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The Quiet Jungle
Ship of Dreams / Everything - 7"
Yorkville - 1967
Michael Panontin
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Doug Rankine and the Secrets scored a huge hit in early 1966 with a rather goofy novelty tune called 'Clear the Track, Here Comes Shack'. The song was a quintessentially Canadian ode to the burly Toronto Maple Leaf forward Eddie Shack, and it was a smash.
'Clear the Track...' rocketed to #1 on the CHUM-AM charts in Toronto in February that year and charted for an unbelievable nine weeks. But the Toronto-based group of singer/guitarist Rankine along with Bob Mark (guitar), Henry S. Thaler (electric piano), Mike Woodruff (bass) and Rick Felstead (drums) were hardly thrilled at the hit to their reputation with such a lame-o song all over the radio.
"We didn't know it was going to be released as a single and played across the entire country," Rankine later recalled for the Garage Hangover site. "Once it was released, we thought (or hoped) it would just disappear into the night and nobody would care about it. As fate would have it, it didn't disappear."
The guys signed on to Bill Gilliland and Fred White's Yorkville label, which thanks to a string of Ugly Ducklings records (under its previous name, Yorktown) was about as hip as it got in Toronto at the time. "We had our sights set on 'stardom'," Rankine explained. "Clearly, we needed a way to distance ourselves from a 'novelty song' such as 'Shack'. The most logical solution in the eyes of the execs at Yorkville Records was to change the name and get a couple of singles into the marketplace."
So, as the rechristened Quiet Jungle, they released the first of two seven-inchers for the label in January '67. 'Ship of Dreams' is stellar psychedelia, from its eerie opening guitar squeal to the delicious organ riffs and mellifluous harmonies that followed. The record climbed to #31 on CHUM, was #6 in Kingston (ON) and even received airplay as far away as Vancouver. It was just the breakthrough the group needed. Sort of.
"Our bookings increased and we were playing right across Canada. Everyone booking us, however, wanted the 'Secrets' to play 'Clear the Track, Here Comes Shack' and not the group that just released 'Ship of Dreams'. I was seventeen at the time and the money being offered was pretty good, so we decided to take the bookings and pocket the money!"
The Quiet Jungle also had regular slots on TV shows like CTV's After Four and High Time, where they appeared "fairly often". There was a follow-up single, the less interesting though much tougher to find 'Too Much in Love', that went nowhere. After that the group seemed to quietly vanish from the Toronto scene. Except that unbeknownst to many at the time, they had actually found gainful employment as session musicians for the budget label Arc, churning out bargain-bin fodder like A Little Bit Me (an album of Monkees hits) and The Story of Snoopy's Christmas and Other Favourite Children's Songs.
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