Dave McCluskey

Dave McCluskey’s story is not the usual one of a club musician grinding his way from bar stages to a record deal. In fact, one of the strangest things about his brief late-1970s recording career is how little public performing he had done before finding himself in major Toronto and Los Angeles studios surrounded by some of the finest session players in North America. Decades later, the story took another unexpected turn when a partly inaccurate biography connected to the 2010 Japanese CD reissue of his album found its way onto CitizenFreak.com — and McCluskey’s own family ended up prompting the correction that brought the real story back into focus.

McCluskey was born in Barking, England, and came to Canada with his family while still a child. After arriving in the Toronto area, the family first lived in Scarborough before eventually settling in Pickering. Like so many young musicians of his generation, he grew up under the spell of the Beatles, though his first serious musical ambition was not to become a singer-songwriter or guitarist, but a drummer. His parents bought guitars for him and his brother when they were young, but after McCluskey continued asking, they eventually relented and bought him a drum kit. The problem, as it often is with drums in a family home, was the noise. Once that became too much, his brother, already a capable guitarist, began showing him chords, and McCluskey gradually shifted toward guitar.

Despite that early interest, McCluskey was not a working teenage musician. He did not come up through a long apprenticeship in local bands, and he later described himself as essentially a basement musician. He played at home for himself, his brother, and a close friend, but not in any organized scene. The first time he remembered singing in front of an audience came when he was about 18, after his brother pushed him into getting up with a country band in a bar. McCluskey sang a mixture of Eagles, Hank Williams, Beatles material, and other familiar songs, and the reaction was strong enough to give him the feeling that performing might be possible. But even then, he was not yet part of a working band circuit. He was still mostly writing at home.

The turning point came through Glenn Johansson, a Scarborough musician and studio owner whom McCluskey first met while Johansson was playing in a lounge. Johansson gave him a card and told him to call if he ever wanted to record anything. The opportunity came when McCluskey’s best friend asked if he could make a cassette of his songs to play in his truck. McCluskey contacted Johansson, brought in the material he had, and received an honest assessment: the songs he planned to record were not strong enough. When Johansson asked what else he had, McCluskey played the beginnings of ‘What You’re Doin’ to Me.’ Johansson heard something in it and suggested they record that instead.

What followed was an intense weekend session. McCluskey arrived on a Friday and left on Monday morning with recordings that would change his life. While Johansson handled much of the playing and production work, McCluskey finished ‘What You’re Doin’ to Me’ and wrote ‘So in Love With You’ during the same studio period. Johansson’s arrangement ideas were central to the shape of those demos, and McCluskey later credited him not only with getting the songs recorded, but with helping shape the voice and presentation that made the recordings stand out.

Johansson encouraged him to send the cassette to record companies. McCluskey did it in the most direct way imaginable: he opened the Yellow Pages, looked up record labels, and mailed copies to companies including A&M and GRT. Michael Godin at A&M was the first to respond and invited him in for a meeting. The same day, GRT’s Jeff Burns, then vice-president of A&R, also called. Burns was struck by the circumstances: when he phoned the house and asked for Dave McCluskey, McCluskey’s father answered, and Burns was reminded of a similar call he had once made to Dan Hill’s home.

When McCluskey met Burns, the story became even stranger. Burns asked where his band was playing. McCluskey told him he did not have a band. Asked where he was performing, he said nowhere. He had never played professional dates, had nothing booked, and had no live act to speak of. He had simply written songs at home and recorded them with Johansson. Rather than backing away, GRT became more interested.

Burns later arranged for McCluskey to meet at a house in Scarborough, where he found himself in a room with Burns, GRT president Ross Reynolds, Matthew McCauley, and Fred Mollin, who had recently been involved with Dan Hill’s ‘Sometimes When We Touch.’ McCluskey was asked to play, but with no experience performing for a room of industry people, he was nervous and uncomfortable. His guitar playing did not impress them, but the voice and the songs did. A call followed from Fred Mollin telling him to come to Manta Sound in Toronto — and not to bring his guitar.

The resulting album was produced by Matthew McCauley and Fred Mollin and recorded in Toronto and Los Angeles. McCluskey sang, while the producers assembled an extraordinary group of musicians around him, including John Capek, Doug Riley, Tom Szczesniak, John Andersen, Bob Mann, Leland Sklar, Mike Porcaro, Jeff Porcaro, Steve Lukather, Dan Dugmore, Andy Newmark, Jim Horn, Bobby Kimball, and others. For McCluskey, who still thought of himself as a young songwriter from Pickering rather than a seasoned studio artist, the scale of the sessions was almost surreal. Only later did he fully understand the calibre of the musicians who had played on his record.

