Calling Occupants with Klaatu’s Terry Draper

‘‘Let the music speak for itself. That’s why we did the anonymity thing in the first place, because we didn’t want to get our personalities involved.” That’s how Canadian musician Terry Draper describes his days with a historic musical trio known as Klaatu. “We wanted to have private lives and still make millions of dollars in the music business. So let the music speak for itself instead of pictures of handsome fellas with the wind blowing their hair. That kind of backfired when they convinced themselves we were The Beatles.”

Terry Draper is still letting the music speak for itself. And he certainly still has a private life while making meaningful music from his home studio in Toronto, Canada. For 20 years, he has recorded and released a body of work that can be found via his website, terrydraper.com, which very much includes a fresh collection of progressive pop called In My Garden.

And 40 years ago, people believed that he and his friends John Woloschuk and Dee Long weren’t three Canadian musicians finding their musical way, but that they were four British musicians gone underground to escape their Beatle selves and continue making music together under a pseudonym. But Klaatu was Klaatu, not The Beatles. Though it’s fair to say that The Beatles had a hand in the musical lives of Klaatu’s members, because The Ed Sullivan Show aired in Canada,