The Trews guitarist John-Angus MacDonald soaked up some of Ace Frehley’s mojo on tour

Nobody ever expected a gang of rowdy rednecks from the South to score a radio hit advocating gun control. Thirty-three years ago Lynyrd Skynyrd did just that with “Saturday Night Special”, and now a quartet of boogie-minded rockers from the North has taken up the antigun torch.

On their new CD, No Time for Later, Nova Scotia’s the Trews rally against the endless carnage wrought by Smith, Wesson, and the other dealers of death.

“Another bunch of kids in a bloody mess/Another maniac killing innocence,” hollers lead vocalist Colin MacDonald in the opening line of “Gun Control”. According to guitarist John-Angus MacDonald, Colin’s younger brother, the song is a direct reaction to last year’s Virginia Tech massacre, in which student Seung-Hui Cho slaughtered 32 people with two semiautomatic handguns.

“Me and Colin were sharing an apartment when we were writing for this record,” MacDonald recalls, on the line from New York City, “and that happened right in the middle of it. It was all over Fox and CNN, and to us it felt like everybody was really beatin’ around the bush, talking about how the guy was psychologically imbalanced, or how there were no security guards on campus with guns. And to us it was just like, ‘No, dummies!’ We just took the guns right out of the equation.”

The anger and frustration heard on “Gun Control” is easily understood by Canadians who feel powerless against the steady stream of U.S.–made weapons landing on our streets. But as MacDonald learned firsthand while touring the States recently, a song that puts the NRA in its cross hairs isn’t always welcomed there.

“We’ve been playing it on the road every night,” he explains, “and some people come up to us and say, ‘That’s brilliant, and I totally agree,’ and then others come up and say, ‘Keep your fuckin’ hippie-dippy values in Canada.’ ”

But even the most staunch defender of the right to bear arms would be hard-pressed to dismiss the urgent riffs and catchy melodies that adorn “Gun Control”. Most of the songs on No Time for Later sport a similarly amped-up vibrancy. MacDonald gives most of the credit for the CD’s intensely rockin’ vibe to producers Gus Van Go and Werner F, and notes that he was particularly impressed by Van Go’s previous work with Montreal hard-rockers Priestess.

Like them, the Trews–who play the sold-out Commodore Ballroom on Monday (April 14)–are heavily influenced by classic guitar-rock; they listen to everything from ’70s bands like the James Gang and Humble Pie to newer, retro-flavoured acts such as the Kings of Leon. And they’ve just completed an American tour with Ace Frehley, which has led them to take a tip from that old Cheap Trick song and get their KISS records out.

Opening for the former KISS picker has been inspiring for MacDonald (“Ace has got so much mojo to his playing”), and has led to pointers on how to play the nifty solo from “Firehouse”. When it comes to the Trews’ guitar breaks, though, MacDonald isn’t quite as quick to share. He did allow Colin to take the lead solo on “Burning Wheels”—and create a “crazy maelstrom of fucking sound”—but it’s not a favour he normally lays on his bro.

“I’m the lead guitar player,” he points out with a chuckle. “I don’t sing any songs, so I should get to solo on ’em.”

To hear the full audio of my 2008 interview with John-Angus MacDonald of the Trews subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 650 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with rockers since 1982.