Back here but still out there

>> The world is finally ready for psych-punk pioneers Simply Saucer

YESTERDAY’S TOMORROW, TODAY: Simply Saucer

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

The name’s a nod to Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets, but when Hamilton, Ontario’s Simply Saucer first played in 1974, they must have struck many as a musical UFO. Singer/guitarist Edgar Breau and his bandmates offered up an idiosyncratic blend of the Velvet Underground’s gritty cool and the Stooges’ troglodyte riffage, with Hawkwind’s electronic oscillations, Can’s trance jams and Terry Riley’s avant-garde darkness tossed in alongside odd sci-fi references.

Today, of course, these names are touchstones for fans of alternative rock. “They’ve become the pantheon of cult sainthood,” says Breau, over the phone from Hamilton. “It’s come full circle, and I think that probably had a lot to do with the interest paid to the Saucer, because all those influences became much more mainstream as time went on.”

In the early ’70s, though, the names were known only to truly obsessive connoisseurs (such as Breau and co.), and bringing the trippy sextet jams they’d been concocting in their practice space out to a skeptical public had its challenges. “The six-piece band never played out. Too weird and wild, I guess. We did our first show, as a four-piece, in ’74 at an Anglican church basement. There was one hour-long song we did called ‘Noise,’ which was pretty well just that. Sometimes the shows went over really well, at other times people seemed a little bewildered by what we were doing.”

At the time, there was no scene to be part of, and certainly no Internet to network on. “It was very isolated. Teenage Head were in the west end, we were in the east, and they were almost like two different cities, two different cultures, and the twain didn’t meet. I used to correspond with the bass player from Rocket From the Tombs, Craig Bell, in the early ’70s, because we were both members of the Syd Barrett Appreciation Society. It’s funny how we both ended up in bands that have been compared to one another—and both operating in isolation.”

When punk broke in ’77, culture caught up with the Saucer, or at least should have. The band jumped into the punk scene on Toronto’s Queen St., with mixed results. “It was as if there were some unwritten rules. The songs had to be short. They had to be fast. And they had to be ugly. We did some songs like that, but we had others too. It was also more a fad, and fashion-conscious, which was not where we were at.”

Add that to stolen gear, pulled plugs and line-up shifts, and it was the beginning of the end—or rather, the end of the beginning. Simply Saucer broke up in ’78 with only a seven-inch single to their name, but in 1989, their LP Cyborgs Revisited (recorded by Bob Lanois!) was released posthumously. “Almost immediately, it got great reviews,” recalls Breau, citing hype from Spin’s Byron Coley and Edwin “Savage Pencil” Pouncey’s NME column. “When Sonic Youth came to town to open for Neil Young, they dedicated their set to Simply Saucer.”

In 2003, the Hamilton-based Sonic Unyon label dropped the expanded reissue of Cyborgs with spectacular results. Breau had long since moved in an acoustic solo-singer direction, and was quite leery of strapping a Strat on again. Thankfully, he bit the bullet, and now not only is the Saucer flying again, the band has an album of new material, Half Human, Half Live, on its way.

“Once I was doing it again,” chuckles Breau, “it all just came back. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to crank it up.”

With CPC Gangbangs and Plastic
Crimewave Sound at la Sala Rossa
tonight, Thursday, June 14, 9 p.m., $15