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Bill Marion
Flower Girl / Give Me More Love - 7"
Nimbus - 1967
Michael Panontin
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Bill Marion was a founding member of the Paupers along with Skip Prokop, and he was even responsible for the band's name ("We had 50 cents among us," Prokop has said. "Bill said, 'Why don't we call ourselves the Paupers?'"). The Hamilton native, whose real name was Bill Misener, had even managed to strike up a songwriting partnership with Prokop. By the summer of '65, all six sides of the group's first three singles were authored by Prokop and Marion.
But just as the Paupers' fortunes were starting to rise - the group's new manager, a young Bernie Finklestein, had hooked the guys up with Arc Records - Marion grew restless and quit the band, citing "hassles regarding his songwriting". Marion's departure was a minor blip. Finklestein told the guys, "What you need is a singer who writes poetry," and then promptly walked across Yorkville Avenue to a place called the Mousehole and signed Adam Mitchell.
The following year, in 1967, Marion was approached by composer Ben McPeek, who had recently formed the Nimbus label along with Jack Richardson, Al Macmillan and Peter Clayton. Nimbus was created with the express purpose of showcasing Canadian talent. So what better way to launch the label than with Marion's orchestral 'Flower Girl', a song that Billboard dutifully described as by the "one-time lead singer with the Paupers [and] backed by the big rocking sounds of a 26-piece band and four-voice chorus".
There is no evidence that 'Flower Girl' troubled any charts at the time. But on an aesthetic level, it was a fine piece of summer-of-love popsike. Marion would find success in the seventies, using his real name, on a number of fronts: as a singer, as a producer/arranger and even as a member of iconic soft-pop masters the Laurie Bower Singers. And Nimbus definitely lived up to its own mission statement, issuing dozens of discs by a host of Canadian artists, including Copper Penny, Cat, Bonnie Dobson and of course the Guess Who.
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