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The Kings
This Beat Goes On / Switchin' to Glide - 7"
Extreme - 1980
Mike Milner
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The Kings got their start in the late seventies when Oakville (ON) native Mister Zero (ne John Picard) met up with keyboardist Sonny Keyes while they were living in Vancouver. The pair began composing songs and eventually decided to return to Ontario, where they recruited singer/bassist Dave Diamond and drummer Max Styles. As Whistleking, the four spent a good three years writing and performing their own music.
One way for a band to get some notice (and airplay) back in those days was to enter one of their original songs in a contest held by a local radio station. For Whistleking, that meant competing in the first ever home-grown competition sponsored by Toronto powerhouse CHUM-FM. The group actually beat out six hundred other entrants, but it was to little avail. "We got a free lunch," Zero recalled, "and every label turned us down."
With the rise of both punk and, as the guys describe on their website, "the marketing ploy known as new wave", they opted for a name change to something a little more au courant. And so, as the renamed Kings, they decided to make a record on their own, and that is where, as fate would have it, a chance meeting turned everything around in an instant. The band were working at Nimbus 9 Studio at night and during off hours. Bob Ezrin, himself fresh from producing Pink Floyd's The Wall, happened to be back in Toronto at the time and decided to stop off at the studio. "Our manager played him our stuff and he liked it," Zero remembers.
Ezrin's involvement was a major turning point, and with his assistance the Kings signed with Elektra Records in Los Angeles. The noted producer had initially offered to remix some of their already recorded tracks, but in the end everything was rerecorded with Ezrin at the helm. In fact, the Kings write that every song had to be broken down and "revamped". And that is most obvious on the group's biggest hit, the double-sided 'This Beat Goes On' b/w 'Switchin' to Glide', which was usually spun as a single track on the radio.
"One of Ezrin's techniques was to hear the song in a simple form and when he heard something he didn't like he'd yell stop and it was fix-it time," the band explain. "That is what happened with 'This Beat Goes On'. It was a simpler chord structure that was not as hooky with lyrics that were not as direct. Diamond understood what Ezrin was getting at regarding the chords and went and changed the parts so that, although more complicated musically, it sounded better and was way more catchy. [And] that is when Zero re-wrote the lyrics to the B-verse."
'This Beat Goes On'... was a staple on the radio from the summer of 1980 right through to the early months of 1981. The song spent 23 weeks on the charts down in the US, peaking at #43 on the Billboard Hot 100, while up here in Canuckistan it reached a lower but still respectable #59 position.
The Kings continued to record, issuing a handful of albums right through to 2003's Because of You set. But they were never able to duplicate the success they had with 'This Beat Goes On'... Along the way, the group opened for some of the bigger acts of the day and were invited to perform on American Bandstand. They even scored a coveted spot at the massive Heatwave Festival north of Toronto in August 1980, surely a career highlight. "Heatwave promoter John Brower was a guy we met around town and he thought we were good enough to be on the bill," Zero recalled for CM. "We played last because we wanted to be under the lights at night. We're so glad we have the movie of that night; it shows us at a specific moment and time, rocking out."
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The Kings
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