SJHS Piano to the Rescue

In our high school days, long before the days of portable digital pianos, we always had the problem of what to use for keyboards on a live gig. The small apartment size piano in one of the Saint John High School music room sound booths came to the rescue. I recall at least four occasions, two of which were on the premises, the coffee house performance and the gym dance, but two others were off-site. The school allowed us to truck it down to CHSJ for an appearance on Jene Wood's Time For Juniors, a popular children's TV show at the time. That was an interesting programming decision. It was a nightmare to get it up the stairs to the studio. Unfortunately no footage survives of that show. We tried to find it. The other time was when we bounced the perfectly in-tune piano, in the back of a van, over the heavily pot-holed streets of Saint John, all the way to the Battle of the Bands concert at Exhibition Park. When it came time to perform things were no longer so well in-tune.

Here is Jim playing his latest composition on that piano to Dave in the SJHS music room. Dave is either listening very deeply or falling asleep.

Here is Jim Malcolm playing the piano with Mike Maxwell, John Cheeseman and Peter Guravitch hanging out. John Cheeseman became the drummer in our follow up band the next year called The Cars (yes you heard right). John, who came up with that name, unfortunately passed away recently after a highly acclaimed career in writing and arranging on the Toronto music scene.

I am not sure if this was our target audience but we took what we could get for exposure.