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Ian Thomas


Ian Thomas - Painted Ladies / Will You Still Love Me - 7

Painted Ladies / Will You Still Love Me - 7"
GRT - 1973


Michael Panontin
"Ooh-ooh, feelin' fine mama / Painted ladies and a bottle of wine mama / Ooh-ooh, feelin' good mama / They took my money like I knew they would."

Ian Thomas' 'Painted Ladies' - the bouncing clavinet and that earworm of a chorus, especially - was etched into our teenage brains back in the seventies, though truth be told we had little idea what it was about.

Thomas had enjoyed a brief taste of fame with his previous group Tranquillity Base and his song, 'If You're Lookin'' (#24 RPM in 1970). But for most people he seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. He was just 23 years of age and about as far away from that edgy lyric as anyone could have been. The son of a former Baptist minister, who by his own admission "had lived a pretty sheltered life", Thomas at the time was ensconced in suburban life, happily married with two kids and a day job at the CBC.

But he also had seen a bit of the darker side of life on his tours across the province.

"I was in a band playing just the hellholes of Ontario, sharing dressing rooms with strippers," he would later tell radio station Boom 97.3. "Some of them were turning tricks on the side. And when you're stuck in some dumpy hotel in the middle of nowhere...you miss home like the dickens. I wake up one morning, one of the strippers would be coming out of her room. You're heading down for breakfast together. It was a real culture shock for me."

Thomas had originally written 'Painted Ladies' in his basement in Burlington ON, and then fleshed it out at night at the old RCA Studios on Mutual Street in Toronto. It was there that those almost-otherworldly clavinet parts were added. "They had these old TC-630s," he recalled. "It was a sound-on-sound Sony tape recorder, so I could stack up harmonies and guitar parts. I had the whole song together with the exception of bass and drums. The clavinet was an idea of John Lombardo's, who was the producer for me on that. John Capek - he wrote 'Rhythm of the Heart' with Marc Jordan and a number of other great songs for other artists - played the clavinet. And then I stacked up all the harmonies just like I did at home on my TC-630."

'Painted Ladies' came out in the fall of '73 and was an almost immediate hit. The record entered Toronto's influential CHUM chart in early October and by the end of November had reached #5, where it sat for two weeks. Then it caught on across the country, peaking at #4 for the week of Jan. 12th, 1974. "I just watched it sail up the charts," Thomas fondly remembered.

Thomas has had a number of successes over the years: charting the occasional single, acting (playing Dougie Franklin on The Red Green Show), composing for TV (the animated series Bob & Doug), even writing a couple of books. Still, the average person would be forgiven for considering Thomas a one-hit wonder.

Things might have turned out differently had 'Painted Ladies' been more of a success in the US. Strangely, it failed to even crack the top 20 there, something Thomas chalks up to a lack of promotion and a bit of good ol' corruption.

"I often wondered why the song didn't go farther than #27 or #26 in Billboard. And then I read the book Hitman and I realized $250,000 had to change hands to break the top 20," he explained. "The mother company in the United States was Chess Janis Records [and] they were just cheapskates. They just sort of threw everything at the wall and they weren't willing to spend a penny on anything. If they had chucked the 200 grand or whatever it was in, the album would have been front-racked and it would be a totally different story."

Thomas for his part is sanguine about the whole thing. "That's the nature of music business. Some days you have to pave the road ahead with greenbacks."

(Shown above is the Dutch picture sleeve.)
         
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