IN a club just off Granville Street the band is dishing out the kind of gritty, nasty, rock 'n' roll that can mortify a mother at 40 paces.
The sound is steeped in Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, but on closer inspection, the band seems a little young to be quite so gritty or so nasty, and come to think of it, so does the crowd.
"We had all our Grade 10 friends in this bar," recalls musician, singer, and producer Steve Dawson. "The owner was thrilled 'cause I don't think anyone ever went there."
Dawson laughs frequently at the light larceny and heavy riffs of that first band, which somehow parlayed a gig playing school dances into a performance on YTV, and turned that into a steady gig playing at the Arlington Cabaret on Broadway.
Dawson, 39, remembers the bar's manager issuing one stern caveat before Heavy Draft took the stage:
"He said 'These people coming to the show look awfully young, so part of the deal is that you have to supply your own ID person. . . because I don't want to be bothered doing it.'"
More than 20 years later, Dawson is currently tuning up for a slightly more legitimate acoustic concert series at the Electric Owl on Main Street in Vancouver.
On the last Sunday of each month, Dawson is scheduled to lead the Black Hen house band as they back up different performers. The series kicks off with a March 25 performance by Colin James.
Growing up in West Vancouver, Dawson's love affair with tunes about deceased flowers and women with satin shoes and speed-freak jive started when he looted his parents' record collection and found Sticky Fingers by The Rolling Stones.
"They had that awesome crazy record cover with the zipper on it," Dawson says.
"I was pretty young when I was listening to this stuff," he adds with a laugh.
But as much as he loved the Stones, it was the British blues of Long John Baldry's It Ain't Easy that literally left its mark on him.
"I actually have a scar on my back from dancing around the living room to it when I was about four, and I fell into the fireplace," Dawson says, speaking with something that sounds like pride. "And I still have the scar."
Dawson was later able to trade solos and compare scars with Baldry.
"I got to play with John quite a few times in the last few years of his life. I think people really took him for granted around here because he just lived here for so long and he played at the Yale a lot, and people got used to seeing him around, but really, he was a legendary musician."
Despite serving as the axeman for a hard rock band as a teenager, Dawson found himself gravitating to the freeflowing improvisation of jazz, enrolling at the Berklee college of music in Boston, Mass., after graduating high school.
"I went there right out of high school thinking that I would study jazz in a really serious way," Dawson says. "Really soon after I got there, I kind of hooked up in a scene of people that were playing acoustic music and bluegrass."
After meeting aspiring bluegrass artists Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch, Dawson found himself drifting from jazz and grabbing hold of the sharper corners of roots music.
"Before I knew it, that was the thing I was most into, and I kind of let the whole jazz thing drop and got into more acoustic and bluegrass and blues and country and Hawaiian."
Dawson is a student of music, and requires little provocation to tell a story about legendarily bad-tempered bluesman Skip James recording songs from his deathbed, ("He didn't mess around at all,") or the appeal of modern macabre lyricists like Joe Henry or Elliot Smith.
It may be Dawson's nearly archaeological devotion to uncovering music's past that has made him such a soughtafter producer. Dawson has produced albums for Old Man Luedecke and Jim Byrnes, and oversaw Roxanne Potvin's cover of early '90s radio staple "I'm Too Sexy" by Right Said Fred.
"I thought there were other songs that would've been a lot better, but in the end, I think she might've been right," Dawson says, recalling his fear the cover song would overshadow Potvin's songwriting.
"What ended up happening was we got incredibly close to placing her version of that song in an ad for Diesel perfume, which would've paid for the rest of her life, basically. And we were so close," Dawson says, laughing.
Despite having worked as a music producer for more than a decade, Dawson says the qualifications needed to work behind the glass can be murky.
"The definition of a producer is kind of up in the air," he says, recalling recording an album for a music producer who was successful despite being completely musically illiterate.
However, economic forces may be bringing the days of the non-musical music producer to an end, according to Dawson.
"Budgets are dropping, and there's more records being made than there were back then, so producers have to bring more to the table."
Even while helping a diverse array of singers realize their musical visions, Dawson's own songs are always taking shape.
"It's more culling from past experiences," he says of his songwriting. "I carry around a book with me and write little snippets or lines, and maybe four years later when I've completely forgotten where that came from, it'll end up in a song."
Inspired by folk and blues songs as well as movies like Punch-Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dawson is dedicated to expanding the tastes of today's listeners.
"The palette of the listener these days is so opposite of the way that music was presented back 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, that when people hear an old blues or an old country record from the '30s or '40s, it might freak them out, because it's really in-your-face, really dry, and really raw and really out of tune and out of time and all this stuff that is no longer really acceptable in modern music."
Dawson maintains that if people blow the dust off some old records, they'll be glad they did. "There's this whole amazing library full of incredible music that was popular once but has really been forgotten now in lieu of more modern production values and pop music has been forced down everybody's throat so aggressively over the last 20 years that people don't know about stuff outside of that little box for some strange reason."
Dawson and his band are scheduled to take the stage this Saturday. Proof of age will be required.
