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CMW Profile: Dean Lickyer
From March 9 to 13, Torontoist is covering the crap out of Canadian Music Week, with daily concert and film previews, reviews of the latest action, words with your favourite and soon-to-be-favourite bands, and more.
Dean Lickyer band members Joshua Alvernia, Zander Lamothe, Justin Bozzo and Sean Royle pose in a Royal York Hotel elevator on March 11, 2011.
If the members of Aerosmith were twenty and from Hamilton, they would tremble in the shadow of rock gods Dean Lickyer. Named after the man who introduced them to the sweet sounds of the 1970s as teens, the band mixes classic and modern rock with the bravado of ten roosters put together.
To watch their live show is to see twenty-two-year-old singer Joshua Alvernia wail and flail, taking up all available space on the stage, while his bandmates throw down some serious, hard-rocking music. They don’t deny their classic rock influence, but tell us they’re a band for the ages. Cause age ain’t nothing but a number, man.
Torontoist caught up with Dean Lickyer in the mezzanine of the Royal York Hotel on Friday evening. With beers in hand, they cozied up on a lobby couch to tell us what it’s like to be so damn awesome.
Torontoist: You guys seem pretty young. How long have you been playing together?
Joshua Alvernia: I’ve been playing with (guitarist) Sean (Royle, 21) for six years, with (bassist) Justin (Bozzo, 21) for four, and (drummer) Zander (Lamothe, 19) for just over a year.
What would you say is the perfect way to describe your sound?
Alvernia: Basically, it is a furious form of rock and roll.
Bozzo: Very energetic, I guess. Raw. We just like good music, it doesn’t matter if it’s old or new.
Alvernia: It’s rock and roll, not just rock. Don’t say “furious,” though. That was a joke. We’re, like, rock and roll, by the first sense of what that meant.
Like Elvis?
Royle: Yes.
The last time we saw you guys, you were basically all over the place, flailing this way and that. Are you thinking of putting on a good show when you do that, or just feeling the force of rock?
Alvernia: I think before we go on we’re like, “we’re going to put on a wicked show.” I guess when we’re on, we don’t think about it too much.
Did that come naturally?
Everyone, except Bozzo, in unison: Yes.
Bozzo: It took me a while at first.
Lamothe: It’s probably from playing so many shows. You get used to being on stage.
Joshua Alvernia, Sean Royle, Zander Lamothe and Justin Bozzo make up Hamilton rock-and-roll band Dean Lickyer.
Do you like Toronto? Do you get a different crowd reaction here than other places?
Bozzo: People like us everywhere, but there’s something about playing in Ontario that’s different. In Toronto, you have to be somebody before they want to listen to you. Out east, and out west, it’s welcoming and they love you. In Toronto, they don’t want to go to the front to rock out because no one else is doing it.
I heard you named your band after someone’s dad.
Royle: No. It was a friend of my dad’s.
But he’s someone’s dad, right?
Royle: Yeah. He has a kid. He was a friend of my father’s in high school.
It’s a bit of an odd name for a band nonetheless. Do you ever get tired of having to explain it to people?
Alvernia: We do, yeah.
Bozzo: But it’s a good story. People always seem to like the story.
While you have a very defined sound now, do you see that changing as time goes on and you get into different musical interests?
Royle: We’re all growing as musicians, listening to new things every day. Now I listen to stuff that’s even older than the stuff I did then, like Chuck Berry and stuff. There’s a lot of new stuff too.
Alvernia: We kind of let our hearts guide us. It’s nothing sinister like trying to write for a certain group of people.
I heard you guys opened for Bon Jovi at the Air Canada Centre this year. How did that come about?
Alvernia: It was a contest on Q-107 (FM). We entered it and we won. For Bon Jovi, it was a sold-out crowd. For us, it was 15,000 people there.
Was that the biggest show you guys have played?
Alvernia: We played before KISS at Sarnia Bayfest. There were about twenty-two or twenty-three thousand people.
Was that nerve-wracking?
Alvernia: For Bon Jovi, it felt a lot better. KISS has this sixty-metre stage and it felt huge. I didn’t know what to do with myself.
So, what did you do?
Alvernia: Just ran a lot.
Dean Lickyer played CMW shows on Friday and Saturday. Their next show is next Saturday in Austin, Texas. They say another Canadian tour is in the works after that.
Photo by Nancy Paiva/Torontoist.