Event Info
She Stole My Beer Live from Wicket Hall
She Stole My Beer celebrating 30 years of Beers Live from the Strathcona
8:00pm - 11:00pm Doors at: 7:30pm
$25 + s/c adv., $30 @ the door.
Hard-copy tickets
Physical tickets at: The Strath Liquor Store
Event Description
Press Release Mon Jan 30/23
She Stole My Beer Live at
Victoria’s Wicket Hall, Sat. March 18/23
She Stole My Beer started in the early 90s as a 7-piece hippie jam band influenced by the Grateful Dead, Little Feat, Bob Marley, John Prine, Neil Young and the Allman Brothers Band.
Their first album Sparks Off the Guardrail remains a stone-cold classic, one of the best recorded in BC back when Vancouver was fuelled by legendary producers Bruce Fairbairn Bob Rock, Little Mountain Sound and world-class strip clubs that together drew the cream of the hair bands to produce more 90’s platinum rock albums than NYC.
During that era our local West Van heroes integrated the exact opposite influences; country, roots, psychedelia, reggae and folk into two albums that 30 years later stand in the pantheon. They became a huge live draw yet remained largely underneath the media radar, outside a devoted regional following.
She Stole My Beer recorded Mule on Saltspring Island on Taylor’s Farm and played the golden live age circuit of Harpo's in Victoria to Vancouver’s Town Pump, to Whistler’s Buffalo Bill's with the Beat Farmers, TO reggae stars One, Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, Hopping Penguins, Downchild, Big Sugar, the Sattalites, the Odds & Rymes with Orange.
The Beers are led by twin vocalist, guitarist, songwriter/bandleaders Tom Taylor and Chad Chillibeck, with Hammond B3 Maestro Jordan White, Dave Hughes on the bottom plus a triple drum attack, courtesy of Dean Waisman, Liam MacDonald and Franco Diligenti.
Whistler locals consider this the finest band in their cultural history and until Covid their annual sold-out GLC shows were a cornerstone for the pillars of the community to get their freak on.
In 2020 She Stole My Beer released their first album in a quarter century with the fine, mature, slow-food song cycle Shake the Chalet just before the pandemic killed the arts for 50 months. Older and mellower with families being raised, Shake the Chalet is another gem that only truly gives up its gifts on repeated listens.
Dave Hughes contributes an eight-minute outlaw dirge in Hard Ways. Taylor is in fine form with a couple of brilliant slow-burn melodic earworms that build in intensity in Old Black Mule and King of July with Riot Act rocking as hard as anything they have done. Chad delivers the jaded All My Love and The Worst of It Now which crunches live. Shake the Chalet stands up to its twin album brothers as fine-burnished, country-flavoured classic rock. It is timeless and it is now.
But this is what drives She Stole My Beer’s intensely devoted fan base, the fact that their material gets inside you over the years with its subtle hooks, organic playing and sturdy song structure. SSMB are underground rock legends with legs and legacy, part of whose magic is that they remain unknown.
Killer covers are a critical part of the She Stole My Beer live experience from up to 20 Dead cuts in their repertoire including an epic China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider, to Beat Farmer tracks, Van Halen, Kiss, Delbert McClinton, or the Allman Brothers. Neil Young’s Powderfinger is an incendiary example. The Beers honour their hippie jam band tradition by mixing up their sets constantly during marathon shows. Like their unique, psychedelic Toad Hall concert posters, each night is as unique as a snowflake.
The originals are stellar. I recently formatted a pub playlist for a Nanaimo venue that ended up including 12 SSMB songs which were more than Marley, Clash or Arcade Fire contributed.
It strikes me as funny that 30 years later these boys reflect the moment more than ever with country having eaten rock and Dead tribute acts flourishing. After the massive cultural retraction of the Covid lockdowns that killed live music, people are ecstatic to celebrate a great show, but the legends are leaving middle earth and legacy rock acts are facing extinction and mortality.
That is what makes a She Stole My Beer performance in 2023 such a powerful tribal and spiritual experience. They deliver a show as celebratory as their legendary influences who are on retirement tours. The songwriting, the musicianship, the ramp up to the cultural happening; all feed into something greater, something that is fading away from our consciousness.
You can’t put a finger on the band. You can’t describe their format or their flavour. They have never had a commercial hit or even close to one. Most people know their name as a goofy semi-humorous anomaly. But on their first comeback show last Nov 12 at the Garibaldi Lift Company in Whistler, (which sold out 400+ seats instantly), they absolutely burned the place down. Two smokin’ 60-minute sets plus a half-hour encore cookin’! You had no idea where they were going in the set next, causing a riot of joy amongst the Whistler and Vancouver locals who roared their approval.
On March 18th in the new Wicket Hall in the Strathcona Hotel, She Stole My Beer will put on one of the best live shows of the year in Victoria. They will play songs that many have rarely heard, building those songs into sledgehammers of rhythm that make the dancers quake and the room shake. Killer musicians in their prime, songwriters 30 years into their craft, brothers in arms forever now playing clean and hard. Then they will go back to their families and their day jobs like this blur of magic never happened. As the Beers live legend rises anew.
Tickets on sale Monday, Jan 30th @ 10 AM. Digitally @ strathliquor.com or hardcopy at the Strath Liquor Store, $25+s/c in advance, $30 at the door. Doors @ 7:30, show @ 8 pm.
Produced by DNA Events & Entertainment. For info or interviews contact promoter David Branigan, at daviddnabranigan@gmail.com. More event info at strathconahotel.com.
Venue
919 Douglas
Open / Operational
In-Person Event
Sat. March 18th 2023 + Add to Calendar
The Wicket Hall
