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FYI

Early Days When Cowboys Found KD Lang A Bit Too Strange

Kathryn Dawn Lang, OC wasn't always the perfect singer and the toast of Music City. In fact, in her backyard in early days she was a force to reckon with, and some of the forces she had to reckon with weren't warm to her punked-up hillbilly persona. Ross Perlmutter explains.

Early Days When Cowboys Found KD Lang A Bit Too Strange

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Ross Perlmutter Facebook


“I have a very special board tape of kd getting fired, by the crowd, onstage at the Ranchman’s in Calgary.

The short story is that Neil McGonnigal and I booked her into the Ranchman’s for her Calgary debut. The place was packed with cowboys and local music people, and the first set went swimmingly. Halfway through the second set, some drunk cowboys thought: ‘Hey, waitaminute. This woman is a gawdamn punk rocker, and she’s making fun of our music!’ And they approached the stage. On the tape, you can clearly hear them say ‘you have to leave!’, and kd responds by saying ‘OK, we’ll just finish this set...’

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‘No, NOW!’

“Kd apologized with an ‘OK, buckaroos and buckarettes’ and that was it. We pulled her from the Ranchman’s and booked her right next door at another club called Longhorns, and that was the start of her rise to fame. That tape remains one of my most prized possessions.”

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Mark Hiscock
Alice Tsui

Mark Hiscock

FYI

Obituaries: Newfoundland Folk Artist Mark Hiscock, Country Music Trailblazer Johnny Rodriguez

This week we also acknowledge the passing of The Ponys drummer Nathan Jerde, English multi-instrumentalist and composer Jack Lancaster and noted Australian rock drummer James Baker.

Norman Mark Hiscock, an accordionist, vocalist and songwriter and a towering figure on the Newfoundland folk music scene as a member of Shanneyganock, died suddenly on May 6, at age 53.

A CBC obituary notes that "a lifelong musician based out of St. John's, Hiscock was a mainstay of Newfoundland and Labrador's musical landscape, and was a founding member of the well-known folk band Shanneyganock — known for tunes steeped in the province's long history of storytelling."

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