Rick James, Neil Young and the mythical tale of the Mynah Birds

The story of folk icon Neil Young and funk master Rick James were once being in a Yorkville band together has become the stuff of rock 'n' roll legend. They were unknowns at the time and the Mynah Birds just happened to be where their paths converged, along with those of Goldy McJohn and Nick St. Nicholas, future members of Steppenwolf, and Bruce Palmer, who ultimately wound up with his buddy Neil in Buffalo Springfield.

The following story, largely excerpted from Nicholas Jennings’ Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound, published by Penguin Books in 1997, is one of the earliest accounts of the now storied Mynah Birds band. It draws on an extensive interviews Jennings had with musicians Jerry Edmonton, a member of the Sparrows and later Steppenwolf, and Bruce Palmer, himself first a Sparrow and then a Mynah Bird. Edmonton died in 1993, Palmer in 2004.

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Yorkville seemed the perfect place for Rick James. A black teenager from across the border, James was an aspiring singer who had formed his own harmonizing, Motown-style group in his hometown of Buffalo, New York. After dropping out of high school at fifteen, he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve to avoid the draft. James was placed on active duty the following year and ordered to report to the U.S.S. Enterprise. But when he missed registration and faced disciplinary action, he fled to Toronto and soon found refuge in the bohemian neighbourhood of Yorkville. 

It didnʼt take James long to capitalize on both his singing talent and his navy uniform. Forming a band called The Sailor Boys, he began appearing at the El Patio and other Yorkville clubs and coffehouses.

Then the group met Colin Kerr, a nervy entrepreneur who was looking for ways to promote his Bloor Street pet store that sold mynah birds exclusively. With Kerr as their manager, the Mynah Birds were launched as Yorkvilleʼs newest rock band.

Meanwhile, Jack London & the Sparrows were already one of Canadaʼs first rock groups signed to a major label, and their hit singles on Capitol had led to TV appearances and some big gigs. There was even a full-length album. But then the Sparrows found out that Jack London (real name: Dave Marden) was more interested in lining his own pockets and pretending to be from England rather than looking after the band. According to the Sparrowsʼ drummer, Jerry Edmonton, the group learned that the deal London signed with Capitol had most of the money going to him. Recalled Edmonton: “He would go in and collect the royalties and weʼd see him the next day with a new fur coat, going out to restaurants. I donʼt ever remember getting a penny.” The Sparrows staged a mutiny and continued on without London.

Around the same time, the group decided to swap bass players with the Mynah Birds, much the same way two hockey teams might do with defensemen. The Mynah Birds sent Nick St. Nicholas to The Sparrows in exchange for Bruce Palmer, a skinny 19-year-old kid whoʼd already been in several bands and was living in Yorkville with his girlfriend. No one was happier about the trade than Palmer. “I was sick and tired of all the phoney business around Jack London & the Sparrows,” he said in 1996. “Besides, when I saw the singer of the Mynah Birds, the way he sang and moved, I wanted to be a part of that. He was the closest thing to the real deal, as far as talent and soul was concerned, that Iʼd seen in Canada.”

Kerr had his own pet mynah bird called Raja, and one of his first moves as manager was to have the band adopt Raja as its mascot. He even taught it to say “Hello, Ed Sullivan” in anticipation of an appearance on the American TV show. Kerr, who seemed to spend all his waking hours dreaming up new gimmicks, then devised the perfect outfit for the group: black leather jackets and pants with yellow Beatle boots and turtlenecks—mynah bird colours. All the attention-getting tactics paid off with a number of TV appearances, although Ed Sullivan wasnʼt among them. The band also recorded a single for Columbia Records. Written by Kerrʼs brother Ben, a country singer turned street busker (not to mention Torontoʼs perennial underdog mayoralty candidate), “The Mynah Bird Hop” failed to make the charts. But the raucous rock ʼnʼ roll number (and its soulful B-side ballad “The Mynah Bird Song”) remains a rare and fascinating piece of Yorkville-era Canadian pop.

At a certain point, Kerrʼs publicity stunts became too much for the Mynah Birds. Recalled Palmer, “Heʼd organize these screaming teenage girls to chase us from our rented limousine through the Eatonʼs department store on Queen Street; it was crazy. This was his idea for getting media coverage. It was bad enough that he had us wearing yellow Beatle boots, but we drew the line when he asked us to shave our heads to look even more like mynah birds. Thatʼs when we decided he was out of his mind.”

Without a band through which to stage his schemes, Kerr turned his attention to his Mynah Bird coffee house, which became famous for its go-go dancers who performed in a second-storey glass booth visible from the street. When that novelty wore thin, Kerr introduced topless dancing. The much-publicized launch, however, was “more or less a bust,” as one newspaper quipped. “Fifty-one choking reporters stumbled about in semi-darkness as a faulty smoke-effect machine spewed murky clouds of carbon dioxide in all directions, and a half-nude, gagging go-go girl was trapped in her cage.” Still, Kerr did continue regularly featuring topless dancers, body painting, porno films and, strangest of all, a nude male chef. The Penny Farthingʼs John McHugh lamented that Kerrʼs policy brought “the dirty-old-men-in-raincoats brigade” into the village, while Palmer said he later thought of Kerr as “the Larry Flynt of Yorkville.”

According to John Robert Colomboʼs Haunted Toronto, “eerie presences and poltergeist-like effects” began to disrupt the dancing and showing of adult movies at the Mynah Bird. Lights went off and on, dancers heard angry, disembodied voices and chairs were thrown about unoccupied upstairs rooms. It turned out that, years earlier, the rooms had belonged to an artist who used them for his studio. Obviously, his ghost saw no artistic value in Kerrʼs nude policy.

