CH:  I really wanted to talk to you about the music scene in Powell River when you were growing up here.  Would that have been in the 1970s?

ML:  Yeah, well I graduated in ’82 just down the street here at Max Cameron High School and at that time at our age group there were really two bands in our age group.  There was our band that was my group of friends with Richard Light and Sandy Place and Richard Lefay and our name changed many, many times.  We were like a pop rock band.  And then the other band was called Renegade.  Tom Vanichuk who’s famous for Pretty Boy Floyd there [Mark points at the Pretty Boy Floyd album Bullets and Lipstik on the shelf]; Steve Briggs who’s still to this day an amazing, amazing guitar player; Greg Hamilton on bass; and Darren Salino on drums, and I believe Chris Lewis on piano.  They were called Renegade and I always felt that they were a lot more professional than we were.  But it was a real fun thing.  And, you know, both bands sort of shared stuff with each other.  We would go to their shows, they would come to our shows.  “I need to borrow an amp” or “I need to borrow a guitar” or “You got a bass string?” or that sort of thing, there was a lot of support that way.

Later on, once I became, you know, of legal age, played a few bars.  There was a bar out in Townsite called the Cellar.  I did a few nights out there a couple of times.  But it was mostly, you know, school dances and house parties and things like that.

CH:  What names did your band have?

ML:  Oh gosh, we were Rogues Gallery for a while, I know we were Royal Flush for a while.  I can’t even remember them all to be honest with you.  But yeah, it seemed like every day we’d change our name.  Some of them only lasted a couple hours.  [Mark laughs.]

CH:  What kind of music were you playing?

ML:  Well, our core band -- because we had a band where we had our core band and then a couple other fellas.  And these other fellas were older than us and were really great for guidance for us and taught us to play a lot of really great pop songs and with those guys we made a lot of money.  With our core band that was just our friends, we would pick songs that we loved -- it could be Pink Floyd or it could be David Bowie or it could be somebody less well known like Adrian Belew -- and we would spend a lot of time just sort of jamming; sometimes even just writing our own tunes.  It was a lot of fun.

CH:  You mentioned the Cellar.  What kinds of places were there for bands to perform in Powell River back then?  You played at house parties?

ML:  Well, we did.  We would often play house parties.  As a matter of fact, that’s where we played most.  I do remember playing out at the Italian Hall and at the Dwight Hall on occasion.  That band that I had, most of the band left for college before we were of age to play in the bars so none of us actually really played in the bars until later and we didn’t play together when we did that.  But at the time there was the Cellar.  There was also -- of course the Westview always had bands going back to that day.

CH:  You were telling me that you knew drummer Pat Steward who lived in Powell River back then.

ML:  Absolutely.

CH:  Steward went on to play drums with Bryan Adams, including on the Reckless album, and he also played with Odds.  How did you come to know him?

ML:  Well, actually he was in school with my brother.  Brad, my brother, is a really great bass player; still plays around town with the band Frenzy.  And Pat lived on Texada Island actually.  Brad and Pat were in school together.  So Pat sometimes would come over, you know, needed to be here in the morning to go to school and would sometimes crash out at our place.  And just got to know him.  Then when Brad and Pat and other friends moved to Nanaimo to go to college there, you know, when I would go down and visit, kind of hang out with him.  I bumped into Pat, oh it must be eight to ten years ago now, and it was really just really great to see him.  He had moved on, of course, from Bryan Adams and at that point he was playing with the Odds as well as Colin James.

CH:  What was he like as a person?

ML:  Oh, he’s just a super-nice guy, really nice guy.  Fun, you know, he was a real fun guy, he always had a really great attitude, you know, happy fella.  I really like Pat.

CH:  Another person from Powell River was Tommy Floyd, who you mentioned.

ML:  Tom Vanichuk.  Yeah, absolutely.

CH:  He was big in the Vancouver metal scene in the ’80s with his band Pretty Boy Floyd.  I was into metal back then down in Vancouver and I remember seeing the name popping up from time to time.  You knew him too.  What was he like?

ML:  Oh, he was a great guy.  He was FUNNY.  That’s the first thing I always remember about Tom is he was really a funny guy.  And I think he was truly dedicated to the art of rock ’n’ roll, that’s one thing I always admired about Tom.  I found him to be quite courageous to, you know, try to make it in the rock world.  As we all know, it’s a one in a million chance to do that.  But he really put the effort into it and I think that that record that he made -- and there’s another fellow from Powell River on there, Peter Parker, who was the guitar player with him.  It was the two of them that, I believe, spearheaded this band.  And yeah, I can’t say enough about how courageous I thought Tom was to pursue that ’cause it was definitely the thing he always loved.

CH:  It’s a long shot to make it in rock ’n’ roll.

ML:  It is, it is, and I think they did a great job.

CH:  Do you know of any other Powell River musicians from those days who went on to big things like Pat Steward?

ML:  Well, not quite at that level.  I have heard rumor, although I’m not sure, that Greg Hamilton who played back then with Steven Briggs and Tom Vanichuk in Renegade, I understood that he played bass with Powder Blues for a while.  Steve Briggs, he, the last I heard, was playing with the Bebop Cowboys and has sort of started doing a sort of country style of music, a little bit more country.  But he’s such a fabulous guitar player, you know, he can play any style of music.  The other fellow who was always a really great musician in town was Armando Castagnoli of course.  Now he’s back in his home town in Tahiti, I believe, and just still playing music.  I see pictures of him up on Facebook and he’s still playing.

CH:  Yeah, Armando was a big name when I was in high school here too.

ML:  Yeah right, right, sure.  He played with our band for a time and I always kind of just stood in awe of Armando because he made it look so easy, right.