Pat Carpenter (left) , Clayton Millan (middle), and Wayne Harbord (right) from the band The Glass Cage at the CHLY studio. (Lauryn Mackenzie /CHLY 101.7fm)

In the summer of 1968, performing a once in a lifetime gig, a band of Vancouver Island teenage boys decided to record their live performance, an album that never saw the light of day, until now.

Flash forward to the summer of 2016, music aficionado Marcus Pollard of Victoria, and his wife were visiting Port Alberni.

On the trip he decided to visit his favourite consignment store This N That. That is where he found an acetate record from an unknown psych rock band: The Glass Cage.

“I bought a bunch of ‘cooky’ records, a bunch of comic books, and including this one that was an acetate, and it just said ‘side one’ and ‘side two’ on it. It was $4 and it was trashed,” Pollard said. “So I said, ‘Well, of course, I have to get it's trashed.’ About a couple of weeks later, I got home, and I just kind of tossed it on a pile. Then a couple of weeks later, I went and listened to it and went, ‘Holy crap. What the heck is this?’

Having spent many years as a promoter and booker in Victoria, Pollard said he has a good eye for seeing a spark in someone when they are still early on in their career.

As a vinyl collector, he said he finds a lot of rare things, but he said 99 times out of 100 those things never leave a lasting impression on him.

“But this, it just blew out of my speakers and I just thought, ‘What the hell is this?’ I was listening to somebody who was talking about the first Radiohead record–not the second one, which everybody likes, but the first one– and she said, ‘It just smelled like B.O. and teenagers,’” he said. “And that's kind of what this record sounded to me like. They just sounded like youth–brawny boy, youth. It was pretty cool.”

From there Pollard said he needed to find out who was involved in the young psych rock band.

Members of the band The Glass Cage meet at the CHLY studio for their interview. This was the first time Millan (left) has seen Carpenter (right) since 1968. (Lauryn Mackenzie / CHLY 101.7fm)

So he started looking.

“I probably, I talked to dozens of experts in the field, and collectors and archivists, and all of them went, ‘no idea, no idea, no idea,’” he said.

One day in 2018, on a post Pollard had made about the band on a Facebook page about Canadian music appreciation, he got a hit: band member Norm Roth.

“At first I thought I was being punked. I thought he's going to ask me for my credit card and that we can get together or something like that,” he said. “So I called him up and it all checked out.”

Roth was one of the founding members of the Nanaimo based band The Glass Cage. Together with band mates, 60 years earlier he had written and sang the songs on the album.

Then teenagers, Roth was lead vocalist, Wayne Harbord was lead guitar, Clayton Millan was on bass, the late Terry Morrison was on keyboard and the late Doug Hastings was on drums.

“Old Pop who made the recording said, ‘this is something you fellows will cherish for years to come,’ and we did,” said Wayne Harbord.

Harbord came down to CHLY’s studio along with Clayton Millan and Pat Carpenter. Carpenter was a founding member of The Glass Cage who was replaced by Harbord before they recorded the album.

Carpenter said in 1966 while he and Millan were 15 years old, the two boys decided to form The Glass Cage. Both were attending Nanaimo District Secondary School at the time, and soon others joined.

“The first guy that we got was Doug Hastings on drums. Clayton knew Doug, and we asked him if we could do a rehearsal or two. He sounded great. So that was a good start. He had a place in those days, they called it a rumpus room, a rec room down in the basement, you that we could practice in. So that was fantastic. We needed a lead singer. Norm Roth was also at [the] high school,” Carpenter said. “At the time, he was singing with a group that was kind of more folk based, called We Three, and he had a great voice, and so we asked him ‘would you like to become part of the band?’ We were fortunate enough to get him. Then the last person we added, of course, was Terry Morrison on keyboards and backup vocals and his previous band, which was called the Cry for Justice, had broken up so we jumped on that right away and asked him, and that was how the whole band came together.”

Millan said as a band they took their music seriously, wanting to make it big. They toured across the province playing every show possible.

Millan said, shortly after Harbord joined the band they took part in a battle of the bands event in Vancouver where they took on local band Winter’s Green, a band increasing in popularity. They would one day change their name to Trooper.

Carpenter (middle) said in 1966 while he and Millan were 15 years old, the two boys decided to form The Glass Cage. (Lauryn Mackenzie / CHLY 101.7fm)

“We lived on West 64th off Granville Street, and Winter’s Green would come over and spend a lot of time at our place. Plus the Collectors who morphed into Chilliwack, they would come over there. We practiced like crazy all the time,” Millan said. “It was great fun. We learned a lot, of course, because these guys coming over from other bands that were huge, even at that time, were really informative and gave a lot of information.”

Then when the band got invited to perform at the grand opening of the Fuller Lake Arena in Chemainus B.C., they knew this would be the perfect moment to finally record the music they had been playing for the last couple of years.

Harbord said they got Jack Taylor, or Pop as they called him, to come by and record their live set. Taylor owned the store Sewing and Sound on Nanaimo’s Commercial Street located where the Vancouver Island Conference Centre now sits.

Sewing and Sound was a store he and wife ran for sewing machines and music. Carpenter, who worked at the store after school, remembers Taylor’s interest in audio recording. Taylor had a number of reel-to-reel recorders which he used to record the band’s performance.

“He was selling tape recorders, radios, all kinds of stuff, early cassette recorders. At the time that he did this kind of recording, eight track stereos were the big thing,” Carpenters said. “The eight track tapes were probably about six inches by four inches, fairly big, but they would sound great in the car. You'd have speakers sort of set up in the back, in the front.”