The Manta sessions also produced a personal surprise. McCluskey had been a major fan of Fludd, and while at Manta he struck up a conversation with drummer John Andersen. When Andersen mentioned that he had once been in Fludd, McCluskey was stunned. Years later, that connection would become part of a much larger circle in his life.

Some of the Los Angeles sessions took place at studios such as Sunset Sound, Sound Factory West, Record Plant, Wally Heider Studios, and Cherokee Studios. ‘Lady of the Night’ was created under particularly intense pressure. GRT needed one more song for the album, and Burns called McCluskey with a blunt instruction: write it that day, because he was flying to Los Angeles the next day. McCluskey began the song at home, continued working on it on the plane, and arrived in Los Angeles with only part of it finished. At the Chateau Marmont, Fred Mollin took him to a ballroom with a grand piano, and the two completed the song there before recording it the next day.

The album gave McCluskey a remarkable opening, but the momentum did not last. He was writing material for a second album, and later felt those songs were stronger than the first record. Then the business around him collapsed. GRT and Janus Records went bankrupt, his management situation fell apart, and the career structure that had appeared so quickly disappeared just as fast. There were discussions with other labels, including Mercury and Epic, but nothing came together. McCluskey later reflected that because he had not come up through bands and clubs, he did not have the experience or support system to simply keep going. He had not built a road career first; the record deal had come almost out of nowhere.

Eventually he stepped back. He took work in the trucking industry, though not as a driver, and built a more conventional life. Music, however, never disappeared completely. After moving to the Newmarket area, he formed the Dave McCluskey Band, performing steadily from roughly 1992 to 1999. That period finally gave him the kind of working-band experience he had never had before the GRT album.

In 1999, his long connection to Fludd came full circle. McCluskey had first met Ed Pilling years earlier, in 1979, while he was still working on material for his planned second album. By then Fludd had dissolved, but he and Pilling became friends. Two decades later, Greg Godovitz and Ed Pilling saw the Dave McCluskey Band and discussed forming a British Invasion-style group. McCluskey brought his band into the project, and the lineup initially performed as No Flies on Frank, a name suggested by Godovitz from a John Lennon drawing. As audiences kept requesting Fludd material, the project gradually became Fludd again. After Godovitz left and Ed Pilling’s brother Steve joined, McCluskey suggested they simply perform as Fludd, since that was clearly what people wanted to hear.

McCluskey remained with Fludd for about a decade, contributing acoustic guitar, piano, and background vocals during that period, including on the 2006 album Flood Lights. But by 2011 he felt he was losing himself as an artist. After a live radio broadcast in Toronto, he told Ed Pilling that he loved him but was finished. He went home and told his wife he had retired from music.

For several years, that seemed to be the end of the story. Then life took a turn more unexpected than the record deal itself. McCluskey discovered that he had a daughter he had never known about. She had found him through Facebook after learning who her biological father was, and DNA testing confirmed the connection. By then she was an adult with a family of her own. McCluskey suddenly found himself not only a father, but a grandfather.

The discovery changed the direction of his life. His daughter and four grandchildren were living in Sussex, New Brunswick, and McCluskey eventually moved there to be near them. He has described the discovery as the greatest blessing of his life. The move also reframed his own past. Had he known about his daughter when he was 19, he believes his life likely would have taken a completely different course, and the music career that briefly carried him from Pickering to Manta Sound, GRT, and Los Angeles may never have happened at all.

That family discovery also led, indirectly, to the correction of his public story. McCluskey’s album had been posted on CitizenFreak.com with biographical information that traced back to the 2010 Japanese CD reissue. Much of that account, he later explained, was either inaccurate, embellished, or distorted. The correction began when his grandson found the CitizenFreak page and began reading the biography aloud to McCluskey’s daughter while McCluskey was sitting nearby. He immediately recognized that important parts of the story were wrong. That led McCluskey to contact Robert Williston directly so the record could finally be set straight — not through a recycled reissue note, but through McCluskey’s own recollections of how the songs, sessions, record deal, collapse, Fludd years, and Sussex chapter actually unfolded.

In Sussex, McCluskey found a quieter life and a strong local music culture, including open jams and community performances. He has also considered returning to his unreleased songs in a modest way, possibly through acoustic video performances. Some of the second-album material that never reached the public has now been heard by his daughters, closing another small circle in a life shaped by late discoveries, sudden openings, missed chances, and unexpected returns.

-Robert Williston