Preview
JOHN FORD
Wednesday, March 26
Ship and Anchor Pub
Chris Read doesn’t care if his friends don’t like his band’s music. In fact, he’s used to them making fun of it. And it’s pretty likely that the bassist for Vancouver’s John Ford got used to being ribbed while apprenticing in Calgary’s music scene circa 10 years ago, at a time when bands seemed to routinely and overtly take the piss out of each other.
"Yeah, our friends make fun of our music, but so what?" he says. "It really doesn’t bother me. We’re gigging a lot and we’ve got support to get our single out, so we’re doing more than a lot of them are. Besides… when we get on stage, we open it (the music) up."
Read grew up in northwest Calgary and knocked around in various bands, including Bad Housekeeping, before settling in Vancouver about three years ago.
While at one point John Ford did take to the stage with acoustic guitars in hand, stints opening for the likes of Tragically Hip and David Usher taught them that to win over someone else’s audience, they should use their electric guitars to go for the jugular. While such tactics safely swung them away from the alt-country catchment, it did put them in a bit of a bind. Their music is no longer cool enough for campus radio, but it’s too headstrong and well-written to be tossed in with the crap on commercial radio. Read admits it’s a problem.
"You listen to (commercial) radio and it’s hard to picture us in there. It wouldn’t have been as hard to picture a few years ago, but now, who knows?… In the meantime, we’ll give ’em as much as we can in our live shows, and try and win ’em over one by one."
When John Ford first formed, the band was perceived as a Buffalo Springfield-meets-Crazy Horse kind of roots band. Listening to the group’s album, the Gordie Johnson-produced Bullets For Dreamers, any whiff of roots music is a memory, composted by the stomp of rock riffs and beats. The album’s opening chords are like a four-year flashback to the start of D Generation’s Through the Darkness album. Read owns up to the fact that he was a fan of that band and has also been keeping tabs on the solo career of D Generation vocalist Jesse Malin.
Like Poison dressed up in the glad rags of The Damned, John Ford’s songs rely on a hooky hybrid of phrases and hundred-pound harmonies to underpin lyrics that sound like they’ve been spit out of a mouth cocked halfway between a smile and a snarl. The result is 11 songs that seem instantly familiar. Sure, people who perceive themselves as cool might make fun of you for owning the record, but you can just turn up the volume on a song like "(Gone is The) Freedom Train" and drown ’em out with its heart-speeding guitar crunch and roller coaster-phrasing. |
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