I was born in 1980 so the Stampeders were before my time.
But I do remember when I was 6, I was playing some 45’s at my uncles place, and I was flipping through the pile and stumbled across ‘Hit the Road Jack’.
I must have played it 50-60 times in a row and when we had to leave I put up a tantrum until my uncle gifted it to me.
I started collecting their LPs in my 20’s and they are such an underrated group. The recordings themselves have not aged at all, great guitar tone(s), tight unit, and at times they got quite hard rocking.
LPs I have are: Carry On, Steamin’, From the Fire, New Day.
RIP Ronnie King
Thanks for your post. You know your stuff.
Imho the Stampeders were the most underrated Canadian Rock Band of that magical 1970's period.
They first charted with "Carry Me" somewhere around 1970. Then came the monster hit "Sweet City Woman" in 1971 and it sold about 4 million copies.
Unfortunately, American audiences loved the song but thought that the Stampeders were a Country and Western group. That's not hard to imagine given their name and the dominant banjo chords in the song but in fact the Stampeders were a rock group and had a hard edged rock sound, especially when you saw them live (I saw them 3 times). They never charted that well again in the USA with the possible exception of Hit the Road Jack which was also covered by Ray Charles a few years earlier.
My favorite Stampeder song was "Wild Eyes" which is a knock-out rock classic that Rich Dodson played on the double neck guitar. I ran up to him after one of the shows and said "How many overdubs did you use-how do you tune your axe to get that sound-- and how many takes before you got the final cut?" He calmly looked at me and said "Man, I don't really remember." I said ya, cool and got him to sign the T-shirt.
Another memory from that show was Ronnie King saying "I'm the Keith Richards of this band." It was an honest comment about some of his life and when I saw Ronnie play for the last time about five years ago he had aged and slowed down considerably.
Its sad to see guys like this as well as Gerry Doucette and Myles Goodwin go (all in the last few years) but hey--Time waits for no one.
Thanks Ronnie