Sean Kelly - Metal on Ice: Tales from Canadas Hard Rock and Heavy Metal Heroes

Copyright Sean Kelly, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Allister Thompson

Design: Courtney Horner

Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Kelly, Sean, 1972

Metal on ice [electronic resource] : tales from Canada's hard rock and heavy metal heroes / by Sean Kelly.

Electronic document in multiple formats.
Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-4597-0711-5

1. Heavy metal (Music)--Canada. 2. Rock music--Canada.

I. Title.

ML3534.6.K295 2013 782.421660971 C2013-900809-8

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

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Rites of Initiation into Canadas Hard Rock Scene

I n 1984/85 I was a member of the G&P Welding PeeWee A hockey team in my Northern Ontario home town of North Bay, Ontario. As with most young Canadian boys, there was nothing more important than my regular schedule of Tuesday night practices and Friday night games. That all changed with the musical revelations pumping through the speakers of an intimidatingly large ghetto blaster, property of one Scott Dean, the toughest eleven-year-old youd ever meet. Scott had a penchant for getting into physical altercations with members of the opposing teams, their parents, and sometimes even his own parents. But he also demonstrated a protective sympathy for my own gentle nature, and I could always count on Scott to deliver payback (usually in the form of a crosscheck to the throat or back) to anyone who levelled me on the ice.

The music from Scotts ghetto blaster would pump us up as we rocked out to the strains of Survivors Eye of the Tiger, Billy Squiers The Stroke, and Chilliwacks My Girl. This was the stuff you could count on hearing every time you strapped on your roller skates and hit the Northern Lights Roller Rink, an aluminium-sided monstrosity that was home to many first kisses, first boob-grabs, and first beatings at the hands of moustachioed pre-adults in cut-off tees, hi-top sneakers, and too-tight jeans. But one day Scott threw on something that pushed the pedal down much much harder and a lot heavier. It was a band called Helix, and the song was Rock You. All the familiar elements that used to exist in the background of the music Id heard (guitars, drums, vocals) for me all of a sudden came screaming into the foreground. Within the first few measures of the tunes famous call-and-response chorus of Gimme an R (R!), O (O!), C (C!), K (K!) whatcha got (ROCK) and whatcha gonna do? ROCK YOU! a shift in perception happened. Music wasnt just going to be a background soundtrack for my life; it was going to be my life. I was going to learn to play the guitar for real! I was gonna shout at the devil. I sure as hell wasnt gonna take it, and I was gonna rock you.

Thus began my process of discovery of hard rock and heavy metal music. The music was piped into my life in the same way it was for any number of Canadian pre-teens picked up from the schoolyard and the ever-growing output of music videos airing on the music specialty shows of the day. Shows like Friday Night Videos , Video Hits , and Good Rockin Tonite played the odd video of the heavy metal I was craving, but my main fix came from the freshly launched MuchMusic channel, and specifically The Power Hour , a sixty-minute blast of metal in all its existing incarnations. Helix loomed large in my mind, but to be honest, they were overshadowed by the metal sounds coming from the U.S. and Europe. These bands just seemed to be more prevalent at the time and certainly had more print space in rock and metal rags like Hit Parader , Circus, Creem and whatever other publication I could pick up at Shoppers Drug Mart. Even though the wheels of establishing our Canadian cultural identity had long been set into motion by the mid-1980s, I believe it is safe to say that as consumers of pop culture product, many of us were still largely informed by content coming from south of the border. We modelled the idyllic view of family life on such shows as The Cosby Show, Family Ties , and Growing Pains , marvelled at the Americanized bravado of Indiana Jones and Rocky Balboa, and most definitely consumed much more American music than Canadian. Canada was willing and ready to mainline American entertainment.

As far as music goes, the ever growing popularity of the cable TV medium bombarded us with images of American and European bands performing to screaming throngs of thousands. In doing so, these artists seemed like rock gods who would never deign to play in arenas that held fewer than 10,000 people. In other words, for those of us Canadians who grew up in smaller locales, simple mathematics seemed to dictate that we would never see these artists in their perfect natural environment, an eighty-foot stage with a full array of speakers piled high, walls of Marshall cabinets, and enough lights to power a small city. Of course, I was aware that there were Canadian bands out there, but they really only existed in my periphery. I heard their songs on the radio and I had seen their videos. Many of them, like Helix, Kick Axe, and Honeymoon Suite, were definitely contenders for my devotion as a fan. Looking back, I doubt I really considered the fact that they were Canadian at all. They just existed in the shadows of the heavyweights whose image, hype, and music I had been consuming via American mass media.

The musical fare of Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister, Mtley Cre, and Def Leppard were doing heavy rotation on my parents archaic turntable, and my hockey-playing buddy Scott and I would spend hours listening then poking away at the out-of-tune second-hand electric guitars we had acquired for Christmas. There was no Internet guitar tablature or YouTube videos to learn from, so instead we perfected the techniques we could master, posing in front of the mirror and smoking cigarettes in the backyard. Scott had long blond hair and looked like an eleven-year-old rock star. And frankly, faking along to records and sneaking out for a smoke in the backyard with a cool-looking kid was satisfying enough. This was gonna be my thing. I really wasnt prepared for the new dimension my thing would take on after I witnessed my first rock n roll concert, nor was I aware until years later of the significance of the venue in which it took place.