Singer made her mark

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This article was published 12/11/2016 (3549 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The 1960s was a golden decade for Canadian television music production, with CBC Winnipeg serving as a regional centre for music shows.

Local performers such as Peggy Neville, Reg Gibson, Georges Lafleche, Ray St. Germain and Lorraine West, to name a few, were featured on their own television shows backed up by the cream of local musicians, including Lenny Breau, Ron Halldorson, Dave Young, Reg Kelln, Dave Shaw and arranger Bob McMullin. CBC Winnipeg employed a roster of talented backing singers who served duty on several productions. They included Yvette (Shaw), Micki Allen, Lucille Emond, Barry Stillwell, Hector Bremner and Karen Marklinger.

‘We never felt like we were stars. I certainly didn’t. We didn’t get inflated egos’  

Marklinger enjoyed a prominent career as a well-respected and in-demand backing vocalist, featured performer, guest star and recording artist. Toronto broadcaster Fred Napoli once said, “Karen Marklinger is, in my opinion, probably the best female vocalist I’ve ever heard in Canada. Her approach is timeless because it has nothing to do with fads or styles.”

“I feel so privileged to have played so often with Karen,” veteran guitarist/bass player Ron Halldorson, who worked with Marklinger at CBC Winnipeg, says. “She had such wonderful phrasing, and her voice just floated through the air. Karen and Yvette were the best singers I ever worked with.”

“I can’t ever remember seeing any female vocalist on television that ever looked or sang better than Karen,” Winnipeg bandleader Jimmy King observed. “She was absolutely outstanding.”

Born in 1944 in Sedley, Sask., where her father operated the local grain elevator, Marklinger and her three siblings grew up in a musical household.

“We could all sing and were always singing,” she recalls. “We would stand around the piano with Mom playing, and we would sing four-part harmony. We could all sing harmony. Mom was a wonderful classical and pop pianist. She was a terrific sight-reader. We all had to take piano lessons, but only (older brother) Peter had any talent on it.”

After moving to Regina when Karen was 11 years old, she sang on several talent shows before joining Peter in a jazz duo.

“The first time my brother heard Oscar Peterson, he determined that was the music he wanted to play,” she says. “So it was Peter’s influence that got me into singing jazz. He coached me on how to phrase like a jazz singer and to ease up instead of singing all out, which I used to do.” The two performed frequently at Regina’s Attic Club.

The family relocated to Calgary in 1960, where Karen completed high school and business college, taking a secretarial job at United Grain Growers. She appeared on several Calgary television and radio shows, including Four for a Quarter and Here’s Petch starring Ray Petch. Still in her teens, Marklinger made the bold move to try her luck launching a singing career in Los Angeles.

“I stayed with my uncle and aunt and went around with a photo and my handwritten resumé,” she remembers. “I was scoffed at wherever I went. No agent was interested in me. They wouldn’t even look at me.”

Chastened by her experience, Marklinger returned to Calgary, happy to pursue a career on her own terms. “I was never good at promoting myself,” she admits.

In 1966, CBC Winnipeg music producer Ray McConnell was putting together a six-week summer music show starring guitar player extraordinaire Lenny Breau. On the lookout for singers for the show, he was travelling through Calgary when he heard of Marklinger. After hearing her sing, he invited her to join the show.

“I had never heard of Lenny Breau,” she admits. “Ray found Judy Singh in Edmonton and me in Calgary. But I didn’t want to move to Winnipeg. I liked my job at UGG, and I liked what I was doing around town with my singing.”

Nonetheless, at age 22, she signed on. The CBC put her up for the summer in a room at the downtown Charterhouse Hotel, a short walk from its studio. The two Albertans joined Yvette to become the Nocturnes.

McMullin was the show’s musical director. Besides Breau, Marklinger, Yvette and Singh, it included bassist Dave Young and Wayne Finucan on drums.

“We all got along well,” says Marklinger, “but I didn’t socialize with Lenny. I certainly was aware that he was involved in drugs. You could tell he was higher than a kite, but I wasn’t interested in being around druggies. I was surprised that Judy (Singh) got involved with him. But, oh my God, Lenny was such a great musician.”

She also enjoyed the remuneration. “I made more money when I came here to do The Lenny Breau Show than I made in a week working 9 to 5 in Calgary,” she recalls. “I think I got $156 a show.”

