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The Midnight Angels
I'm Sufferin' / (I Wish) in the Moonlight - 7"
Apex - 1968
Michael Panontin
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Charles Nabess first cut his guitar chops way up in the tiny hamlet of Thicket Portage, Manitoba, a good 600 km to the north of Winnipeg. The young Metis, who grew up as the second youngest in a family of twelve children, was already teaching himself how to play the guitar by the age of ten. At 16, Nabess moved with his younger brother Donny to the town of The Pas. Near the end of high school, he got the idea of playing in a band of his own and started jamming with friends Larry Haynes and Jim Moran.
The boys formed an instrumental group called the Venturas - with Haynes on bass and Moran on drums - and began belting out covers of hits by their namesakes, the Ventures. When the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, they decided they needed a singer and invited brother Don into the fold. After a few name changes, first to the Essentials and then to the oddly named Three Hairs and a Hat (after the top hat that Moran virtually slept in) and finally to the Midnight Angels, they started venturing farther and farther out of town to play. And with their eyes set on making a record, their practice of playing just cover songs started to change.
"They wrote original music, too," recalled David McLeod (of Manitoba's Native Communications Incorporated) on the indigenous info site, Ammsa, "Charles' guitar playing was central, with his impassioned style and impeccable timing." One of those originals was the hopping 'I'm Sufferin'', a classic garage-rocker that seems to cop an idea or two from the Animals' 1964 single, 'I'm Crying'.
'I'm Sufferin'' was recorded in Toronto in the fall of 1967. RPM reported the following in their October 28th edition: "Another great western Canadian group that was in Toronto recently and completely ignored by the television crowd was the Midnight Angels, from The Pas, which is about a million miles north of Winnipeg. They were in town with their manager Melvin Metzner and from what I hear they cut one of the best sessions ever recorded at Sound Canada."
'I'm Sufferin'' was issued on Apex in early 1968, and while it didn't exactly set the charts on fire, it certainly caused a stir up in The Pas, with RPM gleefully informing us that "the local record bar had to close down after running out of copies of the Angel's Apex release of 'I'm Sufferin''. Seems the excited fans were playing havoc with the floor displays and just causing one great crush."
Bill Allard replaced Moran on the drum kit - possibly even after the recording of 'I'm Sufferin'' though it is in fact his picture on the sleeve - and the group went on tour for about a year. The Midnight Angels eventually morphed into Three Penny Opera, spending the better part of two decades performing live in North America and in Europe. These days, Nabess is recognized as a trailblazer by aboriginal musicians throughout Canada. But given the whiteness of the rock 'n' roll world back then, that trail was certainly not without its share of roadblocks.
At times he was introduced as the Spanish guitar player 'Carlos' to appease audiences. "Promoters couldn't deal with a native leader of a band touring and emulating stars like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles - the bands that greatly influenced Charles," McLeod explained. "Charles told me people in the music industry would say things like 'We don't want to have braids there' on stage. Charles didn't have braids, of course, but management frowned upon having a visibly native person in the band, and yet he was the leader of the band."
Even farther back, in his days as a budding guitarist back in Thicket Portage, the local priests and nuns tried to steer him away from any musical pursuits. Nabess of course ignored their pleas. "[And] it's a good thing he didn't listen to them," McLeod added "because he went on to travel the world with his music and he allowed many of us to dream and to think about having careers in music."
(In 2013, a near-mint copy of 'I'm Sufferin'', with the extremely hard-to-find picture sleeve, sold for a cool $922.)
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