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The Ugly Ducklings
Somewhere Outside
Yorktown - 1967
Michael Panontin
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Nineteen sixty-six was the year pop's voice cracked, when its squeaky clean Beatles complexion broke out in the pimply scruff of garage rock all over North America. From the Chocolate Watchband out in San Jose and the 13th Floor Elevators in Texas to the Unrelated Segments in Detroit and the Remains in Boston, a plethora of scrawny kids fumbled with chords on their brand new Telecasters while aping Mick Jagger's already affected snarls.
Toronto at the time was no different. Of the scores of garage bands in the city back then, the Ugly Ducklings clearly ruled the roost. Their debut single, 'Nothin', recorded on a two-track machine for $300 and pushed into regular rotation just a few weeks later by local deejays, reached #18 locally on the CHUM-AM charts that year. The band appeared at the massive 14-hour Toronto Sound revue in front of 22,000 screaming kids. And if that weren't enough, they had managed to open for their heroes, the Rolling Stones, at Maple Leaf Gardens in June.
The Ugly Ducklings started out in far-flung Scarborough on a serendipitous day in 1964. "A guy at school told me about some kind of a show at Cedarbrae Collegiate the following night. And I thought I'd check it out," the group's drummer Robin Boers would later tell Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine. "I'm walking down the halls at this school, wondering why I'm there, and I come around the corner, and there are these three guys with long hair, as long as mine. So, I'm looking at them, while they're looking at me, and I just said, 'Hi, I'm a drummer'. And they all burst out laughing, and said, 'Well, we're a band, and we're looking for a drummer!'"
The Ugly Ducklings eventually started playing around town and soon became the most popular band in the city's hip Yorkville neighbourhood. Of course, the fact that they included lots of Stones tunes in their set hardly hurt. "A lot of people liked us because they thought we were from England," Boers recalled. "We were new, we had one step up on the rest...and we had longer hair!" In '65 the group - singer Dave Byngham, lead guitarist Roger Mayne, rhythm guitarist Glyn Bell, bassist John Read and Boers - began headlining at a place called Charlie Brown's. "Charlie's was a place that held maybe ninety people. But we used to get 470 people in there, on chairs, on tables...everywhere. Man, if the Fire Marshall had come down."
The band followed up 'Nothin'' with two more singles, the upbeat 'She Ain't No Use to Me' and the scorching hot 'Just in Case You Wonder', but it soon became clear that if they wanted real success, they needed to make a full-on LP. Boers: "We were finally told that if we wanted to get anywhere, we had to do our own material. And soon afterward, we had a whole album of material."
Somewhere Outside was finished up towards the tail end of '66 and unleashed into the shops just as 1967 was getting underway. Much of it seems to skirt the cusp of garage rock and psychedelia. In addition to the three aforementioned singles, all banging tracks on their own, there are surly takes on Bo Diddley's 'Mama, Keep Your Big Mouth Shut' and the Rascals' 'I Ain't Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore'. The Ducks' stabs at psych, like the languid 'Not for Long' and the wilted flower-power chic of 'Postman's Fancy', fall a bit on the flat side. Much better is the excellent acid-blues rave-up 'Windy City (Noise at the North End)', which echoes what Paul Butterfield was up to at the time, especially the exotic excursions on his East-West set.
The Ugly Ducklings followed up with the syrupy 'Gaslight', which shot to #1 on CHUM in October '67 (edging out the Stones' 'Dandelion', ironically). But it was sort of a bittersweet success, as the song was actually just Byngham singing with New York's Tonight Show Band. It would prove to be the group's last taste of the limelight. The Ducks released one more single, but by that time they had strayed so far from their original sound that there was nothing left to do but break up.
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