Rock and Roll Inc.

Volume One, Chapter Eleven

There are a lot of ways for a young kid in the 60s to build a career in the music world. You start a band or join one. You can play around town or tour the country. You can write songs, write or perform or produce for commercial TV and radio. You can work in a recording studio or put together one of your own. You might build and design audio hardware. Or, as in the case of the four young lads in a band called the Eternals, you can do all this and more.

Ron Paley – along with his brother Ted, and John Hildebrand and his brother Harry – put their band together in 1961 in the little town of Rosa, about an hour south of Winnipeg, just up from the U.S. border. Ron’ parents run a farm implement dealership and a grocery store there, and out back there’s an abandoned warehouse – perfect for band practices. This is where the guys will build a recording studio. Now they can record their stuff and play it back to learn how and where they need to improve. “We started doing this just as kids in a band,” says Ron. “We bought a Ferrograph recorder, we had a sound wall, and that was it. The piano was in the house, so we would mic the piano and run a cable outside about a hundred feet to the room.”

Talent and ambition are important. And timing, as everybody knows, is everything. “There were lots of teens,” says Ron. “Families were big and the kids were teens. We’d rent a hall in a little town like Tolstoi and you’d have 250 kids there, and there weren’t any bands competing with us. There were polka bands and that was it.”

It’s the right time and the right place – for the band, for the kids. As for the parents, particularly among the Mennonites, it’s a different story. There are lots of Mennonites in southern Manitoba, including bandmates John and Harry Hildebrand, and not all of the grown-ups are as open-minded as the guys’ parents: “John Hildebrand went and bought himself a Fender guitar and a Fender amp from a jewelry store in Steinbach,” says Ron. “When they found out he was playing rock and roll, the owner came to his house and said ‘I have to take the instruments back. We cannot accept this.’ So he refunded him completely. So we just went into Lowe’s Music in Winnipeg and he got them there.”

Business is brisk for the Eternals. They’ll go from town to town, booking the local hall for one or two hundred bucks; they’ll hire one of the radio DJs out of Winnipeg to emcee their shows for maybe fifty dollars (including a ton of plugs on their programs); and they’re selling upwards of a thousand tickets at a dollar a pop. You do that two or three nights a week, you’re making serious cash. You do that for two or three years and you’re on your way: You’ve got the experience, you’ve got money in the bank, and your confidence is growing steadily. It’s time to take it all to the next level. And there isn’t a better place to go than Winnipeg. And it’s 1964! “The schools, the community clubs, were just booming,” John Hildebrand says. “The community halls really really had it going, and it was vibrant.”

Maybe too vibrant? Maybe the Eternals aren’t ready for Winnipeg. “We had so many bands here,” says John, “and a lot of really fine bands. We were maybe a little mellower, with maybe a little more variety-type music than a lot of these bands, especially in the community halls.” This might take longer than expected. They might have to change their ways, doing more and at the same time earning less. In the city, most of the bands are making at best a couple hundred bucks a week; out in the country each one of the Eternals makes that much in a single night. Well, if that’s what it takes… “Fifty percent of something is a lot more than a hundred percent of nothing,” as John puts it. “I remember some mornings, we would set up at a school at let’s say eight in the morning, and we’d be playing till nine, for virtually no money. But we connected with the schools, so we had a following that way. Even though it wasn’t much money, we reached a lot of people.”

There’s another way to reach a lot of people – a lot more people. “CKY, I believe, was the first radio station in Canada to have 50,000 watts,” says John. “It went all the way to Texas. The importance of that is that now the rural people could hear us.” With the help of the DJs they’d been working with, the Eternals continue to work their rural circuit. “We would just pay them an honorarium, whatever we felt was there, and consequently they’ll say, ‘Hey, I’ll be joining the Eternals and we’ll be playing in Brandon,’ or whatever the case might be. And so we got this free advertising, that we were out there. Very very rarely did we play in a place that wasn’t sold out.”

John and Ron were the first to move into Winnipeg while their brothers stayed behind. The band’s doing well, the guys are making money, but they’re still not quite feeling ready to go into the music business full-time. John gets a job at a printing company; Ron works at one of the banks. On weekends the four of them meet up at their gigs. “At times,” says Ron, “our brothers would drive to somewhere like Dauphin to play and John and I would rent a plane, just to get to the shows.”