Home Grown Volume 2: Saskatoon's Hottest New Talent

In 1996, Saskatoon radio station SUN 102 FM invited musicians from the city and surrounding area to submit their best songs, then picked ten acts for a locally produced compact disc. Audio Art Recording sponsored and assembled the project, with SUN 102’s Guy Ethier and Audio Art’s Glenn Ens as executive producers.

Thirty years on, the subtitle Saskatoon’s Hottest New Talent reads a little differently. Some of these musicians left almost no trace after 1996. Others kept working around Saskatchewan for years. A few were caught just before careers that took them much further, and at least one had already spent years in one of the province’s most successful rock bands.

The disc opens with Five Minute Miracle and ‘Southbound’, recorded at Silverwood Studios with Allen Ayers engineering. Aaron Adair sings and plays acoustic guitar, with Curtis Olson on lead guitar, Ryan Hall on bass and Patrick Young on drums. By 1999 Five Minute Miracle had toured Canada three times in a single year, had put serious money into a professional album, and was seen as one of the few Saskatchewan acts able to tour well beyond the province.

Charger follows with ‘Hey Katie’, recorded at Fresh Vibe Studio.

Track three, The Non Happners’ ‘Nothing I Am’, features Dave Tycholis on vocals and keyboards, Brent Truitt on guitars, Kevin Macza on bass and Don Schmid on drums and percussion. Schmid had joined the Northern Pikes in 1986 and stayed through their major-label years. By the time the Pikes went on hiatus in 1993 they had collected eight Juno nominations, four gold records and a platinum record. This track catches him in the six years between the band’s original run and its 1999 reunion.

Lace contributes ‘The Gettin’ Ain’t Gettin’ Good’, with Phil Desroches, Tracy Simpson, Dean Gallagher and Steve Ramenda. Very little else survives about the group. A band did not have to break nationally to be part of a city’s musical life, and for acts like Lace a local CD such as this may be the clearest record that they existed at all.

Wood’s ‘Kissing You’ was produced by singer and rhythm guitarist Chris Besenski and recorded at Silverwood Studios with Jeff Gantnier on bass, Neil Hendry on lead guitar and Damon Tupper on drums. Listed on background vocals is Andrea Menard.

Menard went on to become a prominent Métis singer-songwriter, actor and writer, working across music, theatre, television and film, with five Gemini nominations and fifteen Canadian music awards. Her breakthrough came soon after with The Velvet Devil, a project she has said “put me on the map.” This background-vocal credit places her in the Saskatoon music scene before The Velvet Devil brought her much wider attention. It may not be her first recording, but it is one of the earliest to carry her name.

Wood was a serious local draw in its own right. By 1999 the band had released three CDs and was playing to crowds of up to 7,000.

Tekoa’s six-minute ‘Maybe Now’, with Shannon Wegner, Trevor Harder, Myron Wegner and Raelene Harder, was recorded at Creative House. Bo Bek’s ‘Daydream’ is an Audio Art production, produced by Bo Galczyk and Glenn Ens and engineered by Ens and Wayne Geisbrecht, with Dale Dufort, Ray Goertzen, Ron Mohr, Dwayne Harder, Elsie Osborne and Vincent Spilchuk backing Galczyk.

Audio Art runs through the whole project. Ens co-founded the studio in 1984, and it grew into one of Saskatoon’s key recording studios, working over the years with the Northern Pikes, Jordan Cook, Josh Palmer and Teresa Sokyrka. Read with the studio credits in hand, Home Grown Volume 2 maps the musicians, studios and engineers who kept independent recording going in Saskatoon in the mid-1990s.

Slabdrab contributes ‘Las Vegas Showgirl’, recorded at Audio Art with Michael Barrett, Jeff Walters and Kris Perrier. The band stayed active for roughly another decade, releasing three full-length albums and sharing bills with Nazareth, Honeymoon Suite, Harlequin, Trooper, April Wine, Streetheart and Lee Aaron. Soundscape Magazine named their Soda Pop Superstar Saskatchewan’s top independent album of 1999.

The Acoustic Horror Club, Judah and Dallas Pendleton, supply a track whose title is printed on the disc as ‘Castles’n as and’.

The disc closes with Polly-Esther’s ‘Cherub’, featuring Anique Granger on lead vocals and mandolin, Rachel Duperreault on violin and Charles Dumont on drums. Granger and her childhood friend Duperreault had started the group only a year earlier, in 1995. Polly-Esther went on to record three albums and spend a decade touring Canada, the United States, Europe, Egypt and Israel, and won the 2003 Western Canadian Music Award for Outstanding Francophone Recording. Granger has since built an extensive solo career.

The ten tracks catch musicians at very different points. Polly-Esther was just starting out. Andrea Menard was a few years from the work that made her name nationally. Five Minute Miracle was about to move from a local following to national touring. Wood was becoming one of Saskatoon’s best-supported independent bands. Don Schmid had already finished the first big chapter of the Northern Pikes. Around them sit Charger, Lace, Tekoa, The Acoustic Horror Club and players whose later stories are much harder to trace.

SUN 102 billed these ten acts as local independent artists and “tomorrow’s stars.” Heard today, the CD is a snapshot of a Saskatoon music community in motion, taken before anyone knew which names would travel.