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The Eternal Triangle


The Eternal Triangle - It's True / Watch Me Go - 7

It's True / Watch Me Go - 7"
New Syndrome - 1966


Michael Panontin
If you bend the truth just a little bit, you could probably make the case for the Eternal Triangle as Canada's first supergroup. The trio got their start when Tom Northcott, who at the time was heading up his own Tom Northcott Trio, hooked up with the CFUN Classics' frontman Howie Vickers and a precocious 18-year-old singer named Susan Pesklevits.

Northcott was already enjoying considerable success in the Vancouver area, with his trio issuing a pair of singles, the cocky garage-rocker 'Just Don't' and its more upbeat follow-up 'Goin' Down', both of which tweaked the charts locally. The guys were regulars at Jerry Kruz's Afterthought club and had even scored a three-day slot in early 1966 at the Kitsilano Theatre in support of the Signe Anderson-fronted Jefferson Airplane. And then they landed the mother of all gigs, appearing as regulars on CBC-TV's locally produced Let's Go.

Northcott would have had plenty of time to chat with Vickers, whose band appeared weekly as the official house band for the show. Pleskevits was no stranger to the tube herself, having sung on the nationally syndicated Music Hop show as a teenager since 1963. (Music Hop and Let's Go were essentially one and the same. The former started broadcasting from Toronto in 1963 with Alex Trebek as its host. But it eventually started asking other local CBC affiliates to produce their own contributions to the show, which allowed it to be broadcast five days a week instead of just one. Vancouver held down the Monday night slots as Let's Go, while the Toronto production would air on Thursday nights as Music Hop.)

So it was there in the studios of that weekly pop music review that Northcott, Vickers and Pesklevits started hashing out ideas for a group they would dub the Eternal Triangle. The three issued the gloomy, melancholic 'It's True', which Northcott released on his own New Syndrome label, in the middle days of 1966. It's a rather mediocre bit of wax and is for the most part forgotten these days, understandable when you consider the three members' later efforts. But it did manage a bit of chart action around the lower mainland, showing up on lists at CKLG as well as at CFUN (where it peaked at a respectable #16).

All three went on to bigger and brighter things, with Northcott serving up solo hits in 1967 ('Sunny Goodge Street') and 1970 ('Crazy Jane') and Vickers joining the Collectors for their two classic albums in the late sixties. That of course is small potatoes next to Pesklevits, The cherubic singer and her muse/future husband Terry Jacks would set the gold standard for lovelorn popsike as the Poppy Family, sending no fewer than eight songs into the charts up north here, including their 1969 chart-topper 'Which Way You Goin' Billy?' (US #2, UK #7) and 1971 top-tenner 'Where Evil Grows'.

(Near-mint copies of 'It's True' have pushed over the $100 mark of late.)
         
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