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Misty Fire
Cries of a Gambler / Who I Am - 7"
Fundy - 1973
Michael Panontin
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The pride of New Brunswick back in the early seventies must surely have been Misty Fire, five lads from the Saint-Paul de Kent area whose lone seven-inch is a rather rare little nugget in the world of garage rock collecting. The original line-up consisted of singer Dominique Poirier on vocals, guitarists Leo Belliveau and Clayton Gaudet, bassist Leandre Leger and drummer Jean-Maurice Roy. The band boast on their Facebook page that "they quickly rose to fame in their local area of Saint-Paul, NB with their great rock music talent and harmony vocals, with influences from Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, and Creedence Clearwater Revival to name a few".
As one might imagine, being from such a remote part of the rock and roll universe - Saint-Paul de Kent is about 45 minutes to the north of Moncton - Misty Fire had to play wherever they could find gigs, and that of course included high schools, weddings and county fairs. In fact, it would appear the guys seemed to be hitting their stride in 1973, with a photo on the page showing Belliveau and Poirier as winners of Best Rhythm Guitarist and Best Vocalist, respectively, at the Expo Kent Sainte-Marie.
That same year, with Alfred Vienneau having replaced Gaudet on lead guitar, the group readied themselves to enter the studio to record their lone, tough-to-find 45, 'Cries of a Gambler', issued on the equally obscure Fundy label. That heart-wrenching ballad is decent enough, but it stretches out to five-plus minutes, where it sort of implodes towards the finish with a tepid guitar solo and a frankly annoying vocal (though there is actually a short video clip of the good bits - in colour, no less! - on the FB page). Flip the record over, however, and the listener is treated to one of the more fascinating finds in Canrock history. The raucous 'Who I Am' is a fantastic slab of seventies rock that seems to have it all: a caustic guitar riff and an equally unhinged solo, the sort of high-pitched yowl that virtually defined the era, and just the right amount of rough edge to keep the whole thing interesting.
The disc was issued in a relatively healthy run of a thousand units. Still, it's a tough one to track down. A copy sold in 2022 for a whopping $455 CAD, and that one was barely in VG+ condition. Also worth noting is that there is actually a Wikipedia page titled List of people from Kent County, New Brunswick, but our heroes from Saint-Paul are nowhere to be found. Time for an update, I'd say.
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