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It's All Meat
It's All Meat
Columbia - 1970
Michael Panontin
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Despite those crotch-grabbing allusions, not to mention nods to the Animals song of the same name, It's All Meat actually took their name from a 1960s dog food commercial extolling the virtues of its beefy chow ("100% meat, no filler!").
The Toronto five-piece were led by their chief songwriters, drummer Rick McKim and keyboardist/singer Jed MacKay, who already boasted production credits on the Underworld's sought-after 1968 garage gem 'Go Away'. And they were managed by none other than Jack London of mid-sixties hitmakers Jack London and the Sparrows.
McKim and MacKay trace their roots back to the mid-sixties. "Rick and I were in a band called the Easy Riders," he told the Garage Hangover site in 2006. "Our repertoire mostly consisted of blues, and Stones, Kinks, with some amped up folk stuff as well." After splitting, the pair held auditions for a new band, adding Norm White on guitar and bassist Rick Aston on bass. The last to join was guitarist Wayne Roworth.
"[I] was 18 years old when I answered an ad in the paper for a guitarist," Roworth remembered. "I think we jammed a bit, then Jed wanted me to improvise on a song he and Rick had wrote called 'Crying into the Deep Lake...Baby'. For some reason I picked up my Dad's Ric and picked off a melody in G. Jed said later that 'moody' picking landed me the spot."
In 1969, It's All Meat issued their 'Feel It' seven-inch, a searing slab of Detroit proto-punk that has become highly sought after in garage collector circles. Home base was the Cosmic Home, a small club on Yonge Street in what was then the northern fringes of the city. By the sound of it, shows must have been loud...and exciting as all get-out.
"I remember Norm stabbing the headstock of his Strat into the white ceiling tiles and bits of tile would fall on people. He also used the mic stand as a slide, moving the guitar neck on the chrome pole," Roworth recalled. "I remember Rick McKim used to hit his knuckles on the snare rim causing them to bleed."
The guys recorded It's All Meat at RCA Studios in April 1970. The record came sheathed in a beautiful gatefold cover, a rarity in Canada back then. Much of it seems to straddle mid and late-sixties psychedelia, with the spectre of Jim Morrison and the Doors looming heavily throughout. MacKay's organ sets an eerie backdrop to his bold operatic vocals, especially on tracks like the aforementioned 'Crying into the Deep Lake'. Elsewhere, 'Roll My Own', takes that haunting organ and channels it into a driving guitar-heavy freakout, while the nine-minute-plus 'Sunday Love' opens with a pastoral VU vibe before morphing into a torrid Iberian rave-up. There's admittedly some gristle to be trimmed - It's All Meat sometimes bogs down in tepid blues riffs and overwrought vocals - but still, it's easy to see why it fetches upwards of a thousand USDs these days.
The group unfortunately never issued another record. That is a pity, since subsequent reissues of It's All Meat have all included unreleased demos that are in some cases superior to the LP. McKim himself seems to agree. "It's a shame the band broke up. We had lots of material to go, but couldn't hold it together."
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