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Mashmakhan
As the Years Go By / Days When We Are Free - 7"
Columbia - 1970
Michael Panontin
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"It was like we were the Beatles or something," Jerry Mercer would tell former deejay Rick Keene about the time Mashmakhan landed in Japan on the heels of their single, 'As the Years Go By'. "At home, we were playing before two or three hundred people. We sold 400,000 copies of the song in Japan. There were 10,000 Japanese people waiting for us!"
Mashmakhan were the quintessential one-hit wonders. 'As the Years Go By' reached the coveted top spot in eight cities across Canada, and it also sold well in the US, and of course, Japan. By my count, the single was issued in at least fifteen countries, including Israel, Argentina, Peru and Costa Rica. It even earned the group a spot alongside the likes of Janice Joplin, the Grateful Dead and the Band (among others) on the bourbon-soaked cross-country bender Festival Express.
The four - songwriter and keyboardist Pierre Senecal, guitarist Rayburn Blake, bassist and singer Brian Edwards, and drummer Jerry Mercer - go back a long way...all the way to 1960 in fact when they first played together briefly. Edwards didn't stick around for long, but Senecal, Mercer and Blake would gig for a good five years under names like the Phantoms, Ray Blake's Combo and the Dominoes. Through the latter part of the sixties, they were known as the Triangle, playing back-up to future gospel leader Trevor Payne.
But things started to move quickly in 1969. They caught the attention of producer Bob Hahn, who whisked the boys from their native Montreal up the St. Lawrence to record at the Columbia Canada studios in Toronto. With former-drummer Edwards rejoining the band, the four dug up their hippie roots, and as the groovier-sounding Mashmakhan (allegedly after a brand of hashish sold by a local dealer) recorded perhaps the finest double-sider in Canadian history.
With its prancing organ and pseudo-philosophical musings on love and life, 'As the Years Go By' became a huge hit, selling 100,000 copies up here in Canada, nearly half a million south of the border, and even more in Japan, earning them that 'big in Japan' reputation long before all those Budokan bangers of the later-seventies. But flip the record over and you get what is easily the band's finest hour. 'Days When We Are Free' is blissfully pure free-form rock, managing to meld freewheeling piano, lush harmonies and (especially on the album version) some positively searing guitar into a near-flawless tune. Nothing more perfectly captures the last days of the Woodstock era - before it succumbed to the trappings of prog - than this. (And there is a pretty cool version en espanol by a Florida band called Coke from 1972 that is well worth checking out.)
Mashmakhan would have no other hits. After a couple of LPs, the self-titled debut, where these songs appeared, and the less-successful follow-up The Family, the band split, leaving it to the AM oldies stations to keep the flame alight for more than fifty years.
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