ROCK’N THE RIDEAU continued from pg 17
have come out of Liverpool. For Frank it was like that wild scene in the movie “That Thing You Do”, when the young band hears their song on the radio for the first time. “We were in a car on the
Queensway around ten after five. We had CFRA on, and the DJ said, ‘Here’s a brand new band with a brand new song. It’s The Townsmen with I’m Such a Dreamer’. We were all screaming because we had never heard ourselves.” After that single came a string
of opening gigs for hit bands like the McCoys, Gary Lewis and the Playboys and The Young Rascals. The Townsmen were even on the bill of the notorious Animals concert at the Coliseum that turned
into a full scale riot. Like other 60s musicians, Frank
Morrison remembers those days fondly: “There were 67 local bands
and they were all working in places like The Tower, Riverside Gardens, Pineland, church basements, all over the place. They were making good money, making records, and back then that was a big deal. It was a golden situation for local bands.” The hit singles kept on coming.
“We’re Doing Fine” and “Funny How Love Can Be” were big local hits, and their cover of the Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” hit the Top 30 across the country. The addition of Gary Comeau
from The Esquires and Don Norman and the Other Four improved the band musically, but by 1968 the clock was ticking for the Townsmen, as it was for Don Norman and other veteran bands.
Bands were pricing themselves
out of the market, and unless you had a single riding the charts, gigs were getting harder to find. Kids had transistor radios and improved home sound systems, so they weren’t going out to hear live music as much. With the drinking age lowered, Hull became the place to party, killing the church basement and high school gigs. It was the end of an era. The Ottawa scene from 1964
to 1968 was pop-heavy, but that pop was on par with anything coming out of Britain or the U.S. Thankfully, fans like CKCU’s Dave Sampson, Gary Comeau, the late Richard Patterson and Ian McLeish of Mouse Hole Music have kept the music alive some 50 years later.
For more on the Townsmen, check out “We’re Doing Fine – The Anthology” on Mouse Hole.
46 BOUNDER MAGAZINE
www.bounder.ca
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