THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,399) Jeremy Dormouse — “Just to Hear the Bells”
Why hasn’t this gorgeous folk song from Canada been covered a million times? “Don Tapscott’s sublime” song is “a highpoint” of an “[o]bscure folk LP with a transition sound from 1960s coffee house into ’70s downer-loner zones”. (Patrick Lundborg, The Acid Archives, 2nd Ed.)
“In the springtime Just to hear the bells chime Bringing thoughts of you”
Of the LP, rockmyworldcanada3006 says:
One of the hardest to find album collectibles there is. This recording . . . features a very young Lynda Squires (Reign Ghost) and many other Canadian folk notables of the day. Jeremy Dormouse (aka Cris Cuddy) had previously been with a late sixties folk outfit, The Rejects, who also put out an ultra-rare privately-pressed album.
Opinions on the LP as a whole aren’t necessarily complimentary. Patrick Lundborg writes that “[a] lost-in-time atmosphere and idiosyncratic singing and playing makes for a trip with a clear identity, yet the connection between the arrangements, vocal mannerisms and underlying tunes seems random and for the hell of it, rather than conscious explorations. (The Acid Archives, 2nd Ed.)
Richie Unterberger writes that:
There were numerous albums in the mid- to late ’60s . . . in which the singers were tentatively bridging the folk and folk-rock sound. There aren’t, however, many locally pressed LPs from the era that try to emulate that sound with a much lower budget. Jeremy Dormouse’s Toad, released in Ontario, Canada, in 1968, is one of them. But even if you’re a big fan of the singer/songwriters mentioned in the first sentence of this review, it’s unlikely you’ll take a great shine to this. It really is bare-bones — sort of more like a demo presenting songs for . . . artists to consider covering . . . . [T[he songs — largely originals . . . aren’t on the same level as the work of the songwriters who are the obvious inspirations. And most gallingly, the singing ranges from adequate to poor, culminating in an album that straddles the line between the amateur and the professional, with one foot in the troubadour folk era and the other in an almost frightened, “dip the toe in the water” glance at early folk-rock. Actually, some of the songs, like “Just to Hear the Bells[]” . . . aren’t bad, and you could just about imagine some of them being sung by the likes of [Tim] Buckley, [Gordon] Lightfoot, or [Eric] Andersen. Those mild pluses, however, are outweighed by the overall mediocrity of the majority of the tracks, as well as the somewhat annoying lugubrious downbeat feel to some of the vocals and tunes.
Chris Cuddy recalled:
It was my good fortune while at university to meet some exciting musicians including poetic composer-singer Marcus Waddington and his friends guitarist-arranger Peter Cragg and guitarist-singer Don Tapscott . . . . At that same time I was part of a trio called The Purity Complex . . . at school, and back home was friends with guitarist Richard Gullison, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Dennis Delorme (aka Rev. Orval Rutabaga), his wife vocalist Carol Delorme and his partner fiddler-vocalist David Mazurek (aka Zeke Zilch). At the Green Door Coffee House in Oshawa and the Bushel Basket Coffee House in Whitby I became acquainted with other musicians who also participated in the Toad recordings, notably Terry “TR” Glecoff, John Gurney and Kathy Reid. . . . While playing with Gullison, vocalist Lynda Squires and bassists David McKay and Nick Corneal, the concept of the Jeremy Dormouse LP rose and led to the living room sessions with Mike Clancy engineering while the Waddington/Cragg/Tapscott songs were recorded at the university language lab by Peter Northrop. The cover was silk-screened by Barry Gray on blank covers bought at a failed pressing plant’s auction . . . .
https://bordeldorock.blogspot.com/2013/02/jeremy-dormouse-toad-recordings-1967.html
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