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Copper Penny
Sitting on a Poor Man's Throne / Bad Manners - 7"
Sweet Plum - 1973
Michael Panontin
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Anyone who listened to Copper Penny's top-twenty single 'Sitting on a Poor Man's Throne' back in the early seventies would have been forgiven for thinking it was the work of some gritty urban blues band. That down-and-dirty rhythm, those ghetto guitar licks and lyrics like "Singing songs for nickels / Is the only life I've ever known / And I'll never get arrested / Sittin' on a poor man's throne" were pretty convincing. The fact that the song was covered a few years later by none other than Bobby 'Blue' Bland himself only served to reinforce the case.
But the group responsible for it was actually a product of Kitchener (ON), hardly a hotbed of soulful slums and backwater juke joints. Things go as far back as 1965, when singer Kenny Hollis and keyboardist Rich Wamil launched a band called the Penny Farthings. By '68, with a name change to the Copper Penny (after a b-side to a Paupers forty-five) and a line-up that had solidified around Hollis, Wamil, guitarist Vern McDonald, bassist Paul Reibling and drummer Bert Hamer, the guys set their sights firmly on the AM dial.
The first stop was Lanny Williamson's Chelsea Sound studio in Toronto, a wannabe popsike hit factory located on Mount Pleasant Road that produced a half-dozen or so singles for the likes of the Five Shy and the Carnival as well as the Copper Penny, all in 1968 and all on Columbia Canada. The Copper Penny recorded three seven-inchers there, the best of which was the sickeningly sweet 'Nice Girl', which peaked at #77 on the RPM charts. From there, the guys moved on to Jack Richardson and the more established Nimbus 9 Productions, issuing a couple of blue-eyed soul singles and an LP, 1970's self-titled Copperpenny.
Strangely enough, in November 1969 Copper Penny found themselves on a bill with Led Zeppelin, who had just released the blues-belting Led Zeppelin II the previous month and who must have been aghast at hearing the wimpy AM fare of their support act. But things were not quite so simple. Buried at the end of side 2 of Copperpenny was a track called 'Stop the World', an eight-minute-plus psych-rock opus written by Wamil and McDonald. It was hardly what you would call a top-notch tune, but with its references to "gettin' stoned" and its searing guitar solos, it was at least au courant. And more importantly, it hinted at a darker side to what was essentially a non-threatening teenybopper act.
But Copperpenny was selling poorly, despite having been issued down in the States, and as a result the group started hemorrhaging members. By 1973, Wamil and Hollis were left to stitch together a new band, this time with Bill Mononen on guitar, Ron Hiller on bass and Blake Barrett on the skins...and without their chief songwriter Vern McDonald, who had penned or co-penned nearly every song up to that point.
With Rich Wamil picking up the bulk of the songwriting slack, Copper Penny started work on a new batch of songs, the best of which was clearly the Shaft-influenced 'Sitting on a Poor Man's Throne'. Under a new label, the London records subsidiary Sweet Plum, the boys were hooked up with producer Harry Hinde, a fast-talking ex-Detroiter who, according to musician Bill King, "knew everyone. Every soul artist, label guy, rack-jobber, radio giant and gangster in Detroit". Hinde took the band back to his hometown to Pac 3 Studios, a lesser-known recording studio in Dearborn, Michigan run by Richard Becker (whose flimsy resume up to that point included little of note, save for Lunar Funk's sinewy 1972 throwdown 'Slip the Drummer One').
With Becker at the controls and David Van Pitte's lush string arrangements, along with some backing vocals by Telma Hopkins and Joyce Vincent (a.k.a. Tony Orlando's Dawn), Copper Penny recorded an album's worth of material at Pac 3. 'Sitting on a Poor Man's Throne', the second single from those sessions, was issued in the early summer of 1973 and by September 16th had managed to reach a very respectable #16 on CHUM-AM's much-vaunted list. 'Sitting...' was also issued south of the border on the Big Tree label and in Australia on Ascot, though neither one scaled the sort of heights of the Canadian release.
The members of Copper Penny all went their separate ways following the release of the LP Sitting on a Poor Man's Throne. By 1975, Wamil had cobbled together a new version of Copper Penny, this time a six-piece with Brian Russell on guitar and Paul Zaza on bass. That new band issued a full LP of covers on Capitol called Fuse, among which was a damn fine rendition of Hot Chocolate's 'Disco Queen'. The group put out one final single in 1976, a version of Natalie Cole's 'Needing You', but by then it was pretty much academic and Copper Penny was never heard from again.
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