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Music
Stellar Band of Neighbours a quintessential East Vancouver band
By Kevin Potvin
And about to sing our unique experience to a national audience
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There are about twenty-five people spread around the periphery of the darkened room, some seated on recycled church pews, others around big round tables. Around an inner circle bathed in spotlights highlighting notation stands are six musicians, some of the finest players that that national incubator of music, Commercial Drive in East Vancouver, has ever produced.
It’s an open rehearsal for the Stellar Band of Neighbours, comprised of Dell Cowsill, Stephen Drake (The Odds), Wyckam Porteous, Kevin Kane (Grapes of Wrath), Johnny Fay (Tragically Hip) and Simon Kendel (Doug and the Slugs). A few friends and family have been invited, one night before the newly-formed band’s public debut to an already sold-out show in White Rock to be recorded by the CBC.
The mood is professional and relaxed at the same time. As they move through their repertoire of twelve original songs, they all seem to fall into a specific style. But on the rainy patio outside during the break, I ask Dell and Wyckham what that style is, and they tell me they don’t know, they ask me. It’s Canadiana is the best I can do, a bit blues, a bit folk, a bit funk, a bit rock. There are five singers and six songwriters in this band, making the night roll on with stirring harmonies, lone plaintive voices, a wall of guitars and a full-throated bass and drum line, plus deft keyboards providing perfect offsetting commentary. The sound is full, it is awe-inducing.
The room we’re in is a side room off the main gallery at Chapel Arts, a year-old rejuvenation of an old funeral home at 340 Dunlevy Street, heart of the old tree faller, fisherman and miner-recovery zone, where heroin as self-administered pain-killing medicine has permeated the area for most of a century. To sit here with friends listening to new songs by rejuvenated musicians from old great Canadian bands is as life affirming as the pretty watering-can rain falling gently outside in a rejuvenated house of last rites in a neighbourhood under rejuvenation where the last of the fallers, fishermen and miners still linger on their last legs around the corner, the trees and fish in the interior and up coast now all dead and the mines needing only machines now.
All five voices hit the harmony on the title line of what might be their signature song, “You can go but you cannot run away.” It’s a beautiful song, and a specifically Vancouver song. So many people end up here rather than come here, if only because they can’t go south, they can’t go north, going east is backward, and they’ve gone as far west as they can before they drown in the ocean. That sense of terminality—Vancouver’s official nickname is Terminal City, and the old elite’s watering hole, still tucked in there on the better end of Hastings Street, is The Terminal City Club—pervades most of the songs, happy or sad. It’s a simple truth of this place, and the music by Stellar Band of Neighbours is produced by the geography and climate here. “There is no moral to this tale,” sings Wyckham, “there is no lesson in this world, Henry Cooper loved a girl, Henry Cooper loved a girl.” In an improvisation, they all repeat the line a few times, laughing, after stopping their instruments.
Stephen stops and restarts “You should have been here” to say to them “It’s a rehearsal, there should be a guitar solo here.” They all nod and, without the beat dropped, come back around to the start, return to the place he stopped them, and off the guitar solo goes. It’s works like a charm and Simon says “that’s it!” and Paul pumps his fist in the air, all in the stream of the song. It’s a treat for the small audience, to be present at the moment of creation like that.
The Stellar Band of Neighbours’ genesis began on the deck of Turk’s Café on Commercial Drive, when a few of these talented musicians got the idea to create a new thing where they could all write songs and sing. The whole idea went from conception to sold-out gig in two weeks. “We’ve been rehearsing like crazy, exhausting,” Wyckham says. Only two days earlier, chatting on the sidewalk with him outside Turk’s, I watched Dell show him hand-written notes to a few of the songs he promised to write out in full and copy for the band. That’s how fast they pulled it all together.
The most fascinating element of the night comes in the second set, exactly the same twelve songs in the same order as the first set. It is a rehearsal after all. To witness what the musicians do to the songs on the second go round is to understand what appeal making music has to musicians.
Stellar Band of Neighbours is so named because most of the band are neighbours all living in the chestnut and cherry tree adorned streets reaching east off Commercial Drive. In the wisdom of west side city fathers a century ago, the chestnuts are of the non-edible kind and the cherry trees produce no fruit. That’s the kind of local detail that gives rise to a distinct sound to the music that comes out of this place, a sound so well expressed by this thoroughly east side band, destined to gain a national audience.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
The Republic of East Vancouver supports no party, advocates
for no cause, represents no group, serves no master, and considers
problems with no preconceived notions. We hope to afflict the comfortable,
both materially and intellectually, and comfort the afflicted—of
both kinds as well, and we are trying to do both things at the same
time.
Publisher, Editor
Kevin Potvin
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Potvin
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Dan Crawford, John Daigle,
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