The band recorded five of their original tracks, all written by Roth, as well as a cover of the Outside Woman Blues by the band Cream and an outro jam session.

But shortly after, as the boys and their band were getting older, their time as The Glass Cage came to an end, leaving the original recording without a proper release.

Millan said he can’t fully remember why the band broke up but said it was just something that slowly morphed into everyone going their separate ways.

“What did break up Glass Cage? Well, it's a morphing process, basically, you just kind of decide on what you want to do,” Millan said. “We changed the name again to Lemon and we were going up and down the island doing gigs and that. But we're getting better and better, and people were telling us we were doing that”

So in 1969 The Glass Cage, then called Lemon, came to an end. Or so they thought.

In 2018, after first finding the album and later meeting with the band, Marcus Pollard just knew he needed to get this album out to a wider audience.

“I'm not a religious person, but I think that once I heard the record, and once I realized that nobody else had heard the record, I felt that it was a sin against nature if I didn't get this out to the world, I really did,” Pollard said. “I felt that for me to turn my back on this and turn my back on these people who I had met, I felt I couldn't do it.”

So Pollard teamed up with his friend Jason Flower, a musician and archivist out of Victoria who created the archival record label Supreme Echo.

The two of them started working to bring this 60 year old recording to a modern audience.

While Flower worked with a team in California and New York to boost the original audio to modern standards, Pollard started researching the history of the music scene in Nanaimo.

He said he found that there wasn’t much written about the music scene in Nanaimo during the 1960’s

“Nobody really seemed to know any of these bands. So I ended up writing a booklet for the record. It's about 5,000 words, but we got photographs of all of the bands,” Pollard said. “I hope that people in Nanaimo, especially who were there, will be able to go, ‘Yeah, this was it, this was our scene.’”

The new vinyl features all five of their original tracks, all written as well as the cover of the *Outside Woman Blues* by the band Cream and an outro jam session that was recored in 1968. (Lauryn Mackenzie / CHLY 101.7fm)

Pollard was also able to commission Salt Spring Island artist Bob Masse to design the cover art for the album. He describes Masse as one of the great poster artists of the 60’s and the 70’s, who is best known for making posters for bands like the Tragically Hip, David Bowie, the Doors, Pink Floyd, and even the legendary Woodstock music festival.

Working on this project has been a worldwide success for the original band members, finally seeing their album released on vinyl for the first time. Black Flag Frontman and radio host Henry Rollin even featured the album on his show this past month.

This past Sunday, the first of three album release parties were held for The Glass Cage’s album Where Did the Sunshine Go?

Carpenter said the album release party at Neptoon Records in Vancouver was an amazing experience.

“I actually couldn't believe the response. There is a whole kind of community of garage band so called aficionados all over the world and these guys have grabbed onto this,” Carpenter said. “There were probably 60-70 people who showed up in Neptoon Records there, buying up copies of the record. We played it in the store, and everybody heard all the tunes. It was just a great experience to meet everybody there.”

Harbord said it has been great to get all the recognition from the work they did back in the 60’s.

“My youngest boy and my eldest son, they both heard the record when they played a bit of it on YouTube, and said, ‘Dad, that's fantastic. We're not going to be a forgotten garage band, people will know who The Glass Gage was,’” Harbord said

While Millan had to miss the first album release party due to illness, he said he is just so happy to see his album have its second chance in the sun.

“We're not kids anymore. I mean, I'm 75 years old myself. So it's been a thrill. Everything morphs from one thing to another, and when it got to the end for me,” Millan said. “I thought, ‘okay, that's fine. I'm happy with what we did and how we did it.’”

Having the album finally be finished, Pollard said he feels so happy about how it turned out.

“Jason and I had lived with this music for so long that we weren't really sure if it was great or not, because we were kind of too familiar with it. So to see the world, literally, the world, open up and go, ‘Yeah, this is as cool as you thought it was,’ is spectacular,” Pollard said. “At the first party, the one at Neptoon, it was all smiles, just ear to ear smiles. It was amazing to see. These guys, they're super spry, and they're all just, being rock stars, their records getting reviewed. They've never had reviews before. It's crazy, it's so satisfying.”

Pollard said being at that first album release party was such a surreal experience seeing everyone meet each other, and hear the music again for the first time.

“The keyboardist Terry Morrison passed away in September, but his daughter showed up to the record release party. I actually found her and just told her about the project and invited her to come. You can only imagine what that would be like,” Pollard said. “She'd never heard the music before, and her dad is all over it, his keyboard is all over the record. It's just been 15 levels of gratifying. Watching her just sit there and cry happily listening to the music was a beautiful thing”

The group is now gearing up for their last two album release parties on Saturday February 21 at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria and on Sunday February 22 at the Vault Cafe in Nanaimo. The release party at the Royal BC Museum is already sold out.

Vinyls of Where Did the Sunshine Go? will be available for purchase at the release parties. Physical and digital copies of the album can also be purchased on the band’s Bandcamp.

While not all the members of The Glass Cage are able to see what has come of their recording, Carpenter said they are grateful for every second getting to celebrate the music they once all shared together.

“I’d like to pay tribute to Terry and Doug, who were, of course, a huge part of the band, and just paid tribute to them for their contribution, and may they rest in peace,” Carpenter said.

Funding Note: This story was produced with funding support from the Local Journalism Initiative, administered by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.