Victoria’s underground rock legend Stephen McBean brings ‘Bang Box Boogie Tour’ to Key City Theatre

By Ferdy Belland

“I’m kicking off the Bang Box Boogie tour in Portland,” explains Pink Mountaintops vocalist-guitarist-bandleader Stephen McBean (pictured), “and we’ve got a dozen dates to follow. We’re starting to get back into the heavy swing of things with live performances. We did a few shows across B.C. and Vancouver Island back in April, which went really well. Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo, Cumberland, Powell River – it was cool, but somewhat unusual.

“There are all these new communities emerging, where we can play shows we couldn’t play before. That’s partly due to the bigger cities becoming, sadly, too expensive to live in, so working-class artsy types are migrating to smaller cities where they stand a chance of still making it. And they keep their musical tastes with them after the move. But it’s great for us – there’s more touring opportunities now. It’s a lot of fun. And we get to play Cranbrook for the first time!”

Pink Mountaintops brings their compelling brand of high-octane psychedelic art-rock to Cranbrook on Wednesday September 13 as a mid-tour stop on their 2023 Bang Box Boogie Tour, with special guests The Mellow Rows.

“There’s a Nelson show, there’s a Red Deer show…I mean, I’ve never played Red Deer before, believe it or not. And I haven’t played Nelson since 1995, not since I was still playing in Gus. I can’t believe it’s been almost 30 years since I’ve played the Kootenays – I guess the booking agents kept us too busy elsewhere! It’s going to fun to play Cranbrook.”

“This latest touring version of Pink Mountaintops will be me and Tolan McNeil, my longstanding musical sidekick who’s been with me since the Gus days,” says McBean. “We’ll be playing with a drum machine and a sequencer setup to flesh out the rest of the live show. This will be our avant-garde weirdo guitar-orgy set!

“We had to modify Pink Mountaintops this way just because touring is just so damn expensive right now, for everyone doing it. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing the Rickshaw Theatre or Madison Square Garden. It doesn’t help when gasoline is a buck-eighty a liter. And don’t get me started on vehicle rental costs! So, it’s just me and Tolan. Which is not to say that the audience will be cheated or anything – far from it! Tolan and I can create a hell of a lot of sound together, with or without the help of a drum machine or a sequencer array.

“Sometimes we’ll pick additional musicians up along the way; we’ve got lots of musical friends everywhere, and please remember that there’s been 30, almost 40 different people who’ve passed in and out of the band over the years. Pink Mountaintops will not disappoint!”

If there’s one thing Stephen McBean does not do as a musician, it’s disappoint.

He’s been vigorously active on the Canadian underground rock scene since 1983 (when he was fresh young punk-rocking lad of 14), and McBean casually exploded out of the sleepy post-imperial doldrums of Victoria and blasted his way through the rest of the 1980s (and all through the 1990s) in a long string of cleverly muscular bands that crossed the spectrum between punk, psychedelia, garage rock, heavy metal, and most points in between: Mission of Christ, Gus, Ex-Dead Teenager, Jerk With a Bomb.

But it was the disjointed post-9/11 indie-rock scene of the 21st Century where McBean made his international mark, supernova-ing over an unsuspecting, blasé Millennial / Gen-Z audience worldwide with the near-simultaneous 2004/2005 releases of the debut albums (both on Jagjaguwar Records) of his prog-stoner-whatchamacallit outfit Black Mountain – and of Pink Mountaintops, where McBean steered away from the more angular-metallic approach of Black Mountain and focused more on slippery, experimental psych-rock that also touched on folk-rock styles from time to time (and sly double-entendre lyricism).

Both albums (and, resultingly, both bands) were immediately lauded worldwide by the discerning critical intelligentsia, and quickly gained large international audiences through rigorous worldwide touring.

And as far as Pink Mountaintops goes, that unit released their fifth album Peacock Pools in 2022 and have been promoting the bejeezus out of it ever since.

“Reaction to Peacock Pools has been really good!” says McBean. “I made the record during the pandemic. I didn’t really plan on making a new Pink Mountaintops album, at first. I’d moved into a little house and set up a home studio to muck about on – and then the entire world shut down.

“So I started settling into this new situation, and in the days and weeks and months that followed I was checking out online what my other musical friends were up to. They were all in the same boat I was. Tours were cancelled overnight. Everybody was isolating themselves, but what do you do to keep the creative routine alive? So I reached out in all directions online and brought in Stephen McDonald and (drummer for the legendary Melvins) Dale Crover, who were happy to collaborate with me because the pandemic shut them down too!

“The silver lining to that whole dark COVID-19 cloud was writing songs and making a record with those guys – victory out of disaster.”

“It was a dream for me,” says McBean. “Working with Stephen McDonald was awesome! Josh Wells was out in Chicago, Ryan Jewell was out in Columbus, Ohio…everyone was scattered everywhere! Before, I’d made records in bits and pieces, where you’d email riffs or parts or sketches back and forth with each other to overdub and such, but I’d never done an entire album collaboratively through DropBox! I wouldn’t want to always create an album’s worth of music that way, but the process was definitely a very fun experiment.

“It was exciting to get people to send stuff to me. I’d get a bass track and a vocal track from McDonald, with no idea what it sounded like before it popped into my email inbox, and I’d throw it into my computer, sit back and listen – with a big smile on my face.

“Thankfully, since we’re basically living in the future, it was remarkably easy to make music that way. Looking back, the pandemic was certainly a very heavy time for everyone. It’s sad that there didn’t seem to be a lot of lessons learned for all of us who endured the situation…for some people, they learned something. And now we’ve all gone back to abnormal.”

“We’re starting talks as to getting another Black Mountain album on the go, for later this fall,” says McBean of his rapidly-scaling musical schedule throughout the remainder of 2023. “We’ll be firing up the songwriting and aiming eventually for a new record.

“The core members of Black Mountain have to regroup. Amber Webber rejoined the band at the end of 2019, which was awesome, and we were planning on a new album then, but of course the pandemic erupted and that was that for the time being. I forgot that the American border was actually closed for awhile. So we had to shift everything back.

“The pandemic really shook everything apart, in the ways in which we’d operated for years and years, as songwriters, or recording artists, or touring performers. We’re finding ourselves reattaching ourselves to a more low-key grassroots approach to what we do. Everyone’s trying to restructure themselves in their own way.”

Pink Mountaintops performs live at the Key City Theatre (with special guests The Mellow Rows) on Wednesday, September 13; showtime 7 p.m. Admission: $20 advance, $25 at the door (tickets available online at www.keycitytheatre.com).

This will be a combination All-Ages / 19+ event, so the teenagers will not be left out. Don’t miss out on witnessing Canadian indie-rock legends at point-blank range! Please Support Your Local Arts Community. 

Photos submitted

Article Share