Allan Nicholls

Allan Nicholls was born in Montréal on April 8, 1945, and grew up without much money in the city's Saint-Laurent district, heading out to gigs in borrowed suits and cheap copies of Beatle boots. Hockey ran in the family. His grandfather, Riley Hern, was in goal for the Montreal Wanderers when they won the Stanley Cup in 1908, 1909 and 1911. Music got to Nicholls first. By the late 1950s he was singing with the Montereys, a band built around guitar instrumentals.

In 1963 he formed J.B. & The Playboys with lead guitarist Bill Hill, rhythm guitarist Andy Kaye, bassist Louis Atkins and drummer Doug West. The Playboys came from the magazine, and J.B. was a joke only the band understood. They arrived a few months before the Beatles reached The Ed Sullivan Show, and their sets mixed originals with early Beatles songs. They played high school dances and YMCA functions and became regulars at the Bonaventure Curling Club, one of the liveliest rock rooms in Montréal. A local cologne manufacturer signed on as their manager and had the teenagers fitted for matching suits.

The band's first single, 'Cheryl' backed with 'All My Loving', appeared on DJ Enterprises in 1964. RCA Victor's Canadian International series signed them next and put out four singles in 1965, among them 'Chances', 'One Love, Your Love' and 'My Delight', most written by Kaye and Nicholls. Their self-titled RCA Victor album gathered those sides with new recordings, including 'Sticks and Stones' and a version of Rufus Thomas's 'Walking the Dog'. That year the Playboys toured Canada with the Rolling Stones, who were still travelling between shows in two station wagons, with the Montréal band driving behind them. After one strong set in Ottawa, Mick Jagger leaned in as the bands crossed paths at the stage and told Nicholls he had done a great job. A short run of dates with the Beach Boys followed.

On stage the Playboys were a confident band. In the studio they could never catch that energy on tape, and the hit record they needed never came. Tired of being confused with Gary Lewis & The Playboys, they became The Jaybees, and turned up in the low-budget thriller Playgirl Killer performing 'Leave My Woman Alone'. In 1967 they flew to New York to record with producer Artie Kornfeld, who would later help create the Woodstock festival, and walked into the studio to find session musicians waiting to play their parts. Even the harmonies went to hired singers. Only Nicholls' lead vocal survived on 'Poster Man', which Capitol released in 1968 under the name Carnival Connection. The session drained the band's confidence, and a debt their manager had run up in the band's name to buy amplifiers finished the job. By 1969 it was over.

That year Nicholls went to New York and joined the Broadway company of Hair. He went on to play both of its male leads, Claude and Berger, and stayed on Broadway for six years, appearing in Inner City in 1971, Dude in 1972 and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road through its closing in 1974. He also played Herod in a Los Angeles production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

His solo records ran alongside the stage work. In 1970 Avco Embassy released his version of 'Goin' Down', a song from Hair, which he co-produced with the McCoys, backed with 'Sounds and Noises'. The same year he sang on a live CBC broadcast with Rick Derringer and the McCoys behind him. In November, Rare Earth issued 'Coming Apart', written by Jimmy Griffin and Robb Royer of Bread and produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, the former Rolling Stones manager. The flip side, 'Let The Music Play', was a song Nicholls co-wrote, published by Mr. Nickels Music, a name that would appear again on his Aquarius single. Another single, 'The Joke', followed in 1972. Back in Montréal in the mid-1970s, he sang with a revived Mashmakhan alongside keyboardist Pierre Sénécal as the group issued further singles on Aquarius Records.

By then Robert Altman had brought him into film. In Nashville (1975) Nicholls played Bill, one third of the folk trio Bill, Mary and Tom, and contributed to the film's music. In 1976 he appeared in Welcome to L.A., which Altman produced, and in Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson.

The Aquarius single came out in the middle of that run. 'I'll Love You From Far Away' and 'Country Junk' were both Nicholls songs, produced by Michel Lachance for Mr. Nickels' Music and manufactured by Aquarius Records Ltd. at its offices on Youville Street in Montréal. The A-side runs 4:41. RPM Weekly named it a Contemporary Pick in its September 18, 1976 issue, and the same issue showed CKBB in Barrie, Ontario playing it.

A few months later Nicholls was on movie screens across North America as Johnny Upton, captain of the Charlestown Chiefs, opposite Paul Newman in George Roy Hill's Slap Shot (1977). With Altman he kept writing. He composed the country songs heard in 3 Women (1977) with Tom Walls and Jeff Wilson, songs that finally reached a soundtrack album in 2020 with Nicholls singing 'Drink Until I Drop'. He co-wrote A Wedding (1978), which brought BAFTA and Writers Guild of America nominations, and co-wrote A Perfect Couple (1979) with Altman, also writing for Keepin' 'Em Off The Streets, the rock band at the centre of the story. In 1980 he played Rough House in Altman's Popeye.

Nicholls directed Dead Ringer (1982) with Meat Loaf and shot music videos for Meat Loaf and Leonard Cohen. In April 1983 he spent six days filming I Am a Hotel at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto, a half-hour television musical written by Cohen and Mark Shekter and built around Cohen's songs, with Cohen himself as the hotel's resident spirit. It won the Golden Rose at the Montreux television festival in 1984. Over three decades he worked on about two dozen Altman projects as actor, writer, composer, producer and assistant director, and his television work included several seasons as an associate director on Saturday Night Live.

In April 2006 he released Songs From The Source, recorded at Archer Studios in Burlington, Vermont, a collection of the songs he had written or co-written for Altman's films. Altman died that November. Nicholls settled in Vermont, where audiences came to know him through the vaudeville-flavoured Americana group the Hokum Brothers.

Shawn Nagy of the Super Oldies label found a copy of the J.B. & The Playboys album in a store bin and issued a CD anthology in 2005, and Montréal's Justin Time Records brought the album to streaming services in February 2021. Two years earlier, over a beer, Nicholls had asked Bill Hill whether they should get the band back together. With guitarist Ron Stutz, bassist Stuart Patterson and drummer R.D. Harris, they played the Hudson Music Festival in Québec in 2019. After the pandemic pause they went into hotel2tango in Montréal's East End with producer Howard Bilerman and cut nine songs in a week. The album, titled 2025, came out sixty years after their first LP. "J.B. and the Playboys was my first love," Nicholls said that year.

-Robert Williston