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Properly understood, the story where Rob Frith finds a rare Beatles reel-to-reel worth at the very least hundreds of thousands of dollars and ends up giving it in person to Sir Paul McCartney is, in fact, a footnote to the making of The History of Vancouver Rock & Roll Vol. 5, and not the other way around.
It’s not going to be remembered that way, for obvious reasons. But as the liner notes by Doug Schober make clear, it was only because of the compilation, which Frith and Schober were in the process of assembling, that they decided to spin the Beatles reel-to-reel, which had been gathering dust on the shelves of Neptoon for a decade. Frith had assumed it was just an nth-generation bootleg rather than a precious master tape.
“Without The History of Vancouver Rock, there would have been no Beatles tape”, Schober says to me at the counter at Neptoon, with Frith nodding agreement next to him. “It was kind of serendipitous, because we went into the back room and we were going to go Larry’s [Larry Hennessy, more on whom later] and go through a mountain of tapes to find what was going to be on this volume. And he’s just, ‘I came across this the other day’, and I was like, ‘Yeah, bring it.'”
The Beatles tape was the last one the men listened to that night, and they almost didn’t, because they were getting peckish.
“It was midnight, we were so tired, and we never had dinner,” Schober remembers.
Frith and Schober smile and shake their heads at how they almost passed up what turned out to be the score (and the story) of a lifetime. But finally, they decided to throw the tape on on, almost as an afterthought.
“And because of that, he got to do the whole Paul McCartney thing!” Schober says. “So it seemed like it fit as part of the story.”
If you haven’t read about the whole adventure previously, it is recounted by Schober at some length in the notes, along with captions about each of the bands represented on the comp, some of whom Schober will be writing follow-up articles on for Ugly Things magazine.
He also maintains a Youtube channel called Noise From the Cranium, which itself has an episode on the Beatles find.
Video of Noise From the Cranium Episode 47: Rare Beatles Demo Tape Found at Neptoon Records
Larry Hennessy, meantime, who did the digital mastering on the project, gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the making of the album here. He’s joined at the ReeltoReeltoDigital studio by Frith and original Collectors’ vocalist Howie Vickers, who appears on three tracks on the album, two solo and one a previously unreleased Collectors’ tune, discovered by Frith at the end of a Tom Northcott live tape.
Northcott is also on the album, covering Donovan’s “Sunny Goodge Street”, recorded live at UBC. Northcott and Frith are friends, and it’s not the first time Frith has been involved in reissuing his music; that’s Northcott on the album cover, in fact.
One abiding mystery of The History of Vancouver Rock & Roll series has always puzzled me is why Volume 3, first released in 1983, is so much more of a collectible than Volumes 1 and 2, and the hardest one to score.
Sure, it has the heaviest tracks, thanks to Vancouver psych heroes the Painted Ship and Maple Ridge garage rock champs the Northwest Company. It also has the funniest song on any album in the entire series, Orville Dorp’s “Jesus Marijuana”. But it almost never turns up in stores, and when it does, can have pricetags of $60 or more, compared to the other volumes, which are mostly readily available at Neptoon. What gives?
Video of Orville Dorp – Jesus Marijuana
Frith, interviewed downstairs at his store, starts at the beginning, but over the course of telling the story of the series, all becomes clear: Volume 3 came out first!!!
“How it happened was, there was a bunch of us that put on the record swap meets in Vancouver, called the Vancouver Record Collector’s Association,” he says. “And whatever money we raised, we put into the account, and we thought what should we do? It should be something to do with Vancouver. I had planned on doing a ‘History of Vancouver Rock’ years ago, like in the 1970s.”
That project got scuttled when Frith gave a guy he met $750 towards work on the project and then never saw him again.
“My early experience was, be careful of the industry!” he recounts. “But I ended up suggesting doing this to the other guys in the VRCA. And at the time, 1983, the garage band stuff was so popular, on records and reissues; they just sold so well. So we kind of had a plan of doing Vol. 1, 2, 3, 4 in time sequence, with volume 1 being the ’50s and early ’60s, volume 2 would be the mid-’60s, and Vol. 3 would be the garage band stuff and… it was always a mix of stuff.”
Then they had a brain flash.
“If we put out Volume 3 first, that’s what everybody wants right now, so we’ll make enough money that we can afford to do the other ones!” Frith says. “That was the idea, so we did that, and also, with the collector’s mentality, if you put out Volume 3, with the music everyone wants, they’re going to also want to have Volume 1 and 2: they’re going to want to have the whole set!”
Savvy move, there, Rob!
People who like the heavier material on Vol. 3, or fans of the Northwest Company and the Collectors, both of whom are represented on that album, will want to pick up Vol. 5 as well, since Richard Stepp’s pre-Northwest Company band, the Questions, are represented in the form of a song called “Set Each Other Free”, an unreleased demo that is one of many high points on the album; side 2, quite a bit heavier than side one, also boasts tracks by Hydroelectric Streetcar and a band that Frith knows almost nothing about called the Impact.
There’s also some lighter, poppier material by bands like the Unforscene (whose “Many Thanks” stands out as a fine piece of obscure Vancouver popcraft) and Gillian Russell.
Howie Vickers, Richard Stepp, and other unconfirmed guests will be present for the launch of the album, starting at 7pm tonight at Neptoon, with copies of the album available on CD, black vinyl, and in a limited teal-coloured variant.
More on the launch here, and note that the clip is set to the song by the Collectors (“Everyone Say”, an unreleased 8 track master) that occupies the final slot on the album.
Of course, the Collectors would later morph, with a few lineup changes, into the band Chilliwack, but everyone knows that, right?