Don't Forget Your Mother

Every year on Mother’s Day week-end, or close to it, I like to have a special show for folks who no longer have their mother, like myself or orphans who never knew their biological mother (also like myself). Some of you may be acquainted with my tune “Enfant Choisi” which is about my adoption by the dear lady you see pictured with me in a 70s promo shot.

It’s also the only show of the year where you’ll hear me sing my “cult classic,” “Don’t Forget Your Mother”. After I was "discovered" by Andre Perry in the early 70s, we recorded three sides and two were released on Good Noise Records, but “Don’t Forget Your Mother” was never released (for a variety of reasons).

But it was a bit of an underground favourite in Montreal in the early 70s. Everybody remembered that tune and just a few years back I ran into one of the guys who played on the session, Tom “Bones” Malone, who was in Toronto filming a Blues Brothers movie. I was just starting to ask him if he remembered that session and he began singing the chorus. Wow! After all those years. The drummer for the session was Jim Gordon, a first-call studio drummer in Los Angeles who had just finished touring and recording with Derek and The Dominoes. He wrote (and played) the piano part in “Layla”. He was later institutionalized for killing his mother in a schitzophrenic episode but that’s another (hopefully unrelated) story.

This year the show is Mother's Day and it's at one in the afternoon and a very nice little cafe so it might be a chance to bring your mother, if you're lucky enough to have one who's still living. Tell her it's not that loud, repetitive rock blues but more like story-telling folk blues. I will be joined ne a few musical friends but I don't know who can make it because their mother might want to do something else.