4 songs from Cal Cavendish debut LP - Mountain Road

Cal Cavendish had a seemingly breif run with the commercial side of music in Canada.
He among other lesser knowns were subjected to Birchmount, a small label subsidary of
Quality records which took subjectively dicey (in terms of charting possibilities) groups or
artists and posted a big "CANADIAN ARTISTS COLLECTION" in a series of LPs released
in 1968-1970ish. In today's collector market, one of the hottest of those in the series was Wayne McGhie and the sounds of Joy.
Cal was on the roster and is one of least talked about in the series.
His first Lp was issued by Birchmount and is a sparse country relapse with some twang a bit of grit and humour mixed with some Johnny Cashisms. He was no spring chicken being 28 at the time but still young enough to be flexible.
Later on in the mid 70's he was trying to promote a single entitled something like "government inspection" and he took a small plane over the city of Calgary, Alberta and dropped 100 records
and some Manure. He was on a creative lark mixed with frustration and what he admits was
some depression.  See the entire article below.
The whole ordeal and his back story wound up in a well received but short lived play called
"buzz job"
in 2009.

I have found a beat up copy of his first LP and decided to share 4 songs from it.
One gets a glimpse of his pessemistic humour some fragments of a romantic and introspective
side and his dealings with the blues.

It's a diamond in the rough!




songs featured :

01-sitar pickin' man
04-takin' out the line
02-she'll never be mine
03-rays of love

(from :  http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/swerve/story.html?id=d383484b-5be0-40d9-ac7d-7faeb31526ba )

Cal Cavendish, april 11, 1975

Land a crippled plane in the Hudson River and you're a hero. But take to the skies to dump 100 pounds of manure and 100 copies of your latest record on downtown Calgary and the cops will take you to a shrink. And even when that psychiatrist says you're "as sane as me," you're still up to your neck in legal doo-doo.

BY THE CALGARY HERALD JANUARY 30, 2009 BE THE FIRST TO POST A COMMENT

Land a crippled plane in the Hudson River and you're a hero. But take to the skies to dump 100 pounds of manure and 100 copies of your latest record on downtown Calgary and the cops will take you to a shrink. And even when that psychiatrist says you're "as sane as me," you're still up to your neck in legal doo-doo.

That's what Cal Cavendish, then a 34-year-old pilot and struggling folk singer, discovered on April 11, 1975. It began as the politest of protests, with Cavendish writing a letter to the air-traffic controller at Springbank airport, in which he explained his plan to "make like Louis Riel and rebel a little."

His three-hour flight was intended to call attention to his struggles as an artist in a boomtown, and began with Cavendish flying beneath power lines on his way into town, then zooming past the hospital where his ailing father was a patient, before buzzing the control tower at the Calgary airport and the restaurant in the Calgary Tower. Such a flight was never going to end well for Cavendish, but it might have helped if he'd had a valid pilot's licence. The problem for Cavendish was that his licence had been suspended the previous year after he sought treatment for depression. That's not to say he didn't know what he was doing--he told reporters "that buzz job on the Calgary Tower was a beaut."

The upshot of Cavendish's protest was a $3,000 fine for reckless flying, a headline calling him the "Mad Manure Bomber" and the end of his aviation career. Today, he is a truck driver and the subject of Buzz Job! The True Story of Cal Cavendish. The play is written and directed by David van Belle and stars musician Kris Demeanor. The show runs Feb. 5-10 and 12-13 at the Ironwood Stage and Grill. It will feature original songs and some of those written by Cavendish, but it is not a mere recounting of his infamous night in the sky. Van Belle says the greater attraction for him, as a struggling artist in his 30s, is the notion of how creative types try to make ends meet. Calgarians who work downtown will be relieved to know that van Belle does not have a pilot's licence.

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Swerve and the generous folks at the Calgary Folk Music Festival are giving away two tickets to the Saturday, Feb. 7 show of Buzz Job! at the Ironwood at 8 p.m.