then we overdubbed the chorus power guitar at Kingdom Sound, Long Island, New York, where we mixed the album. One of the highlights of that trip was the visit to Columbia Mastering Labs in Manhattan where those in attendance saw the eight-track Studer desk used by Jimi Hendrix for " Electric Ladyland." Cool! The thing looked like it came out of a submarine.

    Popaganda

  • Day by Day: The lead guitar break in this song is what we used to call a "nolo" because the lead vocal was the centre of interest in the solo section of the tune. The real challenge was to noodle around the lyrics.

    Tomcat Prowl

  • Climbing the Walls: I even got a writing credit on this one. Those things were few and far-between.
  • It Must Be the Rain: Our producer, Brian "Too Loud" McLeod let me out of my cage on this one. Not a hit, but an interesting piece.
  • Tomcat Prowl: This tune is the best example of Brian McLeod taking a good, new,original tune from Doug and John and making it feel like "Too Bad" in terms of how he got the instruments to work together. It should have been more successful. oh well.
  • Powerful Thing: Can I live without overdrive, they asked.

    So much for my long-winded yet incomplete tour of our discography.

    In retrospect, the 1980's went by quickly. We toured Canada, New England and the U.S. west coast relentlessly with the exception of the first half of 1986, when Doug worked on his solo project. We spent brutal amounts of time driving, and it proved to me that one really does get paid to show up. That is the hard part. The gig is where one cuts loose and, if one is lucky, it all seems worthwhile. And there were the special moments:

    "Geronimo" - last sound heard before the huge splash and poolside shrieking when our burly road manager half-emptied the Capri Hotel pool with a birthday bellyflop.

    "Trolling for gophers" - last sound heard before gales of laughter at the sight of two buddies driving on the shoulder of Hiway 102 at seven miles per hour.

    "Baker, you dog" - last sound heard before Peter McCullouch took the darts away from Wally and I in the Keg Whistler condominium at 4:00 a.m.

    "Focus down" - not always the last sound heard before the passenger section settled down.

    "Three no trump" - We used to play a lot of bridge. It helped.

    "More smoke" - last thing heard before a round of cursing on stage as Mikey Dube fired up the fog machine yet again.

    "Let's just fucking get there" - first words out of several mouths in unison following any sort of suggestion for a recreational stop.

    All in all, my tenure with the band from 1978 to 1992 was way more good than bad. It certainly did not always seem that way at the time. However, when I think of how much of North America we got paid to see, it still amazes me. From Port Hardy to Cape Spear, from San Diego to Inuvik, from Alert, N.W.T. to Washington, D.C.,we really got around for a good long while and we made a lot of people happy for a moment or two. A guy could do worse.

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