Simply Saucer - Biography
By Oliver Hall
When Simply Saucer formed in Hamilton, Ontario in the early 1970s, it was one of a small number of isolated, visionary North American and UK bands working in the space opened up by the Velvet Underground, the MC5, the Stooges, Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart and Krautrock. Because Simply Saucer was active in the early and middle 1970s, writers often refer to them as “proto-punk.” As with their contemporaries Pere Ubu, the term is fine as a strictly chronological designation, but it unfortunately implies that the band’s aesthetic was crude and undeveloped, which is not the case. Cyborgs Revisited (Mole Sound 1989), the album of mid-70s recordings on which most of Simply Saucer’s legendary status is justly based, does not sound like a bridge between the Velvets and the Ramones, or anything like that; it sounds like a fully realized and elaborated sonic vision, created almost in secret by people aware of the prophetic power of their music, if unsure of its legacy. As it turned out, Simply Saucer’s mid-70s hypnotic death-trip groove rock anticipated the sound of such 80s underground bands as the Scientists, the Birthday Party and Sonic Youth.
Edgar Breau started playing with keyboardist Paul Colilli around 1971, and the two met David Byers at a Hamilton house party in January 1972. The trio jammed sporadically throughout the year, whenever and wherever they could. That fall, the three began rehearsing more regularly in a Hamilton dance hall, and then Byers rented an isolated apartment in a commercial zone of Hamilton where the band could rehearse late into the night without fear of noise complaints. Hamilton is just across the border from Buffalo, New York, where the band traveled to get contemporary records by Can, Faust, Neu! and Cluster that shaped Simply Saucer’s early attack.
The group gained three new members in 1973: drummer Neil DeMerchant, bassist Kevin Christoff, and analog synth player Ping Romany, whose playing particularly distinguished the band’s early sound. Byers moved into a downtown loft to accommodate the larger band’s rehearsals. According to “David Byers and the Origins of Simply Saucer” at www.theshangs.ca, the name Simply Saucer, which the band chose in the summer of 1973, refers to Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets. Byers decided to leave the band when the lease on the loft ran out in October, and Colilli quit to return to college around the same time. Simply Saucer had not yet played a show when Byers and Colilli quit.
Breau kept Simply Saucer going with Christoff, Romany and DeMerchant in a new Hamilton rehearsal space they called The Office, also Breau’s new dwelling. Rick Bissell approached the band in March 1974 and offered to manage them. Bissell booked the first Simply Saucer show at St. Alban’s Anglican Church in Hamilton’s east end—“We were an east end band,” Breau told interviewer Lou Molinaro—on June 22, 1974. The second of their three sets that night consisted entirely of an improvisation titled “Noise,” which Breau says started fights in the audience and brought the police to the venue. The following month Simply Saucer recorded their first sessions in two days at Master Sound Recording, built by brothers Bob and Daniel Lanois in the basement of their mother’s house in Ancaster, Ontario. Those sessions, funded by Bissell, have an intensity, focus and aesthetic motive force lacking from even the most extreme of Simply Saucer’s underground rock contemporaries; perhaps only Suicide, Destroy All Monsters and Rocket from the Tombs match up.
Bissell continued to book shows for Simply Saucer through the summer of 1975, most of them at Ontario high schools. DeMerchant quit the band in November 1974 and drummer Don Cramer joined. Cramer left the band and returned several times before settling in as the band’s permanent drummer, and 15-year-old drummer Tony Cutaia filled in for Cramer during his absences in 1975 and 1976. The band’s association with Bissell ended in July 1975 with Bissell’s resignation, and Simply Saucer soon left behind the death-trip hellfire of “Nazi Apocalypse” in favor of a brighter sound.
Ping Romany left amicably in August 1976 because Breau’s new melodic garage-punk tunes left him with little to do on the Moog, and the band was evicted from The Office in September. Simply Saucer briefly split up, then reformed in early 1977 as the trio of Breau, Christoff and Cramer with a new Hamilton headquarters called Saucer House. Alex Pollington joined the band on second guitar and backing vocals in April 1977, around the same time the band picked up new manager Gary Pig Gold, who began to get Simply Saucer on Toronto punk gigs. Hard though it may be to believe, in a narrative twist worthy of SCTV, Gold miraculously booked this lineup of Simply Saucer on the Toronto broadcast of the 1977 Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon. Fed up with punk, Pollington quit in November, and guitarist Steve Park, formerly of Hamilton punks Teenage Head, joined.
Gold released the only Simply Saucer record to come out during the band’s original incarnation, the single “She’s A Dog” / “I Can Change My Mind” (Pig 1978), which discloses a bubblegum influence not apparent on the band’s ’74-’75 recordings, though without any apparent loss of fire, ambition or creative power.
According to the timeline at www.simplysaucer.com, by June 1979 the band had “resort[ed] to playing covers in small town bars.” Park and Christoff quit in July 1979, bringing Simply Saucer to an end. Inspired by John Fahey, Breau began a solo career as a folk guitarist and singer. Breau, Byers and Christoff formed a new band in 1985 called the Third Kind, which split up after recording a demo the following year. Breau and Christoff continued to collaborate through the late 80s and early 90s in Edgar Breau and the Shadows of Ecstasy, whose recordings are now available on Shadows of Ecstasy (Anthology 2009). David Byers formed a new band called the Shangs at the end of the 1980s.
Simply Saucer’s posthumous career began with the issue of the band’s first album in 1989, ten years after the group broke up. Cyborgs Revisited consists of the 1974 session recorded by Bob and Daniel Lanois and a 1975 live performance. (Cyborgs Revisited was first released the same year as Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy, also produced by Daniel Lanois.) The strength of these performances made Simply Saucer famous among forward-thinking musicians and record collectors during the late 80s and 90s.
Julian Cope made Cyborgs Revisited his Album of the Month in May 2001, and the Canadian label Sonic Unyon released an expanded version of Cyborgs Revisited in 2003. Breau then released the solo album Canadian Primitive (Songhammer 2004). Simply Saucer reformed in 2006 for a Hamilton show with fellow Canadian punk legends Teenage Head and Viletones, and continues to perform following several lineup changes. The reunited band released the new album Half Human, Half Live (Sonic Unyon 2008), which combines new studio tracks with recent live ones. Saucerland (Anthology 2009), released on the digital label Anthology Recordings (www.anthologyrecordings.com), is a compilation of live and rehearsal recordings from 1975 to 1979.
Paul Colilli, the keyboardist who quit Simply Saucer in 1973, got a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is now Professor of Italian Studies at Laurentian University in northern Ontario as well as Associate Director of the Italian School at Middlebury College. Among his numerous scholarly books are The Angel’s Corpse (Palgrave Macmillan 1999) and Vico and the Archives of Hermetic Reason (Éditions Soleil 2004).
