As has been tradition for the past several years, the Friday night of the Shawville Fair is reserved for a classic rock act and this year fans are in for a treat.
Canadian Music Industry Hall of Famers April Wine will take to the stage at 9:15 on Sept. 1, for what’s sure to be a high-octane performance. They played a great set for an enthusiastic crowd back in 2010 and they’re eager to repeat the performance.
Last week, The Equity caught up with lead guitarist Brian Greenway to talk about everything from life on the road to Trailer Park Boys.
Greenway was born a short jaunt down the Ottawa River in Hawkesbury, Ont. in 1951. He spent his formative years there before moving to nearby Montreal when he was eight. He said his exposure to music came early in his life.

“My mother and dad met doing amateur opera, so there was always music in the house,” he said. “When I was about seven years old I found myself entertaining the family, you know, pretending to sing to the radio.”
“My grandfather was the caretaker of the Montreal’s town hall and they had a big stage there with a P.A. and a microphone,” he continued. “When it was empty and there was nobody there on the weekends he let me fire up the microphone and I’d sing and pretend I was doing shows.”
After taking lessons for a few years, he purchased his first electric guitar on his birthday in 1965.
“This was just when the Beatles were coming out,” he explained. “We all wanted to be them. You go into school one morning when the Beatles came out and that afternoon we all had our hair combed down over our foreheads.”
“The teachers were all aghast,” he added with a chuckle.
The wave of Beatlemania spurred Greenway’s desire to be in a band, but he disliked the traditional guitar lessons he was receiving at the time.
“They were painful, he was trying to teach me chords and ‘Row, row, row your boat,’” he laughed, adding that he began to see another teacher, Cliff Reynolds, who played in a local band.
“I would go down to his house and he would teach me the basic chords and I learned the rest myself,” he said. “I can’t read a note of music. I just play what’s in my heart, my head, my ears. Sometimes my fingers come out with stuff that I never think of.”
In 1968 he took up the harmonica after seeing blues legend James Cotton perform and much like guitar, he picked it up mainly by observation.
“That’s how I do things I just watch and listen,” he said. “I guess I’m a good chameleon that way.”
He played with a variety of bands in Montreal during the early 70s, most notably with Mashmakhan, whose single “As the Years Go By” reached number one on the charts in Canada.
April Wine was founded in 1969 in Halifax, N.S., but relocated to Montreal in 1970. Greenway had played with many of the members and alumni but it wasn’t until 1977 that he officially joined.
I knew them all from various other band,” he said. “Steve Lang, the bass player, he joined in ‘76. I had played in the Mashmakhan and the band Cheeque with him.”
“I applied to join April Wine in ‘73 when they were looking for a guitar player but Gary Moffatt got the job,” he continued. “In between ‘73 and ‘77 when I joined, they were doing a lot of tours and they had different people as a four piece band and they would add other people for vocals or keyboards. They decided they wanted a fifth member that could sing, write and play the guitar and my name came up because I knew them all.”
At the time, Greenway was working as a forklift operator but he survived the three month probation period and became a full-fledged member of the band. His first record with the band, First Glance, featured the single “Roller”, which was the band’s first international hit, remaining on Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles chart for 11 weeks.
“All of a sudden, ‘Roller’ starts taking off in the states through a station in Michigan and then we got busy for three or four years,” he said.
They toured the U.S. for several years, opening for such acts as Rush, Journey and Styx. Their next album Harder…Faster topped their previous success by staying on the U.S. charts for 40 weeks, propelling them to bigger stages and bigger crowds.
“In 1982 in Germany we played rather large shows with Neil Young as the headliner and Crimson and Jethro Tull, Michael Schenker,” Greenway remembered. “There was about 125 to 150,000 each day. That was quite something, it was Labour Day weekend, it was outdoors, just beautiful.”
But the stresses of life on the road proved to be too much for the group and they broke up in 1986. During this hiatus, Greenway released a solo project, Serious Business, which featured his signature hard rock style.
In 1992 they reconciled and began churning out albums again.
Nowadays, they aren’t playing as many shows as they used to but Greenway says that the crowds that come out are extremely diverse in age. Many were likely introduced to the band through their parents, but there may be an even more unlikely explanation for all the young fans: the raunchy, hit Canadian comedy series Trailer Park Boys.
Ricky, the foul-mouthed, dope-growing anti-hero of the show is a massive April Wine fan and plays many cassettes in the tape deck in his 1975 New Yorker. Greenway had a laugh while recalling the episode where Ricky kidnaps Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson and repeatedly asks him to play April Wine songs.
“They’re good guys,” he said.
He said one of the best things about touring is seeing the positive effect the music has on the fans young and old.
“That’s what music does, it sells emotions and good times,” he concluded.