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The Andantes
Today's Fool / Lady - 7"
Chic-A-Go - 1968
Michael Panontin
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The Andantes were once considered to be the most talented band in Regina.
That may sound like a joke - I mean, the Saskatchewan city in the mid-sixties had barely 125,000 souls - but the competition included the likes of the White Knights (a.k.a. Tomorrow's Keepsake) and the Checkerlads. Regina was also no different from thousands of other cities around the world. When A Hard Day's Night opened, the local teenagars, including some future Andantes, sat gobsmacked in their seats and then rushed home to form their own version of the Fab Four.
As a five-piece that included no less than two trumpeters, the Andantes played regular Friday night gigs at the YMCA, wowing the youngsters and eventually scoring some recording time at local radio station CKCK in the late summer of 1966. The two tracks they recorded, 'Oh Baby' and 'I've Got a Secret', received a bit of airplay and allegedly were circulated amongst hardcore fans, but they were ultimately never pressed up onto vinyl.
By 1967, the Andantes got some valuable press in The Regina Leader Post, with the local newspaper extolling their unique two-trumpet approach, their obvious musical depth and, oddly, their decidedly clean-cut image, about which the band's drummer and leader Gary Montague quipped, "We're what you might call the Joe College types." Serendipity struck later that year when the boys were hooked up with Don Edwards, a transplanted Chicagoan who agreed to take them on at his newly formed booking agency.
The fast-talking Edwards made a few calls back home and before long the wide-eyed prairie boys were booked for recording time at the venerable Chess Studios. Making the trip would be Montague, guitarist Gerry Schlegel, singer Don Gutheil and his brother Daryl on trumpet and keyboards, and bassist Dinni Wilkie, a last-minute stand-in for founding member Ken Leonard, whose worried parents forbade him to go.
The lads - and they really were just giddy, naive kids who knew little about Chicago or Chess Records for that matter - left Saskatchewan on August 13, 1968 with $1500 tucked away in Montague's suitcase for expenses. When they entered The Windy City, they were confronted with a teeming, menacing metropolis. In addition to the usual crime and racial tension, Chicago was reeling from that year's April riots and bracing for the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
"There were cops everywhere," Daryl Gutheil recalled years later on the It's Psychedelic Baby site. "It was tense. People would ask us 'When are you leaving?' 'Oh, in a couple of days.' 'That's good because something is going to break out here soon.' They knew it." To make matters worse, they noticed at their hotel that the expense money had gone missing and the guys had to call for an emergency money transfer from the Gutheils' father.
Things got better once the Andantes got inside the studio. They were introduced to the legendary recording engineer Malcolm Chisholm, whose resume stretched all the way back to Chuck Berry's first sessions, and Dave Purple, guitarist for the locally popular Cryan' Shames, both of whom would be doing the producing. The August 16th recording was quick, just four hours despite the numerous overdubs. Mixing was done the following day. "When the songs were finished," brother Daryl recalled, "one of the engineers wired the master tape machine into a small radio and played the tunes for us; we were thrilled!"
Back home in Canada, the group got to work pushing their new piece of wax, which paired the fuzz-driven, almost overwrought 'Today's Fool' with the more infectious - and frankly far superior - blue-eyed soul of 'Lady' over on the flipside. In true DIY fashion, 500 copies were pressed up, which the guys themselves personally delivered to the shops. "We sold a few hundred copies, and got some local airplay so I guess it was worth the experience," remembered Daryl G. To which Montague added, "I even remember we had played some gig at the university in Saskatoon; heading back the next day we pulled over at a cafe for breakfast or lunch, closer to Saskatoon than Regina. We were anonymous. Someone got up out of the blue and punched in 'Today's Fool' on the jukebox!"
But the party didn't last long...at least for the band as a whole. Schlegal's talented guitar skills, charismatic stage presence and impressive songwriting ability (the excellent 'Lady' after all had flowed out of his pen) were undeniable assets. But his own excessive partying was testing the patience of his more strait-laced bandmates. And so in late September, barely a month after they returned from Illinois, Schlegal was booted out. His replacement was the more presentable Ray Statham, in Montague's eyes a "tall, dark and handsome dude with a clean shaven heavy dark shadow, dressed in a smart black suit".
More important perhaps was Statham's technique. He was "a fine gritty-rich guitar player" with a heavier blues sound that seemed to dovetail perfectly with the Andantes' future direction. In November, this new line-up found themselves sharing the bill with the uber-heavy Vanilla Fudge...for two nights in fact at Regina's Exhibition Auditorium. The Andantes marched on into 1969, getting tighter and tighter with this newer sound, but by the middle of the year they had started to splinter.
By 1970, the band was whittled down to a four-piece with just the Guthiel brothers left from the original line-up (with Bob Deutscher on guitar and Don Young on drums). But the guys still had their sights set on another recording, and so having finally realized that there was already a more famous Andantes singing down in Detroit, they opted to pare down their name as well, to the hipper-sounding Andante.
That band would spend a good portion of 1970 touring, especially across the northern US. And though they did eventually make their way to Bob Edwards' new home in Eau Claire (WI) to record twenty-odd tracks (both covers of current hits and original material), that second single never came to be. Today, mintish copies of 'Today's Fool' will run you about a hundred bucks (USD).
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