And now, if you’ll pardon the expression, for something completely different…
There are a lot of twists and turns in the adventures of Sugar and Spice, but this story isn’t about the band – it’s more of a “making of” thing. It’s not even about the musicians. It begins during the final days of an earlier band, the Griffins, when an enterprising 15-year-old named Michael Gillespie cooks up the idea of putting together a new band, the likes of which Winnipeg has never seen or heard.
In 1965 Michael gets to play bass in the Griffins, but just long enough to see that he really doesn’t belong here (“To call me a musician is an insult to musicians”). What he does find is a rock and roll niche he can call his own. “I saw that it was really hard for a typical working musician to pay their bills on the amounts that they were getting paid. No one in the band could afford to make their payment for their guitar or their amplifier – and I recognized that this won’t work without some business moxie. So I took over that component. I paid the bills, I paid the disc jockey to come up, then I distributed the money to band members. And they liked it better that way.”
Business moxie, and his technical chops, are something of a signature note in Michael’s repertoire, in his teen years and earlier: He’s into electronics (age six) – building, repairing and tricking out all kinds of equipment, musical and otherwise –and he works part-time in an electronics repair shop. In his spare time he’s into music: he hangs out on weekends as a go-fer for the CKY radio DJs out doing their remotes. Later he’ll host his own radio show, airing via the University of Manitoba’s hard-wired in-campus sound system.His school grades (and attendance records) suffer a bit, not because of all the extracurricular stuff but because of the university courses he’s taking, learning Fortran programming. But enough about sidelines; Michael’s heavily focused on the Griffins.
It really helps if you actually love music and the people making it, but making more money for the group is how real managers earn their keep; business moxie 101. “I managed to get our rate up. I was the salesman. I had to convince them that we were worth money. We were getting $75 to $80 a night for a five-piece band with a manager. At that time, I also had a part-time job doing electronic repair and I was being paid 50 cents an hour; 75 bucks doesn’t sound like a lot until you put it into perspective – how many days a week did I have to work to get the 10 percent I got off of one gig, that seven and a half bucks. That was a long working day, that was two days.”
Neil Young is correct. There were two hundred bands in Winnipeg at that time – we were the Liverpool of Canada.
If you’re pulling in that 10 percent two or three times a week, everybody’s happy. And the Griffins are doing just that. “Neil Young is correct,” says Michael. “There were two hundred bands in Winnipeg at that time – we were the Liverpool of Canada. And the magic to put all that together was the fact that the drinking age was 21. Kids out of high school had no place to go, so they would come to the teen gigs. We would play at a community club, a Kiwanis hall, a church basement, a hockey rink – we would play anywhere.”
It’s fun while it lasts, and reasonably profitable, but after two years, the market’s getting tighter. This brings us to the beginning of Michael’s epiphany. “The thing that I recognized is that our success and every other band's success was our enemy – because we had so many competitors. We couldn’t raise our rates, we couldn’t get more money, because somebody else would play for that same rate. It got tough.
We’re all long-haired, moustached, sideburns like crazy, wearing a British tweed jacket and slacks and Beatle boots. I mean, if you blinked your eyes, it could be any band. They looked the same.
“And the material that everyone was playing was generally the same. You could go to the community club every week and a different band is playing, and you’d hear the same music. So it was difficult for us to stand out. We’re all long-haired, moustached, sideburns like crazy, wearing a British tweed jacket and slacks and Beatle boots. I mean, if you blinked your eyes, it could be any band. They looked the same.
“I said, you know, the music that’s beginning to become very popular is Motown. And there are a lot of groups there with female harmonies, and there isn’t a single band out of our two hundred bands that has a female member, let alone a female singer. We should find ourselves a really good female singer, and we could take on a different genre and be unique among the Winnipeg bands.”
Distinction by design
It turns out one of the guys in the band has a friend who has a girlfriend; she sings, really well actually, and so do both of her sisters. The Murphy sisters are more than happy to come aboard. But not this band, Michael thinks. There are a couple of players whose hearts just don’t seem to be in it as much, and there’s a couple of other guys (from one of their rival bands, the Mongrels) who just might be persuaded to jump ship. Michael proposes that maybe it’s time for the Griffins to pack it in. Off he goes, along with three ex-Griffins, two ex-Mongrels, and the three Murphy sisters.
