Gary James' Interview With John Finley of
Jon And Lee & The Checkmates



He was part of a band that opened for The Rolling Stones in 1965. In another group, he worked with Paul Rothchild, who produced both The Doors and Janis Joplin. The gentleman we are talking about is John Finley, and he has some stories to tell!

Q - John, you're one of these guys who knew early in life what you wanted to do with your life. I say that because the lead singer of one of the groups you were in laughed when you said you wanted to do this forever. That was the turning point in your life, wasn't it?

A - Actually, he was the leader of the band, but he wasn't a singer. He was the guitar player. I was seventeen. I lived in a little town, twenty-five miles outside of Toronto and they lived in Toronto. So, at the end of the weekend, him and another guy in the band were driving me home. I said, "Man, I just love this so much, I want to do this for the rest of my life." And he said, "Nah." One guy was in his final year of high school. The rest were in college. He said, "This is a nice thing to do, but you'll finish high school and you'll go to college and that'll be it. Then you'll move on to your life." I said, "No, no, no, no. I'm going to do this forever."

Q - Does this guy know that you followed your dream. Did he ever contact you?

A - I don't know. I haven't had any communication with him since the demise of that band, which was a few months or half a year later. But I do have another experience from that. So, the membership started to change. We had a sax player and he wasn't very good at all, but I wanted sax and trumpet. I loved the Ike and Tina Turner records. That kind of sound. So, membership started to change. We brought a keyboardist in and he got his guitar player in and got rid of the guy who was the leader. There was one guy left to get rid of and that was me, and the sax player that I met and got into the group was a wonderful guy named Leo Donahue. He was a full-time musician. He worked in Michigan and I guess Ohio and around Ontario. He was deep into Jazz. He was a real cool guy. So, when they kicked me out of the band: "We don't need a singer. We can all sing." Of course they weren't real singers. They were just players who sang. I remember just being heart broken and walking down the street with Leo. Leo said, "John, don't you worry. These guys aren't going on. You are. You're going to go way past anything they could dream of doing." You know, I've tried to get in touch with him, but I haven't been able to find him. He's somewhere in Michigan.

Q - Maybe he'll read this interview online and you'll get a phone call.

A - Maybe he will. Yeah. It's just funny how life is.

Q - The next group you were in, Jon And Lee & The Checkmates opened for The Rolling Stones at Maple Leaf Gardens, not once, but twice. April of 1965 and October of 1965.

A - Yeah.

Q - You only had eight minutes onstage. Most warm-up groups get half an hour or sometimes forty minutes. Eight minutes? Why only eight minutes?

A - Well, there were two warm-up groups. The other one I guess took too long or something like that. Politics, you know? We were actually told we weren't going to get to go on. We were devastated. I mean, this is a major show and we're very popular. The other group had an older audience. We had the same demographics as far as age-wise as The Stones did. We were loved in Toronto. We had a following in New York City and in Philly (Philadelphia). It was a four piece rhythm section and two singers. The rhythm section was kind of fashioned after Booker T. And The MGs. The other lead singer and me were kind of like Sam And Dave or The Righteous Brothers. Something like that. Anyway, this friend of ours fought for us and talked with The Stones themselves and finally was able to pull eight minutes for us. We went on and we killed it. I'll never forget the feeling when I walked onto the stage and I told people I felt this big, wet, warm blanket of humanity flow over me. I just broke into tears. It was just so overwhelming. We tore it up.

Q - At that particular time in the Stones' touring history they were using The McCoys, Patti LaBelle and Monti Rock as support acts. You're saying they didn't have anyone like that on the bill?

A - Nope. The other group was like the longest established band in Toronto. They'd been the top money earners forever and they'd been together since 1958. And they were older than us. They got on the show not because of the audience there, but just because of how long they'd been established, their tenure.

Q - Did you ever get to interact with with any of The Stones. Did you meet Brian Jones?

A - I remember the bass player (Bill) Wyman and the drummer, Charlie (Watts). I didn't have an interaction with Brian. I have pictures of the other singer and I having our picture taken with Mick (Jagger). Then afterwards the guy who really fought for us, he had an after hours club and it was our home base where we rehearsed at and played at sometimes. It was a real family thing. So, he had a big party afterwards and that's when Bill and Charlie showed up for the party.

Q - That was nice of them!

A - Yeah, well, they liked to party. Murray Campbell was the guy's name. He was involved in things. He was a guy around town, kind of important, known to everybody.

Q - How'd you find Mick Jagger to be?

A - It was a long time ago. It was just like, "Hey, I know I'm more famous than you guys, but we're all musicians." It wasn't like, "You guys aren't on my level." Commercially speaking, that's right, business wise. But as far as being an artist, being musicians, no big deal.

Q - After the show, girls were tearing off your clothes? Did any of the guys get hurt? Where was security?

