Saskatoon Rocks

SOUND FX

Sound FX was a five-piece Saskatoon rock band that worked the city's clubs and hotel rooms in the early 1980s, playing current Top 40 hits alongside original songs with a new wave and power pop edge. Joe Chad sang lead, Rob Worobetz played guitar, Mark Sadlowski played keyboards and saxophone, Tony Parent played bass and Rob "Headdy" Hemsworth played drums. Each member wore his hair a different colour, and the local papers made a point of mentioning it.

By 1982 the band was a regular at the North 40 Inn on 20th Street West, playing both the hotel's show room and Sneakie's, the second-floor discotheque upstairs. Sneakie's promised Top 40 and FM rock "played the way you want," stayed open until 5 a.m. on weekends and switched to soft drinks after 1:30. The club brought Sound FX in for a run starting on a Monday and also booked the band for its party welcoming 1983, with a hot and cold buffet, party favours and midnight treats on the ticket. The group also played Emilio's on Idylwyld Drive and Flanagan's at the Holiday Inn, which billed it as a "dynamic five piece band" with a lively, up-to-date Top 40 show.

In 1983 the band took its own songs to the Lower Hall of the Saskatoon Centennial Auditorium. The preview in the paper's entertainment column called Sound FX a free-wheeling, high-energy Saskatchewan rock band, throwing inhibitions to the wind with coloured hair, mobility and madness on stage.

That same year Sound FX made its first record, a self-titled five-song 12-inch EP produced by Brian Plummer for Cimarron Productions. It was recorded and mixed at Studio West in Saskatoon with engineer Gary Dean. Wayne Wilkins, who owned the studio, was executive producer for BBJ Management, the same role he had taken on Plummer's own album No Questions. The record collected five band originals: 'She Stole My Heart', 'Caramia', '(You're Much Too) Close A Shave', 'Julie's Jewelry' and 'Agent 88'.

CKOM 1250, which billed itself as Saskatoon's only rock station, added the EP to its album chart in December 1983. It entered at No. 20 on December 9 and moved up to No. 18 the following week, in a Top 20 that also held Streetheart, Headpins and Jack Green alongside the Rolling Stones, ZZ Top and Culture Club.

In 1985 Sound FX contributed 'Shape Up' to Saskatoon Rocks, a Rock FM 103 compilation of original songs by eight area bands, produced by Studio West Canada Ltd. at its Pike Lake facility. The lineup was unchanged from the EP, and the song was credited to the whole band. By then much of Saskatoon's independent rock was being recorded at Studio West, where the Northern Pikes had cut their debut EP the year before.

-Robert Williston

FLYING COLOURS

Flying Colors was a Saskatoon rock band of the mid-1980s: Tom Liska on lead vocals, Kevin Barrett on keyboards and vocals, Grant Lagimodiere on guitar, Gary Zdunich on bass and Mark Weston on drums and percussion. The band's one known recording is 'One More Heartache', a Weston original included on Saskatoon Rocks, the 1985 Rock FM 103 compilation of songs by eight area bands.

The track was cut at Studio West's Pike Lake facility outside Saskatoon, with Mitch Barnett engineering and remixing and studio owner Wayne Wilkins as executive producer. Barnett had worked as an assistant engineer on Sound FX's EP two years earlier, and on Saskatoon Rocks Flying Colors shared the record with Sound FX, Revelon, the Northern Pikes, the Guise, Third Party, Denim and the Frantics. When the band formed, where it played and when it ended are not yet known.

Kevin Barrett came to Flying Colors with the longest track record in the band. Born in Saskatoon on August 31, 1958, the youngest of five boys, he started piano at five. As a teenager his brother Mark talked their father into buying him a Yamaha combo organ and amplifier, and he began writing songs and playing in bands. In 1978, the year he graduated from Walter Murray Collegiate, he joined Tornado Warning as keyboardist and lead singer. The band toured Western Canada and recorded some of his early songs. Through the 1980s he played in The Warning, Gallery, Dash Riprock, Arena, Los Tornados and a later version of Tornado Warning.

In 1991 he formed the Kevin Barrett Band and recorded an album of his own songs, Making Movies. Tomcat Records picked it up, and in 1994 'Dance To The Beat Of My Heart' reached No. 3 on the Futures Top 40, followed by 'I Don't Know Why'. The band shared stages with Bryan Adams, Steve Miller, Extreme, Sass Jordan and Colin James.

Barrett finished a Bachelor of Music in Music Education at the University of Saskatchewan in 1993 and taught high school for 26 years. He started at Nutana Collegiate as a temporary art teacher, launched a guitar course there and learned the guitar himself as he taught it. He spent his last ten years at Mount Royal Collegiate, where he founded the Rockin' Royal Orchestra. He kept playing in Outside the Wall, a Pink Floyd tribute, and in Kashmir and BC Read, and in his final decade wrote much of a catalogue of more than 300 songs. Five of them were recorded by Nashville session musicians shortly before he died in Saskatoon on June 15, 2023, at 64.

-Robert Williston