It’s the summer of 1967; now comes Phase Two of Michael’s vision. We have to change our style and our image, he tells the “new” group. And perhaps most important, we don’t want to come across as just a revamped version of the Griffins.
“We can’t just be the same band with a different paint scheme. We have to develop a completely new repertoire. We have a record out and have it in the Top 10. And we have to give ourselves a new name.” The new band will be called Sugar and Spice – but not just yet… Not until we’re one hundred percent ready.
“We rehearsed from roughly August 67 through January 68 – in utter secrecy. I had a really high-end two-track tape machine, and every night I would come back from my part-time electronics job and we rehearsed, we recorded everything we did, and played that back and critiqued it and worked until we were really good.”
Meanwhile, Michael is busy working some of his many connections, musical and otherwise. He calls on Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings, looking for some original material; they both offer him a few of their tunes to try out and the band picks two of Randy’s songs, Not to Return and I Don't Need Anything, for their debut recording.
“The strategy was, we would rehearse, we would record, Randy wrote for us, he produced the recording, I was the recording engineer. I played the bass on one of the tracks because our bass player was too nervous.”
Next up: exposure, promotion, posters, photo shoots, wardrobe, business cards – getting all those little marketing ducks in a row. “Doc Steen agreed that when our record hit, he would push it on CKRC; it immediately jumped into the Canadian Top 10 and it was being played all the time. Sugar and Spice – nobody knew the name – so clearly we must be from somewhere else, which was the goal.”
The hungry i agency’s Frank Wiener likes what he hears about the mysterious new band; he agrees to start talking them up with some of his bigger clients, one of which is the University of Manitoba. “He convinced them to bring in this new band, the one that had the hit on the radio – and we got the gem booking for the year, which was the University of Manitoba’s Winter Carnival. There were 4,000 kids in that place.”
With this juicy plum in hand, Michael then pitches Bob Burns, host of Teen Dance Party, airing every Saturday afternoon on CKY-TV. Burns, too, likes Michael’s story, and he passed it on to his audience – the dancers in the studio and his faithful TV viewers. “Hey, boys and girls,” he announces, “next week we’re gonna have the hit band Sugar and Spice doing their hit here on Teen Dance Party. And… they’re going to be at the University of Manitoba that same night.”
Mission accomplished: the record’s out, getting respectable airplay across the country (and heavy rotation in Winnipeg), and the band has never appeared in public. “Nobody knew who we were until we stepped in front of the TV cameras and lip-synched the tune.” Michael recalls hearing later about a lot of people’s jaws hitting the floor. “They said, ‘Hey, isn’t that the Griffins? And who are those girls? And what’s that music?’ So we did that on Saturday afternoon, and that night we played our first live gig in front of 4,000 people.”
“Remember those community club gigs from not so long ago?” he asks. At this point, he’s smiling like a Cheshire cat. “At the Crescentwood community club we were earning 80 bucks; for one set at the University of Manitoba we earned $800. And we never looked back. From that point forward, as a band – now eight players, a manager and an agent – we’re making more money than our parents.”
Hmmm, I think. Michael and I still haven’t talked about Sugar and Spice’s actual journey, their ups and downs, the many changes still to come. But that’s the way it goes: Sometimes you just have to start before the beginning. And isn’t it also true that these are often the kinds of things, long since past, that stay with us forever? That’s certainly true in Michael’s case. This band, his contributions to their success, and his experiences as part of this whole era – I got the sense that these matter as much, if not more, than his numerous and quite remarkable achievements that would follow.
“Sometimes I’ll hear something in the background, on the radio – I’ll hear something like Dancing in the Street and I’m teleported to 1965 at the River Heights community club, or I’m watching my band come out on the stage, or opening for the Who or Sonny and Cher or somebody, and the room explodes with that music...”