McManus took out a $500 bank loan and with the help of engineer Bill Seddon recorded two songs - "Sunshower in the Spring"[4] and "Gimme a Hand" with Garwood Wallace on guitar and John Woloschuk on bass.
An album was recorded but disagreements led to the cancellation of the deal with A & M. While at the Canadian National Music Conference in Vancouver in late 1972, McManus met jazz musician and composer Tommy Banks who was about to start his own label, Century II, in Edmonton.
McManus moved from Vancouver to Edmonton in 1973, and there worked with a number of acts, including Russ Thornberry, The Original Caste, and Roy Forbes.
McManus began to expand his writing in order to include the work of jazz musicians Tommy Banks, Earl Seymour and Lenny Breau, who were in Edmonton at the time, into his recordings.
McManus mixed his Edmonton tracks at the Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco and then moved to London, Ontario to take up teaching duties in the new Music Industry Arts[5] Program at Fanshawe College.
Although he was teaching full-time, he continued to write and in 1976 another of his songs, "What a Day", was recorded by the Vos Family and used in a promotional campaign to raise funds for the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
In 1981, London promoter Don Jones asked McManus to perform an opening set of material to entertain children at Mr. Dressup appearances.
With McManus' experience in music legalities, he was able to help Mr. Dressup (Ernie Coombs) get out of a bad recording contract and the two hit it off working on their own material together.
In 1987 McManus, concerned with the lack of representation for songwriters in Canada and the inability to copyright songs in Canada, teamed up with music lawyer Stephen Stohn, (Chair of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences) and Donna Murphy (CIRPA) to revive the long dormant Canadian Songwriters Association to which McManus was elected president for four years before becoming Chairman Of the Board.
In addition, the SAC hosts Bluebird North activities across the country bringing together some of Canada's most inspiring songwriters to share their songs and stories.
Concurrent with his presidency of the Songwriters Association, McManus took the opportunity to publish an editorial “Copyright Should be Forever” in the national magazine of the performing rights society PRO Canada, the precursor to SOCAN.
During that time he discovered a Doo Wop a cappella act called The Essentials singing at a local ice cream stand in London.
In 2009, that editorial was quoted as one of the “prescient” articles of the 1990s by Steve Knopper in his much praised book about the rise of digital music and the fall of the record companies, Appetite for Self Destruction.
[citation needed] The band has placed music with J Walter Thomson of NYC for Sunsilk, with Red Bull for an extreme sports site and they have had their songs performed in The Vampire Diary series.