With Jack London gone from the Sparrows, bluesy singer John Kay stepped in and became the band’s new frontman. Kay had been crashing in the apartment above the Night Owl club belonging to folksinger Vicky Taylor, who recalled that Kay moved out just as Neil Young was moving in. In fact, the two future rock stars met briefly in Vicky’s crash pad and rapped about the New York scene, where Young had recorded some demos and Kay was soon heading with the Sparrows (they later flew to Los Angeles to be reborn as Steppenwolf). 

But, with Kayʼs future seemingly assured in the Sparrows and Youngʼs prospects looking dismal, they had little else in common. Youngʼs prospects improved in early ʼ66 when Bruce Palmer spotted him walking along Yorkville Avenue carrying a guitar and balancing an amp on his head like an African tribeswoman. Palmer was looking for a guitarist for the Mynah Birds and, in a brief Yorkville curbside exchange, asked Young if he wanted to join a band. Young said sure. “We actually needed a lead guitarist,” Palmer recalled, “and he played rhythm on a twelve-string Gibson acoustic with a pick-up. And this, in a city full of Telecasters! We mustʼve been nuts.”

Things were looking up for the Mynah Birds. They found a new guitarist, another manager, Morley Shelman, and a serious investor in John Craig Eaton, the millionaire heir to the department-store empire. Eaton was bored with the family business and wanted to use some of its fortune to dabble in the new rock ʼnʼ roll. He bought the Mynah Birds brand new equipment, gave them an expense account and allowed them free use of a company limousine. Eaton would leave his sedate Rosedale mansion at night to come down to swinging Yorkville to check out his charges and spur them on. Said Palmer: “Heʼd come into the dressing room in his trenchcoat looking like Knute Rockne. We were the football team and he was the coach. I guess it gave him something different to do.”

Palmer also recalled an endless cash flow from Eaton. Most of it, he says, went on drugs, including amphetamines introduced by Rick James. For Young, it was a whole new experience. “We used to pop amyl nitrates before going on stage,” said Young, “and walk on just killing ourselves laughing and rolling around from the things. I remember at a high-school gig I was so high that I jumped off the stage and pulled my guitar jack out in the middle of a song.”  

Young was happy playing sideman in a band that appeared to be going places. The strength of the group was really James, a dynamic performer who Palmer described as “a cross between James Brown and Mick Jagger” (much of the Mynah Birds repertoire, in fact, was based around Rolling Stones songs). But Young and James also began collaborating on original, folk-flavoured r & b material for the band, including a number called “Itʼs My Time.” 

At the time, Young was sharing his apartment at 88 Isabella Avenue with James. “We did some wild things in there,” Young told broadcaster Howard Stern. “It’s all very hazy to me now [but] I’m glad I made it through that stage—it was a little dicey.” Because of drugs? Stern asked. “Yeah, there were some drugs going on there.”

“It’s My Time” featured the funky folk-rock style that piqued the interest of Motown Records, home of such pop superstars as Stevie Wonder and The Supremes. The all-black label owned by Berry Gordy, Motown had never signed a white rock band before, and certainly never one from Canada (though it did later sign Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers, which included Tommy Chong, better known as half of the stoned-out comedy duo Cheech & Chong). 

Perhaps Gordy thought it a novelty to record a black singer backed by four white guys but, for whatever reason, Motown signed the Mynah Birds. In late February, the company flew the group to Detroit for a month-long recording session with Smokey Robinson and Toronto’s own R. Dean Taylor as producers (Taylor, a songwriter and one of Motown’s “great white hopes,” later had his own hits for the label, including “Gotta See Jane” and “Indiana Wants Me”). The Mynah Birds taped sixteen songs and Motown was excited.

The album, however, never got released. The problem was that James was still technically AWOL from the navy, and with the Vietnam War moving into high gear with the first bombing of the North, Motown executives didnʼt want to get caught with a felon. They convinced James to turn himself in, and with the lead singer in the brig, the once-promising record deal was off. 

Bummed out big time, the remains of the Mynah Birds returned to Toronto only to find that Shelman, the manager, had fatally overdosed on heroin, shooting most of the groupʼs $25,000 advance straight into his arm. Talk about the needle and the damage done.

Young and Palmer headed back to Yorkville and, within a few weeks, had organized a trip in Young’s Hearse to Los Angeles, where they ultimately joined Stephen Stills, Richie Furay and fellow Canadian Dewey Martin in a new band. The rest, as they say, is history.

Listen to “It’s My Time”

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Postscript:

• Interest in the Mynah Birds over the years has grown to near mythical proportions, thanks to various publications and recordings
• Although there are plenty of photographs of the Mynah Birds with Rick James, there are none in existence that include Neil Young (one fuzzy image that appears to include both James and Young did appear on a bootleg, but it’s unknown whether it’s real or fabricated)
• Rick James, who later became famous for funk rock hits like 1981’s “Super Freak,” died in 2004. His autobiography, Glow, was posthumously published in 2014 and included some details about his time with Neil Young in the Mynah Birds
• Neil Young published his autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream, in 2012 and included some details about his time with Rick James in the Mynah Birds
• In 2006, Motown finally released the Mynah Birds recordings “It's My Time” (credited to Rick James, R. Dean Taylor and Mike Valvano, although Neil remembers writing it with James) and “Go On and Cry,” onThe Complete Motown Singles, Vol. 6: 1966. In 2012, those two numbers were released as a special 45 rpm single for Record Store Day. Other tracks, including “I’ll Wait Forever,” a Rick James-Neil Young co-write, “Masquerade,” “Fantasy” and “Got You in My Soul,” have all appeared on various bootlegs.

With excerpts from Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound by Nicholas Jennings (Penguin Books, 1997)