Recordings
THE STORY OF A JOKER'S MEMORY:
Jim and Chris met in September 1968 when they enrolled in a brand new experimental school called Greenbank, which boasted “no grades” and “student-centered” programs. Jim took an 8th-grade Rock Music class, and one day brought his record player to school along with a brand new 45. When he dropped the needle in class that day, Chris looked down from his desk asking “What’s that?”. “It just came out,” Jim told him. “It’s called Crimson and Clover”. “I love it” said Chris, who played guitar and piano, and asked Jim if he was a musician, and the response was: “no, I write poetry, but I got bongo drums for Christmas “. Good enough. The two began collaborating: guitar, bongos and – what? A cassette recorder? “I record the piano so that we can play along,” Chris told him.
Jim was impressed with his new friend’s technical prowess.
Lyrics, melody, piano, guitar, drums, and cowbell propelled their creative force into high school. But there was something missing as cassette tapes quickly piled up around them. Many recordings were punctuated by outbursts from JM’s biggest fan, Chris’ little sister Jenny yelling: “You guys can’t sing.”
Play it. Play it again. Rewind. Play it again. Yep. She was right. Without a singer, the Holt-Ellis songs would be instrumentals. What to do with the lyrics? The two went looking for a voice and found many talented musicians. “You have to meet this guy Steve,” Chris said. “His brother plays in a professional rock band.” There, in the basement of Steve Murphy’s home, were the guitars and amps and wires and drums. Chris sat down at the Hammond organ. Steve picked up his bass and plugged it in.
“You’re a drummer right? There’s the drums”. Jim played the drums with his hands bongo-style, but quickly found drumsticks, and soon after that bought a drum set of his own – a tiger-patterned drum kit.
Chris played in groups with names like Undertaker and, Child (a band born in Macon, Georgia) and Manas Ojas, based in Quebec. Whether it was a Moog synthesizer, 35 mm camera, Hammond organ with spinning Leslie tone cabinet or film, Chris embraced technology and new sounds, winning an award that same freshman year for a zany 8mm short film chronicling high school life. Jim found a more suitable rhythm in the written word. He won a poetry contest his freshman year, and by the time he graduated high school, published a book of his poetry called The Seasonal Lightning Rod. Joined by bassist Steve, Jim shared his poems with high school audiences. And, on September 30, 1974, on the stage at Le Hibou coffee house in Ottawa, Jim and Steve delivered the first public reading of lyrics from A Joker’s Memory. Chris was there. So was Canadian singer-songwriter David Wiffen who had helped edit much of Holt’s poetry.
At this point, Chris and Jim were taking cues from their progressive rock star idols. For Chris, it was Rick Wakeman of Yes, for Jim it was King Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield. And, when Rocket Man became the unofficial anthem of their graduating year, they looked to Elton John and Bernie Taupin as their role models.
Throughout it all, Chris and Jim worked at crafting their own continually evolving progressive rock epic. Wherever there was a piano – the basement of Chris’ home, or at high school, on stage at lunchtime – Chris would play and Jim would stand by his elbow, both of them piecing it together. Piles of reel-to-reel tapes grew steadily next to piles of cassette tapes, yet the problem remained: They still needed a singer. They emerged from high school, having convinced their friend and singer Jim Ounsworth to join them. But, still had to find other voices and find other musicians as passionate about progressive rock as they were. They scoured Ottawa and Hull, Quebec, looking for them. They found what they needed in a band called Larkspur. The second they walked through the cigarette haze of the Fife & Drum Tavern on Albert Street in downtown Ottawa and heard the band playing Frank Zappa’s Peaches en Regalia, and then Steely Dan’s My Old School, they knew their search was over. Larkspur was clearly a cut above your typical three-chord bar band. And, when they performed Roundabout by Yes, Chris and Jim knew they had to do A Joker’s Memory with these guys.
They found drummer Steve Hollingworth, bassist Peter Fredette, guitarists Dave Binder and Brian Sim, plus singers Floyd Bell and Joey Hollingworth. Between August 1975 and January 1976, Chris and Jim, with the help of many musicians, including many from Larkspur, recorded A Joker’s Memory on a 16-track Studer using 2″ tape, at Marc Studios with producer Keith Whiting and engineer John Sebansky.
