The improbable story of Simply Saucer
Hamilton cult heroes from the early ’70s featured in new book by Jesse Locke
The improbable story of pioneering Hamilton rock band Simply Saucer is a music critic’s dream.
That’s exactly what Toronto writer Jesse Locke has been doing for the past three years, working from more than 50 exhaustive interviews with band members (there have been a lot of different players over the years), fans, friends, hangerson and fellow scribes.
Locke’s 246-page book, entitled “Heavy Metalloid Music” was recently released by the boutique Toronto publishing house Eternal Cavalier Press and is receiving several launch events across the country including one Saturday, Dec. 17, Factory Media Centre on James Street North.
You can be excused if you haven’t heard of Simply Saucer. During the band’s glory days in the mid-’70s, their fans probably numbered in the tens — not tens of thousands or tens of hundreds, just tens.
Now, however, Simply Saucer is revered by rock critics around the world for creating a unique and distinctive sound that has influenced some significant alt-rock bands like Sonic Youth.
Simply Saucer’s debut album “Cyborgs Revisited” — which wasn’t released until a full decade after the band broke up — is now considered one of the greatest records ever made in Canada. Finding an original vinyl copy is the sort of thing collectors go ga-ga over.
In 2007, a panel of more than 600 music critics voted it No. 36 in Bob Mersereau’s respected 2007 book “The Top 100 Canadian Albums.” Publications such as Uncut and NME in England have gurgled with unbridled enthusiasm about Simply Saucer, as has Pitchfork and Spin in the U.S.
Author Locke is your typical Saucer fanatic. He’s a 32-year-old freelance journalist and music fanatic, who was converted to Saucerdom just a few years ago when he stumbled across “Cyborg’s Revisited” in a friend’s collection.
Locke couldn’t believe his ears. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing came from early ’70s Canada, let alone early ’70s Hamilton. It combined the minimalism of the Velvet Underground, the mindblowing sonic storm of Hawkwind, and the off-kilter everything of Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett. Frighteningly good and still original, there truly wasn’t anything else like Simply Saucer in Canada at the time and probably still isn’t.
Locke was listening to 2003 CD reissue of “Cyborgs.” A little research and he found that the original was released on a 1989 limited edition vinyl by a Hamilton freelance journalist and all-round music geek by the name of Bruce Mowat, who now lives in Grande Prairie, Alta.
Further research and Locke found that most of the record had originally been recorded in 1974 by Bob Lanois in the makeshift basement studio of his mother’s home in Ancaster. (Bob’s brother Daniel Lanois would later go on to become producer of U2, Peter Gabriel and Bob Dylan). The recordings were lost for 15 years until Mowat came across them accidentally through a chance meeting with Saucer frontman Edgar Breau.
Following the 2003 CD reissue and the rave reviews it received, Breau and bassist Kevin Christoff put together a new version of Saucer (the last one split up in 1979) and began performing the old songs again, as well as writing some new ones.
Locke first saw the new Saucer at a Toronto gig in February, 2013. He knew there was a compelling book to be written about Simply Saucer and was determined to ask Breau if he could write the band’s story.
We learn of the fights that broke out in the early gigs, the bizarre reactions at high school dances, the strange costumes some band members donned, the wild parties at the Saucer House on Ferguson Avenue, run-ins with police, run-ins with gangsters and rumours of devil worship.
Locke chronicles how the band never quite fit in with the Toronto punk scene, like fellow Hamilton rockers Teenage Head. The members of Simply Saucer were always outsiders, never finding a pocket to fit until 25 years after they split up.
More importantly, he gives us a glimpse of what key band members did between the 1979 breakup and their rediscovery in the new millennium. Locke also continues the story into the present makeup of the band, as well as exploring its connections to other Hamilton bands such as Battleship Ethel and Sublimatus.
Locke understands he is still writing to a limited audience of hardcore fans to a band that has achieved a semblance of cult status, but he feels that could change.
“Hopefully this book will serve to expand the Simply Saucer fan base,” Locke says.
That seems to be happening already. There’s a DVD documentary in the works, plus another re-release of “Cyborgs Revisited” as a double-vinyl LP from the Los Angeles-based In the Red label.