April Wine

There are certain inescapable truisms to life in Canada: The winters are cold, the raccoons will get into your garbage, and, at any given time of day, there’ll be an April Wine classic blasting out of the pickup truck that’s driving past you. Formed in 1969 in Waverley, Nova Scotia (before relocating to Montreal a year later), April Wine spent the ‘70s and early ‘80s as Canada’s preeminent hard-rock emissaries, occupying the space between The Guess Who’s good-time romps and Rush’s pyrotechnic riffs in the canon of hoser heavyweights. While the band’s earliest successes came from amped-up covers of Hot Chocolate jams (“You Could Have Been a Lady”) and Elton John obscurities (“Bad Side of the Moon”), singer/guitarist Myles Goodwyn eventually came into his own as a hitmaker who could fuse pop punch with metallic crunch. To this day, hearing eternal rave-ups like "Oowatanite,” “Roller,” and “I Like to Rock” triggers that spine-tingling sensation of being at an arena show when the lights first dim and the crowd starts to roar.