If you were living in Osoyoos in the 1970s you will probably remember Mathers Music and Electric on Main Street. For teenager Barry Mathers, his musical family, that store and this sleepy town were the perfect creative incubators.
Those lazy summer days growing up on the shores of Osoyoos Lake, working at his parents’ music store, and warm languid Saturday nights attending dances at the community hall in front of Gyro Beach. A simpler, easier era that’s practically a ready-made movie script.
“It was a really great place to grow up,” says Mathers, whose childhood memories clearly keep Osoyoos in his heart. “It was beautiful and I just loved Osoyoos back then, it was smaller and just a wonderful place to grow up, it had a real nice small town vibe about it.”
But having aspirations of a music career there was no option but to move to Vancouver. He only lasted a few years though: “I just couldn’t handle the rain anymore coming from beautiful Osoyoos and all where the annual rainfall is like nine inches a year,” he laughs.
Returning to the Okanagan he settled in Kelowna where he says it was a good compromise between a really small town and a big city.
On April 8, Mathers and his Dirt Road Opera bandmates – Rachel Matkin, Jim Ryan and Robert Bailey – will return almost to his old stomping ground, with a one-night performance at Oliver’s Venables Theatre.
Mathers chuckles over the fact this will be the band’s first performance at Venables – to a live audience, that is. The band had the misfortune of releasing their debut album ‘Nowheresville’ on the precipice of the pandemic. “The timing was really bad,” Mathers wryly notes.
“We all got locked down and normally you make a record and then you go on tour and of course we didn’t have the opportunity to do that so we’re just starting to get back at it now and it’s great to be doing some shows again,” he says.
“It’s great to be on stage, it’s one of the most fun places to be and we were deprived of that for a couple of years so we’re really looking forward to all the shows we have coming up.”
Like many musicians over the last two pandemic years the band made videos for some of the songs, practised, Zoom’ed and for Mathers, “I’ve been writing lots, I have enough for a couple of albums now,” he laughs. “That was the good thing to come out of it I suppose,” he says, looking at the silver lining.
The band also played a concert at Venables in February 2021. The eagle-eyed will surely note that this is not possible given that COVID-19 was raging and lockdowns were still in place.
Theatre Manager Leah Foreman had originally booked DRO back in the fall of 2019 and then COVID hit so it was cancelled. Rebooked and cancelled again, Foreman suggested the band come down and film a concert.
“So, we played to 400 empty seats which was more intimidating than playing to a full house. It was just bizarre, you know, you just finish the song and there’s dead silence.”
Also missing, he says, was “the energy transfer from the band to the audience and back – it’s a really big part of playing live. It always gets us all fired up so it was an interesting thing but we did get a nice video out of it.”
The band is very much looking forward to playing to a full house, Mathers says. “It’s a beautiful room, it was designed for acoustics, it’s a really wonderful sounding room, but without all the bodies in there it is a little hollow. So yeah, it’s much nicer when you got a house full of people!”
For those not familiar with the band’s music, Mathers describes it as “acoustic kind of country rock stuff.” Labels are just such a problematic thing in life. More definitively Dirt Road Opera is a bit more alternative sort of country, in the form of roots music.
“There’s a label called Americana which is a pretty large umbrella that encompasses a lot of different styles of music. We fall into that category a little more now than actually calling it country music,” he says. A rough similarity might be Blue Rodeo, he suggests.
“I’m a big fan of Neil Young and he seemed to just always be all over the map and just wrote whatever he wrote so that’s kind of the way I am – different days produce different songs.”
Heavily influenced by California bands like The Eagles, Jackson Browne, Gram Parsons as well as country singer/songwriters like Steve Earle and Guy Clark, the group’s music is strongly oriented towards harmonies.
And this is where the velvety-voiced Rachel Matkin lifts the already great music to an even higher level. Matkin, who hails from a family of substantial musical talent, has played (guitar and mandolin) and sung alongside country music greats like Dwight Yoakam, Patricia Conroy, Ian Tyson and the list goes on.
In fact all the band members have a depth of talent and encyclopedic experience playing with everyone from the Payolas to Debbie Harry, Alice Cooper, Jimmy Page, and Gino Vannelli.
“I really love the band we’ve got right now,” Mathers says. “We all started playing music at a very early age and Jim Ryan, our bass player who plays keyboards too, started playing the piano when he was three and he’s just amazing to watch on stage.
“He really gets into the music and it’s just a pleasure to watch him play and another fellow from Bowen Island plays with us, Rob Bailey, and he’s multi-instrumental, he plays steel guitar, banjo, keyboards, everything. And Rachel and myself – lots of harmonies and so that’s what we bring to the table now,” Mathers says.
The six-year old Dirt Road Opera is actually only the latest incarnation of the members’ musical career, with Mathers highlighting he and Ryan played together in a band called the Cruzeros for nearly 25 years, travelling all over the world and producing three records.
“Rachel actually sang a lot of harmonies with us on our albums and would join us on stage, so we’ve all kind of been playing together for a long time.”
When asked what the audience can expect, Mathers says “expect to hear some really good music, it’s a pleasure to watch the band play and Rachel’s vocals are just outstanding. There will be lots of harmonies, a lot of original songs and we play some covers by bands we really like, for instance Blue Bayou by Linda Ronstadt.
“It’s just a lot of pretty nice listening music with a wide variety of instruments between the four of us.”
For a taste of what you can expect from an evening with the DRO, check out videos and music (including ‘Hell or High Water’ written for the people of Lytton), on their website dirtroadopera.ca or on your favourite music streaming platform. For tickets contact the Venables Theatre box-office.
