Simply Saucer

Simply Saucer came out of Hamilton, Ontario in 1973, built by a circle of record collectors who gathered at Bob Moody's Record Bar on John Street North, the one shop in town that would special-order the Velvet Underground, Can, Amon Düül II, Hawkwind, Soft Machine and Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd. Edgar Breau had grown up on country music, Elvis, the Beatles, Gordon Lightfoot and the Kinks before the Record Bar crowd pulled him further out. In 1972 he hitchhiked to Vancouver with a friend, came home that fall, threw his schoolbooks into a creek at King and Quigley, and set about building a band modelled on Barrett-era Floyd and the Velvets.

The first version was a six-piece rehearsing in an upstairs apartment near the Record Bar: Breau on electric guitar, theremin and vocals, Dave Byers on guitar, flute and treated saxophone, Paul Colilli on Farfisa organ and piano, Kevin Christoff on bass, Neil DeMerchant on drums, and Breau's foster brother John LaPlante, who renamed himself Ping Romany and worked audio generators, oscillators and later a MiniMoog. They played long improvised pieces and had no interest in the cover songs that kept other Hamilton bands working. One afternoon they turned the feedback up, walked out of the building and followed the noise as far as James Street.

The name came from A Saucerful of Secrets, and 'Simply' was a nod to a British group called Just Us. In October 1973 the band rented a storefront at 220½ Kenilworth Avenue North, known as The Office, which became rehearsal room, headquarters and Breau's home. Members of the Parkdale Gang would pound on his back door in the small hours. Colilli left for college, Byers drifted away, and the four-piece of Breau, Christoff, DeMerchant and Ping Romany remained.

Rick Bissell, a Montrealer living in Hamilton, became their manager in early 1974 and booked their first show, in the basement of St. Alban's Anglican Church on June 22. The east end kids who turned up got DeMerchant sawing at a violin he could not play, Breau's audio generators and an hour-long piece called 'Noise'. Fights broke out and the police arrived. Bissell kept them working anyway, at high schools, youth halls and county fairs across Ontario, where audiences expecting a dance band got feedback and oscillators.

In July 1974 Bissell paid for a session at Master Sound Recording, the studio Bob and Daniel Lanois ran in the basement of their mother's house in Ancaster. Breau brought along White Light/White Heat and Raw Power to show the brothers the sound he wanted. Bob Lanois engineered and mixed. The band cut six songs, several in a single take: 'Instant Pleasure', 'Electro-Rock', 'Nazi Apocalypse', 'Mole Machine', 'Bullet Proof Nothing' and 'Here Come The Cyborgs'. The money ran out before Breau could add a final guitar overdub to 'Bullet Proof Nothing'. His lyrics, written in a stream of consciousness and fed by science fiction, comic books and the street life around The Office, ran to cyborgs, Eva Braun, metal bodies and mutation. Christoff and DeMerchant drove the songs hard while Ping filled every gap with electronic squall. Canadian record companies passed, and the tape went on a shelf.

DeMerchant left in November 1974. Don Cramer took over the drums, then briefly John Miles, and in spring 1975 fifteen-year-old Tony Cutaia. On June 28, 1975, the same day Pink Floyd played Ivor Wynne Stadium, Simply Saucer gave a free afternoon concert on the roof of Lloyd D. Jackson Square in downtown Hamilton. Part of it was caught on a two-track Tandberg reel-to-reel. Breau introduced the band to the shoppers as heavy metalloid music, and the tape preserved 'Here Come The Cyborgs', 'Dance The Mutation' and a ten-minute 'Illegal Bodies'.

Bissell wanted a contract giving him the right to make decisions for the band. Breau refused, and Bissell was gone by July 1975. That September, after a show at McMaster University, their guitars were stolen. Cutaia left, Cramer came back, and the band played no shows at all in 1976. Breau spent the year writing shorter, more direct songs, among them 'Low Profile' and 'She's A Dog', which left little room for oscillators. Ping Romany quit in August 1976, staying on as a roadie, and the next month the band lost The Office and broke up.

The break lasted a few months. In early 1977 Breau, Christoff and Cramer started again in a rented house on Ferguson Avenue South, the Saucer House, rehearsing in the basement nearly every night, Christmas included. Alex Pollington joined on second guitar in April. That same month Breau met Gary "Pig" Gold, an American fanzine writer who interviewed him for The Pig Paper, came to a rehearsal and heard a connection between the new songs and the punk scene growing on Toronto's Queen Street West. Gold became their informal manager and took them up the QEW to play with Teenage Head, the Viletones, the Battered Wives and the Poles. When Pollington left in November 1977, his replacement was Steve "Sparky" Park, one of the founders of Teenage Head, which did nothing for relations between the two bands.

With Breau, Christoff, Cramer and Park, the band played the Hotel Isabella, the Colonial Tavern, the Beverley Tavern and the Horseshoe, and opened for Nash the Slash and Pere Ubu. Gold decided they needed a record. Corn-roast fundraisers paid for a May 1978 session at JB Sound in Hamilton, and on June 8 Gold's Pig Records issued 'She's A Dog' and 'I Can Change My Mind' as PIG-1, in a pressing of 2,000. They had picked the two most approachable songs in the set, and the band admitted the single showed only part of what they did on stage. The single drew favourable notice in Britain, where Record Mirror named it Single of the Week, and Breau later recalled a similar "pick hit" in the New Musical Express. It was the only record Simply Saucer released in the 1970s.

