Emerald City

Emerald City were a Montréal hard rock trio built around guitarist, singer and songwriter Matthew ‘Matty’ Enright. When the band came together Enright was an 18-year-old guitarist raised on Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and already writing his own songs. Drummer Pat Saraceno was a year younger. Bassist George Gardos was 27 and already had a decade of Montréal rock behind him.

Gardos and his best friend, drummer Corky Laing, had come up through a run of local bands that led to Bartholomew Plus Three in the mid-1960s, with guitarist Barry Albert and keyboardist and singer Gary Ship. The group started out at high school dances and Sweet Sixteen parties and was soon opening Montréal shows for The Who, Cream, Herman’s Hermits and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. A deal with Bell Records took them to Atlantic’s studio in New York, where Felix Pappalardi produced their recording of ‘When I Fall In Love’.

On April 2, 1968, the Experience played the Paul Sauvé Arena with Soft Machine and Olivus opening. Gardos later recalled that Hendrix and his entourage came by the band’s rehearsal space on Côte-des-Neiges afterward, and that he played bass through the marathon jam that followed.

By 1969 the group had become Energy, a trio of Gardos, Ship and Laing writing their own material. Pappalardi produced an album for them, and that summer the band moved to New York. In September Laing left to join Pappalardi and Leslie West in Mountain, and the Energy studio tapes were lost in the upheaval. A live reel from Nantucket at the end of that summer survived, with early versions of ‘Mississippi Queen’ and ‘For Yasgur’s Farm’ played before either became a Mountain song, and decades later Gardos digitized those tracks for archival release. Through the early 1970s he worked between Montréal and New York before joining Emerald City.

Emerald City recorded Waiting For The Dawn at Studio D.S.P. in Montréal. Denis Pantis, who had been producing Québec rock and roll records since the early 1960s, had set the studio up around 1970 with equipment bought from Stereosound, in the old CFCF film studio building on Côte-des-Neiges. Pantis served as executive producer, and Joey Perno engineered and co-produced with Enright. Enright wrote all ten songs. Roger Gravel added synthesizer and what the sleeve calls “keyboard accrobatics”, and Lorri Zimmerman and Mary-Lou Gauthier sang backing vocals. Both came from the circle of Montréal studio singers that produced Toulouse in 1975. Zimmerman was in the trio’s 1976 lineup when the bilingual disco single ‘It Always Happens This Way (C’est toujours à recommencer)’ charted across Canada, and Gauthier, whose sister Heather was a founding member, went on to a long career as a session and touring vocalist that included years with Céline Dion.

Enright’s guitar carries the record. Hendrix-styled leads sit alongside surprisingly commercial song structures, ‘Guiding’ is an instrumental showcase, and ‘Rythmn Hyghway’ pushes the trio into funk.

The album came out on the small Hippopotamus label as HLP-97202, with a 1976 date on the labels. By the band’s own account the copies were pressed across 1975 and 1976 with no launch and no promotion, and most were sold at Emerald City’s shows, which took them to nine of the ten provinces and a handful of towns in upstate New York. Originals came in a thick paste-on sleeve with a Hendrix-style guitar on the cover, and the record later became a collector’s item among fans of Canadian heavy psych, drawing vinyl reissues.

Enright wrote, sang, played, produced and managed nearly every part of Emerald City, and by the band’s account Waiting For The Dawn remains the high point of his career.

-Robert Williston