People's Food Song b/w When the Rivers are Hot

Fat Chants came out of Edmonton's coffee houses in the late 1970s. Ross Campbell formed the trio with his childhood friend Allan Stein and Saskatoon-born pianist Mairi MacLean, who had left classical music for pop and toured with the Skip Kutz Band. They sang swing in close three-part harmony and wrote their own funny, pointed songs about the world around them, a style they called left-wing swing.

On February 4, 1979, Fat Chants played on the three-hour premiere of People Talking Back, CBC Television's live call-in experiment hosted by Gordon Pinsent, which linked studio audiences across the country by satellite. Few people outside Edmonton had heard of them before that night.

This single was their first studio recording, cut at Darryl Goede's Machine Shop Studios in Edmonton. Goede played bass and co-produced, Eric Leuke played drums, Campbell sang lead, and Stein and MacLean added guitar, Rhodes piano and harmonies. 'People's Food Song', by Campbell and Stein, goes after junk food and corporate control of what people eat. Campbell's reggae-tinged 'When The Rivers Are Hot' starts from the March 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. It pictures the multinationals as addicts lining up for their uranium fix, names the places at risk from Australia, Pennsylvania and California to Saskatchewan and Europe, and warns of poison falling from the sky, with children paying for progress in cancer and mutation. The rivers of the title are hot with radiation. Saskatchewan was MacLean's home province, and its northern uranium mines were among the richest in the world. Even the catalogue numbers make a point. The food song is MSG 4U, a message for you that doubles as the junk-food additive, and the nuclear song is U 235 PU, for uranium-235 and plutonium. The band made the record available to community groups for fundraising.

In the summer of 1980 Fat Chants played the Edmonton Folk Music Festival, on a bill with Odetta, Stan Rogers, Valdy, Sylvia Tyson and Connie Kaldor. The festival program introduced them as a local trio devoted to the swing of the 1930s and '40s, and reported that they had lately made the Guinness Book for outstanding poster coverage.

In 1982 Campbell recut 'When The Rivers Are Hot' with his new Ross Campbell FatBand for the album I'm Talkin' To You, produced by Claire Lawrence at Pinewood Studios in Vancouver. The new version was looser and less political. It is the Fat Chants original that collectors and DJs, many of them in Europe, went on to hunt down.

-Robert Williston