Maurice Singfield - Oliver Klaus Interview

Oliver Klaus is an Eastern Townships based band that formed in 1969 and are considered to be an early “indie band” by its members. In this interview Maurice Singfield (Capt. Moze) engages our readers by exploring his early youth when he first became aware of music by The Beatles like most kids of that generation did as well as his early band Les Notables prior to Oliver Klaus. Singfield also speaks on the early days of the band, writing and recording their groundbreaking debut LP and much much more!

When and where were you born? When did you first begin to fall in love with music?

I was born in 1950 in Granby, Quebec, Canada. When I was 13 years years old, I remember hearing the Beach Boys', In My Room, on the family car radio on our way to the beach. It was the melody that got to me. I found it to be different, more melodic than most recordings of the day. I had the same reaction to the Beatles' singles, She Loves You and I want to Hold Your Hand.  There was something about the melodic structure that captured my interest straight away. Up until then I found most of the commercial music pretty bland. Shortly after, when I was 14, my parents bought me a guitar. It was a cheap Sears catalog acoustic, but it managed to capture my interest enough until they bought me my first electric guitar, also a cheap Sears cataloger  instrument.

Was this something that was relevant around your households growing up? When and where did you see your first concert? Do you have any siblings?

My mother and father listened to the radio and played some of the current popular music of the day on a record player that had a built in speaker. For me, music became more relevant as the sixties progressed and the Beatles emerged as the top artist. The “British invasion” shaped my musical interests more than anything else. It was in 1964. I saw the Beatles in Montreal at the forum. Regardless of all the noise from the screaming fans I could hear the Beatles perform their songs with outstanding vocals and musicianship. Considering that they didn't have monitors and had a very small stage with speaker columns on either side, their harmonies were spot on. I grew up in a family of five boys. I was the third oldest, the middle child. My brother Bryan, who was a couple of years younger than me became my musical partner, and founding member of Oliver Klaus. Bryan was a natural drummer. He made playing the drums look so easy. He started out playing with bread knives on a bread board and finally got our parents to buy him a snare drum and a hi hat from a Montreal pawn shop. We managed to jam out with our cheap beginner instruments in the Singfield home basement for a year or two before earning our own money and buying more professional equipment.

Who were some of your earliest influences? When did it dawn on you that you wanted to be a musician an artist? When and where did you play your first gig and what was that experience like for you?

Needless to say, as mentioned above, the Beatles plus many of the bands that came out of that era, The Rolling Stones, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and The Doors. I guess it was when I first heard the Beatles and saw them perform in Montreal. My main interest as a musician was to write songs and record. I wanted to write songs that captured that feeling I had when I first heard the Beatles and The Beach Boys. I wanted to craft the perfect song. Songs that had a sweet spot, chord changes that backed beautiful melodies. I can't say what my first gig was. I remember playing in church basements, high schools and community centers throughout Quebec a lot in the 60s. It was a great experience to feel the crowds react to our music. At the beginning we never played bars, only chaperoned dances. It was good clean fun, but then came the drugged up 60s. Kids were smoking dope and the parents couldn't control the events any longer so they stopped having dances. We were forced into the bars as a result and began working for the the cash register. The most important thing was to sell alcohol. However, it was still exciting to be able to get people on the dance floor and to keep them asking for more.

Did you participate in any groups prior to Oliver Klaus? How did you initially meet your band mates and what were your first impressions of everyone? What led to the decision to first form the band? When and where did you guys first get together to jam and what was the chemistry like?

Yes, Bryan and I cut our teeth in a band called Les Notables. This band played all the hits at the time, from the Beatles to the Doors.  Once again, only playing dances at community centers and high schools throughout the province, after which we formed Oliver Klaus. Well as you know Bryan the drummer is my brother. We didn't have to go through the “getting to know each other' thing. Our bass player, Jerry Cushen, went to the same high school as we did (Waterloo High School), so we were already friends sharing the same ambition, to play in a band. We were a trio and remained so from 1968 through to 1973. While playing in Les Notables from 1966 to 1967 I started writing songs. The band was a cover band and I felt, as did Bryan, that we wanted to perform more original material. Oliver Klaus was to be the band that would feature our creative drive. We started practicing in our parents basement. At the time our bass player, a friend from Waterloo, was Graham Worden, but only for a brief period of time until Jerry Cushen took over the position. Graham was no longer interested in being in the band. We had great chemistry.  Jerry and Bryan as a rhythm section were tight and always in sync. It came natural to them. I was able to throw chord progressions at them and with little effort they were able to find the groove. The three of us understood each other musically and things just jelled.

When and where did the band make their live performance debut and what was that experience like? When and where did recording begin for the band's lone debut masterpiece and what was the overall experience and approach to music?

