Looking at a Baby b/w Old Man

The record was ready to press and the band still had no name. Barry De Vorzon phoned from Los Angeles and told them to decide. The choices were The Collectors or The Connection. They became The Collectors.

Howie Vickers, Bill Henderson, Claire Lawrence, Glenn Miller and Ross Turney had come together from Vancouver’s C-FUN Classics, an R&B band with years of club and television experience. At the Torch Cabaret they began mixing their covers with original songs for a sometimes rowdy nightclub crowd. Jack Herschorn took their demos to Los Angeles and found interest at De Vorzon’s Valiant Records, the label that had just broken The Association with ‘Along Comes Mary’ and ‘Cherish’. A Vancouver band built on close harmonies suited it well, and the group travelled south to record.

Their first single, ‘Looking at a Baby’, backed with ‘Old Man’, came out in February 1967 on Tom Northcott’s New Syndrome label in Canada and on Valiant in the United States. Written by Vickers and Henderson, the A-side packs the group’s harmonies, layered arrangement and first psychedelic touches into just over two minutes. It reached No. 4 on Toronto’s CHUM chart on April 24, 1967, spent eight weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart with a peak around No. 8, and climbed to No. 23 nationally in RPM.

The flip side, ‘Old Man’, was written by Vickers, Henderson and Lawrence. Together, the two songs capture the group at the moment it was leaving its R&B past behind and beginning to find a sound of its own. Neither side appeared on the band’s 1968 Warner Bros.-Seven Arts debut album or on Grass & Wild Strawberries the following year. Edsel Records in Britain reunited the two songs on the 1987 compilation Seventeenth Summer.

Within a year The Collectors were recording long-form psychedelic pieces in Hollywood and playing major California venues. Their collaboration with playwright George Ryga, Grass & Wild Strawberries, followed in 1969, and after Vickers left, the remaining members became Chilliwack in 1970.

-Robert Williston