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The Magic Bubble
The Magic Bubble
Columbia - 1971
Michael Panontin
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Toronto's Yonge Street by the late sixties was a cauldron of blistering soul and scorching rhythm & blues, a fire no doubt lit years before by the likes of the young David Clayton-Thomas and his mentor, Ronnie Hawkins. Bands like Mandala, Grant Smith and the Power and Lighthouse packed bars and clubs up and down the strip, with some of their songs even cracking the airwaves around the city. The influence obviously spread to the nearby Hamilton/Burlington area, where sister and brother Rita and Frank Rondell formed the Magic Bubble.
Frank, who was actually born Gianfranco Anthony Chiarelli, was not new to the CanRock music scene. The erstwhile early rock 'n' roller had already issued some pretty swell discs in the early sixties as Frank Rondell and the Chancellors (the best of which is the quasi-novelty disc 'The Bat' from 1964.) After a solo single, 'These Are the Dreams', failed to bother any charts in '67, Frank turned to the harder blues-based sounds that were all the rage.
The Magic Bubble, according to RPM, developed quite a following, especially in Burlington, where they were regular fixtures at a club called The Tree Top. It wasn't long before they caught the ear of Johnny Williams, the Director of A&R at Columbia Canada. Williams promptly whisked the group, which also included guitarist Wade Brown, keyboardist Paul Benton, bassist Brian Kirkwood and drummer Sonny J. Milne, up to Toronto's Thunder Sound Studios to record a full-length LP.
The Magic Bubble was issued in June '71 and was given plenty of promo space in RPM, with the siblings featured on the cover of the magazine's June 19th edition. It's an eclectic mix of softer pop tunes and hard-edged rockers. RPM wrote that "they are bubble-gum enough for the Top Forty programmers and the chicken-rockers should also find the album interesting".
Unfortunately, The Magic Bubble is a somewhat haphazard affair, mired in tepid songwriting and cliched rhythms. In fact, much of the record is rescued by the siblings' talented vocal performances, especially on such tracks as 'Whisky Fire' and 'Sunshine Man', where Frank's throaty Claytonesque wailings carry otherwise weak material. The true gem is unsurprisingly Rita's boldest performance, the band's closing cover of 'Summertime'. Rita's vocals, which alternate between a slick and robust Julie Driscoll and a lamenting Janis Joplin, soar over Benton's keyboards and Brown's guitar, rendering the Gershwin classic a cross between Brian Auger and the Electric Flag. It's a brilliant 5'52" that needs to find its way onto a comp someday.
Alas, with meagre sales and without any chart trajectory, The Magic Bubble was soon lost to time, barely surviving as a footnote even on the collector circuit. Rita Rondell, however, after a spell in the seventies fronting blues-rock combo Battle Axe, quit Canada altogether to do session work in Italy, returning in the late 1980s to launch a successful career as none other than blues belter Rita Chiarelli.
Mintish copies of the LP, which was never issued outside of Canada at the time, will probably set you back close to 200 USDs. There's also an eight-track version out there, which I was fortunate to find at a yard sale, buried in a pile of easy listening tapes, for 50 cents.
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