Shortly after the record was mastered in Montreal, overseen by Jim, 250 were pressed at the RCA record plant in Smiths Falls. Each vinyl record was inserted by hand into a simple white album cover, labeled with a black and white sketch created by their high school friend Sandy McFadden. In July 1976, A Joker’s Memory was broadcast for the First and only time on Ottawa radio station CKOY.
On Sunday July 18, 1976, Chris and Jim crossed the US border with 50 copies of A Joker’s Memory in the trunk of Jim’s 1964 Pontiac Parisienne, bound for New York City. For the entire week, they played their music for music publishers at Screen Gems, United Artists and others with no takers. Inside the Brill building, beginning at the top floor, they knocked on doors stenciled with the same message:BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. Jim assured Chris: “What are they going to do? Tell us we can’t read?” Most of the publishers told them to leave.
THE STORY OF BIRTHDAY BOY
One publisher on the 3rd floor didn’t tell them to leave. Ezra Cook asked them to come back after lunch. When the two left his office, they went to lunch with no plan to return. Dejected, they walked to the NYC subway bound for their motel room, and for the long car ride home back to Canada. It was hot, they were tired but they stopped and said “Let’s just go back and see the guy who told us to come back after lunch”. They pivoted on their heels, for one last showcase. Music publisher Ezra Cook welcomed them in. Passing on the album A Joker’s Memory, he asked if they had a pop song. They pulled out a cassette of Birthday Boy. Ezra popped their tape into his machine. Birthday Boy played.“Close the door,” he told his receptionist in the adjoining room.
She did. “Do you have a reel-to-reel version of this?”. Chris and Jim handed it to him. Ezra wound the tape through his deck and let it play through speakers mounted in corners on the wall behind his desk. As it played, he thumbed through the latest copy of Billboard magazine and found what he was looking for. He dialed a phone number and got right to the point: “Are you still looking for a pop song for your album?”. Jim and Chris watched as Ezra raised the telephone receiver over his head, yanking it back briefly to ask: “You like it?” He raised it again and let the song finish. Ezra paused and looked at Chris and Jim, then barked into the phone one last time.“Yeah, I have the writers right here. Yeah. Sure”. He hung up the phone. “Let’s sign this”. Ezra said the contracts would be in the mailbox at our address in Quebec by the time Chris & Jim returned home. He was right. Buzz Cason, who co-wrote the classic iconic love song Everlasting Love, with Mac Gayden, recorded Birthday Boy on his 1977 album simply called Buzz. The liner notes were written by Holt’s childhood hero Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary.
Birthday Boy was later released as a single on the Dick James Music label, manufactured and distributed in Canada by GRT of Canada Ltd..Had Chris & Jim finally arrived as songwriters? If they had any doubts, those doubts vanished the instant they held the Birthday Boy 45 in their hands, knowing full well that Dick James Music was the company that signed up Elton John and Bernie Taupin in 1967, the year before Chris & Jim met. When the single was released, Chris & Jim delivered copies to radio stations across Ontario, with birthday party fanfare complete with cupcakes, party hats, and streamers. One of the most memorable moments for the pair was hearing Birthday Boy played on CKTB radio in St. Catharines after having just put the single in the hands of DJ manning the night shift.
Birthday Boy was later released as a single on the Dick James Music label, manufactured and distributed in Canada by GRT of Canada Ltd:
The STORY OF HIPPYLAND LOST
After having been to Burning Man for 25 consecutive years and having embraced a spirit of radical free expression, Jim found it easy to unlock a voice calling for peace, love, and understanding, undiminished since 1967. Emerging from those same long years, having diligently crafted a wild and lulling ambient style of instrumental music, Chris once again – after some 40+ years – found a fitting match in Jim’s lyrics. In keeping with the same loose theme about loss and regret as expressed in A Joker’s Memory, the new album Hippyland Lost is a lament over the abandonment – or so it seems to Jim & Chris – of 60’s idealism for stark, seldom-challenged, cynicism. Hippyland Lost – essentially the B-side of the original A Joker’s Memory – is about reclaiming hope: “I’m moving towards something” is a thought reminder to the listener that “This here is a brand new light in the same old rusting machine”. The three songs that make up A Joker’s Memory B-side are: “A Rock and a Soft Place”, “Black Rock, City Rock” and “Hippyland Lost”. They were recorded in Chris’s home studio, with the master mixes being done in the fall of 2022 at Clear Lake Recording Studios in Burbank, California. The videos for these three songs can be found on our Videos page.
