From Hockey Rinks to Honky Tonks

From The Daily News of Tuesday, April 1, 2008 . . .

It was one of those Chilcotin autumnal mornings in 1984 when Evan Westerlund clambered onto a Greyhound bus departing Williams Lake and headed east to seek fame and fortune as a hockey goaltender.
Who was to know that long and winding road would lead him to Malmo, Sweden, his goaltending career a distant memory but a recently released CD — Howlin’ At The Moon — giving birth to new dreams?
Yes, the one-time aspiring junior goaltender has watched a lot of water and ice pass beneath his feet since the early 1980s when Joe Tennant was growling at him from the bench of the midget AAA Kamloops Evans Loggers.
“Stu Grimson and Mark Ferner used to protect me in my goalie crease,” notes Westerlund, 42, who attended school at Mac Park and NorKam.
That trek in 1984 took the Golden native to Humboldt, where he played for the Broncos of the Saskatchewan junior league. After one season there, he headed southeast to Yorkton, where he spent two winters with the Terriers.
It was while in Yorkton that the torch he now carries for country music first was lit.
Westerlund only agreed to join the Terriers because they would provide him with a part-time job at radio station GX94.
“I spent a lot of hours in the music library between games and practices,” Westerlund adds, “and learned to love country music to the core. I got listening to guys like Marty Stuart, Travis Tritt, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and such.”
That led to something of a radio career — if 12 years can be called that — in small and mid-size Canadian markets, places like Vernon, Penticton and Prince George. That, of course, opened a lot of doors.
“I attended country concerts everywhere and often, and then decided to start writing songs in 1996,” he recalls.
The writing part, he says, came out of a Dale Carnegie course he attended on behalf of a Penticton radio station
(CKOR-AM800).
“I went into the course thinking leadership, communication, radio . . . and came out thinking I would fulfill my passion for songs and music,” Westerlund says.
So, he adds, “I picked up a guitar, and started writing.”
If only it were that easy.
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Westerlund actually played trumpet as a youngster, before dropping everything to pursue a hockey career. He first picked up a guitar in 1995 and says he has been “strumming and doing live shows ever since.”
He got really serious about it some seven months ago and now his days consist of three to four hours of fingerpicking practice “to hone my chops for live performance.”
Westerlund describes his shows as “a mostly stripped-down acoustic show, with a percussionist and lap steel player, both doing harmony vocals.”
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It was while he was in Dallas at a business conference that he met Minna, the woman who would become his wife. Minnna is Swedish, so the goaltender-turned-songwriter eventually moved to Stockholm, but not before spending some time in Nashville learning, as he says, how to write with the pros.
He and Minna, along with daughter Amanda, 2, now call Malmo home. As it turns out, Westerlund’s family tree is rooted in that area and he has traced the roots back into the 1600s.
Which doesn’t mean he has forgotten Kamloops.
He mentions longtime friends like Lorne Cumming and Ladd Maloski, who he refers to as Lou and Bully.
“Evan is a beauty,” says Cumming, who now runs the
KIJHL’s Chase Chiefs. “He really liked chopping lazy players with his stick at practice and didn’t hesitate to back it up with a good tilt when it was required.”
Cumming also recalls getting an early taste of Westerlund the musician.
“Evan was the only goaltender I played with whose day-of-the-game routine was playing his drum set in his basement to the Scorpions, then air-banding at the rink to his Walkman until warm-up,” Cumming says. “Nobody said anything — as long as he stopped the puck!”
Westerlund has two sisters — Roberta Marshall and Trudy Hicks — who live here. There are cousins here, too. His grandparents lived here. His late father, Carl, was a railroader, something that led to Evan spending the summer of 1988 working on the railroad and no doubt singing, yes, “I’ve been working on the . . .”
And now Westerlund has released his first album — Howlin’ At The Moon — in Norway and Sweden, and he hopes it will make a little noise over here. It was recorded in Nashville in October and November with the help of a group of players whose recording credits include Tracy Byrd, David Ball, Martina McBride, Charlie Daniels, Ray Price, Brooks and Dunn, Alan Jackson, Terri Clark, Tammy Wynette, George Jones and on and on. Howlin’ At The Moon is backed by Rootsy, an independent label.
“The music journalists over here have taken a shine to it with some great reviews,” he says. “They describe it as a blend of The Band, The Eagles, Johnny Cash, Dierks Bentley and Willy Mack.”
Which only makes sense because, as Westerlund points out, “these are the people I have been influenced by.”
After giving Westerlund’s music a listen, Kelly Moore, the program director at Country 103, also likened the sound to Mack. Moore says Westerlund’s first single, I Miss You, will make its debut Wednesday during the noon hour on the B.C. Artist Showcase. (If you miss that, you may check out Westerlund’s music at www.evanwesterlund.com.)
In the meantime, Westerlund will continue to beat his drum in Sweden, all the while knowing what he is up against.
“This is the land of ABBA; the third-largest export is pop music,” he says. “And most people don’t get what country is.”
Westerlund’s research, which included checking things out with the Country Music Association (CMA), revealed “Sweden has nine million people and programs the least amount of country in the entire world.”
But what he has found is that “people try to do country here.”
Which means that Westerlund is prepared to dig in, bear down and git ’er done.
“I humbly accept,” he says, “that I need to work my butt off to make something good happen.”

Gregg Drinnan is sports editor of The Daily News. He is at gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca.