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The B + 3


The B + 3 - Taboo / Why Oh Why - 7

Taboo / Why Oh Why - 7"
Canadian American - 1966


Michael Panontin
The guy on the cowbell.

Any rock and roller worthy of the distinction knows Corky Laing as the percussive force behind that mother of all power trios, Mountain. Or maybe even as one-third of the hard-drivin' offshoot West, Bruce and Laing, whose 1974 LP Live 'n' Kickin' was on regular rotation in suburban basements back in the day.

But the iconic musician also had a bit of a wild reputation in his early days in Montreal. As a seven-year-old, he told his father that he wanted to be a drummer when he grew up, to which his dad replied, "Son, you can't do both." His entrance into the music world is the stuff of legend. After getting suspended from school for, of all things, chucking his principal's desk out the window, the 13-year-old Laing used the time off to get a job as a stage hand at a local club. While assembling the drum kit for the main attraction, he took the opportunity to test them out with a little bit of light tapping. As fate would have it, the headliners - none other than the Ink Spots - were without a drummer due to a musician's strike. And so in a scene worthy of an old Hollywood movie, Laing was given a quick on-the-spot audition and then hauled out on stage.

"These guys were legends," he would tell the Montreal Gazette in 2007. "I was just a kid. I was terrified."

Laing's first real musical concern was the Bartholomew Plus Three, a band headed up by Barry 'Bartholomew' Albert that managed a handful of singles from 1965 to 1967. The Bartholomew Plus Three featured, in addition to Albert on guitar and Laing on the drum kit, bassist George Gardos and singer/keyboardist Gary Ship. Their records were mostly pretty tame, and those looking for hints of Laing's future direction will likely be sorely disappointed. This 1966 record for the Canadian American label is as good a place to start as any, I suppose. The a-side, 'Taboo', is an uptempo, organ-driven number that seems to be equal parts Beatles clone and Yiddish wedding song (probably no surprise given that songwriters Irwin Levin and Neil Sheppard, as well as Laing himself, were all Jewish). Over on the flip, things tone down a notch with Laing and Gardos' lethargic ballad 'Why Oh Why'.

Though the B + 3 started out playing at high school dances, it didn't take them long to work their way to some pretty high-profile gigs, including a coveted slot on the October 29th, 1965 bill with the Rolling Stones at the Forum. Laing, it seems, always managed to find the party. "Because I'm such a good groupie and entirely committed to getting next to any musician who can teach me anything," he reminisced, again in the Montreal Gazette, this time in 2012, "we'd jam in a basement studio on Cote de Liesse. Stay up all night. I happened to know some nice Jewish girls in Cote St. Luc who would join us over there and it was kind of like a party. From '63 to '68, we'd smoke a lot of hash and take a lot of speed and just play. People like Hendrix came by after their shows. It was a [one of the many expletives deleted] great time!"

For all the hijinks, though, the B + 3 went out with more of a whimper than a bang, releasing a lame-o rendition of Doris Day's 'When I Fall in Love' in the fall of 1967 (which was amazingly produced by future-bandmate Felix Pappalardi around the same time he was producing Cream). Laing, Gardos and Ship would go on to form a band called Energy, where Laing started fleshing out the drums and vocals to a new song he was working on called...'Mississippi Queen'. And the rest, I guess you could say, is history.
         
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