Rabble - The Rabble Album

Tracks

Side 1

		Track Name	Length
	1	Golden Girl	02:18
	2	Black Potato	02:45
	3	Nothin' But	04:26
	4	Rising of the Sun	04:32
	5	The Crushing Hand of Mother	02:57

Side 2

		Track Name	Length
	1	We'll Bring You Flowers For Your Wall	01:50
	2	Can I Squeeze	01:58
	3	The Energy Ritual: House of Cards; What?; Collapse of the Sugar Plum Fairies; Genesis

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Information/Write-up

From Montreal, Quebec, this band began life as a high school garage band in 1964 and lasted through to 1970. Original drummer David Wynne recalls:- "Like most of the other band members we had started in high school garage bands (more basement in the Canadian climate) copying the Ventures and Shadows etc, then the Beatles, Stones and Dylan. I left The Rabble in 1965, shortly after Golden Girl was written, to join The Haunted. Their first drummer, Brian Robillard then joined The Rabble..."

Their best known song was Golden Girl and their albums which were an amalgam of pop and psychedelia, are both now sought-after by collectors. The first is decidedly patchy with more rubbishy pop songs than expected (I Still Can Hear You Laughing, Black Potato and Can I Squeeze?). Golden Girl is a straight-forward but competent pop song and was their most successful 45. The album does contain three tracks which are of interest; Rising Of The Sun, a gentle laid back number with a psych-pop ending; the rather unusual The Crushing Hand Of Mother, notable for its tempo changes and psychedelic guitar work and the magnum opus The Energy Ritual, a four part pop-psych potpourri, strongly influenced in places by the Sergeant Pepper era Beatles.

The Give Us Back Elaine! album has nothing to match The Energy Ritual, the final track There's So Many Things comes closest culminating in a sort of guitar freakout, but it is the more consistent of the two and musically a progression on the first. There are a few plain pop offerings like Candy, Too Bad and Why Am I Lonely, but much of the pop-based material on tracks like Here's Your Mourning, Nowhere To Ride, Put It Down To Magic and Please Set Me Free veers towards psychedelia or on a few tracks snippets of weirdness. Quite an interesting album.

Roberts later played in a band called Raving Madd, who recorded an acetate of Hey Joe and four other songs. Some band members later formed an outfit called The Chocolate Pudding in the mid-seventies.

Late in 1969 John Pimm released a weird psychedelic 45, Oh Gilda/Watch Him Grow (Warner Bros 5027), with assistance from members of The Haunted, Rabble and Our Generation, which dated back to a session in 1967.

John Pimm is out on Vancouver Island and still apparently plays in bands, whilst Rick Metcalfe now lives in Ottawa.
-Dreams, Fantasies, Nightmares

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