Excelsior

Excelsior were a Montreal five-piece who came out of The Sound Box and left two singles behind them in 1970, just as Canadian radio was being told to start playing Canadian records.

Three of the five had already spent years on the same stages. Ron Hepworth and Bud Swan go back to The Red Cats, a high school R&B group started around 1965 with drummer Brian Redmond and guitarist Michel Dugas. When that band ended in 1967 the four kept going, brought in Jim Boyce as lead singer and harmonica player, and became The Sound Box. They rehearsed in a small room at 2401 Chemin Bord-du-Lac on Île Bizard, warmed by an old cast-iron stove, and worked high schools, chalets, dances and proms around Montreal through Donald K. Donald Productions. Boyce and Hepworth wrote both sides of the first Sound Box single, ‘Warm Your Mind And Soul’ b/w ‘I’m Learning’, issued on Regency in 1968. The follow-up, ‘I Want You’, put the band on a bill with Andy Kim and Gary Puckett & The Union Gap in front of about 7,500 teenagers when its members were only eighteen or nineteen.

Redmond and Dugas went on to Marble Hall, on Aquarius, early in 1970. Boyce, Hepworth and Swan joined guitarist John Farley and drummer Kevin Pike in Excelsior, with Brian Ross as manager. Farley became Boyce’s new writing partner.

Their Polydor single paired ‘Cherry Wine’ with ‘Movin’ to the Country’, both by Boyce and Farley, on 2065 016. The producer was Ron Dykhof, a Montrealer who had sung lead in The Sceptres from 1963 to 1966 and written their ‘It’s All Over Now’ and ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ before moving into A&R at Compo. That fall RPM had him at MCA as A&R assistant, running a session for the Montreal trio Wizard at RCA’s Montreal studios.

The record was out by July 11, 1970, when RPM reported that Chappell Music had acquired ‘Cherry Wine’ through Jerry Renewych of its Montreal office, in the same batch as two Trevor Payne songs. The same issue described a sellers’ market for records made entirely in Canada, with the CRTC’s 30 percent content rule due in early 1971 and new production companies forming almost daily. Polydor’s number placed Excelsior in the 2065 series alongside Five Man Electrical Band’s ‘Moonshine (Friend of Mine)’ and The Bells’ ‘Fly, Little White Dove, Fly’.

BMI Canada’s The Music Scene noted the release in its September-October issue, naming Canadiana Music as publisher of ‘Cherry Wine’ and Pied Piper Music for the flip, and reporting that Ross had “great hopes” for it. RPM’s Top 50 Canadian chart had ‘Cherry Wine’ at No. 50 on September 19 and at No. 32 on October 24, the same spot as the week before. When the magazine cut that chart to 30 records on October 31, the single appeared instead among its Recommended Canadian Singles, in the same column as Pagliaro’s ‘Give Us One More Chance’.

The band’s other single appeared on Paragon PA-1023, again produced by Dykhof, here billed as Ron Van Dykoff, this time for Montreal’s Sheldon Kagan Agency. ‘Behind the Door’ was credited to the whole group. The flip, ‘Feeling Restless’, was written by Farley, Hepworth and Boyce, the one Excelsior song that brings the old Sound Box writing team and the new one together. Both sides were published by Pied Piper, with lacquers cut at RCA Studios in Toronto.

No album has surfaced, and nothing further has been traced under the Excelsior name.

-Robert Williston

Lineup

Jim Boyce: lead vocals

John Farley: guitar

Ron Hepworth: organ

Bud Swan: bass

Kevin Pike: drums