Ocean (band)
Ocean are a Canadian Christian/progressive rock band comprising vocalist/keyboardist Greg Brown, bassist/vocalist/songwriter Jeff Jones, guitarist/vocalist Janice Morgan, guitarist Dave Tamblyn, and drummer virtuoso Chuck Slater. Unlike most bands of the time, Ocean's lineup has been (mostly) constant and unchanging from conception to the current day.
B.O. (Before Ocean)[edit]
Ocean was formed in the summer of 1970, in Prince Albert in a Can National Park, Saskatchewan, Canada, by hippies Greg Brown (cousin of Rush engineer Terry Brown), Janice Morgan, and Dave Tamblyn, plus lifelong songwriting partners Jeff Jones (who by coincidence had quit his one-day gig with Rush in 1968) and Chuck Slater. Having been friends since starting school, Jones and Slater had developed musically side-by-side and had a common vision of what Canadian rock should be.
Jones's talent as a songwriter was evident from as young an age as three. "His gifts were there for all to see", recalls music teacher Stan Egglington: "Every sentence Jeff said was lyrical poetry, he could rhyme anything." Jones also had a talent for guitar playing, although tragically this musical avenue was closed off to him in 1967 when he was involved in a tragic boating accident which robbed him of three of the fingers on his left hand; this would later be his inspiration when writing the band's hit single "Put Your Hand in the Hand". Unable to express himself musically, Jones became despondent and withdrawn, until Greg Brown, a new acquaintance of Chuck Slater's, met him and introduced him to the electric bass.
Jones, able to play the instrument without a full allowance of digits, instantly fell in love with the bass and began writing songs at an unprecedented rate. "Jeff wrote enough songs in that short period to keep us going from then on," recalls Slater: "We had a special shed which we used to keep all the songs in, all on paper, and whenever we wanted to do a new album we'd just send someone in with a stapler to collect 12 at random." Greg Brown spent more and more time with Jones and Slater from that point, developing with them his own inimitable style of keyboard playing. By 1970 they united in a common vision for the future, under the banner Ocean, a name under which they would all play from then on.
Surfing the wave[edit]
After Ocean formed the band practiced together and honed their collective musical abilities. They started playing in small local venues to small local crowds. Within the five following years they developed a modestly sized but fiercely loyal fanbase in their home-province of Saskatchewan and were eventually signed up by the now-defunct up-and-coming Canadian record company 5ft 5m Records. It was while with 5m that Ocean recorded and released their first record, Infra-Sound Echo Test (1971).
Infra-Sound Echo Test[edit]
For a first album this is very ambitious. It doesn't have the polished together feel of many of the band's later releases but it is certainly the most energetic and earnest of the band's albums. Borrowing heavily from lesser-known recording artists like Lysurge and Twistacular, the style is psychedelic rock for around two thirds of the tracks, with the remaining third being more ambient, like sticking up stars while underwater.
Noteworthy tracks include "Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Jesus Man" (the band's biggest hit single, later featured by evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong on CBS's Hee-haw), "Rainbow Connection" (featuring the first ever recorded utterance of the word "hats" on any recording medium anywhere), "Aprils" (featuring an oboe), "Purple Haze" (a Jimi Hendrix cover), "Deep Enough for Me" (later covered by the Bee Gees), and "We Got a Dream" (a Martin Luther King, Jr. cover, later covered by The Go-Gos).
“This petulant noise angers me!”
“...shut up God, you just don't understand, you're too old, far too old. Actually dad, how old are you? How come I got a birthday and hand-holders and you don't have them? Are you older than Parkinson?”
The Astral Traveller Alan Parsons Project[edit]
While signed with Artie Ripp's Kama Sutra Records, Ocean released another studio album. A little more cohesive than the first album, The Astral Traveller Alan Parsons Project (1972) is hard to find, but is considered still today, to be one of the most important albums in the psychedelic rock genre. The whole album was played as one-hour long studio session and cut into separate tracks during the edit. The band, all twisted on LSD, THC, MDMA, PCP, and GHB, were only transitorily aware that they were even holding instruments.
The album showed a powerful push from the colourful psychedelia of old to the twisted absurdity of prog, borrowing less from American funk groups like Funkamatronic and Bitch Slap Bass, and more from American and British prog bands like Steven Tyler's Underground Tunnel and Leaded Zenith. Being an early attempt at the new style it often finds itself heading down cul-de-sacs and having to five-point turn to get out. Brave but fundamentally poor. Notable tracks this time around were "Make the Sun Shine" (an Aquarius cover), "Give Tomorrow's Children One More Chance" (a boomer apologia screed), and "I Have a Following" (another MLK cover, later covered by Phil Collins).
“We set up a video camera in one corner prior to recording the album, watching it back afterwards we could see ourselves careening around the room screaming, either fighting with guitars or trying to fuck them, I'm not sure which. I don't remember any of it.”
After the relative flop of their second album, Ocean signed to EMI Records, and under them released four studio albums, two live albums, and a two-disc Greatest Hits.
“Absolutely BANG! It's direct, it's vague, it's fresh and punchy. This album categorized a zeitgeist. Pure drummage.”
Desidious Dreams[edit]
Having only ever played small local venues before, the Progress tour was the band's first fully international tour, as it took them to the USA. For both Chuck Slater and Jeff Jones it was the first time they'd ever left Canada, or seen escalators. Though they were growing rapidly in popularity the band didn't yet have sufficient fans to fill the ambitiously large venues booked for them. As such many of the shows went poorly, evoking acts of violence against assorted lighting technicians.
“I love this early sound, it's so raw and potent, really skellington, really honest. It's a bit shit though, I mean they're not really in-tune or in-time, but the passion's there; that's key, the passion. It's like Jesus; he probably couldn't play bass for shit, almost certainly couldn't change time signatures halfway through a chorus, whilst playing twelve-minute keyboard solos and crowd-surfing, but we let him off that hook, because of the passion...and the Machine Messiah thing.”
Breakup[edit]
Riding high on a wave of international popularity Ocean, by the mid-1970s, seemed untouchable. Unfortunately as musical tastes changed, Ocean didn't, and before long they began to lose out to the emerging new wave of cock rock and disco-dancing. By this point the band was falling apart. The huge combined drugged egos and paranoia of the collective members was forcing the music into bizarre directions, the result being a kind of thriller-polka-psych-prog abortion interspersed with screamy trad-rock and meandering spoken-word pieces. This constant fighting seemed to signal the end for Ocean, and they disbanded in 1975. EMI, perceiving the decline in the band's popularity, quickly released a Greatest Hits album, as a kind of money-making bookend to the band's roller-coaster career.
Tragedy unexpectedly struck in 1987, when Chuck Slater committed suicide. By this point, Brown, Morgan, and Tamblyn had moved back in with their parents, while Jeff Jones went off to join Tom Cochrane's Red Rider.
Legacy[edit]
The generation who'd lived their youth through the heyday of Ocean and the myriad other similar bands had by now become old, their memories patchy and their brains runny. As such they now had no memory of the awfulness of the music and their rose-tinted glasses and crippling middle-age made them nostalgic for the music of their pasts. Also a new generation of "music-loving" stoner proles, disenfranchised from the feeble modern emo dross, looked to the past for salvation.
It is due to this sickening anomaly in the musical climate that Ocean, along with most of their peers, were briefly able to reinvigorate their careers. In 2006, the surviving members were inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, where they performed a 70-minute electro-prog-jazz suite of "Put Your Hand in the Hand".
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