The Queen Street shows dried up, and by 1979 the band was working long residencies in small Ontario bars and padding its sets with covers. Some of the people around the Saucer House had gone into dealing, and the men who came by began to frighten Breau as he rehearsed downstairs. The last show of the original band was July 24, 1979, at the Mississauga Belle. Park gave notice and Christoff followed four days later. Soon afterward an affair inside the household ended in violence, and one of those involved shot himself in the house, where Christoff found him. Breau said later that it sealed the whole period in a very negative way.

Breau put the electric guitar away. Through the 1980s he married, raised a family, studied cabinetmaking and read his way into pre-Vatican II Catholicism, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and the distributists. He took up acoustic fingerpicking in the manner of John Fahey and Robbie Basho and wrote songs closer to folk and country than to anything Simply Saucer had played.

Breau himself started the band's second life. He mentioned the old group to Hamilton broadcaster Bruce "Mole" Mowat and gave him a cassette from the 1974 session. In early 1988 Mowat dubbed six copies and mailed them to underground writers. Byron Coley offered to release the music through Forced Exposure, then backed out and told Mowat to put it out himself. Breau recovered the session reels from Rick Bissell, Mowat borrowed money, and Bob Lanois restored both the studio recordings and the rooftop tape.

Cyborgs Revisited came out on Mowat's Mole Sound Recordings in 1989 as MOLE-1, in a pressing of 920 copies. Side one held the six Lanois recordings, side two the three Jackson Square tracks. The insert carried Mowat's notes and a letter from Breau naming the band's influences and closing with praise for gardeners, farmers, home brewers, distributists, beekeepers, monks and Chestertonians. Fifteen years after it was recorded and ten years after the band ended, Simply Saucer had a debut album.

Coley called it the best Canadian album ever made, and the NME heard Barrett-era Floyd crossed with the Warhol-era Velvets. Julian Cope and Thurston Moore became champions, and Chris Stigliano had been putting the band on the cover of his fanzine Black To Comm before the record existed. Breau wanted none of it. He stopped performing altogether and home-schooled his children. A CD issue followed in the early 1990s, and in 1996 Chart magazine's readers placed Cyborgs Revisited at No. 48 among Canadian albums. In 2003 Hamilton's Sonic Unyon released an expanded edition with rehearsal and live tapes from 1977 and 1978 and the first CD appearance of the Pig Records single. Bob Mersereau's 2007 book The Top 100 Canadian Albums ranked it No. 36, ahead of records by The Band, Neil Young and Rush. Ty Segall covered 'Bullet Proof Nothing' on the flip side of his 2010 Goner single 'Caesar', and Jon Spencer and John Dwyer joined the admirers.

The Sonic Unyon reissue drew Breau back. He had begun playing acoustic shows under his own name, and on September 16, 2006, Simply Saucer played for the first time in 27 years, a six-song set at the Corktown in Hamilton with Breau, Christoff, Park and drummer Joe Csontos. Breau said he had to picture himself singing 'Here Come The Cyborgs' again before he could commit. Park stepped away, and the band settled around Breau, Christoff, Csontos, guitarist Steve Foster and Daniel Wintermans on guitar, theremin and electronics. In 2007 they recorded at Catherine North Studios in Hamilton, and Sonic Unyon released Half Human / Half Live in 2008, a studio side of songs from Breau's unreleased 1970s catalogue and a live side, the same shape as Cyborgs Revisited. On October 13, 2007, at Southpaw in Brooklyn on a bill with Alan Vega and Oneida, Simply Saucer played outside Canada for the first time. Detroit and Chicago followed in June 2008, along with Terrastock 7 in Louisville. In 2009 Colilli and Byers sat in with Breau and Christoff for an improvised recording session.

In August 2011 the band went to Detroit, the city whose music had shaped them from the start, to record five songs at Jim Diamond's Ghetto Recorders with producer Jeff Meier of the Detroit Cobras and Rocket 455. Detroit arranger McKinley Jackson added piano to 'Low Profile' and Hammond organ to 'Dance The Mutation'. Schizophrenic Records released the session as the Baby Nova EP in 2014. Logan Hardware issued the Reckless Agitation EP in 2013, mounted on a flying disc, and Mammoth Cave put out 'Bullet Proof Nothing' as a single in 2014. In 2016 Logan Hardware and Galactic Zoo Archive released Saucerland, a double album of demos, alternate takes and live recordings from 1975 to 1978, with track notes by Christoff. Some of it came from the band's copyright tape, a cassette they recorded at rehearsal and mailed to themselves in the 1970s as proof of authorship.

That November Eternal Cavalier Press published Heavy Metalloid Music: The Story of Simply Saucer by Toronto journalist Jesse Locke, the band's authorized biography, built from interviews with members, families, Bob Lanois, Gold, Mowat, Coley and others. Locke ended up behind the drum kit at the launch shows. In 2018 In The Red Records reissued Cyborgs Revisited as a remastered double LP with the full surviving Jackson Square concert on the second disc and new notes by Locke. Label Obscura released 'Lo-Fi Garage Symphonette' and 'Alien Cornfield' the same year, the first new Simply Saucer songs in about four decades, recorded at Royal Mountain Studio in Toronto by Nyles Miszczyk with Breau, Christoff, guitarist Mike Trebilcock, singer and multi-instrumentalist Colina Phillips, keyboardist Ed Roth and Locke on drums.

Breau and Christoff still lead Simply Saucer, in lineups that have included Trebilcock and Blue Rodeo drummer Glenn Milchem, and Breau keeps a parallel career as an acoustic songwriter.

-Robert Williston