Valdemar Horsdahl
Folk singer/songwriter/producer
Hall Of Fame Inductee 2008
Lifetime Achievement Award
The other day I found an old acetate that I thought was gone forever. It's the original version of 'Play me a Rock and Roll Song' recorded in Vancouver in the fall of 1969. This one was produced by Terry Jacks and was never released or heard by more than the people involved because Valdy got his record deal shortly after this and recorded the song again in LA. . That is the one that became the hit and got radio play. Valdy and I had just finished the Hosanna band and Jacks had heard a single that band had made a few months earlier.(nobody ever heard that either) Jacks hired me to play on r+r song based on what he called the 'pedal steel licks' he thought he had heard on the Hosanna recording. It was actually my old black Telly through Eddy Paterson's Leslie doing my very early Clarence White imitation. Yikes!..............other than Valdy and me, I can't remember who the other players are. The studio is Baroka Sound in Vancouver, where the second Poppy Family album was made. ( It was at this session that Terry asked me to join the Poppy Family) The noise level is horrible...over the 37 years, the paper envelope chemically reacted to the vinyl and created a very rough surface and... it is in mono. It is a little bit of Victoria history though. Live off the floor to 8 track Scully. Valdy put on some vocal harmony and tambourine and I think that was it. Norm MacPherson September 2007
A little background to the song: "Rock and Roll Song": Valdy, a virtual unknown (at least to us) in 68 (perhaps it was 69) played in a concert at Esquimalt High School in the gymnasium. Sitting next to me in the bleachers was "wise-guy" Kerry Ireland who tired of Valdy's folk music and hollered out: "Play some Rock and Roll !" an occasion now immortalized in song - Bob Cadwallader
