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The Rabble


The Rabble - Please Set Me Free / I Still Can Hear Them Laughing - 7

Please Set Me Free / I Still Can Hear Them Laughing - 7"
Trans-World - 1967


Michael Panontin
The Rabble's proverbial fifteen minutes of fame was more like a year...from May 1967 to April 1968 to be exact. The Montreal five-piece had barely arrived back from Toronto after playing to thousands at the Queen's Park Love-In when they issued what would become their biggest hit, the mellifluously melodic'Golden Girl'. And while that single was filling up the local airwaves that summer, the band was getting some valuable international exposure at Expo '67.

Norman Rowe, writing for Melody Maker in June, was certainly impressed. "[The Rabble's] music is strange and beautifully weird, like long psychedelic symphonies," he wrote. "Their latest record, 'Golden Girl', is selling up a storm and looks like topping the charts here real soon. I hope this group get to England some time - they'd really take off in a big way."

And then of course came the mother of all gigs, a back-up slot for Cream at the Paul Sauve Arena in April the following year which is now the stuff of legend. The British trio cancelled at the last minute, and in a show-must-go-on story for the ages the Rabble were left to placate a crowd of some 5000 obviously disappointed kids. The guys played an hour-long set to "thunderous applause after each offering", according to RPM. What's more, the magazine noted, "Their performance was so inspirational it caused a near riot."

The key to the Rabble's charm was their uncanny mix of catchy hooks and Zappa-esque weirdness. For the group's singer John Pimm, who along with guitarist Mike Harris wrote the bulk of the band's songs, that was all part of the plan. "There was a monster in a cave, hidden behind a thin veneer of respectability," he would tell the Montreal Gazette many years later. "The pop stuff was a plant to make us palatable. It was intentional."

Pimm's popular 'Golden Girl' was certainly proof that the formula was working. And so, with the song riding high in the local charts, Harris decided to take his own stab at it. "'Please Set Me Free' is exactly what it says: a person feels trapped inside, by his or her own limitations, and wants to be mentally free," he explained to CM. Unfortunately for the Rabble, though, that monster poked its head out a little too far, and what seemed like a crisply composed pop hit was bookended by an extended eastern-tinged intro/outro and graced with a blazing guitar solo straight out of the Byrds' 'Eight Miles High'. "Yeah, the solo in that song had a South Asian raga thing happening, but the idea of playing electric blues guitar like Freddie King eventually predominated, and people couldn't make sense out of what we did there." In other words, a cool track but hardly what you would call pop chart material.

As was the case with 'Golden Girl', the real delights were found on the record's backside, in this case Harris' nearly perfect 'I Still Can Hear Them Laughing'. "It was a nostalgia song about parties we went to a few years earlier," he recalled. "A lot of the lyrics were not describing anything in a matter-of-fact way, just purely poetic imagery." Again, we're driven down the same road as 'Please Set Me Free': hooks the size of a butcher's gambrel and sing-along lines like "On the basement floor / at the kitchen door / coming back for more / I still can hear them laughing", but a tinny production and an off-kilter guitar solo that must have been anathema to radio programmers of the day.

The Rabble released many records, including two full-length LPs, right through to 1970, but never quite managed to break out of the Montreal market. "It was just too small time. A band could be a huge deal in Montreal and not even heard of in Toronto," Pimm lamented. Looking back, local promoter Donald K. Donald also had his regrets, telling the Montreal Gazette, "This band had the potential to be worldwide superstars. They were that different. They were that unique. If I had known all the things that I know today, I would have gone right to New York."

Both Rabble albums were released on CD in 2008 and pressed up on vinyl a few years later. And original pressings have pushed over the $200-dollar mark these days. There's even a YouTube video of two gents doing a version of 'Golden Girl' on classical guitar that is surprisingly pretty. Still, it's a bittersweet epitaph for a group that to this day has never been properly comped in any format. The Rabble deserve better.
         
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