Metagenesis

Metagenesis came out of the Renfrew area of Ontario around 1970 or 1971. An early lineup was guitarist Errol Rousselle, Frank Campbell, Henry Tuck and drummer Peter St. Michael, four young players who worked the Friday-night dances at the Renfrew Recreation Centre, the local high schools and rooms such as Butson’s Valley Hotel, where they played in December 1973.

A year later the band had moved up to the Green Door room at L’Auberge de la Chaudière in Hull, booked for the week of December 10 to 14, 1974. On the way home after the final set of that engagement, Rousselle was killed in a road accident. The newsletter of the Ottawa musicians’ union, Local 180, called him an excellent guitar player with “a very promising group from his hometown of Renfrew.”

Metagenesis regrouped in 1975 and went back to work in the hotels of the Ottawa Valley and beyond, including the White House Hotel in Renfrew, the Russell Hotel in Smiths Falls and the Beacon Arms in Ottawa. Murray Reid was a member from 1975 to 1980, before leaving to lead his own Murray Reid Group, and Leonard Dombroskie also played in the band during these years. Metagenesis was among the rock acts at the Mississippi Hotel in Carleton Place when that old country room turned to rock bands to bring in a younger crowd.

On Halloween night 1980 Metagenesis played a community dance at the Almonte arena hall. The town had been cleaning up after a destructive Halloween the year before, and the Lions Club, the Civitan Club, the town and local businesses backed a dance organized by high school student Cherri Campbell to give teenagers somewhere to go. About 350 of them turned up.

By the early 1980s the band had a foot in Ottawa rock radio. In 1982 CHEZ 106 pressed The Spirit of Rock and Roll Album, a promotional LP manufactured by CBS Records Canada, and closed it with ‘Valley Lads’, credited to Delmer and Cecil with Metagenesis, with the song credited on the label to Frank Zappa.

The lineup that made the records had Darwin Demers on lead vocals and guitar, Heather Drummond on lead vocals and bass, Frank Campbell on guitar and vocals and Peter St. Michael on drums and vocals. With two lead singers and four voices, the band could cover a lot of ground. In 1983 they entered Sharechez, the CHEZ 106 competition for unsigned regional acts, and made the ten finalists. Their song ‘Hey You’ opened side two of Sharechez ’83, the third LP in the series, alongside Back Alley John Revue, Nathan Mahl, Pushkins, Streetboy and Tactics. Eight Seconds won that year with ‘Where’s Bula?’.

The same year Metagenesis released Got What She Wants, a six-song album on Pame Records (PR-001). It was recorded and mixed at Altair 4 Studio in Lanark, Ontario, engineered by John Cybanski, and produced by the band with Paul Imeson. Mastering was done at McClear Studio in Toronto, and World Records handled the custom pressing.

The songs were written in-house. Drummond wrote the words to ‘Showin’ Through’, ‘Hey You’ and ‘It Seems’, Demers wrote the title track, and Campbell and Leonard Dombroskie wrote ‘Fool for Your Love’, with the music to all five credited to the band. The closer, ‘Calabogie Boogie’, went back to the earlier days: Campbell and Dombroskie wrote the lyrics and St. Michael and Murray Reid the music. Named for the river and lake village down the road from Renfrew, it is a Saturday-night song about heading out to the water for beer, dancing and rock and roll.

Francis Dupuis handled the art direction, graphics and cover concept, with photography by Ken Craig. The crew listed on the sleeve were Colin “Loon” Hughes as road manager and sound and lighting technician, Michel Lemieux as stage manager and monitor engineer, and James “Jamey” Wilson as “chief cook and scapegoat.”

Metagenesis kept playing, with changing lineups, until the late 1980s. Darwin Demers sang lead in Shake the Ghost, the Ottawa band of David Bigelow, Serge Côté, Richard Nash and Mike Wetmore, which won Sharechez ’87 with ‘Man on the Edge’ in a year when over 200 tapes were submitted. Demers later joined the live band of Ottawa’s Cooper Brothers and played on their 2017 album Radio Silence.

-Robert Williston