When the Breau show wrapped, Marklinger was tapped to join the chorus of Winnipeg’s nationally televised Music Hop (hosted by Ray St. Germain), where she joined her friend Yvette and Micki Allen. A year later, Music Hop was replaced by the more hip Let’s Go, which was hosted by former Guess Who singer Chad Allan and included the Guess Who as house band. Marklinger, Allen, Allan and Stillwell became the Good Time Music Appreciation Society and were featured weekly on the show during its two-year run. The show’s producer was Marklinger’s boyfriend from Calgary, Larry Brown. With the producer position open after McConnell’s move to Toronto, Marklinger urged Brown to submit his resumé. He landed the job. It was Brown who hired the struggling Guess Who, crippled by a staggering debt after their disastrous trip to England earlier that year. Brown also encouraged the songwriting talents of Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings.

Marklinger became in demand for television appearances, appearing on a long list of Canadian productions including Juliette and Friends, The Tommy Ambrose Show, CBC Showcase, Open Season, The Group, Barris & Co., The Miriam Breitman Show, Dianne (starring Dianne Heatherington) and more.

“I guess when people see you on television, they figure you’re a big star,” she muses. “But it was nothing like that. We never felt like we were stars. I certainly didn’t. We didn’t get inflated egos. We would complain about the hairdos they had for us or the costumes they had for us. On Music Hop, we had to wear castoffs from Hymn Sing. We wanted to look like Cher, but we had to wear these Hymn Sing dresses. So we never saw ourselves as stars. Yvette got recognized on the street, but nobody ever recognized me. She always looked like she did on television. In real life, I wore glasses and wore my hair different.”

One of the highlights of Marklinger’s career came in 1967, when she performed for Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles and then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau for Canada’s centennial.

“The CBC put on this great big show at a curling rink,” she remembers. “Man, was it hot. We were all soaked in sweat afterwards, and the Queen came along to meet us, and she didn’t have even a drop of dew on her upper lip. The Queen didn’t speak to us, but Prince Charles was quite friendly and talked to me. I was beaming. He asked me if I had an album of my singing. I told him I was going to Toronto to record an album. He asked if I could send him a copy. I never did, though.”

Allan was still under contract with Quality Records out of Toronto and recruited Marklinger and local singer Corrine Cyca to create the Metro-Gnomes. The resulting album, released in 1969, features well-known covers such as Proud Mary, Trains and Boats and Planes, and For Once in My Life and This Girl’s in Love With You (both featuring Marklinger on lead vocals) alongside original songs by Allan, Rick Neufeld (Moody Manitoba Morning), Joey Gregorash and Norman Lampe, and Paul Teskey.

Marklinger recorded her lone solo album, Colours of the Rainbow, for the Canadian Talent Library in Toronto using the cream of Canada’s studio musicians under the direction of ex-Winnipegger Gary Gross. Beautifully arranged and lushly orchestrated, the song selection highlighted Marklinger’s superb vocals and versatility but was not a wholly positive experience for her.

“They wouldn’t let me sing in the style I was used to singing,” she sighs. “They would tell me, ‘Too jazzy’ or ‘Too country.’ ‘Don’t improvise too much.’ They wanted a middle-of-the-road album. So I never understood why they wanted me if they didn’t want me to sing the way I did.”

Released in 1971, the album — originally titled Golden Girl From the West until Marklinger vetoed that, insisting it sounded more like the title of a western movie — sank without a trace, the result of a lack of promotion.

“There was a song on the album titled File it Under Forgotten, and that’s pretty much what happened to the album,” she says.

That same year, Marklinger released a single, Fallin’ in and Fallin’ Out, on London Records. The backing track had been recorded under the direction of Vancouver songwriter Doug Hutton with another singer in mind. When that singer backed out, Marklinger was given the job and added her voice to the pre-recorded track at Century 21 Studios in Winnipeg. The record received considerable airplay locally and across Western Canada.

“I had never recorded anything that sounded that good before,” she says. “The backing track was good. I was quite impressed with the sound.”

She remembers the first time she heard the record on the radio. “I was in Regina with my sister, and I heard a familiar-sounding song in a store. I didn’t realize it was me. Then I realized it was me. That was an exciting moment. It only happened that once.”

Another memorable performance came when Marklinger was the featured singer with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra under the direction of McMullin for a show based on the music of celebrated songwriter Burt Bacharach at the Centennial Concert Hall. Her wardrobe choice that night was particularly unusual.

“It irked me that I would have to pay so much money for a fancy dress that I would only wear for a couple of hours, so instead, I wore my wedding dress,” she laughs.

By the early ’70s, the CBC shut down regional musical production and centralized it in Toronto. Many of the players and singers in Winnipeg had to find other gigs. With the advent of Canadian content rules for radio, there was a demand for Canadian-produced music to meet content rules. Century 21 Studios began recording budget album compilations of hits sung by local performers. Under the title House of Random, a dozen or more of these soundalike albums were produced using Marklinger, Yvette, Allan and many of the former CBC musicians, including Halldorson and drummer Reg Kelln. As Kelln recalls, “Karen always sang perfectly in tune, and she was so versatile. Her phrasing was always so great. She and Yvette were terrific harmony singers.”

