It Won't be Long b/w Restaurant Encounter

By the time the Brass Union returned home from their first Quebec City shows in the early part of 1970, the band had changed a great deal from those early days of searsucker jackets, white shirts and black ties. They had their own trucks now – a black, 9-passenger, window van and a matching white equipment van. The staging was all there, a full light show (complete with every kind of visual effect that was available back then), and a top-of-the-line sound system, board and road crew that traveled with them everywhere. Their songlist which had started out as ‘cover tunes’, copying the originals as faithfully as possible, had been reworked and rearranged with the band’s imprint fully stamped on each number they did. Many of the band’s members (myself included) had their musical roots in the more ethereal world of classical music and its effects showed up fully in the band’s songs – with things like a Mel Tormé song and an arrangement of Anton Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” included in their regular song list. The Brass Union were not the only rock band incorporating ‘classical’ elements into rock music during this time, but they were definitely one of them. And their arrangements of cover tunes and their band original numbers showed this. The band had changed a great deal in 3 years. And as Cliff Hunt mentioned just recently: “The suits were gone, the hair was longer, and the beards were growing. It was not just a visual transition but a musical and social one as well.” By the time the two trucks rolled back into the Hamilton/Burlington area at the end of February 1970, they had been playing together every night for three weeks, practicing nearly every day and spending countless hours together on the road. They were ready for the next step – releasing their own record. And it took them no time at all to do so. The band recorded two numbers at the RCA studios in Toronto in, if memory serves me correctly, a one-day session: “It Won’t Be Long” (side A of their 45 rpm record) and “Restaurant Encounter” (side B). Both songs were written by the band’s lead guitarist, Len Blum and arranged by the band. In truth, neither of these tunes were the band’s favourite originals (they had quite a few written by this time), but they were the ones that the record company felt would be the best pick for their first record. And who were these young kids to argue with proven professionals? The songs were recorded, mixed, produced and pressed rather quickly and by the end of April 1970, the song “It Won’t Be Long” was ‘chart-bound’ on Hamilton, Canada’s CKOC 1150 Top 40 chart. The song stayed on the chart for a number of weeks, reaching as high as No. 7 locally, at one point. As a young kid, still rather ‘green’ to the world of professional music, it was rather nice to turn on the radio at night and hear my own band playing. And with the success of this record, by the end of the summer the Brass Union had secured a show at the biggest venue available in the Southern Ontario area at the time – the CNE Grandstand Show in Toronto.

Len Blum was arguably one of the biggest creative influences in the band from when he joined, late in 1968, replacing the departed Vuk Kovinich on lead guitar. Together with Bruce Ley, Len wrote the script and music for the band’s Fairytale. He wrote both sides of the band’s 1970-release 45 rpm record, along with a number of the band’s original tunes. Together with Darrell Nameth, he worked out most of the band’s cover tune arrangements – arrangements that, without exception, instilled a distinctive Brass Union style into every song the band played.

Len Blum: lead guitar (Tammy Rafferty, Teddy Grimes, Ronaye Shandler, Sheila Guthrie, Sammy Cole)
Darrell Nameth: (Tammy Rafferty): saxophone
John Hannah: drums (Major Hoople’s Boarding House Band, Tammy Rafferty, Privelege, Streetheart, Terry Crawford Band, Bryan Adams)
Terry Bramhall: bass (Dillinger, Falcon, Ray Materick, The Barncats)

Written by Len Blum
Arranged by The Brass Union
Produced by John Driscoll
Recorded at RCA Studios, Toronto, Ontario