THE RISE, FALL AND RISE AGAIN OF JR. GONE WILD
Edmonton band overcomes tragedy, eyes new album
In late November, Mike Mcdonald, Dove Brown and Steve Loree took to the small stage at Edmonton’s Cask & Barrel for a sombre tribute.
It had originally been booked as a solo show for Mcdonald, the lead singer and principal songwriter of Edmonton icons Jr. Gone Wild. But bandmates Brown and Loree decided to join in, hoping to make it as close to a Jr. Gone Wild show as they could manage. It was their first performance without drummer Larry Shelast, who had passed away earlier that month of a heart attack at the age of 54.
“It was almost like performance art,” says Mcdonald, in an interview with Postmedia from his Edmonton home. “We brought our electric guitars and everything and we did the Jr. show except without Larry. It was very difficult. It was really emotional. But it was good that we did it. We got some sh-t out of our system. But it was a real amazing reminder of the big, huge hole that was in the band. Because we tried to do what we usually do, except without drums. We didn’t do an unplugged show. We pretended Larry was there and we tried to do it. But without Larry, we couldn’t quite get there. But it made for an interesting show.”
Shelast’s death was a devastating blow to Jr. Gone Wild and the Edmonton music scene in general. He was the band’s longest-serving drummer, joining in 1991 and playing on its third album Pull the Goalie the following year. He also played on 1995’s Simple Little Wish, which was destined to become Jr. Gone Wild’s swan song. But In 2013, Shelast joined Mcdonald, Brown and Loree for a series of energetic reunion shows that rejuvenated Jr. Gone Wild. They had been playing together off-and-on ever since and were in pre-production for a new record when tragedy struck. Initially, it seemed to put the band’s future in limbo.
So, to keep Jr. Gone Wild from “stalling out,” Loree booked them for a show at the Palomino Smokehouse and Social Club for Friday.
For one, it’s for a good cause. The night, which will also feature The Ramblin’ Ambassadors and Forbidden Dimension, is a fundraiser for Ann Conway, a Calgary music scene veteran who was diagnosed with breast cancer in September.
Her history with Jr. Gone Wild dates back to her days as a waitress at Calgary’s Westward Club, a legendary venue in the 1980s and ’90s that would host the band’s boozesoaked early shows. “That’s when we were literally being juniors gone wild,” Mcdonald jokes.
But the show also gave the band a clear mandate to continue.
Mcdonald, Loree and Brown enlisted Quinton Herbert, who also happens to be Mcdonald’s nephew, to play drums for the show and have been in rehearsals for the past few months.
“He’s known our music and has liked our music since he was born,” Mcdonald says. “He already knew how all the songs went and he has some drumming skills, so all the things we needed were already there. It was just a matter of fitting him in and us getting used to him and all that stuff. But that’s what we’ve been working on. And we’re going to have a pretty high-energy set on Jan. 31.”
After the show, the band is planning to return to the studio with Herbert and continue working on its first album in 25 years. Fans who have attended Jr. Gone Wild shows since 2013 will have heard a few new songs. That includes Loree’s Barricades (The Hockey Riot Song), which the band released as a video and single back in 2015. Jr. Gone Wild have since been accumulating a modest stockpile of new material.
Even if Jr. Gone Wild’s third act also ends up being its final chapter, Mcdonald says they are determined to end things on their own terms.
“When the band ended before, it was kind of icky and nobody’s choice,” he says. “This time we get to make our ending the way we want to. Part of that is putting out one more piece of work. I mean, we may do more. Never say never, right? But we don’t write songs as fast as we used to. So this is taking a long time to get done. But we want it to be as good as possible. So we’re crafting as best as we can.”
Mcdonald says he hopes the album will be out this year. The tentative plan is to release it at roughly the same time as a longin-the-works documentary about the band by Edmonton filmmakers Mike Siek and Eden Munro. According to the film’s Indiegogo page, the doc will be a “cowpunkumentary about the rise, fall and rise again of Edmonton’s Jr. Gone Wild.”
The well-worn cliche “ahead of its time” has always seemed a particularly fitting description for Jr. Gone Wild. This may have been part of the reason they failed to reach the wider audience that so many of their 1990s peers did in Canada. Mcdonald formed the band in the 1980s, when the country-punk hybrid was nowhere near as fashionable as it would become. It wasn’t really country-rock — at least not in the bland Eagles sense of the genre — but a savvy mash-up of Mcdonald’s smart, witty songwriting and a punk fury that befitted their name.
Four studio albums helped establish Mcdonald as one of the country’s best songsmiths. They toured relentlessly for 13 years. But after Simple Little Wish, the band found themselves in front of ever-dwindling audiences. Frustrated, exhausted and broke, they decided to quietly dissolve. Nearly 20 years later, a persistent promoter kept asking the band to reunite. Mcdonald decided to throw him off the chase by quoting what he figured would be an exorbitant and unrealistic price. Much to his surprise, the promoter agreed. It all made for a nice payday for the band, something they rarely received in their heyday. It also allowed Mcdonald to purchase the original masters for Jr. Gone Wild’s long out-of-print and criminally underrated 1986 debut, Less Art More Pop!, which they subsequently re-released.
Since then, the band has been performing part-time and writing new material. But Mcdonald says he is still happy to perform the old songs, particularly since audiences for the reunited Jr. Gone Wild tend to be well-versed in the band’s past.
As for the new material, Mcdonald admits it has been a bit of a slog.
“My standards are nutty high now,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t like anything I come up with. It takes me a long time, especially lyrics. I’m 56 years old now and my inner editor is a fascist.”