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Skylark
Wildflower / The Writing's on the Wall - 7"
Capitol - 1973
Michael Panontin
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After all these years, the name Skylark is hardly what you would call a household name. But the BC group's top-ten single, 'Wildflower', with its tear-jerking opening line of "She's faced the hardest times you could imagine / And many times her eyes fought back the tears" would have been well known to many a young lady back in the early seventies.
Doug Edwards, the group's guitarist, penned the music. But it was Dave Richardson, a police officer in Victoria, BC at the time, who contributed the lyrics, about a young nurse he was dating who would sometimes take her job home with her.
"One night I went to pick her up at her apartment," he recalled for David Foster, Skylark's keyboardist. "She told me that two elderly ladies she had been caring for in the hospital had died that day at work, and she felt terribly sad about it, as she had come to know them fairly well over a period of time. Anyway, she more or less vented her feelings and I just listened."
Richardson put a blanket over his love, who was exhausted and fast asleep, and promptly put pen to paper. 'Wildflower' took all of about fifteen minutes to write, with the modest songwriter saying he "felt that all I did was hold the pen in my hand, and that God did the writing".
Skylark had only been together for about six months when they were brought onto the roster at Capitol Records, the last group in fact to be signed by the great Artie Mogull before he left the label. They were given a generous contract and five months of studio time to record their debut album. But when it was released, Capitol chose another tune, the anemic 'What Would I Do for You?', as the single. It was issued in June 1972, but despite months of heavy promotion, the song just couldn't gain much chart traction.
Enter Rosalie Trombley, a.k.a. "the girl with the golden ear" and "the most powerful lady in pop music". As music director at CKLW in Windsor, her uncanny knack for picking hits helped boost the careers of many artists, from locals Alice Cooper and Bob Seger to Canadians the Guess Who and Gordon Lightfoot. At a station known for its strict AM-hits format - one of the most powerful on the continent at the time - Trombley decided to give 'Wildflower' a chance while it was still just an album cut, something almost unheard of back then. And she steadfastly spun that track for a good three months before Capitol finally got the memo and issued it as a seven-inch to test market it in the Windsor/Detroit area.
It worked. 'Wildflower' was issued in January 1973 (with, interestingly, Dom Troiano's funky 'The Writing's on the Wall' on the backside). The single was picked up by many stations on both sides of the border in the early months, and by the time the dust had settled it had peaked at #10 on the RPM 100 Singles chart and #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Equally impressive, the song climbed to #1 on RPM's Adult Contemporary Playlist for the week of May 26th, 1973.
Skylark hardly had time to bask in their chart success. The seven-piece group had already begun to unravel, leaving only Foster and singers Bonnie Jean Cook and Donny Gerrard to stitch together a new band. Capitol issued a follow-up LP in 1974. But by then the writing really was on the wall for Skylark as they assumed their rightful places in the one-hit wonder club of pop music.
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