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Mock Duck
Do Re Mi / Playing Games - 7"
Baroka - 1968
Michael Panontin
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Guitarist Joe Mock got his start fronting the folky Joe Mock and No Commercial Potential, but by 1967 the blossoming Vancouver scene was already starting to attract some of the more talked-about California acts like the Grateful Dead, the Steve Miller Band and Country Joe and the Fish at clubs like the Afterthought. Mock's own Feb. 24th gig there probably helped to steer his sound down more psychedelic avenues. After a series of personnel changes that year, his band emerged as the truncated Mock Duck, with keyboardist Ross Barret, bassist Rick Enns and drummer Glen Hendrickson rounding things out.
In all, Mock Duck released just three singles and a little-known privately pressed live set. And so with a scene dominated by the more successful Collectors, and a second rung crowded with the likes of the Painted Ship, the Seeds of Time and Mother Tuckers Yellow Duck, the band's obscurity hardly comes as a surprise. Still, top-rate psychedelia was a relatively rare thing and the band's second disc, 'Do Re Mi', with its swirling dirge-like organ intro, searing guitar solo and au courant queries of "Why can't I be free?", most definitely fit that bill. The record received its share of spins on local radio, and Mock Duck even performed it on the Vancouver edition of CBC's swell Where It's At show, hosted by local deejay Fred Latremouille. In fact, that year the band appeared no fewer than seven times at the freak-central Retinal Circus club over at Davie and Burrard Streets, mostly on local nights, though an April 1968 slot in support of the then-hot Charlatans must have been a high point in their all-too-brief career.
('Do Re Mi' also showed up on the 1970 Vancouver-area compilation Cool Aid Benefit, recently reissued and repackaged in a 2-CD/DVD package by Regenerator Records.)
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