21st Century Schizoid Man

The Zoo Crew has that King Crimson monster spinning right now, only it is not the Crimson King doing the damage. April Wine took “21st Century Schizoid Man” and dragged it through a Quebec studio in 1979, then parked it at the back of Harder.....Faster like a bike with the engine still ticking. The Zoo Freaks know a cover when they hear one, and this one does not hide. Cat’s foot, iron claw, the whole paranoid sermon, sung by Brian Greenway while Myles Goodwyn, Gary Moffet and Greenway stack three guitars on top of each other until the middle section sounds like a bar fight that learned music theory. It runs a little over six minutes, which is long enough for a beer and a story, and the story is better than most.

Myles always loved the song. Court of the Crimson King came out right around the time April Wine rolled into Montreal for their first summer there, and he has said they played that record every day. When the band had three guitar players and wanted something that would show off the arrangement instead of just another solo contest, Schizoid Man was the vehicle. They worked the parts hard. The engineer on the session, Nick Blagona, had been in the room when King Crimson cut the original at Trident, so the guy twisting the knobs already knew where the bones were. April Wine rounded a few of the sharper prog edges, kept the nightmare, and made it something a room full of denim could shout back. People still yell for it when the band hits a stage. That is the kind of cover that earns its keep.

The album title has a dirtier origin, and the band never pretended otherwise. Harder.....Faster was cut at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, up in the Laurentians, the same room that would later host a lot of big records. One stretch of the sessions, some of the guys were in the lounge watching Marilyn Chambers in Behind the Green Door. Myles came up out of the control room, opened that thick studio door, and caught the line she keeps gasping on screen. He wrote it down. The title of the record had just walked in. They went one step further and tucked a scrap of that same clip into the flourish at the end of “21st Century Schizoid Man.” If the needle is clean and the volume is honest, you can still hear her in there. Myles later told the story straight, including the part about watching a little film in the studio for light relief. The record came out on Capitol and Aquarius in the fall of 1979, went gold in Canada and gold in the States, and sent “I Like to Rock” and “Say Hello” out as the singles. The King Crimson cover sat on side two and did the heavy lifting live.

The band that cut it did not start in a Montreal studio. April Wine came together in the fall of 1969 in Waverley, Nova Scotia, out of a Halifax scene that already had too many names and not enough gigs. Brothers David and Ritchie Henman had grown up playing in Newfoundland before the family landed in Nova Scotia. Their cousin Jim Henman played bass. Myles Goodwyn, born in Woodstock, New Brunswick, and raised in a working household around Halifax, had already run through Woody’s Termites with Jim, then Squirrel, then a band called East Gate Sanctuary. The Henmans had a group called Prism, no relation to the Vancouver band that used the name later. After a short break they put it back together and asked Myles in. David Henman hung the name April Wine on the new outfit because he liked the way it sounded. That was the whole reason. No manifesto, no zodiac chart, just a name that sat right in the mouth.

Halifax was not going to hand them a record contract. They cut a demo and mailed it to Aquarius Records in Montreal. Terry Flood and Donald K. Tarlton sent back a rejection. The band read it as an invitation. On the first of April, 1970, they loaded the gear, scraped together about a hundred bucks, and drove to Montreal anyway. Flood and Tarlton heard them, signed them, and parked the kids in a place outside town to write and rehearse while they opened shows for Mashmakhan. The self-titled debut arrived in 1971, with “Fast Train” as the first real Canadian hit. Jim Henman stepped out, Jim Clench stepped in, and On Record in 1972 gave them “You Could Have Been a Lady,” a Hot Chocolate song they turned into a North American calling card. The Henman brothers left in 1973. Gary Moffet and Jerry Mercer came aboard. Steve Lang took the bass later. Brian Greenway, who had been in the Dudes with the Henmans, joined in 1977 and made them a five-piece for the first time. That is the crew on Harder.....Faster: Goodwyn, Greenway, Moffet, Lang, and Mercer, with Greenway taking the lead vocal on the Schizoid Man cover and on his own “Before the Dawn.”

Myles stayed the writer, the singer, and the center of the thing from that Halifax rehearsal room until he died in December 2023. The band had already split once, after a farewell run in 1984, then regrouped in 1992 and kept the Canadian rooms full. Greenway is still out there with Richard Lanthier, Roy Nichol, and Marc Parent, and the old records have not gone anywhere. Gold and platinum plaques piled up at home. The Canadian Music Hall of Fame took them in. Canada’s Walk of Fame followed. None of that changes the fact that the weirdest track on the 1979 album is still the one the Zoo Crew just dropped on the Freaks. A Nova Scotia bar band that misread a rejection letter, drove to Montreal on April Fool’s Day with pocket change, and years later hid a Marilyn Chambers gasp inside a King Crimson nightmare. That is a rock and roll resume.

You can dig the whole trail on the band’s own site at April Wine, where the live files still list “21st Century Schizoid Man” on setlists from the Harder.....Faster years and the notes on that album still tell the Morin-Heights story. The official pages are at Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans keep a long-running room of their own over at the April Wine Facebook group, the kind of place where people still argue about pressings and who sang what. And if the Schizoid Man riff has you leaning on the bar wondering what else the Freaks have cued up, the rest of the freeform pile lives over at THE ZOO.