Fond memories of Kitchener for retro rockers The Sheepdogs
Van broken into long ago, nothing stolen, all forgiven
Mention the city of Kitchener to Ryan Gullen and his memories grow moist with nostalgia.
“I remember it because our van got broken into,” recalls the bassist and co-founding member of Saskatoon retro rockers The Sheepdogs, who played at The Boathouse in the band’s pre-fame early days a decade and a half ago.
“But nothing got stolen. So somebody broke into our van, but didn’t steal anything.”
He laughs. “So a respectful person must have realized it was just four poor musicians.”
If it’s not downright affection I detect in his voice, it’s definitely a fond remembrance since, as he duly reports, the van was broken into “a bunch of times” on that tour and Kitchener was the only place where no one actually stole anything.
“Kitchener is a place we’ve always wanted to play,” he enthuses, his regional admiration extending to White Tiger Vintage, the timewarped clothing store the ’70s obsessed musician makes a point of visiting on a regular basis.
“When we were younger, a lot of shows didn’t come through our town. They would go to Winnipeg or Calgary, so it’s always been a really big thing for us to play not just big major cities but smaller centres like Kitchener and Guelph.”
Those small-city roots are the key not only to the band’s old school vibe — in Sheepdogsland, the year 1971 lives forever — but their slavish devotion to the unyielding spirit of golden age rock.
“The reason we play the music we play is not necessarily because we want to be a rich and famous stadium band,” points out Gullen, “but because it speaks to us.
“It’s music we love, that we’ve been making ever since we started the band 18 years ago.”
Their fascination with ’70s stadium rock — with shades of Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top — came not so much from their parents, but from being the first generation able to access the entire history of music, free of charge, on the internet.
“The biggest contributing factor is that we grew up in an era when (the music file-sharing service) Napster existed,” explains the personable 37-year-old, who recalls himself and lead singer Ewan Currie as “a couple of kids bored in the middle of winter illegally downloading music in their parents’ houses.”
“It’s not like cool shows were coming through every week. Historically, if you wanted to discover music, you needed a friend’s cool older brother to be like ‘Check out this record!’
“But in high school, we went down this rabbit hole. We’d hear about Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and start going really deep in a way that hadn’t really happened like that before.”
It laid the groundwork for the Juno-winning band they would become and placed them in the crosshairs when, in 2011, they won a contest to become the first unsigned act in history to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, with accompanying talk show appearances and record deal.
“We were a band from Saskatchewan pounding the pavement, driving across the country and North America, losing money for seven years,” recalls Gullen.
“Literally one day I got a phone call from a guy saying ‘Hey, we discovered your band and want to put you in this competition on the cover of Rolling Stone.’”
It thrust them into the spotlight in a way they didn’t think could ever happen: “People knew who we were. We were being recognized, flying all over the place, playing huge shows and suddenly selling albums — stuff we’d been really trying for. That was huge for us.”
But 2011 wasn’t 1971, and despite outward appearances, The Sheepdogs weren’t Led Zeppelin or The Eagles.
“It wasn’t like, ‘Now we have it made and we all bought big mansions’,” insists the plain-speaking rocker.
“We weren’t catapulted to superstardom. But it put us in position where we could realistically continue to pursue a career in music, where people were paying attention and buying concert tickets.”
The streaming era, of course, proved a double-edged sword, decimating the traditional recording industry and sparking a niche culture that — with the rise of hip hop and dance — relegated The Sheepdogs blues-based guitar rock to the same perch occupied by once populist genres like jazz and blues.
“Historically, if you wanted to be popular you had to have a song on the radio or a record deal,” concedes Gullen, acknowledging this is no longer the case.
“In 2022 a lot of people become popular through TikTok or streaming. We made an album (2010s ‘Learn & Burn’) in a house by ourselves that was platinum selling in Canada. It’s a very different kind of era.”
It is, in the end, a point of pride. “We’re not here still pretending like it’s still 1971,” insists Gullen.
“I’m talking to you on an iPhone with Bluetooth headphones while drinking coffee I got from a coffee shop. We’re not trying to directly emulate or rip off a certain era. We’re not, ‘Let’s make songs that sound like Led Zeppelin or Tom Petty.’
“For us, a lot of it ends up being let’s just make music we’re into that has elements of that kind of stuff.”
If they were in it for the money, he points out, they would have become rappers or deejays.
“We always laugh about that,” says Gullen.
“There are a lot of deejays out there that make unfathomable amounts of money on private planes with their laptops, flying to Vegas to get paid a couple of million bucks in an evening.
“To be a rock and roll band involves a lot more. We have a big trailer full of amps and guitars. It’s a whole production, even in a smaller club, to make it all come together.”
Less money and lower profile, perhaps, but with a pretty cool upside.
“We’re not playing to 40,000 people a night,” says Gullen. “We’re playing to a room full of incredibly passionate diehard people who love our music and love rock and roll, even though it isn’t at forefront of music right now.”
A few days ago, he says, a young woman drove two and a half hours to see their show after Spotify added one of their songs to her playlist and she was hooked.
“I will trade a room full of passionate fans for an arena full of people that know one song you had on the radio in a different era,” sums up Gullen.
“We just try to be really honest about what we do and not take ourselves too seriously. Rock and roll is supposed to be fun, so we want to have fun doing it. ” The Sheepdogs play Centre in the Square Saturday at 8 p.m. For tickets, go to centreinthesquare.com.