Gonna Have a Party b/w Rockin' Baby

Our first sessions were recorded in 1958 at the C.K.R.D. studio in Red Deer. "Rockin' Baby" b/w "Gonna Have A Party" on our own Laurel label. We had the tape sent to King Plastics in Cincinnati, Ohio. Which was the only pressing plant that I was aware of at the time. The name idea originally came from my younger brother whose girlfriend was named Laurel. When the Elvis movie "Jailhouse Rock" came out there was Laurel Records in it so I thought we were going to get sued. To think that somebody in Hollywood would even know of us (but it was a coincidence). Man! We were greenhorns concerning these kinds of things. At the time I believe that the sessions were recorded on a Crown two-track recorder.

I also want to mention that the Laurel single received very good promotion due to being distributed to jukeboxes throughout central Alberta. There was an outfit in Red Deer that programmed all the jukeboxes. That was a big thing for us to get our record on all those jukeboxes. Because other than a little of that type of music being played on the radio, that was about the only exposure for the record. People would hear the record on the jukeboxes and they would come to our dances and sometimes buy the record. So that was how our music first got out to the public.

The first sessions we did for Quality were recorded in the same studio, using the same line-up that we used on the Laurel record. There's an interesting story about the first record on Quality. I realized after the Laurel record how hard it is to distribute the records and get them around, so I thought that if we could get on a bigger record label and get them distributed Canada wide, we may get more exposure. We just did a session after our radio show one night and sent a tape (like a demo session) to Quality. We never heard back from them. Then one day I heard it on the radio, they just took this demo session and released it without our knowledge. It was weeks after that I finally got a contact from Quality.