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The Magic Bubble
The Magic Bubble
Columbia - 1969
Michael Panontin
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Toronto's Yonge Street by the late sixties was a cauldron of bands playing a pounding, massive rhythm and blues, no doubt a fire lit years prior by the masculine bark of the young David Clayton-Thomas and the backwoods bite of Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. The likes of Lighthouse, Motherlode, and the Mandala trawled the clubs and peppered the airwaves with such hits as 'One Fine Morning', 'When I Die' and 'Opportunity', respectively. In 1969, the Magic Bubble - equally a product of this scene, though shorter on talent than their contemporaries - released their sole long-player on the Canadian Columbia label.
The Magic Bubble is a somewhat haphazard effort, mired as it is in tepid songwriting and cliched rhythms. The twin vocalists, Rita and Frank Rondell, however, shine on such tracks as the second single, 'Whisky Fire', and 'Sunshine Man', where Frank's throaty Claytonesque wailings carry otherwise weak material. The true gem here is unsurprisingly Rita's boldest performance, the closing cover of 'Summertime'. Rita's vocals, alternating between a slick and robust Julie Driscoll and a lamenting Janis Joplin soar over Paul Benton's nimble keyboards and Wade Brown's guitar, rendering Gershwin's classic a cross between Brian Auger and the Electric Flag. 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 swept into the dustbin of rock history, 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.
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