Fans of rock and roll will be looking forward to seeing an up and coming Saskatoon group at Gold Eagle Casino this coming Friday night.
One Bad Son is kicking off their latest tour in North Battleford and will be moving on to Edmonton and Grande Prairie and then to various other venues in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and British Columbia.
After that, the rock band has their sights set on the United States for the first time with plans to do an American tour to Seattle and Portland.
The band of singer-songwriters is originally from Saskatoon, and recently located back there after spending four years in Vancouver.
“The plan was always to come back home,” said drummer Kurt Dahl, who is part of the band along with singer Shane Connery Volk, guitarist Adam Hicks and Adam Grant, aka “Granny,” as bassist. “This is where our families are, this is where all our closest friends are.”
They had moved from Saskatoon in order to “take our career to the next level,” he said. The choice for them was either “Vancouver or Toronto, and Vancouver had the ocean,” said Dahl.
Now that they have achieved that “next level” of success, the band members felt the time was right to be back home where they started.
“Once you have that level of exposure, you can be based out of anywhere,” Dahl said, adding “we’re usually based out of our van.”
The hard work for the group began in 2004 in Saskatoon, where the four musicians spent years working to establish their band in the music industry.
“Looking back, they were tough years, you know, to establish a fan base and establish yourselves as writers and bandmates and brothers,” said Dahl. “Most bands don’t get through that first three to five years.”
The four ended up renting a “broken down old house” in downtown Saskatoon and endured lean times as they pursued their dreams. “Everybody’s got other things they could be doing with their lives, but you make sacrifices because you believe in rock and roll.”
Living together for two and a half years allowed the band to hone their skills as writers and “live and breathe the music,” said Dahl. After a while, the group really started to define their sound.
“Things started to really just happen naturally,” said Dahl. “It’s really hard to write great songs and get songs to that level, but things start to click. And that’s the greatest gift for any musician. You hope they always do that. But as you know, with any band that you like, it comes and goes, that sort of magic comes and goes. As a musician, it’s always that pursuit that is the real challenge and gift of being a creative person.”
The group has had some recent success. Their 2012 album, simply entitled One Bad Son, featured some radio hits including Scarecrows, It Ain’t Right and Retribution Blues.
They followed that album up with an extensive tour before releasing their most recent album, Black Buffalo, last fall.
That album includes the hit Satellite Hotel,which made the Active Rock charts as the No. 1 Most Added track for two weeks in a row last year.
Earlier this week, the title track from that album, Black Buffalo, was released to radio for the first time and band members were fielding calls and text messages from people excited about the release.
This is the sort of reaction that “keeps us going,” said Dahl.
For Friday’s show, people in the Battlefords can expect a performance that is true to the tradition of the rock bands that dominated from the 1970s to the early ‘90s.
Rock and roll, said Dahl, used to be “really special — bands played their own instruments, wrote their own songs, kind of followed their own path and made something special. For some reason, in 2015 that’s harder to find.”
One Bad Son is trying to “carry the torch from our idols,” he said, referring to bands such as Led Zeppelin, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and other groups.
“If you like all those bands, you might like us,” said Dahl. “We’re just a real rock and roll band.”
In addition to One Bad Son, opening on Friday night at Gold Eagle Casino will be League of Wolves, a rising band planning to release their debut album this April.
