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Johnny Bower and Little John with the Rinky Dinks
Honky the Christmas Goose / Banjo Mule - 7"
Capitol - 1965
Michael Panontin
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He won four Stanley Cups, was twice awarded the Vezina Trophy and in 1976 was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. But Johnny Bower's most unlikely achievement had to have been the 40,000 copies he sold of 'Honky the Christmas Goose', a totally lame children's record that had one Facebook commenter admitting that "about half of the song was all I could take!".
It was based on a Christmas story written by CBC producer Chip Young, with the music fleshed out by composer Orville Hoover. With a little help from journalist and one-time Toronto Maple Leafs PR manager Ed Fitkin, the guys approached the Leafs' coach Punch Imlach with a plan to have one of the players sing it.
Young headed over to the Tam O'Shanter rink in Scarborough, where the Leafs practised at the time, and pitched the idea in the dressing room. The players bolted. "I've never seen so many guys undress and get into the shower so quickly in my life," Bower recalled for the Toronto Star. "I was the only one left sitting there." But Young was adamant that Bower sing it and Bower, after protesting that he couldn't sing, eventually agreed to do it.
Bower recruited a handful of kids from the neighbourhood including his young son, 11-year-old John Jr., and after a couple of weeks of rehearsal, they walked into the RCA Studios - on the 9th of November, 1965 - and recorded 'Honky the Christmas Goose' in five takes. The song was mixed and pressed up in just a few days. It was also issued in a full-colour picture sleeve - a rarity in Canada in those days - with Bower's face in clear view, just the sort of thing to get young hockey fans to purchase it.
By December, 'Honky...' was in regular rotation on CHUM-AM, the city's powerhouse top-40 station, and by Christmas it was sitting at #29 on the station's influential chart. Bower even took time out from his busy hockey schedule to sign a few picture sleeves. And he was not above resorting to questionable ethics to shift a few extra copies.
"I was sitting there [at Eaton's College Park], selling my records, and there was a big pile of Beatles records sitting on the table next to me," he remembered. "So I took their pile of records and put them underneath the table, and after that, we were selling all of mine!"
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