The Queens of Sheba wanted another royal ass-kicker of a woman on stage with them across Canada. The hall-of-famer headliners Heart and Joan Jett & The Blackhearts found their tour goddess in the form of Serena Pryne.
The Ontario rocker girl (and her band The Mandevilles) is an old-school style of musician. She, like her famous marquee-mates, is fearless on the stage, she prowls and growls like a panther, but she hinges everything on solid melodies and deft songwriting. Pryne is a hybrid of Sass Jordan and Tanya Tucker, easily drawing in the same kind of audience today as Stevie Nicks, Alannah Myles, or Jennifer Warnes did in years gone by.
If Pryne and Heart have a spiritual meeting point it would be at the altar of Led Zeppelin. Both are heavily influenced by the iconic hard rock supergroup, and like the Wilson sisters in Heart, Pryne can wail out Ramble On or Whole Lotta Love with a primal authenticity that only comes from honing the craft of singing to a sharp edge. YouTube trawlers can find a long clip of Pryne working the stage with The Trews at a show a few years ago where they all riffed out a Zeppelin medley for the ages.
"We used to do that quite a bit," said Pryne, about her fellow Ontario pals in The Trews. "We did a tonne of shows together and they are amazing guys, good friends of ours, and we'd do Zeppelin whenever we'd get the chance. Colin (MacDonald, frontman for The Trews) can sing his ass off so whenever he'd call me up to do something it was like 'Hell yeah, let's do Zeppelin.'"
Perhaps Heart will do the same with those skills, since they have a penchant for closing their concerts with Led Zeppelin encores.
Pryne is ready for almost anything she might be called on, musically, on this tour. Since it's the Heart/Joan Jett show en masse, Pryne had to travel light. Only one bandmate is accompanying her for the tour, longtime guitar player and songwriting partner Nick Lesyk, who was with her back when the band was called Oliver Black (that unit once played the The Rum Jungle, now known as Heartbreakers). She's confident that the two of them can set the table across Canada for a full Mandevilles tour once their upcoming album is finished, and she lays much of the credit on Lesyk.
"Nick's a terrific slide player. He's very creative with the guitar," she said. "He doesn't play it the way most guys play it. I think he approaches it from a different perspective. I don't know because I'm not in Nick's head, but for me on the outside looking in, he's not showy like some guitar players can be showboaty, want to wow you with too many notes. Nick comes more from feeling the song, playing it expressively. He can wow you technically, but he doesn't approach it that way. Less is more. That's in my singing, too. I know how to do that (running the scales and over-intoning), but I don't feel it's appropriate. I'll never sing the song the same way twice, because you have to be in the moment all the time."
The songs themselves are also a drawing card for Pryne's growing base of fans. The Mandevilles reputation is not pegged solely on high-impact live performances, the singles also stand up. Hangovers could have been a Sugarland single, Turn A Blind Eye would have gone gold for Fleetwood Mac, Melissa Etheridge would have been proud if she'd come up with Heaven On The Highway, and the list goes on.
Perhaps the Queens of Sheba audience won't get the maximum Mandevilles delivery, but Pryne said the opportunity to learn from such high-grade professionals was a luxurious gift she and Lesyk would be able to implement forever, and that applied as much to the backstage crew as their onstage heroes.
"You don't know who you're going to meet, sometimes in the most unlikely of places, and that person takes you to a whole other level," said Pryne. "We always have to prove ourselves. I don't feel entitled, by any means. Anytime we go someplace new, we have to be good people, we have to go up and introduce ourselves. I always have to get up there, do my best, have fun, and I hope people dig it. Same with Nick. We do it because we love it and in no way are we sick of doing this job."
It's Prince George's first time getting to know The Mandevilles, since they have evolved. The name, incidentally, came from a segment she saw on the TV program Antiques Roadshow where a vintage hand-crank music box was featured. It was made by the Mandeville company. It didn't hurt that the Mandevilla is also the name of a beautiful, hardy, beguiling flower that thrives in a mixture of daylight and shade.
One could say the same for the garden-variety rock star. They need the sunshine for basic life functions, but they really bloom in the darker spaces in life, like nightclubs and dimmed arenas.
"I've been doing it for so long, since I was a kid. It's like being at home. I feel like I'm truly myself in those situations," she said of being on stage with her shoulders squared and her chin high. "I'm really comfortable on stage, and with a lot of performers I think you encounter the same thing: when I'm off the stage I sometimes don't know what to do with myself. I can be pretty introverted if I'm in a new space or don't have a few drinks in me or something. Sometimes I'm pulled back, a little shier, but I can also be out-outgoing, it just depends on the situation. I'm the type of person who just doesn't want to get in the way."
Tonight, with Heart and Joan Jett, she gets to do it in Prince George as an official rock 'n' roll Queen of Sheba.
