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The Unforscene
These Are the Words / You and Me - 7"
Momentum - 1967
Michael Panontin
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"In 1966, two members of a band from Canada called the Unforscene brought some demo records to me," producer Don Perry recalled in his 2016 memoir Don Perry Produced the Music: My Journey through the Golden Years of Rock and Roll. "I was blown away."
Such was the effect that a couple of Vancouver boys in their mid-teens, Terry Robotham and Dan Yard, had at the time. In fact, their precocity actually stretched back a few more years when a 13-year-old Robotham started giving his songs to Yard for a band he was in called the Mods.
Perry then introduced the lads to Mike Curb, a high-flying young producer with a hitherto Midas touch for hit records. "I was working on some sessions with Bob [Summers] and during a break I played him some of the songs. He called and set up a meeting for me with Mike." Curb signed the band on the spot and immediately booked some recording time. The guys were so broke that Perry had to put them up in his apartment while they were in L.A. for the sessions.
Perry took the tapes, which he admits were "as good as anything I heard in my years in the business" to Curb, who was impressed enough to have Perry prevent them from going back home to BC. "Mike came out of his office and told me he would ride down the elevator with me to the garage," he writes. "On the way down he raved about the product and told me I had really 'nailed' it."
In all, the Unforscene issued three singles in their brief tenure with Perry. The first, the snappy Beatlesque 'These Are the Words', came out on both sides of the border in the early months of 1967. And though it vanished without a trace in the US, the record managed to spend three weeks on the influential C-Funtastic Fifty charts up in Vancouver, even reaching the #1 slot on the station's All Canadian Top Ten list.
After a second single, Aug. '67's 'Little Toy', also tanked south of the 49th, Perry brought in the still-unknown Summers to help out on the Unforscene's final stab at success. Curb's philosophy was, in Perry's words, "If a song was a hit for one generation, it would work again for the next." And with that in mind, Curb had them record a version of Danny Hutton's 'Roses and Rainbows', which had been a regional hit for the future Three Dog Night singer back in the late summer of '65. Unfortunately for the Unforscene it wasn't a hit the second time. Even worse, the fast-moving Curb, who had his fingers in a number of pies at the time, had already moved on to his next project.
Perry readily acknowledges Curb's success, which includes an astounding 419 #1 records in the country, rock and r'n'b genres. Perry, who has ground out his own enviable reputation in the industry, is not without the occasional tinge of regret. "Today, Curb Records reads like a who's who of country music. Unfortunately, that's not the Mike I met and the Unforscene and I never had a chance to get on that train with him and ride it to the top."
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