DESTITUTION ROW
The Canadian folk-rockers who infiltrated the San Francisco ballroom scene and ended up at Monterey.
By JON ‘MOJO’ MILLS.
THE PAUPERS
Magic People
Ellis Island
Both Pacemaker CDs
www.pacemaker.cd
Canada. More British than America. More American than Britain. A rather sweeping statement I know, but when it comes to ’60s music it is somewhat true.
Take The Paupers, a Canadian band on the cusp of making it worldwide under Albert Grossman’s management – a group that played The Monterey Pop festival (largely due to Grossman’s influence it must be said) and went on to release two fine albums on Verve that, as the story ends, did not make them successful.
The Paupers liked a bit of folk-rock and country-rock as much as their American cousins, but when they pulled some psychedelic moves it was all oh-so-English.
Debut Magic People (1967) weaves delicate folk-rock tapestries around psychedelia, sounding not unlike The Byrds, The Blue Things or The Beau Brummels, but ‘Tudor Impressions’ is so Celtic it sounds like it could have been written in 18th Century Cornwall.
Ellis Island (’68) takes things further into psychedelia, loses some of the straight ahead pop, embraces a harder Cream/Hendrix blues-rock tone and displays an H P Lovecraft-meets-Jefferson Airplane flavour when the band are wigging out. This fuzzier, freakier approach works well when combined with the West Coast styled harmonies and richly introspective orchestrated material, which is quite often almost Bee Gees-like.
If there was one band who’d have been comfortable in Greenwich Village, the San Francisco Ballrooms and London’s Middle Earth Club it was these boys. |
