Away From Here b/w No Place Like Stoned

Kari Robertson, who recorded as Kathy Robertson, was born in Scotland and came to Canada as a baby. She grew up in Toronto and started singing in the city's folk clubs at fourteen, with an appearance at Massey Hall the following year. Her early influences were Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Nancy Ames, though she says no one singer shaped her: "I tended to like a variety of musicians." In her early twenties she spent a year touring Alberta, and by the mid-1970s she had played clubs and concert halls across Canada and sung her own songs on CBC's Luncheon Date with Elwood Glover and CHCH's The Lively Woman Show.

She wrote 'Away From Here' and 'No Place Like Stoned' in the early 1970s and recorded them at Paul Zaza's Zaza Sound in Toronto, with Zaza producing. The single came out in 1975 as the first release on Hero Records (HR001), an independent label owned by her manager, Ron Henderson, with both songs published through her company Kat Dancing Music. Distribution was handled by Roblan Distributors, which serviced the Sam the Record Man chain. RPM welcomed it in June, and by August Hero was pushing it nationally. In Newfoundland it went to No. 1 at CFCB in Corner Brook. It is a powerful vocal record with a darker, soulful edge that her folk-club reputation would not lead you to expect.

Her other claim to fame began in a music store in Red Deer. On that Alberta tour, her six-string acoustic "warped in the -40 degrees," and the only acoustic the store had was a Hagstrom twelve-string. Back in Toronto, playing the Moorings Restaurant Lounge at Yonge and College, she was spotted by a Hagstrom representative who noticed the guitar and asked if she would be their cover girl, since, as she puts it, "I looked Swedish." The shoot took place at the Scarborough Bluffs, and the red outfit was her own choice: "I picked out the outfit." The photograph ran on the cover of a Hagstrom catalogue around the time the single came out.

Not long after, Robertson left for Britain to tour in concert with well-known country acts, and she later changed her first name to Kari. Back home, the Hagstrom cover had taken on a life of its own among guitar collectors, who knew her only as the Hagstrom Girl. She had no idea. "I was out of the country," she says. "Plus having changed my first name, no one could find me." Kim Mitchell eventually devoted a segment of his show Guitar Picks to the Hagstrom Girl. In the early 1990s she made another independent recording, issued on cassette and CD and circulated mainly to local radio stations.

CitizenFreak first wrote about the single in November 2011. On June 14, 2025, Kari got in touch with the Museum herself, and this biography was written with her help. Her recollections of the Alberta tour, the Hagstrom photograph, her performances in Britain and her later recordings have added a firsthand account to the surviving records of her musical career.

-Robert Williston