Kimberley music fans recently may have noticed flyers, or even caught a performance, from a band called Oracle Jones, who promise to provide a “Glimpse of vintage rock and roll.”
Oracle Jones is in fact the latest iteration of a group of three local musicians whose collective history goes back five decades, and those fortunate enough to have caught one of their recent performances can surely attest to the wealth of talent and experience contained within.
The name for the project, the band explains, comes from a character in the 1965 whiskey runner movie, The Hallelujah Trail.
“I was a big fan of the movie,” said bass player Dave Birch. “I was an usher at the time and I saw that movie maybe 40 times, and I really, really liked it. Oracle Jones was a wagon train scout and he could see the future when he got drunk, basically.”
Jones first started playing music with guitar player Rob Young in 1971 and a year later they were joined by Marty Musser on the drums.
They played together with a couple of other musicians rounding out the band, touring extensively around western Canada until around 1979 when they went their separate ways and started their own families.
Over the years they had several musicians come and go from the lineup and have gone by a few different monikers. The first band in the early 70s was called Light Flight. Another project was called The Groove Juice Special. Then later there was 60 Hertz.
The bandmates themselves will admit that the timelines of all the different iterations and concerts played together over the years is hard to keep track of, but the one thing that is consistent is their friendship and their collective taste and love of the music they play.
The three of them get together in Kimberley every Wednesday to practice for three hours, and still play shows from time to time.
“I think the impetus of the band is friendship,” Birch said. “Every week getting together is like a social thing for me. We all have very similar taste in music.We listen to the same kind of music, we’ve always had the same kind of interest in music, band-wise and stuff. Getting together as friends to play music is where it is for me.”
Reflecting back on their years touring together, the three of them have endless stories and fond memories. From playing the first-ever Kimberley JulyFest back when it was at Coronation Park, to playing some of their favourite gigs at the Banff Springs Hotel when hundreds of the young staff would turn come to the shows every time, to one of their first-ever road gigs at the Marigold Hotel in Regina, which Birch said, “certainly made an impression.”
“We’d been playing for a couple weeks, and in the middle of a song right in the middle of the set, a guy got stabbed right in front of us,” Musser said. “It was at the Marigold Hotel in Regina. Our lead singer turned around and said to us ‘keep playing, don’t stop!’”
These days, while they still love to just get together and practice, Young said they still try and get out to play when they can, though finding good venues can be challenging.
“I don’t think we’re at that stage where all we want to do is sit here and practice,” Young said. “It’s nice to get out there because it puts everything you’re doing to the test.”
In terms of their sound, Birch explained that their poster says “vintage rock and roll” and that they were careful not to say “classic rock and roll,” because that’s not what they play.
“We do play vintage songs, that were often the B-sides to records,” he explained. “Growing up, you bought an album, you didn’t just get a song. You bought an album and it was generally put together with a lot of thought from the artists. It wasn’t just we got six songs, bang they’re on here.”
So you may hear something from Fleetwood Mac’s early era, before Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nix joined the band.
While they’re not writing original songs, Birch said they like to take cover songs and look at them through their own creative lens, ultimately coming away with a rendition of the tune that’s very personal and unique.
He added that back in their touring days, it was crucial to play cover songs as accurately as possible, and the audience would judge them based on how close they could get their songs to sound like the hits on the radio.
Now, however, they play for themselves first and the audience second.
“For my whole life it was the audience comes first,” Birch said. “You want to present yourselves so the audience really likes you, and now in my mind I really don’t care if they like us or not, because I really like us.”
Communicating with each other about what they want to play is also crucial, and over the years they are continually showing each other new songs and new artists and digging, and playing what they like to play.
It’s different now in that they only play once a week, especially considering Birch and Young lived together for 15 years, and they played constantly. But the friendship forged throughout that time is the most foundational thing for all of them.
“At a certain age it felt as though there were a lot of musicians around and if one of them didn’t work you just dumped into somebody else and kept on playing, but the older you get the more you realize how special our friendship was and still is,” Musser reflected.
“And it’s not as straightforward and simple as it seemed when we were young. Now we look at each other and know we’re pretty lucky. This is pretty unique. And it’s not just the friendship, it’s similar tastes, not specifically genres, but a very, very similar approach creatively. And the older you get the more you realize how rare that is.”
Catch Oracle Jones at the Marysville Pub on Friday, May 24 and at Grist and Mash on Thursday, July 18.
