New voices for old material
Rock the Lake 2018 ended on a highpitched note Sunday night at Prospera Place. It also ended with an ongoing debate about the difference between a legitimate nostalgia band and tribute artists.
Ultimately, both can be entertaining — and were — as 11 classic rock bands took to the parking lot stage to entertain 3,500 fans over three days.
As the afternoon-evening concerts began Sunday, the question was: can Doug and the Slugs perform as Doug and the Slugs without the band’s former chief songwriter, frontman and lead singer, Doug Bennett.
Bennett was known to be a heavy drinker onstage who died from cirrhosis of the liver after falling into a coma in 2004.
The original Slugs — guitarists Richard Baker and John Burton, keyboardist Simon Kendall, bassist Steve Bosley and drummer John ‘Wally’ Watson -— reunited in 2009 and got a phone call from Ted Okos of Kelowna.
As a joke, the rotund Okos told them: “I look like a cross between Benny Hill and Meatloaf” to which band members told him that if he could memorize the lyrics, he was hired.
His initial deeper notes raised doubts about his ability to mimic Bennett but his later high crooning, especially on Day by Day (1984), Too Bad (1980) and the finale of Making It Work (1982) broughts cheers from the crowd. The excellent instrumental pop music sound from his bandmates never left any doubt that this was the original Slugs.
I saw the complete band several times in the 1980s; the ultimate show was at Vancouver’s Commodore Club when the opener Slugs had an unofficial competition with Huey Lewis and the News on who could put on the best performance of the night. It was an unforgettable tie.
It might have been the heavy forest fire smoke in the air or the after effects of a Saturday night concert, but The Stampeders had an off-night with difficulty hitting the right notes. It was marred too with three pauses after starting Marigold (1975) to correct missing bass amplification.
“Did anyone listen to these guys before booking them? That was awful,” said one woman in the audience.
The set of “all the K-Tel favourites” by three of the original Stampeders ‚ lead guitarist Rich Dodson (still playing his selfdesigned Fender double-neck guitar), bassist Ronnie King and drummer Kim Berly (who lives north of Vernon) — was in sharp contrast to their April 8 performance at Kelowna Community Theatre.
Little River Band — with none of the original musicians from the 1970s — performed what many considered to be the best show of the night. The elder statesman, Wayne Nelson (ex-Jim Messina band), became the lead singer in 1980 when he was chosen for The Night Owls, the lead single on the Time Exposure album.
Since then, the original band members lost a legal battle to retain the LRB name and bitterly claim that current members recount the original members’ achievements and awards as if they were their own.
Current lead guitarist Rich Herring responded that the new band re-recorded all the hits trying to make them as close to the originals as possible. That was evident Sunday with cheers greeting a series of hit singles: Happy Anniversary (1978), Lady (1979), Reminiscing (1978), Cool Change (1980) and an extended version of the crowdpleaser Lonesome Loser, complete with singalong chorus.
To its credit, the band doesn’t just repeat the oldies but played two cuts — Lost and Lonely, and I’m an Island — from its latest CD, Cuts Like A Diamond, released in 2013. Members are staying current (and social media saavy) with a crowd photo for their Facebook page.
Nazareth had its feet in both the nostalgia and tribute camps to close the show. Originally a Scottish hard rock band formed in 1968, Nazareth is now composed of founder Pete Agnew on bass and backing vocals, lead vocalist Carl Sentance (since 2015), guitarist Jimmy Murrison (since 1994) and Agnew’s son, Lee Agnew, on drums (since 1999).
Sentance certainly looked like, twitched like and screamed like a hard rocker with his black muscle T-shirt, black jeans and tattoos on his biceps, head tossing up and down, fist raised, arm windmilling and dropping some F-bombs.
There was so much bass that even those standing in the lawnchair section could feel the vibration in their torsos. Earplugs were needed. By mid-set, many older fans were packing up.
The highlights were no doubt Shanghai’d in Shanghai (1974), the ballad Love Hurts (1975), Hair of the Dog (1975) and the somewhat subdued Dream On (1982).
“Is anyone in the band original?” asked a fan seated nearby. When he learned it was only the bass player, he responded: “It doesn’t sound like Nazareth.”
Full three-day passes for Rock the Lake 2019 are now on sale.
One correction from Monday’s review of the first two nights: The singer covering the Burton Cummings songs in Randy Bachman’s show Friday night was Mick Della-Vee. The wrong spelling was provided by Bachman’s crew.