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Grant Smith and the Power
Thinkin' About You / You Got What I Want - 7"
MGM - 1968
Michael Panontin
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Grant Smith and the Power are barely a footnote these days in the annals of Canuckistani scholarship, but in their time they were a popular group plying rock and soul at teen clubs around Toronto and beyond.
The band originally started to take shape on New Year's Eve 1966, upstairs at the Gogue Inn out on the city's east side. Guitarist Les Morris, organist Val Stevens, bassist Mike Harrison, tenor sax player Jerry Mann, and brothers Charlie (drums) and Ralph (trumpet) Miller had been performing that night as part of a soul review called Eddie Spencer and the Power. The talented Spencer, one of the many music-minded Jamaicans who had recently made their way up to Toronto, had a powerful voice. But he was much more of a singer than a showman, and it was the latter that the leaders of the group were looking for. And so after the band had finished performing, a stunned Spencer walked up to Harrison and wished him, "Hey man, Happy New Year," adding, "I've just been fired."
In his stead came the London (ON) native Ellis Grant Smith, who had been fronting the popular E.G. Smith and the Express. There were other personnel shuffles - Jim Pauley replaced Morris on guitar, Wayne Stone came over from the Express to play drums and Brian Ayres took over sax duties - but it wasn't long before the band was ready to roll, first as E.G. Smith and the Power and then later as Grant Smith and the Power.
The massive ensemble - promo pics show anywhere from seven to ten members - were part of what was then dubbed 'the Toronto sound', a pasty amalgam of emotive, horn-driven soul and Midwestern electric rock that included more successful local acts like Mandala and David Clayton-Thomas. The guys seemed to hit the ground running, playing regularly in Toronto and parts of southern Ontario, including a total of eight bookings at Ronnie Hawkins' famed Hawk's Nest club in 1967 alone.
By the fall of that year Grant Smith and the Power (with new guitarist Jon Palma having supplanted Pauley) had honed their chops enough to make a record of their own. In September, they recorded their only hit, a competent reworking of Jackie Edwards' 'Keep on Running' (which of course was a #1 U.K. hit for the Spencer Davis Group the year before and the likely template for Smith and company).
'Keep on Running' was released in January 1968 on the independent Boo label. But as luck would have it, while the band were on a brief tour in the northeastern US, they managed to strike a record deal with none other than Tony Orlando, at the time an A&R man for MGM Records. Wisely, MGM grabbed what were arguably Grant Smith and the Power's finest songs, a couple of tracks penned by a little-known Toronto songwriter named Al Rain. Rain is a forgotten man these days, but in his time he was the reigning king of Canadian northern soul, having supplied blue-eyed bangers for the likes of Tiaras, the Allan Sisters and Pat Hervey.
The lithe 'Thinkin' About You' and its more muscular sibling 'You Got What I Want' were actually recorded the previous November at Art Snider's Sound Canada studios in Don Mills. Both tracks were pressed up and issued in Canada and the US (with the sides reversed) in the summer of '68. Alas, neither disc saw much chart action on either side of the 49th, a surprise given that 'Thinkin' About You' is top-rate soul, especially with that effervescent organ and those cheery arrangements. Northern soul collectors have certainly taken notice, with mintish copies going for upwards of a hundred bucks these days.
(And speaking of which, a posting on the authoritative 45cat site informs us that U.S. copies of 'Thinkin' About You' - both promo and stock - all seem to have been stamped on dreaded polystyrene, while those tougher-to-find Canadian copies appear to have been issued on real vinyl. You've been warned.)
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Grant Smith and the Power
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