a big bus. It was so thrilling to see such an accomplished act like The Yardbirds in that setting. Extraordinary! They were also fantastic musicians who played their hearts out for us. I found them to be exceedingly professional and that performance is a treasured memory for me. It was also very inspirational for our band when we got back home.
REDDON:
I’d like to ask you about that next. The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin were a huge influence on the members of your band, The Rembrandts, correct?
HEWITT:
Without question, yes! We were all completely impressed with both those bands and many others from Britain.
REDDON:
How did the Canadian Bandstand appearance come about for The Rembrandts, in 1967?
HEWITT:
Canadian Bandstand lasted several months on television and was broadcast from Waterloo, Ontario at CKCO-TV. Our band, The Rembrandts, was the first live band to play Canadian Bandstand, which is quite an honour really when you think about it.
REDDON: I’d say so. That’s a big accomplishment!
HEWITT:
It all came about thanks to a friend of our band’s, named Dave Barber. He asked the TV station in Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario, CKCO about getting us on that program. We had to be in the Musicians’ Union to go on the show and the program was taped. The pre-taped portion of Canadian Bandstand the night we played it live starred Gordon Lightfoot, who was just starting out at that time.
REDDON: Wow, that’s neat!
HEWITT:
Canadian Bandstand was modelled after the highly successful program that Dick Clark hosted, American Bandstand. There were kids dancing in the audience and everyone had a great time. All you could hear behind the “sound wall” was the drums; everything else was in the background.
Our band had been playing locally and, as I mentioned, we were doing lots of Yardbirds songs and learned a great deal from their records. We were also doing The Rolling Stones, Hendrix and others, too. Gord Cottrill, our guitar player, had this pre-amp he used to get distortion for his guitar solos and it was very, very effective.
Of course, Led Zeppelin wasn’t out yet in 1967 and 1968, but we played many Yardbirds songs in our sets and they went very well. People wanted to hear The Yardbirds’ material. What a thrilling experience! Everyone seemed to love what we were playing. Later, we did stuff from Led Zeppelin. I recall a pretty good version of Good Times, Bad Times for example.
It was funny because, in between one of the breaks in the taping segments when we were on Canadian Bandstand, since we were on television, the soundman came up to us and said, “It sounds really good but there’s a problem with the guitar player’s sound. We can’t get it out of the sound mix, no matter what we do”.
It turns out it was the distortion Gord was using for his guitar work that he had learned from the likes of Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page! He absolutely loved the guitar sounds he got and, as I’ve said, he was really proficient at pulling them off when he was playing. Page and Beck were big influences in his playing and guitar style.
It was amusing that the sound guy didn’t know what Gord was doing -- manipulating his pre-amp that hooked into his main amp, to get the distortion he wanted -- like Page used to do on some of TheYardbirds’ recordings. The sound guy had never heard anything like that before. Unfortunately, the tapes were recorded over for future programming. Back then, no one really thought of archiving things. In those days, the performers played and that was it. It’s unfortunate looking back on it years later, but that’s just the way it was.
In the late 1960s, it’s safe to say that Gord Cottrill was easily the best guitar player in Canada. He was that good. The rest of us mainly rode on his coattails! Our group, The Rembrandts, was a five-piece band, as I’ve said and Gord had big groups of teenage boys watch him play, mesmerized at what he was doing with the guitar. We also played Blood, Sweat and Tears numbers.
Gord had acquired some equipment along the way, like the miniature Leslie. It was put out by a Canadian company called Trainer. It was an extension speaker out of the amp. The regular Leslies were huge and it took several people to move them around.
When we were in Grade 13, we drove down to Toronto for a couple of weekends and cut a few demos on Merton Street, a side street off Yonge and south of Davisville Avenue. We were offered a contract to open for a band from Detroit called Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys, for a tour. We all decided against it, choosing to finish our education instead.
REDDON: What did you think of The Yardbirds, on the whole?
HEWITT:
I thought The Yardbirds were a very, very good band, but not a great one. The guitarists who went through the group at various stages of its career and development, can be classified as “greats”: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. As much as I enjoyed The Yardbirds when I saw them at Hidden Valley, they didn’t strike me as great…with the exception of Page, whom I considered as such. He stood out completely. The vocalist for The Yardbirds, Keith Relf, was adequate but nothing exceptional to me. The Yardbirds’ records and the experimental sounds and techniques that made their music so distinctive compared to many other groups, have always been the main reasons why their work has been so inspirational to me, for all these years.
I know my personal music growth and that of our band, was due to The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin. Learning songs by those two groups made us more skilled and proficient musicians. However, I was probably most influenced, as far as bass players are concerned, by Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane.
REDDON: What other groups or artists did you see in the 1960s?
HEWITT:
I went to lots of concerts in Toronto. There was quite a rich musical scene there really, since it was such a large city. All the big acts went there and we were very fortunate to be within driving distance of Toronto. I remember I saw Jefferson Airplane there and The Grateful Dead, at the O’Keefe Centre. They played there almost from Monday to Saturday…it was a lot of gigs in a row.
Jack Casady, who played bass for The Airplane, was a huge influence on my bass playing. Both The Dead and The Airplane played until about two or three in the morning…amazing! It was interesting because my friend and I worked our way to the stage at the O’Keefe Centre, got on stage and started dancing with Grace Slick, The Airplane’s female singer… really did! The security guys started coming towards us to throw us off, but Grace Slick motioned to them that it was okay, and we kept dancing with her until the song was over! It was a different time back then. Everything was more casual and simple…just as it was when I saw The Yardbirds.
I also saw Jimi Hendrix at The Horse Palace, on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds in Toronto. We paid our money for tickets at the door and basically ran as fast as we could to get as near to the stage as we could. It was all festival seating then. There were no assigned seats and you went wherever you wanted. Hendrix was positively mind-blowing. He was just starting out at that point and wasn’t well known.
The Rock Pile was another place that was a hot spot for the new music
