Super Hits Of The '70s

Throttle Body M/C is the long-running rock project of Jerry Hammack, a Seattle-raised, Toronto-based musician, producer, engineer, mixer, and author whose work has always carried a deep understanding of how records are actually made. Founded in the early 1990s, the project has moved between band, solo vehicle, and studio collective, with Hammack at the centre and a revolving cast of musicians appearing along the way.

Over the years, Throttle Body M/C has included or featured players such as Zoro, Osama Afifi, Stephen Dorocke, Rod Moody, and Aaron “Coleslaw” Taylor. That shifting membership has allowed the project to stretch across different sounds without losing its main identity: carefully built rock music with a strong sense of arrangement, melody, and recording craft.

Hammack’s background as a producer and engineer is a major part of the Throttle Body M/C story. The music does not feel casual or thrown together. Even when it rocks hard, there is a clear attention to tone, texture, performance, and period detail. That comes through especially strongly on Super Hits Of The ’70s, released by Green Monkey Records in 2021, where Hammack built an affectionate tribute to early 1970s AM radio without turning it into simple nostalgia. The album draws from the sound world of classic pop, rock, and soul, but the result still feels like a new record rather than a costume piece.

The 2026 album All That Was shows another side of the project. With Hammack writing, performing, producing, engineering, mixing, and mastering the record himself, the album leans into a harder-edged rock sound while keeping the melodic sense and studio precision that have always shaped his work. The Spill Magazine reviewed the album positively, describing it as strong, loud, melodic rock with grunge edges and giving it an 8.0 rating.

The album was also issued on 12" vinyl through ElasticStage, giving All That Was a physical format that suits Hammack’s old-school record-making sensibility. Where Super Hits Of The ’70s appears to have been issued as a digital album, All That Was carries the project back into the world of tangible LPs, a fitting move for music so clearly built around guitars, studio craft, and the album as a complete object. Copies of the vinyl edition are available through ElasticStage.

What makes Throttle Body M/C interesting is not just that the music crosses styles, but that it is clearly made by someone who understands records as complete objects. Hammack is not only writing songs, he is building worlds around them: the instrumentation, the recording approach, the sonic references, the mix, and the final shape of the album all matter. That gives the project a rare combination of musicianly instinct and studio scholarship.

Outside Throttle Body M/C, Hammack is also known as the author of The Beatles Recording Reference Manuals, a major multi-volume study of the Beatles’ studio work. That same fascination with recording history, technique, and sound can be heard in his own music. Throttle Body M/C is, in many ways, the work of a record maker in the fullest sense: part songwriter, part performer, part archivist of studio language, and part rock and roll lifer.

With Super Hits Of The ’70s and All That Was, Throttle Body M/C has found a fitting home with Green Monkey Records and now joins the Museum of Canadian Music / CitizenFreak as another example of how Canadian-connected music history continues to grow in unexpected, independent, and highly personal ways.

-Robert Williston

  Break out the platform shoes and polyester suits, and pour the world a Brandy Alexander for the release of Super Hits Of The '70s —the fifth studio album from Throttle Body M/C. New members of the Green Monkey family, the long-time Seattle-now-Toronto-based collective is led by multi-instrumentalist, producer/engineer Jerry Hammack.

Founded in 1991, Throttle Body M/C incorporates a revolving line-up of musicians that has included Zoro (Lenny Kravitz, Vanessa Paradis, New Edition, Bobby Brown), Osama Afifi (Yanni, Vanessa Paradis), Stephen Dorocke (Handsome Family) and others.

This time around, Jerry is joined by GMR guitar monster Rod Moody (The Fuzz, Swedish Finnish, Swallow, Spike), Aaron 'Coleslaw' Taylor (Radio Nationals, The Squirrels, Survey Cez') as he explores the pop, rock and soul sounds of early 1970s AM radio. “I have always loved that era of popular music,” Jerry states. “There was so much variety and richness in the Top 40 hits of coming across my radio and I thought it would be a fun to make an album that sounded like it belonged to that magical time.”

And from the first moments you’ve dialed into KJR in Seattle on a cool fall evening, you are transported with a feeling of déjà vu that you can’t quite put your finger on.

In the spring of 2020, Jerry wrote a series of nine songs Inspired by hits from artists like Gordon Lightfoot, Three Dog Night, Lou Reed, Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Billy Paul, Bill Withers and Elton John and set to recording them in his Toronto studio with the help of Moody and Taylor (their collaborations coordinated from the Pacific Northwest through the magic of the Internet).

To dial in the sound of the era, he limited himself to the musical palettes of his inspirations. 'If the original track had two acoustic guitars, one electric, organ, bass, drums, a lead vocal and two backing vocalists, that's all I used.' In one instance (“Blue Velvet”), the song called for a full symphony orchestra and a horn section—so he used of those too!

Jerry also researched the studios where the original recordings were made, recreating them in multiple virtual classic studios that included London’s EMI, Olympic, and Trident and The Record Plant in New York. While not slavish, the recordings also stuck to the limitations of the era, with just a handful of processing and sweetening tools applied to the tracks. 'It was a challenge and a lot of fun to recreate those classic studios in my DAW and then record and mix the songs in them.'

Taken together, the songs are an homage to a wonderful variety of pop, rock and soul, but rather than giving you a clone of days gone by, he brings something familiar and completely new at the same time.

Jerry sent this heady mix to GMR and we said oh hell yeah.

Jerry is also author of the massive Beatles Recording Reference Manuals and a generally productive sort of fellow.