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The Five D
Baby Boy / Good Time Music - 7"
Sir John A - 1967
Michael Panontin
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"We were just another band that was hacking away doing the top 40 or whatever was on the chart."
The Five D, as singer Dave Poulin would tell Jim Hurcomb in his book, Rockin' on the Rideau, were no different from dozens of other young groups in mid-sixties Ottawa...with one difference. As students of the Beatles (Poulin and bassist Brad Campbell talked about forming a band on the night of the Fab Four's Ed Sullivan Show appearance), they were determined to sound as professional as they could.
Gradually the Five D - with a nucleus of Poulin, Campbell and guitarist Keith Richardson - had a note-perfect set that served them quite well. "We were young guys getting up to $500 a night," Campbell recalled. Unfortunately, without any original tunes, their dream of making a record seemed far off. That is, until they hooked up with John Pozer.
Pozer, a fast-talking deejay at local station CJET, had recently formed his own label called Sir John A and had taken an interest in the Five D. The fact that the guys had no songs of their own was hardly an issue with Pozer. He scoured the record bins for little-known records that the group could cover. For their first single, he gave them a couple of tunes, one by a Michigan garage band called the Bossmen (which included future Lou Reed and Alice Cooper guitarist Dick Wagner) and the other a recent flop by the Lovin' Spoonful.
'Baby Boy' was a perfect choice. For one thing, it cribbed a riff or two from the Beatles' 'The Word' and was thus catchy as all get-out. What's more, few people in the Ottawa area had ever heard the original. And so with Pozer's pull and the high quality of the discs on Sir John A (which were usually recorded in Montreal, mastered in Toronto and pressed up at the nearby RCA plant in Smiths Falls), 'Baby Boy' seemed like a sure thing.
'Baby Boy' came out in January 1967 and before long was racing up the local charts. Campbell remembered the first time he heard it on the radio: "We were driving along in this piece-of-junk car with the one speaker in the dashboard. It was such a thrill. It was the perfect summer, blast-out-of-the-radio kind of tune." Pozer, ever the astute promoter, presented a copy of the record to former prime minister John Diefenbaker on the 152nd birthday of Canada's first PM, Sir John A MacDonald. (The square-headed Dief, clearly out of his comfort zone, chuckled and asked the photographers if they were singers.)
The Five D followed up with two more singles, a harmony-laden reworking of Lee Dorsey's 'Get Out of My Life Woman' with the Ivy League's 'Running Round in Circles' on the back side, and a blithe bubble-gum composition by Poulin called She Can't Be My Girl'.
Campbell credits Pozer for much of the group's success. "We opened for Wilson Pickett at Massey Hall in Toronto, and at the Capitol Theatre in Ottawa along with Bruce Cockburn's new band the Flying Circus. John had us doing TV shows. We played for the Queen in 1967. Our last gig was opening for the Who at the Civic Centre. He would just go out there and kick open doors."
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