A decade of Slush

Ten years later, local band still playing for fun

What does it take to keep a band going for a decade? Most big name groups are bound by recording contracts and finances. Rarer are the bands that are not obligated to stay together, but somehow manage to anyway.

For local punkers Slush, Sunday’s show at Merlin’s is a 10-year anniversary of sorts. Drummer Jamie Weatherbie and singer/guitarist Adam Leggett, now in their mid-20s have been playing together since their high school days in New Liskeard up in northern Ontario.

It’s a friendship that, according to Weatherbie, hasn’t changed and probably won’t.

Over the years they’ve kept their band going, recruiting other transplanted Liskeard friends to round out the punk foursome. With Leggett’s enthusiasm for songwriting, the material stayed fresh. Though they were never signed, Weatherbie says the band recorded an album every year between 1993 and 1997, then again in 1999 and 2002.

They’ve taken 26 of those songs and created a compilation CD that will be given away at Sunday’s show at Merlin’s to those who simply walk through the door.

"The album’s called Ten Years Wasted , two different meanings," he quips.

It’s a greatest non-hits collection of sorts, and they are giving it away for free. Weatherbie claims the band is not about the money, and this seems like a fairly good way to prove it.

So perhaps the secret of Slush’s longevity is the fact that they never seem to have taken things too seriously. All along they’ve just been a basement band that’s good enough to leave the basement every now and then.

"Most people who have been in a band for 10 years have been a rock star, done it, and retired or something like that," says Weatherbie. "We didn’t go that next step, we’re just playing for fun and writing music for ourselves."