2:59

To the person among you who can transport me to Vancouver for Saturday, April 29th, I’ll be forever indebted. The stars have apparently aligned in such a way that the Huevos Rancheros are reuniting for a one-off gig. The instrumental Calgary band will be playing at the Railway Club with Carolyn Mark and the Buttless Chaps. This should be the first time the band’s played together since shortly after the release of 2000’s El Muerte Del Toro and Mint Records is saying it will be “probably the last time forever.”

I’d normally think this was just a neat little news item but that last fact just hits me in the gut.

The Huevos were many “firsts” for me. They were the first live band I ever saw (certainly the first in the tiny “rock band in a bar” sense of things). They were the first to interest me in the notion of independent music. They were the first band I ever mail ordered anything from, and while that may seem trivial the fact that I received a handwritten letter, a pile of stickers and a free EP from them simply blew my mind at the time. I never knew bands and the people that listen to them interacted on that level. They were the first to get me interested in “Canadian indie” as a genre, and I can draw some direct lines from them to bands like Chixdiggit, the Smugglers, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet and even the Planet Smashers, King Apparatus, Flashlight and the whole mid-90s Can-ska scene.

I don’t even think I saw a whole set from them either. I’m quite sure I saw them at the Frat House in St. Catherines, which no longer exists under that name. I was probably about 16 at the time and had one of those limited G1 licenses that wouldn’t allow me to drive up there on my own. If I recall correctly my dad had arranged to pick me up at some arbitrary time, and since the band started late I only caught a handful of songs before I had to leave. Still, that whole experience changed me.

I just looked up the show and Google tells me it was on October 22, 1998 and that Chicago ska act the Blue Meanies were also on the bill. I don’t remember that though.

On another night they were back in town with the Reverend Horton Heat, but the show was 19+ (likely a “beer festival” of some sorts) and I was most certainly not 19+. That was my last attempt to see the band, and now it seems my last chance.

Mint recently posted an update on the band members’ whereabouts, stating that frontman Brent J. Cooper is currently a teacher in Calgary. I’d like to think that impressionable young whelps attend his class not knowing what to expect, and on the first day he pulls a guitar out from under his desk, plugs into a wall of amps stacked where the blackboards should be, and just launches into “What a Way to Run a Railroad.” That would set them right. It worked for me.

Huevos Rancheros @ New Music Canada