Bryan and I started playing music when we were 13 and 15 years of age respectively.  Oliver Klaus was formed in 1967 after we had been playing with les Notables, by then, already for about a year. I have no recollection of what was our first gig.  As musicians in Oliver Klaus we had already experienced the thrill of playing for the first time. I can say that early on there was always a certain amount of nervous tension before a gig. It took a couple of songs to warm up. For me the early years were about gaining confidence as a musician. Our first gigs as Oliver Klaus were mainly community centers and high schools in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. As part of the Oliver Klaus creative drive, recording became a necessity.  My interest in recording had already been a big part of my songwriting experience, well before Oliver Klaus. I used to hang a microphone from the basement ceiling and sing into it while playing guitar. I must have been around 15 years old at the time.  Later I borrowed a Panasonic stereo tape deck from a friend of mine and started recording the first Oliver Klaus songs with Graham Worden on bass. That had to be around 1967 (Recently I have been transferring these tapes to digital as I still have the recordings from that time).

When Jerry became Oliver Klaus' bass player I continued recording the band in the Singfield family basement for a while.  When the rehearsal studio for Les Notables, which was located under a restaurant in Waterloo, Quebec, became available, Oliver Klaus took over the lease and we started recording there. After a while it became evident that we needed a proper studio environment with better equipment in order to capture our material onto tape. Bryan and I borrowed $2500 from a local bank (our father signed for us) and we purchased 2nd hand recording gear from the local radio station in Granby, Quebec (CHLT). The next step was the more difficult one to overcome. We had to build a soundproof wall, window and door that would separate the recording room from the sound booth. At the time my older brother Norman was a student at McGill university in Montreal and he had been involved with the university radio station. He arranged a meeting for me with the studio technicians and I was given a tour of the facility. They explained that they had built their own soundproof wall using cement blocks filled with sand. I thought this was something we could do as well. I rounded up Bryan, along with friends of the band and we began the process of building our own studio. 

First we went to a local construction site where a cement-block wall had been torn down and we asked if we could have some of the left over materials. A friend of ours with a pickup truck transported the blocks, and sand from a local sand pit, to our practice room. We built a window using a couple panes of glass positioned on angles to deflect the sound, and a sound-proof door filled with sand into the wall of sand-filled blocks. After, we installed the recording equipment we had purchased from the local radio station. Our approach to music was to have a place where we could record ourselves. After all, we were living in the country and the only recording studios were in Montreal. We didn't have any industry contacts and we couldn't afford to pay for studio time. Besides, the thought of building our own studio was an incredible motivation to continue writing songs and playing music. The experience of actually building it brought us closer together as a band and made us realize that we could accomplish whatever we put our minds to. The next step was to record our album. At the time bands weren't building their own studios and producing their own albums. The “A” side was a collection of six songs recorded in the studio and the “B” side was a live recording of the band at the Waterloo arena in our home town. Once our album was recorded I went to RCA studios in Montreal to have our tape mastered for pressing. We had 500 copies pressed and distributed them on our own, selling them at gigs and through friends.

How did the deal with Capt. Moze Records come about? What did you guys ultimately want to express and explore with your music and these wonderful covers?

Capt. Moze was my nick name (Moze was my father's nick name and we used to refer to him as the Admiral).  I was given a credit on the album as the sound engineer, as I was responsible for the technical side of  things. I wired the studio and maintained the tape decks. You can say that I was the recording nerd. I remember finding a piece of roofing tin in a junk yard, hanging it from the ceiling in the studio and using it as a plate reverb. I ran the wire from the pickup into the sound console and mixed it in with the vocal and instrument channels. We used to sing into the metal sheet by placing our vocal mics in front of it. We wanted our album to resemble a proper record release and came up with Capt. Moze as the record label moniker.  It was a fun thing to do. We wanted to explore our place in time, to reflect the music scene that we grew up in. Our time was AM radio, with everything from, Yummy Yummy Yummy I got Love in My Tummy to Purple Haze in  the pop charts. It was a very diverse listening field to say the least. As a result we wanted to perform some of the great material that we were influenced by, and write our own songs. The Beatles proved that bands could write their own material without the help of publishing companies and record labels telling them what to do. We wanted to explore this feeling of independence as well. Unfortunately, we weren't in a place that was able to help us develop. We didn't have a producer or manager. We had to do it on our own.

The band went on to write and record a few singles after ‘70 such as “Rock and Roll Heaven” and “Long Lost Memories”. What eventually happened to the band after the mid to late 70’s? Did you continue to play music after Oliver Klaus? What have you been up to in more recent years?

Eventually we moved out of our studio in the mid 70s and built a new one in the garage of my house in Waterloo, Qc. The band by then had turned into a foursome (two guitars, bass and drums) and throughout the 70s and into the 80s, 90s and 2000s we recorded and performed less, doing mainly concerts in the local Eastern Townships. In the late 90s we put out a CD called Homeless, our first and only CD released on Capt. Moze records. Today we no longer perform, but I am still actively recording my new songs under the name of Capt. Moze and transferring old tapes recorded by Oliver Klaus, from back in the 60s and 70s, to digital. A pet project of mine at the moment is to restore the “A” side of our first album.  Due to a technical issue (the songs were recorded out of phase), it had to be mastered in mono… With today's technology I am able to transfer the tracks to stereo.

Thanks,

Maurice Singfield (Capt. Moze)