She rocks

She will, She will rock you.

It’s Friday night at the Assiniboine Inn on the Park — the Big A, as its known to a host of regulars — where the all-female band She has already lured a half-dozen people onto the barroom dance floor, two songs into the first of three planned sets of uptempo pop music.

As those bobbing and weaving in front of them sing along to a charged version of Martha and the Muffins’ Echo Beach, guitarist Tracy Young-Dodds, dressed resplendently in a hot pink jacket, white shirt and dark slacks, shoots a wide grin at singer Shannon David and bass player Treasure Peterson, as if to say “will you get a load of this.”

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Moments later, as keyboardist Allyson Krawec takes over on lead vocals to offer up her rendition of a mid-’80s Bangles classic, more audience members vacate their seats to walk, err, dance like an Egyptian.

At the conclusion of the set, which also boasted equally well-received covers of the Go-Gos’ We Got the Beat, Quarterflash’s Harden My Heart and the Pretenders’ Middle of the Road, drummer Barb Smith agrees it’s unlikely a reporter would be lobbing questions at the quintet, if She were a He.

“Mind you, I was in another all-girl band, the Welfare Starlets, back in the ’90s,” Smith says, taking a well-deserved sip of water.

“Yeah, but the big difference is you guys weren’t all in your 50s and 60s,” chimes in Krawec, ex- of the Lemons, Chocolate Bunnies from Hell and Swannage, the latter a unit wholly devoted to recreating tunes from the Phantom of the Paradise movie soundtrack.

“This is definitely a unique project and, I have to say, one of the best times I’ve had in a band, ever.”

Peterson, whose brother Garry, a drummer, was a founding member of the Guess Who, can’t agree more.

“Not only can everybody sing, these women can flat out rock,” says Peterson, a cancer survivor who, owing to a nasty fall that resulted in a torn knee meniscus, requires crutches to reach the stage, and plays and sings while seated on a chair.

“What we’ve got going on here is magic. That’s the only word to describe it.”

A week later, all five members of She have hooked up at a Portage Avenue coffee shop, blocks away from Smith’s Conway Street home, their usual rehearsal space. They collectively shudder when a server reminds them the spot closes in an hour’s time, at 8 p.m.

“We might have to speak with the manager,” Krawec says with a wink, “because that’s never going to be enough time to tell our story.”

Young-Dodds taps herself on the chest, when they are asked who came up with the bright idea for She.

For years, Young-Dodds, whose late father Art Young was once a top draw on Manitoba’s country music circuit, handled bass duties for bands led by her guitarist-brother Chris Young.

“Not only can everybody sing, these women can flat out rock.”–Bass player Treasure Peterson

Chris died unexpectedly in Alberta in 2019. She travelled west with her two sisters shortly thereafter to sort through his belongings.

While there, they came upon a Gibson SG guitar that appeared to be so new, they were unsure if their brother ever had the opportunity to play it in front of a live audience.

“Even though I’d never played lead guitar like him, both of my sisters were like, take (the guitar) and enjoy it,” Young-Dodds says.

During the long drive home, Young-Dodds announced that not only would she teach herself how to play Chris’s guitar, she would form a new band — one that would be entirely female — and that her brother’s axe would be the “star of the show.”

The first person she contacted was Smith, who, in addition to the Welfare Starlets, had also played drums for Wayne Walker, Harvey Henry and American rocker Buddy Knox.

The pair enlisted a few others but when that early iteration of She failed to pan out, it was back to the drawing board… a process that was subsequently interrupted in March 2020 by a certain worldwide pandemic.

Young-Dodds and Smith decided to give it a second go, in the spring of 2022. Both of them were familiar with David, a longtime member of the popular country unit, Hearts on Fire. They gave her a call, and were overjoyed to hear she was interested.

Young-Dodds is also a Chocolate Bunnies From Hell alumnus, so she reached out to Krawec next, to enlist her services.

The last piece of the puzzle was securing a person to play bass. Young-Dodds was well aware of Peterson’s talent from clips of her she’d seen on Youtube, and got in touch with her, through a friend.

One problem: Peterson, who recalls learning Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven “start to finish” the month it came out, 52 years ago, had only ever played guitar; bass was completely foreign to her.

“Except after talking to Tracy, and getting excited over what she was telling me, I headed straight to Long & McQuade to grab a bass, only to fall in love with it the second I got it home,” says Peterson, whose father Ferdinand Peterson was a jazz drummer, and whose other brother Randy regularly sat in with Neil Young in the 1960s, “before Neil took off.”

The group had its initial rehearsal at Smith’s abode in March 2022. Among the 12 tunes they tore through that evening were Mickey, originally recorded by Toni Basil, Heaven is a Place on Earth, by Belinda Carlisle and Pat Benatar’s Heartbreaker.

Krawec feels she can speak for the others when she says the first thing that ran through their minds upon reaching the end of the final number was “holy s–t, what just happened here?”

“What we’ve got going on here is magic. That’s the only word to describe it.”–Bass player Treasure Peterson

“And it wasn’t just the playing that was super tight,” David contends. “Our harmonies were so spot on, you would have sworn we’d been singing together for years.”

The group made its official debut in April 2022, at a curling social held at an army, navy and air force veterans’ club on Ellice Avenue. Following that, they embarked on what they jokingly refer to as the “legion tour,” by appearing at Royal Canadian Legions in and around Winnipeg over the course of the next year.

(If you’re thinking She only performs songs originally done by female artists, think again; the group’s current, 60-song repertoire also counts tunes made famous by the Beatles, the Hollies, John Mellencamp and Michael Jackson.)

“We usually play twice a month, which is the number everybody agreed on, when we started,” Young-Dodds says, noting only one of the five is a retiree, and three of them continue to play in other bands around parental duties.

“To date we’ve played in St. Malo, Victoria Beach, Winnipeg Beach … we did the (Red River Exhibition) this year and that was so much fun, we can’t even tell you.”

Regrettably, even though the calendar reads 2023, some people who’ve never witnessed She before are flabbergasted when they glance up from their beverage, and eye five women on stage, rocking out like nobody’s business.

“It’s not like they’re surprised there’s a gal on vocals, that’s pretty commonplace,” says Peterson, who never fails to bring down the house, when she breaks into Sass Jordan’s Make You a Believer, during which she sounds like the second coming of Janis Joplin.

“It’s more like they expect her to be backed by four or five guys, instead of more women.”

“That or they’ll say something stupid like we’re pretty good… for a bunch of girls,” Smith pipes in, pursing her lips.

“I’ve been drumming since I was 10 years old and to me, there’s still the sense that, as women, we have to be better than the guys to make a favourable impression.”

“There’s still the sense that, as women, we have to be better than the guys to make a favourable impression.”–Barb Smith

“Yeah, well, that’s never going to be a problem,” cracks Krawec, drawing guffaws from her counterparts.

If you want to be the judge yourself, She will be appearing at the McPhillips Station Casino in mid-December, and is also booked for a New Year’s Eve gig in Petersfield.

As for the Dec. 31 date, all five chuckle again, asserting a nap will definitely be in order that day, if the plan is to still be wielding their instruments at the stroke of midnight.

“Back in the day, first set didn’t start till 10 (p.m.),” Krawec says.

“When we told the manager at the Big A a couple of weeks ago that we’d be going on at 8:30 (p.m.) he said, ‘Isn’t that a bit early’? We were like, ‘Uh, not at our age.’”

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