Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound

This is an entertaining, authoritative, and highly anecdotal look at the golden era of Canadian pop music-the historically important decade that gave birth to such internationally respected recording artists as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Ian & Sylvia Tyson, Gordon Lightfoot, Murray MacLauchlan, Bruce Cockburn, Buffy Saint Marie, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Ronnie Hawkins. In the bohemian sixties, Toronto's Yorkville neighbourhood was a hippie haven-our version of Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village, a place where coffeehouses like the Riverboat and the Purple Onion offered a creative mecca for musicians from across Canada. They came from Saskatoon and Winnipeg, from Vancouver and Edmonton and Halifax. By the middle of the sixties, they had forged an adventurous, original sound that the American music press proclaimed "a fresh wind from the north". It was Canadian music's first wave of international success. In researching the book, Jennings conducted more than 100 interviews with musicians, managers, club owners, booking agents, and record company executives including Gordon Lightfoot, Murray MacLauchlan, Bruce Cockburn, among many others. Many of those he's interviewed have provided the author with period photographs and other memorabilia for reproduction in this book.

Nicholas Jennings is one of Canada's most respected music journalists. As music critic and contributing editor to Maclean's, he has interviewed top Canadian and international artists from Joni Mitchell and Robbie Robertson to Whitney Houston and Paul McCartney. A frequent contributor to CBC radio, he worked in Yorkville's legendary Riverboat coffee house in the 1970's.