Sparrows on the Hood (A short story of...)

Sean and I met at a jam session in fall of 1983. At the time I was thinking it would be fun to do an electronic band but I thought it was unlikely to happen. After all, this was the early 1980s in the Canadian prairies. Everything was guitar and rock'n roll. The only other electronic group that I was aware of at the time was the Huss brothers in Edmonton and their band called Psyche. I figured my chance of finding another synthesist was somewhere between not-a-chance and zero.

Anyway, after the session I talked to a few of the guys and Sean was one of them. While talking out on the street I mentioned that I wrote my own music. He wanted to do that too so we arranged to get together and see what we could do.

A week later Sean came over and we talked for a while and decided to see what we could do within a couple hours. I presented a song idea I was doodling with and we worked on the arrangement. By the end of the session we had a fairly satisfying result.

Very quickly we started planning and came up with a few principals for a band.

1) Follow our own musical path and be a 100% original music band.
2) We were serious about this being a career so we will approached it as a job. There would be regular practices and a no drinking (or whatever) on the job rule.
3) Studio recordings will be as close to stage performance as possible. We had both been to concerts where the performance was completely different than the album recording.

Very quickly we decided we needed a singer/front man so Sean invited Travis to come out and give it a try. Soon we were working towards our first concert.

Our first problem was a name for the band. We started toying with various ideas and nothing seemed right. While at a coffee shop Sean broke into a story on how at lunch he and his girlfriend at the time were feeing sparrows french fries. The birds were landing on the hood(bonnet) of the car and looking in. Suddenly Sean blurted out, "I know, Sparrows on the Hood!" Travis and I laughed... it was dumb... and perfect. The project now had a name.

We proceed towards our first concert in 1984. The problem was that after several months of work we didn't have enough music to do a full concert so about 40% of our first show was cover. The overall feedback from show #1 was very good and the majority suggested we shouldn't do covers. Wow! (There was a tape done of the first show. I'm working on getting a copy of it.)

From those humble beginnings we set out to do more. A little over a year later we had a staff change and took on Rosemary to cover keyboards and I moved over to lead vocals. And... we wrote more music and did more performances.

Our next change up came because Rosemary wanted to focus on her school studies. Eventually Brent joined as our new lead. For me, that was great because I liked working behind the keyboards.

We continued to work on touring and perfecting our unique sound and started doing studio records. The first 3 songs studio recorded were Knowledge, Quest for Fire and 30 Seconds to Daylight.

We also participated in a battle of the bands type of competition and won studio time at Studio West out at Pike Lake. There we recorded Homewhen and 30 Seconds to Daylight. Very soon after completing the session we moved to Toronto and played Lee's Palace on Queen Street. The Homewhen single followed very soon afterwards.

Homewhen/30 Seconds to Daylight.

Following the success of the Lee's Palace performance we went back into the recording studio and recorded Portbound, Nocturne, took another stab at Quest for Fire again and did our take on OMD's Pretending to See the Future with the goal to release a mini or extended album. In between the recording sessions Denis joined the band as our drummer. I think that was the best time we ever sounded

The mini-album idea never made it to fruition but the release would have Portbound, Nocturne and Pretending to See the Future. The OMD song broke our no covers rule but the arrangement was a fan favourite so we thought it would be a nice to include it. The final song was an extended mix of Homewhen. The studio recording was actually a special arrangement that contained the single version in the middle. Our intention was to release the extended version in our second formal release.

Sadly, our practice studion was broken in and we lost a few pieces of our equipment. Some of it almost new. The situation was difficult as we were financially stretched and owed money for recent equipment purchased and the band broke up. :-(

My tapes are starting to show their age so in the interest of preserving I digitized and remastered from my collection of "master" tapes

Let's call the collection...