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Winter's Green
Are You a Monkey? / Jump in the River - 7"
Rumble - 1968
Michael Panontin
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Winter's Green trace their roots back to early 1966 and the merging of two little-known Vancouver bands, the Citations and the Continentals. By the following year, Winter's Green started finding themselves on some of the lower mainland's more happening events. A January '67 show at the Afterthought saw them in support of the United Empire Loyalists, while the star-studded Dominion Day extravaganza in Victoria that summer listed the likes of Mother Tuckers Yellow Duck, the Trials of Jayson Hoover and the Northwest Company among others.
In September 1968, Winter's Green (singer Ra McGuire and guitarist Brian Smith along with keyboardist Wayne Gibson, bassist Bruce Rutherford and drummer Stu Wilson) teamed up with Wayne Sterloff, who was looking to launch a new label called Rumble Records. Rumble turned out to be a rather low-key concern that would issue just four singles in its brief existence. First up on its roster was Winter's Green and this schizophrenic seven-inch.
If there is anything to be gleaned from the moody, organ-driven 'Are You a Monkey', it is that the guys must have been spinning the heck out of their Doors records, especially their more adventurous tracks like 'The End' and 'When the Music's Over'. But what Winter's Green seemed to lack in originality, they more than made up for in talent, particularly the deft interplay of McGuire's Morrisonesque vocal and Gibson's eerie keys. 'Are You a Monkey' is overarching as all get-out with its multiple segments and hazy lyrics. But it is nevertheless an interesting three and a half minutes of Vancouver rock history. Flip the disc over and it feels like a totally different band. 'Jump in the River', recorded much earlier, cribs a riff or two off Cream's 'I Feel Free' in its intro, but then it kicks into more straight-up country/bluegrass and is really a bit of rollicking, knee-slapping fun
Rutherford and Wilson dropped out of the picture in '69. The rest soldiered on with a new rhythm section, changing their name to Applejack soon after. Applejack allegedly became quite popular in the Vancouver area, and in 1974 - with just McGuire and Smith remaining from Winter's Green - they caught the ear of Randy Bachman, who signed them to his brand-new Legend label. The guys issued their Bachman-produced debut the next year, changing their name to Trooper in the process and raising a little hell for many years to come.
(All four singles on Rumble were allegedly pressed up in runs of just 200 copies, so good luck getting your hands on one of these. Still, for all its rarity, a VG+ copy of 'Are You a Monkey?' sold in 2013 for a mere USD$100.)
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Quality
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