Let's Go to San Francisco b/w Counting Cracks in the Sidewalk

Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, who shared their name with Snoopy's birthplace in Peanuts, were put together in Edmonton in 1967 by producer Ray Schwartz, who went by Ray Short on CHED radio. Mary Saxton, with two Pace singles already behind her, sang. Mavis McCauley, just out of high school, played keyboards and sang, Mo Boyer played bass and sang, Dermond Murray played guitar, and Bob Ego, who had been drumming full time since he was 15, played drums. Short assembled them to record, and they also worked high school dances and nightclubs around Alberta. A 1967 photo catches them on stage at St. Joseph's High School.

Their single came out in November 1967 as the first release on Fountain Records, which Short and Wes Dakus had lined up with Capitol for national distribution. The A-side was the Flower Pot Men's 'Let's Go to San Francisco', and the flip was McCauley's own 'Countin' Cracks in the Sidewalk'. The Edmonton Journal's Lydia Dotto wrote up a session for the B-side. The band laid down bass, guitar, drums and piano first, then McCauley sang lead with Saxton and Boyer behind her, and added organ and clarinet while Murray dubbed on sitar, with Short at the console. Ego remembered playing his grey-swirl Camco kit with about three microphones and no isolation booths, getting the songs in roughly five takes, and how patient Short was with the young band.

Schwartz Publishing registered more of the members' songs, among them Saxton's 'What's Happening Baby' and Murray's 'Everything's Wrong', but no second single followed, and disagreements over direction and outside commitments ended the group within about a year. Saxton signed with Quality and released 'Sad Eyes' in September 1968, backed with 'Take My Heart', which Murray had written with Schwartz. McCauley and Boyer moved to Southbound Freeway, where she wrote and sang 'Don't Go Cryin'' and the two of them recorded with Norman Petty in Clovis, New Mexico in 1969. That year McCauley and Saxton worked together again on The Rising Sun's Born to Be Wild, which McCauley arranged. Murray later wrote 'The Old Rock Sound' with Southbound Freeway's Dwayne Osepchuk. Ego went on to Witness Inc., Painter and Streetheart, playing on Quicksand Shoes and Drugstore Dancer, and McCauley made two solo albums before joining One Horse Blue in 1980. Boyer died in 1977.

-Robert Williston