The Brobdingnagian Canards were an elusive Yorkville-era band from Toronto whose musical flame flickered briefly in the spring of 1971 before guttering out forever in a storm of artistic differences, bad drug reactions and a police-supervised gear repo raid during their last public performance.

That final Canards show took place on the cramped stage of the famous Night Owl club on Avenue Road before an appreciative audience of ten or twelve, most of whom had entered the club to escape a sudden shower.  According to legend, one of those patrons was future newspaper tycoon, author and Trump-pardoned felon Conrad Black, a regular at their gigs who spent intermissions hawking pilfered copies of course exams to University of Toronto students in the audience.  Later in life, Black never denied that the Brobdingnagian Canards had had a powerful impact on his prose style.

We now know that the Canards recorded their performance that night on a battered AKAI reel-to-reel tape recorder tucked behind the club's drinks counter.  Harry Finegold, proprietor of the Night Owl--and for a brief time manager of the Canards—would have been responsible for hitting record and checking levels before each set.  Forensic analysis of a newly-discovered audio tape shows that he made a mess of the first and second sets, but got good levels for some of the abbreviated final one.

When police stopped the show and the Long and McQuade repo team began filling their van with instruments and amps from the stage, Finegold must have appropriated the Canards' tape recorder and show-tape and taken them upstairs to his garret apartment above the club. Perhaps the risk and bother of selling them outweighed any financial compensation he might have gained, for there they remained, undisturbed in the building's attic for half a century--until renovators discovered them under a large "Dee and the Yeomen" Bristol board poster and a moldy pair of white bell-bottom jeans.

The carpenter who found the horde gave the AKAI and the tape to his daughter, a recording arts student at Toronto's Centennial College.  She showed them to one of her audio professors who specialized in antique recording technology and Toronto music history.  He baked the degraded tape, degaussed the AKAI and managed to extract a song-length portion of usable audio.

He immediately recognized the unmistakeable hallmarks of a Brobdingnagian Canards instrumental:  Smitty "Don’t Call Me Bob" Roberts' screechy Gibson SG; the energizing too-loud kick and snare of "Lead-Foot" Wilhelm Koenig; the amphetamine-enhanced speed-picking of bassman Rickard "Trailer-Hitch" Aarbichikken; that complaining Hammond inflicting structural damage on a tortured Leslie--the signature sound of keyboard player Mitchell "Crap" Krapp.

The restorer has done remarkable work to bring such unpromising raw material back to life.  Unfortunately, he has rather boringly labeled the recovered song "Night Owl 1971"--appropriate, perhaps, but not in the legendary boundary-testing spirit of the band. They would have called it something cryptic and self-deprecating, like their now-lost “Load of True Rubbish” or “Stupid Buys Anything”. If anyone knows where any of the surviving Canards are these days, ask for its real title. It’s their song.

Or ask Conrad Black. He still can’t get them out of his mind:

"That the president of the U.S. may be 'an asset' of the government of the detritus of the old Soviet Union was always an insane proposition. No U.S. major party presidential candidate would ever have considered colluding with a foreign government to rig an election, and no one who tried to would even get a security clearance. Yet practically the entire Democratic party and 80 per cent of the American national media bought more or less fully into this Brobdingnagian canard."
--Conrad Black, National Post, March 29 2019