It's All Meat

Websites:  No
Origin: Toronto, Ontario, 🇨🇦
Biography:

It’s All Meat took shape in Toronto in 1969 around the writing partnership of drummer Rick McKim and keyboardist-singer Jed MacKay, a pair already lurking on the city’s margins as would-be producers and scene catalysts. They weren’t members of the notorious Toronto garage outfit the Underworld, but they produced that band’s blistering “Bound” / “Go Away” sessions, picking up hard-won studio instincts and a taste for volume and distortion that would carry into their own project. The name “It’s All Meat” wasn’t a blues wink or Animals nod—it came from a dog-food slogan bragging “100% meat, no filler,” a suitably cheeky calling card for a group intent on cutting straight to the bone.

With Jack London (ex-Jack London & the Sparrows) handling management, the band—MacKay, McKim, bassist-singer Rick Aston, and twin guitarists Wayne Roworth and Norm White—landed a Columbia Canada deal. The first proof of life was the 1969 single “Feel It” b/w “(I Need Some Kind of) Definite Commitment (Baby),” a proto-punk, organ-stabbed raver that now reads like a Canadian cousin to Detroit’s MC5/early Stooges impulse. A year later they paired the album cut “You Don’t Notice the Time You Waste” with “If Only” for a second 45, showing a tighter, more song-forward stance while keeping the grit intact.

The self-titled LP followed in 1970, recorded at RCA Studios (Toronto) and issued domestically as Columbia ELS-374 in a handsome gatefold—unusual luxury for a Canadian release and one reason originals became collector catnip. The record maps the band’s fault line between late-60s psychedelia and oncoming hard rock: eerie, Farfisa-haunted epics like “Crying Into the Deep Lake” sit alongside ragged Stones-leaning crushers such as “Make Some Use of Your Friends,” with “Roll My Own” splitting the difference in a Hammond-and-guitar churn. All tracks were written by MacKay/McKim, whose partnership anchored both the moodier organ canvases and the greasier riff tunes.

They played around Toronto with a home base at the Cosmic Home and flirted with bigger stages, but the unit fractured soon after the LP—by MacKay’s own telling, there was plenty of material left and momentum to spare, but not the cohesion to carry on. In the decades since, the album’s Canada-only status and hybrid garage/psych/early-hard-rock character pushed it into grail territory; high-grade copies have fetched four figures, while the legend grew through comps and whisper networks.

Reissues finally opened the vault: Void re-pressed the LP (adding a bonus 7"), and a sanctioned CD added unreleased demos—most famously “Astrology,” revealing a taut, funky underside that never made the album cut. Guerssen’s recent 24-bit remasters restore the gatefold aesthetics, add Plastic Crimewave’s liners/ephemera, and (on Bandcamp/vinyl) bundle downloads of the non-LP sides; Milkcow even reissued “Feel It” as a stand-alone 7" in 2024, the single that still feels like the band’s mission statement.
-Robert Williston

Jed MacKay: organ, piano, lead vocals
Rick McKim: drums
Rick Aston: bass, vocals
Wayne Roworth: guitar
Norm White: guitar