The two singers also lent their voices to countless jingles and sang on locally produced segments of Sesame Street.

Both the Metro-Gnomes and Marklinger’s Colours of the Rainbow albums, along with her single Fallin’ in and Fallin’ Out and several additional records, were re-released recently by Super Oldies Records out of Duluth, Minn., and can be bought online at www.superoldies.com.

“I grew up with my family purchasing the House Of Random albums,” says Super Oldies owner Shawn Nagy. “Many years later, I finally got to identify the musicians like Rick Pearson and Karen Marklinger behind some of those great recordings on the albums. You listen to the various styles Karen could handle with ease, and it’s disappointing that she wasn’t a household name in Canada.”

Nagy tracked down the original tapes for the compilation. “The quality of the tapes blew me away. It really sounded like it could have been a modern recording. Karen’s voice simply soars on these tracks, and the orchestration was so very well done, too. I felt people needed to hear this music.”

Through the ’70s, Marklinger gigged around the city (“I was always singing on a Saturday night somewhere in town, a club or a lounge,” she says) before moving with her husband, Brown, to Toronto, where he worked in sports broadcasting. While in Toronto, she recorded several tracks on albums for another former Winnipeg, Paul Grosney, on the tiny Leo label. The couple returned to Winnipeg in 1984. Marklinger resumed her singing career here, including appearances on CKND’s Jimmy King Presents and CBC-TV’s Crystal Club, filmed at the Fort Garry Hotel and hosted by singers Steve Bell and Angela Kelman. On the show, Marklinger sang in a chorus that included Tusia and Annis Kozub.

She worked six nights a week in the Pan Am Lounge at the International Inn with pianist Don Kissick.

“Karen is a musician’s singer,” says Kissick. “She can sing harmony, scat, improvise and is incredibly versatile. She can sing jazz, country, pop, standards and can sing harmony to anything. In her heyday, she was the singer most musicians wanted to work with.”

Marklinger also appeared for a lengthy stint at the Downtown Sheraton Hotel with George Reznik and drummer Bill McMahon, who says working with her was “like working with Ella Fitzgerald. Over the years you work with so many singers, many of whom needed direction,” says McMahon. “But Karen always knew what she was doing and just took off and led us rather than us leading her. Every time we worked with Karen, it was a memorable event. She was like one of the boys but beautiful.” She also played occasionally at the downtown Holiday Inn restaurant and lounge with Ron Paley.

One of her most rewarding recent musical experiences came working with local jazz vocalist/songwriter Lianne Fournier in a jazz vocal ensemble called Trivocals. Kris Purdy and later Dave Lawton were also involved. As Marklinger recalls, “Lianne wrote some very difficult harmonies. It was very challenging. Very hip and wonderful arrangements.”

Adds Fournier, “Karen is one of the most easygoing singers I have ever worked with. So talented and so supportive. She can sing anything.”

In the late ’80s, divorced from Brown, Marklinger headed first back to Calgary and then to Regina to look after her ailing mother.

After her mother’s death, Marklinger worked as a caregiver for others before retiring. She also stopped singing while in Regina after performing with local bands.

“I hated singing at dances the same old tunes,” she says.

“There was no thrill. It has to be challenging. I couldn’t do the same songs all the time.”

Returning to Winnipeg in 2014, Marklinger lives in suburban Winnipeg and, at age 72, says her singing days are behind her.

“There’s an open invitation for Karen to come and sing with some of her old friends at the Silver Heights Restaurant on Saturday afternoons,” says McMahon, who organizes the weekly jazz sessions. “It would be a thrill to work with her again.”

She and Yvette remain best friends and share many memories. “At one point a few years back, I remember saying to Yvette that I didn’t know why I kept singing because I just hated it. And Yvette said to me, ‘No, you don’t hate singing, Karen. You love singing. It’s just the jobs you hate.’ And she was right.”

Marklinger says she harbours no regrets from her lengthy singing career.

“None of us — me, Yvette, Micki Allen — pursued big careers. We didn’t want that. We just loved to sing. I’m a sociable person in a small kind of way, but I don’t like having a big life with a lot of people around and having to be on a schedule every day,” she says.

“I never wanted a manager or someone running my life. I like my quiet life.”

John Einarson writes about Manitoba’s music history. Tune in to his show, My Generation, Tuesday evenings from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. on UMFM 101.5 or stream it live from umfm.com.