By JOHN MACKIE, Vancouver Sun November 26, 2010
Larry Hennessey (left) and Jamie Anstey are twisting the knobs on their latest project,
The Cool Aid Benefit Album at Hennessey's North Vancouver studio. Their company,
Regenator Records, releases old recordings form 1960s bands.
Photograph by: Ward Perrin, PNGVANCOUVER —
Jamie Anstey was born in 1978, but he’s obsessed with the 1960s.
The hardcore music fan estimates he only owns about a hundred CDs, but has about 10,000 vinyl albums and 30,000 vinyl 45s — 5,000 of them by Canadian artists from the 1960s.
This is a guy who forked out $1,200 for a rare copy of The Sultan, a 45 by Neil Young’s first band, the Squires. A guy who can tell you all about obscure garage bands like The Misty Deep, The Stags and Little Judas and the Sinners, and has spent years tracking down unreleased tapes from all three.
He met his match in Larry Hennessey, the JACK FM morning man.
The 50-year-old Hennessey doesn’t have many 45s, but he does have about 3,000 78s. Not to mention hundreds of “quirky” albums (Italian accordion music, odd movie soundtracks, “test your stereo” sound effects LPs).
He also has a thing about vintage recording equipment. He owns so many old microphones he rents them out to the movies, and has cornered the market on reel-to-reel tape recorders.
But he puts them to good use. Hennessey has two home recording studios, where he’s become an expert at bringing tired old tapes back to life.
So good, in fact, that Hennessey and Anstey have formed Regenerator Records to release some lost classics from the 1960s.
Their first release was a Chad Allan and the Expressions live show from 1962, three years before the group was renamed The Guess Who. This year, they released The Chessmen Collection 1964-1966, 13 songs from Terry Jacks’ pre-Poppy Family band.
Now they’ve re-released The Cool Aid Benefit Album, a legendary LP from 1970 featuring many of Vancouver’s top psychedelic rock bands.
Cool Aid was one of those tres ’60s places that popped up in Kitsilano during the hippie era – the liner notes call it “a shelter for runaways, homeless hippies and anyone else who needed their help.”
Unfortunately, it was usually strapped for cash. So a 19-year-old UBC student, John Walsh, dreamed up a benefit LP. Only a few hundred were pressed, which made them quite rare, and treasured among psychedelic rock fans – at one point copies were selling for $200 each.
Anstey was fascinated with the Cool Aid LP and dreamed of reissuing it. When Walsh died in 1997 from cancer, several boxes of the album were found in his basement. Black Swan records sold them off, and Anstey asked someone there if there was a contact for the album.
A few months later, he found himself with Walsh’s widow, Kirsten, going through a couple of boxes that contained the original master tapes and artwork. They took them to Hennessey’s home studio and put them on.
“I think I was shaking, I was so excited,” recalls Anstey.
“There can be some pretty ugly stuff that happens to tapes, but these were perfect, they didn’t need anything,” says Hennessey.
“I put them on and they were just sparkling. The sound is amazing.”
This isn’t hype. You almost get a contact high listening to the wah-wah guitar on Spring’s Bring Yourself Down to Earth Livin’ Blues, Baby and the hippie harmonies on Mother Tucker’s Yellow Duck’s I.
Mock Duck’s Do Re Mi packs harpsichord, an electrifying guitar solo and a ’60s-heavy chorus (“ask me why I cannot be free”) into three minutes. Al Wiebe’s distorted guitar lick on Hydro Electric Streetcar’s Gardens and Flowers is a garage-rock gem. There’s even a spoken word piece, The Planet Man, by Greydon Moore and Leo Jung.
The original album was a single disc, but the re-release has two CDs. Mother Tucker’s Yellow Duck had to bow out of the original album because they had signed with Capitol Records, so Anstey and Hennessey restored the album back to the original concept.
The package also includes a DVD of live performances culled from the CBC archives, along with a short film explaining what Cool Aid was. (The Vancouver location vanished long ago, but the Victoria Cool Aid is still around, and some proceeds from the reissue will go to it.)
But it took awhile to put it all together.
“We probably spent 50 to 100 nights over a five-year span at Larry’s just transferring and mixing [the tapes],” says Anstey.
“Crazy, absolutely crazy,” says Hennessey.
“It’s a mania. It’s not even a labour of love, it’s ‘we must be stopped.’”
It doesn’t look like they can be stopped. Regenerator is working on several more projects, including a Poppy Family DVD of performances from CBC’s Let’s Go show and a double CD of Terry Jacks’ solo recordings, which has been out of print for years.
“We have an agreement with Terry to remaster all his stuff,” says Hennessey, who has also produced some gorgeous Poppy Family T-shirts Regenerator is selling on its website.
“Terry has an amazing ear, a wicked crazy ear. At first it was a little bit odd to be under his microscope, but it was a real pleasure taking those old master tapes and hopping them up. He was very pleased. The final mastering on some [songs] I did 12 times. At the final one he was up and dancing around his living room, so I knew that I’d had some success.”
“There’s going to be Seasons in the Sun, and [a version of] Seasons in the Sun in German,” says Anstey, who co-owns the Apollo record store in Coquitlam.
“It came out in German as In Den Gaerten der Zeit. They paid Terry to fly to Germany and gave him one line at a time to sing. It came out and it was a flop, because it didn’t have the same magic or feel as [the English] Seasons did, [which was] a No. 1 hit in Germany.”
Anstey and Hennessey have lots of Terry Jacks/Poppy Family tapes to go through.
“We have 25 or 30 boxes, and each box is full of 50 tapes,” says Anstey.
But that’s only a small part of the Regenerator archives. In a storage facility on the Sunshine Coast, they have about 5,000 reel to reel tapes of old recording sessions.
“They just kind of come to us, and we go ‘well, you can’t throw them away,’ so there they are,” says Hennessey.
“I don’t know if [many will] ever see the light of day, but it’s everything from stuff by Murray McLachlan to BTO – we ended up with three or four 24-track BTO tapes. I don’t know where the hell they come from, but if some guy’s going to throw them away, we’ll take ’em.”
Many of the tapes are from artists few people have ever heard of, but some of them can be quite valuable. Case in point: the “psychedelic hippie folksinger” Huckle.
“I think Huckle goes for like a thousand bucks on eBay,” says Anstey.
“Huckle is a local guy who wrote these killer folk songs. He made two records, privately pressed. The covers have paper glued on the covers with drawings and song titles, that homemade look, but they’re valuable.
“I have all his master tapes, and he wants to put out a CD and download it online. Kelly Cavanagh [is his name], he’s still a hippie living on Saltspring.”
Whether or not Regenerator has anything to do with a Huckle reissue, Anstey sounds pleased that he’s finally getting some attention.
“These people have never been appreciated,” he says, “and they need to be appreciated now.”
jmackie@vancouversun.com
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