Vancouver bar band Billboard Heroes finds covering obscure Gamma songs to be very effective

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON DEC. 2, 1983

By Steve Newton

“The thing we like to do the most is rehearse,” says 23-year-old Colin Wiebe, keyboardist for Vancouver’s Billboard Heroes. “To take a week or two weeks and just get in a hall and write songs and learn new tunes–learn them just for the sake of learning them even though you wouldn’t play them live. Just to be ‘a band’, you know.

“When you play the same songs night after night, and you have to learn so much of a certain format, it begins to come so naturally that you’re not really thinking about playing–you’re just going through the motions. So it’s nice to just get out for a week and really rehearse. You can go all night or you can go for an hour, it doesn’t really matter. It’s what everyone wants.”

The Billboard Heroes’ strength in working together as a team was very evident when the band played the Outlaws cabaret last week. Wiebe, guitarist Tim McKenzie, bassist Garry Koenig, singer Brian King, and drummer Rick Spolar put on a fiesty rock and roll show, and incorporated about 10 of their own tunes into their regular Top 40 set.

“There’s some good bands in the city right now that have strong originals,” claims Wiebe, “and we’re hoping they can start playing theirs as much as we are. Because there’s nothing wrong with doing two dance sets and then doing an original show at the end of the night.”

Although the Billboard Heroes didn’t do that when I saw them at Outlaws last Wednesday, they do have a complete set of their own material, and will use it in certain clubs. Even though, as Wiebe points out, the response from the powers that be has been pretty cold.

“Everybody’s been trying to discourage us from doing it–the club owners and agents especially–but it hasn’t hurt at all. As a matter of fact, when we played Vancouver’s Tonight, people were coming down just to see the third set. They danced and drank and did what they’re supposed to do in a club, and the club owners really didn’t have anything to complain about.”

Wiebe’s enthusiam for original material is not surprising, considering one of his compositions came third out of 20,000 entries in last year’s American Song Festival. The tune, “I Lost the Key to Your Heart”, which Wiebe calls “a very commercial, Bryan Adams/Rick Springfield type of song”, was sung by Dave Reimer, who Wiebe used to play with in a local band called Race. Since taking the third prize, he’s signed a deal with a local publishing company, and has had several singers show an interest in covering his songs.

“I consider myself more of a writer than a player,” says Wiebe, “but they go hand in hand-you get better at one and the other helps. I like writing pop songs, so I listen to other guys that are writing really good ones. Like Rick Springfield–he’s the typical girl’s idol and everything like that–but I think he’s a really good writer.”

Wiebe and King are the main songwriters in the band, and guitarist McKenzie helps with the musical arrangements. They currently have a four-song demo tape, recorded at Vancouver’s Ocean Sound, which is being shopped to the record companies. The tracks are “Staring Into the Dark”, “Magazine Girl”, “I Wish I Had a Car”, and “Once in a Lifetime”.

Another of the band’s tunes, “Victim of Circumstance”, includes the lyric “billboard hero”, and that’s where they got their name. So even though it may sound pompous, Wiebe points out that the band name doesn’t refer to heroes in a magazine or anything.

Even though the group does play mostly cover tunes–and it would be hard to keep on the unimaginative local bar circuit if they didn’t–Wiebe feels there is something to be said for bands that do other people’s songs. If they do them well.

“I remember when I was growing up, that usually bands doing original material were ones that couldn’t really play the other stuff very well at all. And so they would cop out, saying, ‘Well we do these kind of songs.’ We have to play the hits, just like everybody else, but we like to pick a few things that can show off the band a little bit.”

One of those is the band’s version of Gamma’s “Right the First Time”, which is doubly impressive as it allows bassist Koenig to work out on a neat solo, and also is the sort of song one doesn’t hear every day–a cover not often covered. The group also does the Gamma song “What’s Gone is Gone”.

“We’ve been playing them for a long time,” says Wiebe, “but nobody wants to get rid of them because they’re so effective.”

Wiebe joined the Billboard Heroes last year, after King, Koenig, and Spolar moved out west from Winnipeg, where they had been playing in a band called the Freeze. And since coming together, the current lineup has seen their fair (unfair?) share of trouble on the road. Just about a month ago, when the band had stopped for an early morning pizza in Penticton, somebody hopped into their van and sped away.

They found the vehicle the next day–at the bottom of a cliff–but Tom and Garry’s favourite guitars, a Les Paul Custom and Fender Precision, were never recovered.

“I thought it was a some kind of a joke at first,” says Colin of the disappearing van, “but it didn’t turn out very funny.”

Yet the crime in Penticton–and another bizarre incident involving assault charges in Campbell River–hasn’t been enough to stop the Billboard Heroes, who continue to bring their fast-paced sound to local audiences. Tonight and tomorrow they finish out a week at Backstage.

To read over 100 of my other interviews with local Vancouver musicians since 1983, go here.