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The Ugly Ducklings
Nothin' / I Can Tell - 7"
Yorktown - 1966
Michael Panontin
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Toronto's Ugly Ducklings were hatched in the proverbial backwaters of suburban Scarborough, but it wasn't long before they would become the most popular band in the hip Yorkville neighbourhood downtown. At places like Charlie Brown's, where they most often held court, they plied the crowds with songs by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed and of course plenty of Rolling Stones. But that would only get them so far. To get to the next level, the group needed to make a record of their own and to do that they needed to write their own songs.
It was the late spring of 1966, and the Ducklings - singer Dave Bingham, with guitarists Roger Mayne (lead) and Glynn Bell (rhythm), bassist John Read and drummer Robin Boers - had just returned from a successful but taxing mini-tour of northern Ontario. As they often did, they blew off steam by rehearsing into the wee hours of the night. And it was at one of these sessions that the Duck's breakthrough hit, 'Nothin'', was born.
"One night in May, after one of these marathon outings," singer Dave Bingham remembers in his book Noise from the North End, "Roger and I were the only two left in the building and I asked him to reprise the three-chord stomper that was his personal calling card...And that's when it finally clicked. Something in the way he attacked it that night triggered my subconscious and lyrics just tumbled out of my mouth in a continuous rush."
That synergy continued the next day at rehearsal. Bell added his rhythm guitar bits and Read his rolling bass line, while Mayne finished things off with that scorching guitar solo. The guys were exuberant. "The first time we ran through it we just knew," Bingham gushes. "We couldn't wait to spring this on the crowd at Charlie Brown's."
'Nothin'' went down a storm at the Yorkville club. But more importantly for the boys, their manager Bill Huard had booked some time at Hallmark Studio on Sumach Street. The Ugly Ducklings recorded two songs - 'Nothin'' and a version of Bo Diddley's 'I Can Tell' - for just $330, with Mayne, who was the only one of the five gainfully employed, footing the bill for the session. Huard had the good sense to get a tape into the hands of Ron Scribner, who promoted bands at his Bigland Agency and thus had considerable pull.
"When Scribby heard the tape, he flipped. He was ecstatic." More to the point, the Rolling Stones were booked to play Maple Leaf Gardens on the 29th of June, just a few weeks away, and Scribner urged the Ducks to try to get themselves on the bill. Huard had acetates pressed up and sent off to the promoters by that Friday, and by Monday the Ducklings had been slotted to open for their heroes in front of some 20,000 fans.
Things were moving fast. The very night of the Stones concert, CHUM-AM placed 'Nothin'' head to head with another disc on the station's on-air new release competition. That night on stage, just after doing their sneering rendition of Diddley's 'Mama, Keep Your Big Mouth Shut', the Ducks launched into 'Nothin'', prefacing it with "It's our first record and it just won the Battle Of The New Sounds on CHUM." The crowd went nuts and the Ugly Ducklings had arrived.
'Nothin'' would go on to win that radio battle thirteen times in a row. By the middle of the month, it was on regular rotation on CHUM, thanks in part to pushes by DJs Jungle Jay Nelson and Bob McAdorey, and by August 8 it had reached a respectable #18 on the station's prestigious weekly chart. Equally impressive was its trajectory out east, where the disc was #1 with a bullet on Saint John (NB)'s CHSJ-AM for the week of September 3.
'Nothin' was clearly one of the finest garage singles to come out in 1966, a year that boasted scores of excellent seven-inchers from all around the world. These days, Mayne's scything guitar riffs and Bingham's surly vocals are instantly recognizable and the record is considered a classic of the genre, right up there with other Canuck heavyweights like the Painted Ship's eerie 'Frustration' and the Haunted's riotous '1-2-5'.
(Anorak's may want to take note that the pictured record is the original first pressing, with the allegedly tougher-to-find second and third versions showing the standard multi-coloured Yorktown design.)
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