By Carey Langsner, Rock At Night Ontario, Canada
Burlington Sound of Music Kick-Off Concert @ Spencer Smith Park – June 10th 2017
With summer almost here and the temperatures rising in Ontario, it is time for the 38th annual Burlington Sound of Music Festival. For the third year in a row, the festival has put on a ticketed Kick Off Rock & Roll concert in support of the free festival happening Father’s day weekend.
On June 10, 2017 with temperatures reaching near 30°c, almost 10,000 Rock & Roll fans packed Spencer Smith Park along Burlington Ontario’s lakeshore to see this year’s Kick Off concert hosted by Randy and Mr Lahey from the TV show the Trailer Park Boys. The theme of this years kick off concert was 90”s Rock featuring The Offspring and Live. The concert also included Sumo Cyco, Killer Dwarfs, Spin Doctors, Smash Mouth, Marianas Trench.
Starting off the show was Sumo Cyco. Sumo Cyco took the stage in front of a couple thousand people, the gates had opened just moments before the start of the show and most of the people were still filing into the venue. Sumo Cyco is a punk metal based band from Hamilton, Ontario fronted by Skye Sweetnam, aka “Sever”. Watch for this band to gain in popularity and travel to your city in the near future.
Next up was the Killer Dwarfs, a Canadian heavy metal band who formed in the early 1980s in Oshawa, Ontario. The Killer Dwarfs is a four piece long hair metal band consisting of four DWaRfs. Front man Russ DWaRf Graham, Gerry DWaRf Finn on guitar, Johnny DWaRf Fenton on base and Darrel DWaRf Miller on the drums. While this music was not for all, those “old” metal heads in the crowd did enjoy some of the throwback music.
As the temperature and humidity levels kept rising, 90’s blues-rockers the Spin Doctors from New York took the stage, playing hit songs like “Two Princes” and “Miss Can’t Be Wrong”
By the time that Smash Mouth hit the stage the park was nearly completely full, included in the crowd were a number of Ogre faces on sign posts. Playing many of their hits they had the crowd singing as loud as they could. When Smash Mouth played “All Star” from the Shrek movie the crowd erupted into loud cheers and proceeded to sing the entire song often overpowering Steve Harwell’s voice coming from the speakers.
It was nice to see all the original members of Live back on stage together again for this tour. They entertained the packed to capacity crowd with hits like “All Over You”, “Pain Lies On The Riverside”. The loudest performance by far of the night came not from the stage but from the audience as Live played a tribute to Chris Cornell by performing Audioslave’s “I Am The Highway”.
The Sound of Music festival is taking place throughout the week of June 11-18 around Burlington. The free festival – featuring four live stages with over 50 bands and a number of street performances – will be going on from June 15th until the 18th. See the website http://www.soundofmusic.ca/ for more information.
Thank you to the organizers of The Sound Of Music for again allowing Rock At Night to be apart of this great festival.
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I am the Ontario, Canada correspondent for Rock At Night covering music and summer festivals in pictures and words.
I grew up in the 70’s (gasp!) going to the concerts of some of the best hard rock and punk groups to ever make music.Music seems to have always been involved in my life one way or another.I even met my wife in a bar when I was working with a band and we have been together ever since.Working with Rock at Night feeds my concert and photography addicts.
