So many memories are triggered by song, just hearing the first few notes can send you back to the day you got married, the first road trip you took with your buddies, sitting on the hood of your car watching the sunset with your best friend.
Trooper songs are those kinds of songs -- Janine, Here For A Good Time, Oh, Pretty Lady, Raise A Little Hell.
Trooper, one of the best performance bands in Canada, will take to the Prince George Exhibition stage August 10 to start the fair rockin' in a big way.
Trooper has sold millions of records and had dozens of hits.
Writers Ra McGuire and Brian Smith, founding members of Trooper, paired up to write hit after hit, decade after decade.
"There's points where you get a sense that something's working but you never get a sense of how well it will go over or how sustainable that's going to be," said McGuire. "I knew Here For A Good Time was going to be a hit song after the first time we ran through it. I knew people were going to get a buzz from it because you could feel it in the room with just us putting it together."
Raise a Little Hell was a different story.
"It was a last-minute inclusion on the Thick As Thieves album (1978) because we just didn't have enough songs so we dredged up this old thing," said McGuire. "It's funny that we could have been so out of it at the time but we had been using the song since the '60s - we wrote it when we were 15 and 16 years old."
The long-time friends had been using Raise a Little Hell to close their live shows for years.
"We used it because the crowd went crazy when we played it," McGuire said. "That just didn't make an impact with us at all that people loved it. We just thought oh, this is a good song - a utility thing - it always finished the night off really well. Even after we recorded it and we got it on the second take - usually we do 50 takes or something - and we said OK, we got that. We didn't know that it was anything more than filler until we went down to the states to play for a record company president who said that was the hit."
So, sometimes you know and sometimes you don't know.
And sometimes you can dream about having staying power and sometimes you do have the staying power.
"We're so glad we still get to do this," said McGuire. "The actual experience of being in Trooper is more fun now than it was then. Back when we were making all those songs it was quite a lot of work. You're going from recording sessions, straight to tour, straight to writing the new album and back into the studio. We were putting out a record every nine months. Back in the day we were just looking to be as good as our last record. So these songs have become our ticket to the best party in town."
Tickets are available at www.pg-x.com. Tickets are $20 and include exhibition parking, gate admission and HST. Doors open at 7:30 and show is at 8 p.m.
