Moosknukkl Groovband
Websites:Â
https://citizenfreak.com/artists/91503-big-town-boys-aka-b-t-b-4
Origin:
Toronto, Ontario, 🇨🇦
Biography:
Moosknukkl Groovband’s lone LP (Spiegelei, 1973) represents a brief but telling late-stage convergence of musicians whose core relationships had been formed a decade earlier in Toronto with Tommy Graham and The Big Town Boys.
The project centered on Tommy (Tom) Graham, one of the defining figures of the early Toronto Sound, whose work with The Big Town Boys in the mid-1960s placed him at the heart of the city’s television, club, and touring circuits. Graham’s long-standing collaboration with Mike Lewis, a principal arranger and multi-instrumentalist in the Big Town Boys lineup, remained the creative throughline into the 1970s.
Lewis left Toronto in the mid-1960s to study composition in Munich, where he became involved with experimental musicians around Michael Ranta and producer Conny Plank. By 1971 he had recorded the LP Wuschel with Plank.
That same year, Lewis received an invitation to compose music for the cultural program of the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, a commission that also included studio time to make a record. While visiting Canada, he contacted Graham, drummer Peter “Josh” Collins (Brother Josh), and bassist John Morton, all of whom had circulated through the Big Town Boys orbit, and invited them to Hamburg to work with Plank.
Sessions took place in 1972 at Star Musik and Windrose–Dumont–Time Studios in Hamburg. During the Olympics, the quartet performed publicly as Moosknukkl Groovband within the official cultural program before Graham, Morton, and Collins returned to Canada later that year.
-Robert Williston
Lineup
Mike Lewis: vocals, keyboards, percussion
Tommy Graham: vocals, guitar, percussion
John Morton: bass, vocals
Brother Josh: drums, tabla, percussion, vocals