BiografiePicture the scene: small town - Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. 2004. I’m in the suburbs, in my oldest friend, Jared’s basement – I think we were listening to Trouble at the time, when his stepfather came into the room and said; “Hey, so you guys are into heavy stuff, right? Black Sabbath and all that kind of thing?” I said something like “Yeah, I love Black Sabbath.” To which he says “Well, you know, I used to be in a band, in the old days...” We said something like “Oh yeah? What kind of stuff?” “Oh, you know, kind of Sabbath-y, heavy kind of stuff.” We knew he played guitar and dabbled a little at some jams sessions in the local blues scene, but I got the impression that Jared didn’t even know he played heavy music, back in the day. I asked if he had anything recorded that we could hear. He said he had some old reel-to-reel tapes somewhere and that he would dig them out someday.



About 4 years later, back in Kitchener, John hands me a CD, with simply ‘Ax’ written on it. He says “I finally got round to getting my old band stuff on CD, so here you go” or something to that effect. He told me a bit about the band and showed me some very cool, old photos of himself and the band. They looked the part and I couldn’t wait to hear the CD.



When I got back on English soil, I gave the CD a proper listen and I immediately got very excited about the possibilities. I was happy - they turned out to be so much more than a Sabbath-clone band. It was way more than I had hoped. Unfortunately, there were only 3 or 4 useable tracks on the CD (enough for an EP!), but here was a great, heavy band that nobody has ever heard before, from the early 70’s. This stuff is like the proverbial rocking horse shit – it had been sat on a shelf for close to 40 years – almost a holy grail of a heavy rock nugget! I don’t actually think John ever had any hopes for me doing anything with the recordings – he was merely sharing a memory - almost like he was saying to us young ‘uns “Hey – I used to be a rock and roller, too”. But to me, it meant more than that. I had to do something with these recordings, but what, or how?



The only person I could think of that would know exactly what to do with Ax was Lee Dorrian of Cathedral. I didn’t know Lee personally, but once upon a time, I was friends with guitar player Gaz Jennings, during the early days of Cathedral. I knew Lee had been running Rise Above Records for a long time and he was very into the whole scene of early heavy rock, prog, doom and the likes. I had a strong feeling that he would be into Ax. I got the generic email address from the website and waited for a response. Lee replied and immediately sounded interested. Initially, I was just happy enough to share the music, but then I broached the subject of possibly doing something with these recordings…He seemed into that, too. I couldn’t believe it. I had to tell John – Ax is putting a record out – after 39 years!!



Eventually, Lee and I got to the stage where we had to think about mastering, etc. I somewhat naively thought that Lee might want to just use the MP3’s? Fat chance. Lee does things properly – he wanted the reel-to-reel tape. By this point, I knew that the tapes were unfortunately in poor condition. I had been speaking to John and he had told me that they were in such bad shape, that they were afraid to even press ‘play’ on the tape machine. This was not good news, but Lee wasn’t daunted. He paid for the tape to be collected by courier, flew it to England and then paid for it to be ‘baked’ – a process of treating the tape, which restores it to a useable condition, prior to the mastering. This was why I chose Rise Above: dedication to the cause. The tape was finally baked and mastered – and the recordings sounded better than ever.



The history of the band is sketchy, due to faded memories and lapse of time. Probably formed in 1968-69, Ax originally started as a six-piece with John ‘Fred’ Fredericksen on lead guitar, Jack Smith on bass, Brian Shearer on drums and Gary Gross on lead vocals (the other two members are currently unknown). They got the name when someone asked guitarist John to ‘go get his ‘axe’. They dropped the ‘e’ (and two band members) and Ax was born. The band played mainly local concerts at Universities in Kitchener and Toronto and quickly gained notoriety on the local music scene, signing with the Dram Talent Agency, who tried to get the band to change their name – the band refused.



Ax became known for their live shows and at a free outdoor concert in Kitchener’s Victoria Park, they played an exhausting 3-hour set, which won over the crowd. Their sets were fleshed out by covers of their favourite bands from the time, which included Jethro Tull, The Doors, Wishbone Ash, Procul Harum and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. But their strength lay in their powerful, psyched-out originals, which had a harder edge than the songs written by their peers.



The three tracks presented here were staples of their live sets, along with ‘Battle of the Hangman’, which, unfortunately, was not recorded in the studio, by all accounts (or at least, we couldn’t find a copy of it). John Fredericksen remembers their sole studio recording session as happening “Sometime in 1970, in a studio above a pizza joint in Toronto”. The name of the studio, no-one can remember. John also says that the recording sessions made them realise that they needed a second guitar player for the subsequent live shows, as they had recorded dual guitar parts in the studio. The additional guitar player was Pete Michaels, featured here, in many of the photos you see on the sleeve. However, the photos from the live shows all seem to feature Ax as a four-piece, suggesting that these photos were mainly taken prior to the studio recording session that these tracks are taken from.



Jack Smith and John Fredericksen still live in Kitchener today and have slowly been trying to put the pieces of the Ax history back together for me. After many excited emails and phone calls, John managed to dig out the photos you see here – and the concert contract that singer Brian Shearer signed on the 16th September, 1970 – for a show at the University of Waterloo, for which Ax were paid the sum of $100.00. The payment was doled out between the different members of the band (singer Gary Gross getting $24, while the remainder of the band received $12 each). $19 went to the agency and $5 was provided for travel. No-one seemed to notice that $16 had gone un-accounted for, but still - not bad for a little old band from Kitchener!



As with many bands, the intention of Ax was to go on to bigger and better things. They wanted to ‘crack Kitchener wide open’ and dreamed of Ax becoming as big as one of their many influences and paving the way for other young, talented bands in the area. Neither Jack, nor John remember quite how Ax fell apart, but it probably happened over a few years, leading up to the mid-seventies. As we all know, people drift, fashions change, times change and above all – music changes. Fortunately for Ax, people are always on the lookout for rare and undiscovered quality music, which is precisely why you are holding a copy of this long lost gem in your hands right now.



I genuinely don’t believe Ax realised what a special thing they had, all that time ago. Given a bigger budget, a record contract and a decent producer, they could have gone far. Instead, what we have here is an all-too brief snapshot of a great, heavy, psych-rock band doing what they did best. And I am happy to share it with the world – on Ax’s behalf.




Johnny Ogle

Pig Iron

November 2009Quelle: http://www.riseaboverecords.com/artists/relics/ax/Discografie2010 - You've Been So Bad (EP)