A - Okay, that was another show. That one actually, 'cause it was very private, the security was real tight there. But when we left our limousines, we got out on the street in our limousine, and kids were like rocking our limousines, trying to get in. The doors were locked. The windows were closed. They were going nuts. Mostly girls. We ended up right in front of like a street car, a trolley, headed straight towards it. It stopped and we stopped because we couldn't see where we were going. The driver couldn't see. The other one about the clothes, that was the opening of the new City Hall that year. A little depiction of that City Hall is the logo for the city of Toronto. It was an award winning architectural design. So, it opened and there were 60,000 kids in the Square. A lot of funny things happened that night. There was an older guy on the show named Bobby Curtola who had been a Canadian Rock star, but that's in the first half of the sixties. His time had kind of passed. So, we were on stage and the place was going nuts, starting to riot. The girls were rushing the stage. The mayor of Toronto and Bobby Curtola both came up on the stage and tried to stop us. Bobby Curtola grabbed our keyboarsits's hands and our keyboardist shook him off. The mayor of Toronto tried to grab our drummer's drum sticks and our drummer rapped him across the knuckles and we continued to play. So, we're going back to our dressing room underneath and some girls got in. Well, Bobby Curtola was walking to his dressing room at the same time in the underground garage and he thought they were chasing him. He looked at them and started running and they just ran past him, (laughs) and ran after us. We got a little of our clothes torn off us, but we got away though.

Q - And then the next group you were in was Rhinoceros. That's kind of a strange name. I'm surprised no one in the band or working with the band didn't suggest another name. Were you happy with the name? Did the other guys in the band like that name?

A - Oh, yeah. We loved it. You're talking 1968. Everybody's taking acid. There was a band called Kaleidoscope. It was a group put together by Paul Rothechild, Elecktra Record producer. There were two sets of try-outs, each at twenty to thirty people. Out of the first twenty or thirty, a couple of people ended up in the group. Then in the second twenty or thirty, another two or three people ended up in the group. Then everybody went home for the holidays, '67. By the time I got back to Los Angeles in early February of '68, they had gotten a drummer. The guy that was going to be the drummer wasn't working (out). They got a drummer from The Mothers Of Invention and a guitar player that came in right near the end of the initial three weeks when we were rehearsing, Danny Weis, from Iron Butterfly, in December, 1967. There was already a guitarist from Seattle named Doug Hastings. He was in a group called Daily Flash. The bass player from Iron Butterfly was brought in while I was up in Canada on holiday break and I waiting to get my work papers to be in the U.S. to live there. So, by the time I got back, we had the bass and drums. The band was intact.

Q - You're saying that Elektra Records and/or Paul Rothchild put Rhinoceros together with your permission?

A - I was one of the people that auditioned. They put the band together. It was their thing. Paul had scouted all over North America looking for people to put together his idea of a super group, the best players he could could find that he could grab out of other groups. So he got Billy from The Mothers Of Invention, Danny and Jerry Penrod from Iron Butterfly, Alan Gerber from Chicago and he had a little solo career going, and Doug Hastings on guitar as well. He was from Daily Flash. And then the keyboardist had been in The Checkmates, the group I was in, in Toronto. After that he was in Electric Flag, which was Nick Gravenites and Buddy Miles, drummer. That's where the different people came from.

Q - How much money was spent to promote Rhinoceros by Elektra Records? Do you have any idea?

A - I don't know how much to promote it, but I do know this: First of all, in 2020 dollars, who knows? The album budget was about $10,000, which back then was plenty. I'd say by 1990 it would cost you a couple of hundred grand to make an album that would cost you ten or fifteen grand back in the sixties. So, as far as promotion, all I know is that they really promoted the hell out of us.

Q - $10,000 was budgeted to both record the album and promote the album?

A - No. That was just to make the album. I don't know how much they spent to promote the band, but I know we were promoted heavily in print media. Also, the kind of gray money that gets you reviews on the front page of Billboard, new acts breaking out. Their publicity department really worked hard and got us a lot of magazine interviews like Harper's magazine and Rolling Stone. We were the first group to have an oversized, giant billboard on Sunset Blvd., which I never saw because just before they put it up, we moved to New York.

Q - Didn't The Doors have a giant billboard on Sunset Blvd.?

A - Not before us. We were the first ones. I mean, there were billboards, but this thing was huge and the big arch of the Rhinoceros, the multi-colored arch, was bigger than the billboard. It went over the edges of it.

Q - So, the band moved from the West Coast to the East Coast. What difference did that make where you were based?

A - It changed the trajectory. The group made a few ill-advised decisions that led us down the wrong path. As a result, we didn't realize our potential. And also the management company we had made a fateful error. We were managed by Sid Bernstein, who managed The Rascals. Good guy. He was a good managers, but he had a junior partner. So, Sid had to go to Europe just to do some support for The Rascals. They were on tour there. While he was out of town, out of the country, we were booked to play at Woodstock. And nobody was making any big bucks. We were only going to make $1,500, although back then it wasn't horrible money, but it wasn't much. Well, Billy, his junior partner found us a prom gig for $3,500. Without telling us, without telling Sid, he went ahead and canceled our appearance at Woodstock because he got more money. He thought he was doing a good thing by getting more money at the prom gig on Long Island. Who replaced us? Sha Na Na. (laughs) So, things like that happen. It's a miracle when nothing screws up a band's future.

