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The Stonemen
In the Evening / Faded Colors - 7"
Maritime - 1967
Michael Panontin
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The Stonemen's lone single is criminally obscure, with only a handful of copies known to have survived the sixties. For years there was such a paucity of information out in cyberland that even the release date seemed hard to pin down. But thanks to some heavy excavating, I managed to dig up a little-known interview done by none other than Nardwuar the Human Serviette for Discorder Magazine two or three decades ago.
The New Brunswick band were actually from the rural Cap-Pele / Portage area, about a half-hour's drive to the west of Moncton. The nucleus of the group centred around the Leblanc brothers - guitarists Danny and Fernand, bassist and lead singer Norbert, and drummer Eric - who were from a well-known family of bricklayers, hence the name Stonemen.
"[When we formed], it was about 1964 or something like that," Fernand tried to recall. The Stonemen, who were "the first group with long hair" would most likely have played the usual teen haunts that were popular in the sixties and, as was also typical of the times, they were discovered by a local fellow at one of those venues. "We were playing at a boy's club in Moncton," brother Danny explained, "and there was a guy that was working at CKCW producing some music, Bill McFadden. Through him we got a deal."
So the brothers went into an "old record studio at CKCW back in 1967" to tape what would become one of the rarest garage singles in the world. The hyper-electric 'In the Evening' might have drawn comparisons to Cream at the time and with a bit of professional direction - a trip down to a New York studio, for instance - could even have climbed a few charts. And there are even more pleasures over on the backside. 'Faded Colors' is a lazy psychedelic nugget that sports some delicate guitar riffs suggesting the guys might have given Hendrix's 'Hey Joe' a spin or two.
With a single recorded and in the shops, the Stonemen's trajectory looked to be headed skyward. Danny figures that about 1000 copies were pressed up, and for a short period they were hot items, it seems. "It was distributed all throughout New Brunswick, PEI and Nova Scotia. The single helped us out quite a bit, you know. As a matter of fact, when it first came out, it sold about five hundred copies in one month!" What's more, the Stonemen landed appearances on Top Ten Plus, a locally produced TV show broadcast every Saturday afternoon for which there might still be some precious tapes out there. "We recorded quite a few songs for that. We probably recorded a dozen songs altogether."
But fame was not in the cards for the Leblanc family. "We never heard anything about it again. We never heard anything from [McFadden]," Fernand explained. "We were going to do an LP after that but we disbanded and the whole thing just dropped like that."
Needless to say, the Stonemen seven-inch is a tough one to find, though as Nardwaar pointed out at the time, Eric's Trip drummer Mark Gaudet was the proud owner of a copy. In 2016 'In the Evening' sold for an almost unfathomable 2500 bucks (US), so punters out there in Eastern Canada might not want to put off doing that spring cleaning much longer.
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