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Big Secret Theatre
Friday, September 21 - Friday, September 21
More in: Rock / Pop
The Rocky Fortune want to make something perfectly clear. “If there is one thing I can’t stand, it’s being tagged as an alt-country band or a country rock band,” says songwriter Todd Gesshe. “I don’t listen to country music. No one in our band listens to country music.”
Yes, Calgary’s The Rocky Fortune are prone to the occasional twang. Indeed, they’ve been known to throw down with a banjo, but they know how to mix up their influences. In this case, the influences are all over the map. Guitarist Ty Toews works his axe with Crazy Horse-style abandon. Gesshe is a self-confessed hip hop head. Drummer Craig Florence offers quartz-precision beats with chops that he honed as a teenager in punk outfit Daryl’s Grocery Bag with Toews and Gesshe. With a recently fleshed-out lineup that includes bassist Craig Van Berkel and Steve Fletcher on keys, the band is infused with even more diversity. It’s no surprise that Gesshe is confused by the country-rock tags. It really only touches on one part of what The Rocky Fortune do.
This is brought into crisp focus mere seconds into “She Soviet,” the lead-off track from their latest long-player, Back of the Beeside. Recorded in glorious analogue, the song locks on with a hypnotic bass groove and layers of processed guitars before Gesshe’s tongue-twisting mantras give way to an explosive shout-along chorus. It’s a savvy bit of songwriting and it undeniably rocks.
“Maybe we deliberately produced it that way and put that as the first track to just basically tell people, ‘wake up. Quit calling us a country band,’” says Gesshe. “Let’s just listen to it, and then you will realize that it is just not a fair tag to be throwing on our band.”
If that song weren’t enough, The Rocky Fortune also offer up a similarly propulsive title track. With its anthemic riffs, rapid-fire tambourine and solos that go for days, “Back of the B-Side” is a fist-pumper that will knock the alt-country label flat on its ass.
FOR FOLK SAKES
To be fair, there is a reason The Rocky Fortune got those comparisons. If you weren’t in the clubs for the band’s powerhouse live show, chances are you heard about them when they took home honours in the Calgary Folk Music Festival songwriting competition. “Hot Black Blood” topped the Best of Alberta category with an ironic tirade about this province’s dependency on oil.
“I’m not a staunchly political guy,” says Gesshe, “but looking at the political situation in Alberta, I wanted to kind of make light of what I’m seeing. It’s all greed, greed, greed, greed, greed, and we had an oil pimp for a premier. That’s what was really fuelling all of this and all this affluence. I wanted to shed a little light on that.”
Like much of the writing on Back of the Beeside, “Hot Black Blood” is as smart as it is catchy. Even though the song is built upon Toews’s lightning quick work on the banjo, it’s not country, it’s folk — a distinction that Gesshe is quick to make.
“If there is something I can do it’s write folk songs,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll get a little more heady and a little more free verse with stuff, but I find when I’m writing songs, the stuff that I remember and the stuff that I like is Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly — just straight up. Make it rhyme, make it sound nice, make it fun like you want children to remember this, and you are really trying to share something with people and communicate it easily without making it an overwhelming challenge.”
It’s a delicate balance, but one that is maintained throughout Back of the Beeside. While the band is delivering bluesy breakdowns, tumbling melodies and rhythmic give and take, Gesshe is penning infectious choruses for thought-provoking rockers. Whether the social awareness comes from the folk idiom, his love of hip hop or his punk rock ethics, Gesshe has mastered the difficult skill of saying what he has to without it ever getting in the way of the melody.
“I think a lot of people are afraid of politics, and that’s the problem with the world. People think you are either political or not political,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t have opinions on things, and strong opinions on things. It’s just a matter of sharing a perspective.”
“If someone is listening to a song and it just makes them think about a certain issue in a certain way, it is more inviting than someone in a political band who is driving it down your throat. It comes off more pretentious to me, I find, when someone is talking politics to you…. All I can do with a song is just paint a picture of what you see.”