Q - Did you guys realize that Woodstock was an important gig?

A - Oh, yeah. We were excited about Woodstock. Everybody was on it. We knew it was an important gig. We didn't know it was canceled until like three days before and he called us and said, "I've got good news for you! I got you more money!" "What?" "Yeah, you're playing a prom on Long Island." We're going, "Oh, no." We were pretty miserable.

Q - How did that gig go?

A - We just got so high to stand to do it and we could tolerate it. It was a stupid gig. It was like playing a wedding instead of playing an important Rock festival.

Q - Did you ever sit around and talk with Paul Rothchild about Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison?

A - He and I were very close friends until he died. We met in the mid-'60s. He came out and saw The Checkmates in Toronto. That's where he got to see me and that's why I got the call to come down to L.A. and audition for Rhinoceros. It wasn't called Rhinoceros at that point. It was a supergroup project that the label called at that point.

Q - Did you ever meet Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison?

A - Oh, yeah. I knew Janis a little bit. Janis and I were cool. We were friendly. I knew the group she had before she went on her own and was produced by Paul, Big Brother And The Holding Company. I knew a couple of those guys. Janis was cool. She was friendly. She was down home folks. She was one of the guys.

Q - Would you have been in the studio with her or at a bar having a drink?

A - Well, no. There was this place in New York called Steve Paul's Scene, and we'd all hang out there. Monday nights there'd be jams like Buddy Miles and Jimi Hendrix and The Chambers Brothers and us and Moby Grape and NRBQ. We'd all hang out there and sit in and play together. I remember hangin' with her there while other people were playing.

Q - How about Morrison and Hendrix?

A - Hendrix I never met, but I remember seeing him play bass. He wouldn't play guitar at a jam session. He didn't want to. He wanted to play bass. There he didn't have the public demand. He didn't have his managers. It wasn't a gig. He wasn't "Jimi Hendrix". He was Jimi, one of the guys. And he liked to play bass, so he played bass. As far as Morrison, I knew some of the guys in the group a little bit. Robby Krieger, nice guy. He was who I knew the most. A little bit, Ray Manzarek, but I wasn't a fan of Ray. I didn't like his sound. (laughs) I liked the B-3 sound. Jim, I met him a couple of times.

Q - What'd you think of him?

A - He was just a guy. He was a singer in a band. (laughs)

Q - Was he friendly? Talkative?

A - Not terribly friendly. I think he was a bit of a strange dude.

Q - And so that brings us up to today. What are you now doing?

A - Well, I will tell you I lived in L.A. for forty years. In the forty years I was really involved in the Gospel music scene in L.A. Soul, Gospel. I worked with Andre Crouch, with Walter and Edwin Hawkins, with Reverend James Cleveland. If you research him you'll find he's one of the most incredibly important figures in the Gospel music scene. He started a thing called The Gospel Music Workshop Over America, which has chapters in every major city and tens of thousands of members. I also had a group in L.A. called SOULBOP! and it had some pretty incredible players in it. Stevie Wonder's trombone player was in it. Phil Upchurch on guitar. Phil played with everybody in Blues and Jazz, R&B, on their records. Really great, great players. About five, six years ago I met Jaymz when I was sitting in with Lou Pomanti (whom I already knew). Jaymz was leading a group of jazzFM91 subscribers called the jazzFM91 Jazz Safari. He's a radio personality. He walked in with a friend of mine who ended up being my producer. I was doing a song Nancy Wilson did with Cannonball Adderley called "Save Your Love For Me", and Jaymz loved what I did. We both had pretty fancy clothes on and looked at each other and we became brothers, you know? (laughs) We liked the way each other dressed. He invited me to become part of the community. He's really instrumental in creating a Toronto Jazz community. He invited me to come and perform and then I started doing more things with Jazz FM 91 through him. And then Lorenzo DiGianfelice of Vesuvius Music (my label) said to Jaymz, "Who is this guy and what's he doing? Does he have a CD out? He must have a bunch of 'em!" Jaymz said, "Nothing right now." All I had was the SOULBOP! CD from L.A. and he said, "We got to record him." So their record company put together a budget and my producer, who Jaymz loves and so do I, produced it. A lot of great players are on it. We did that in 2019. It was coming out this year (2020) and along came COVID-19.

Q - We can only hope that people roll up their sleeves. And the Rock stars of 2021 will be the scientists who developed the COVID-19 vaccine.

A - That's right. And we'll have the Roaring Twenties of the 21st century. The Roaring Twenties of the 20th century had a lot to do with the flu pandemic in 1918-1919. When that ended, the Roaring Twenties was a reaction to having such a horrible thing happen. And so, I think we're going to have the same thing. When things open up, things are really going to open up!

Official Website: www.JohnFinleyMusic.com

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

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