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Smyle
Glory Glory / Will I Get Back Home Tomorrow - 7"
Columbia - 1971
Michael Panontin
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The Smile came together around 1967 in Burlington (ON), a bedroom community just to the east of Hamilton. Under the tutelage of Herb Lock, the four - singer/guitarist Ron Demmans, guitarist Ray Durritt, bassist Peter Rihbany, and a guy named Mel on the drum kit - spent the better part of the late sixties gigging and honing their chops, mostly in clubs around Toronto. An early mention of the group came in the June 9, 1969 issue of RPM, where the guys were slated to take the stage at Hamilton City Hall entertaining thousands of trekkers on the CKOC Miles for Millions walk-a-thon.
That same year, the Smile pressed up their own single, 'Be Somebody Else's Friend', on the obscure Ruby label (home to Hamiltonian psych-rockers Village S.T.O.P. and their hyper-rare 'Vibration' seven-inch the same year). That disc must have served as a handy calling card of sorts, as it wasn't long before the band had inked a deal with the high-flying Columbia Canada label, which was on a tear in those years issuing records by the likes of Mashmakhan, the Magic Bubble, It's All Meat and the Souls of Inspyration, to name a few.
With Columbia's heft, a rechristened Smyle (with Tim Regan now on the drums) trotted out their new single, the buoyant southern-rocking 'Glory Glory', in grand style, with the group snagging the cover of RPM magazine and showcasing their song to the suits at a presentation of new product at the Don Valley Holiday Inn in Toronto. That same issue of RPM boasted that the meeting was "very Canadian content oriented [with] more than eighty minutes of the three-hour meet [ ] devoted to showcasing soon-to-be-released domestic product, all of it produced in Canadian studios." That product included some rather stiff competition including the aforementioned Magic Bubble, Thunder Bay's Jarvis Street Revue and Stratford (ON)'s Perth County Conspiracy.
In addition to its Columbia pressing up here in Canuckistan, Glory Glory' was issued south of the border on Epic, as well as on CBS in the UK, Brazil, Spain and France, with the latter two, as was typical at the time, housed in full-colour picture sleeves (with the French version pictured above). What's more, the record managed an impressive #23 showing on RPM's year-end Top 100 chart. Columbia was impressed enough with 'Glory Glory' to put out an entire album's worth of tunes, as well as a couple of non-LP seven-inchers the following year.
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