Sweet ride Eric Volmers
The Stampeders celebrate a long and wild rock ‘n’ roll journey
It was late August, probably 1974.
Ronnie King, bassist of The Stampeders, doesn’t remember the exact date. But he remembers it was on or near the Aug. 23 birthday of Keith Moon, the Who’s hard-partying drummer. He thinks it was 1974 because he remembers the Los Angeles staff of Capital Records, The Stampeders’ U.S. record company at the time, welcoming the trio into the offices by wearing the band’s 1974 concert T-shirts.
“They expected us,” says King, on the line from his Calgary home. “We walked in and the entire building, from the first floor to the top floor, was wearing The Stampeders American Tour ’74. From the janitor to the secretaries to the executives, they were all wearing these T-shirts. We were blown away.”
Later that day, King remembers some “girls” taking the band, which included singer-guitarist Rich Dodson and drummer Kim Berly, on a tour of some of L.A.’s hottest clubs. It was while they were partying at the iconic Roxy in West Hollywood that someone in the entourage rushed over with an urgent assignment. It seems “Moonie” — as they called Keith Moon at the time — had rented out a banquet hall at the Wilshire in Beverly Hills, but the party was in dire need of musical equipment. Could the boys from Calgary help out?
“We said: ‘Well, it just so happens that our road crew is sitting on standby as well, so they can set it up,’” says King. “So we went to Keith Moon’s birthday party. Rod Stewart showed up, and Ronnie Wood, the guys from the Faces. I think Ringo was there. Let me see: Redbone, Micky Dolenz of the Monkees; it just went on and on. We were one of the least-known bands there.”
Perhaps. But by 1974, The Stampeders were one of Canada’s biggest bands and they were riding high. Three years earlier, Dodson’s endearingly banjo-fuelled Sweet City Woman had reached No. 8 on American charts, catapulting The Stampeders to fame. King, Dodson and Berly were rock stars, even if they hadn’t quite reached the heights of Ringo and Dolenz. They had signed with Capital and were playing stadiums, warming stages for the Beach Boys, Steely Dan and Foghat in the U.S. while headlining big shows in their home country.
“It was very exciting for us,” King says. “The more we rocked, the bigger we got it seemed. Some of the biggest stars knew our biggest hit song, Sweet City Woman. I ran into José Feliciano and I said ‘Hi Jose, it’s Ronnie King of a group called The Stampeders. We’re from Canada.’ He said ‘Oh, The Stampeders!’ He starts going into Sweet City Woman, José Feliciano-style with his backup singers. He was doing it Latino style. I was like: ‘You know our song?’ He said, ‘Yeah, Ronnie, wherever I tour in the world that song is Top 10.’”
Sweet City Woman was hardly the band’s only hit. Fans will recall such enduring hits such as Wild Eyes, Carry Me, Oh My Lady, Devil You and Monday Morning Choo Choo. For those heady years in the early to late-1970s, The Stampeders were on top. Not bad for a group of ragtag Calgarians, who began life as a sprawling six-piece act in a Cowtown basement in the early 1960s with ambitions of becoming the Canadian Beatles. After earning a reputation around town, the band caught the attention of a young manager named Mel Shaw. He eventually convinced them to adopt the name The Stampeders, which seemed less than hip to the teenagers at the time, and drop their Beatlesque attire for matching cowboy hats and denim outfits that Shaw’s wife dyed flamboyant shades of purple and pink. By 1966, the crew had bought a shaky 1957, nine-passenger limousine from Imperial Oil and began making its way to Toronto. Yes, it was a limo. But the ride — which the band ruefully dubbed the “Old Smoker” due to a hole in the exhaust that tended to fill the car with toxic fumes — was hardly luxurious.
“We were a six-piece and our manager, his wife and two kids were usually in the front,” King says. “They had a window closed off the back to the front. He didn’t smoke and some of us did. We’d light a cigarette and he’d yell ‘Put that out!’ and he’d put the window up and he’d be swearing at us.”
Toronto was not exactly welcoming, at least not at first. Compared to the hip Yorkville folk scene, this shaggy group in pink and purple suits looked as if it were from another planet.
But the band eventually got a foothold as it slimmed down to three members. Carry Me, released in 1970, became a Canadian hit. A year later everything changed when Sweet City Woman hit the airwaves.
By 1977, though, the band members decided to go their separate ways. Disco was king. Punk was on the horizon. They were exhausted and fighting. Dodson and Berly stayed in Ontario. King eventually returned to Calgary, where he continued to play and eventually landed a residency at a local pub. That would have been the end had it not been for CTV’s Dini Petty Show. In 1992, Dodson and Berly were invited onto the program as part of a series of “Where Are They Now?” shows. Unbeknownst to them, King was waiting backstage to surprise them. They hadn’t spoken in 15 years, but the reunion went well enough that they decided to tour again.
Twenty-seven years later, they are still going. “We are very proud of all the noise we made back then,” King says. “To think that people still remember it to this day. We always do a meet-and-greet afterwards. They buy our CDs, T-shirts and pictures and say ‘Can you sign this for me please? It’s for my father, he couldn’t make it today.’”