This past week, MuchMusic VJ Jesse Giddings took the local music scene to new levels with his new show ROCK CITY. Jesse and I both grew up in suburban Langley, BC. There wasn’t much to do there for the underage crowd, a trend that is amplified in small towns across Canada. The Langley area has become somewhat of an enigma for producing mainstream music with the likes of Headley, Nickleback, and Default all having bandmates coming from the local. And there are countless other indie bands from Langley as well (Zaac Pick, Doubting Paris, Dakona). The local music scene is a rite of passage to creating quality music, and I’ve seen it first hand.
One summer I was working with this grunge band called THRESHOLD. I’d picked up the guitar on occasion, but gravitated towards the art of live sound (aka The Soundman) so my circle of musician friends was large. The bass player, Jeremy, had long red hair and would spend the whole show head banging. We didn’t need lights. It was hypnotic just watching his hair going round and round. His older brother Dan thought we were good enough to headline a show (which we weren’t), and so he decided to sponsor a summer festival. He was on the prowl for a venue that would allow a couple hundred greasy teenagers to rock out to grunge/metal music. In suburban Langley, no one was interested. I don’t know how he found the venue, but he showed up at band practice to announce that the festival was a go. He had secured a field in an industrial part of town that the city would let us use for free. Then he showed us the poster. Written across the top of our picture was SEWAGE OVERFLOW ’95, Featuring THRESHOLD. When pressed about where the name came from he mumbled something about the field and a nearby overworked processing plant, but we were too excited about our first poster to care.
