by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

It’s a bit like that Rock Star show with INXS, except with far better music and without the corny competition. Two years ago, Pembroke, Ontario’s Bruce Felhaber was just a middle-aged cab driver with a fondness for Friday-night benders, an ancient history with dead-end cover bands and a batch of protean metal tunes running through his head.

Today, backed by a band of notable names in Canadian rock, he’s the frontman of Cruce, hitting rock clubs nationwide and howling his heart out (Ozzy Osbourne is a reliable comparison, vocally) while cameras capture the magic for a forthcoming film.

Jordon Zadorozny of Blinker the Star fame had seen Felhaber around Pembroke for years, even knocked a few back with him, but it was his brother Corey (of Sam Roberts Band) who first really clicked with the man, and Steve Durand (Tinker, Moufette, Auf der Maur) who had the vision of records, a doc and rock shows.

“Corey started talking about this wild metal dude who would sing—or scream—classic metal lines, anywhere, anytime,” says Durand. “When I met him, he was like one of my big brother’s coolest rocker friends, somehow frozen in ’82. It was refreshing to see someone totally dedicated to that music and time. When Bruce told me how he felt about Nirvana—‘those were the guys that killed heavy metal’—I was moved.”

“Bruce eventually started showing up at our studio parties,” recalls Jordon Zadorozny, “meeting people, singing loudly in people’s ears and so on. Steve started filming him, [TV cartoon rock icons] Sons of Butcher wanted to take him on tour. Now all this.”

“I’m stuck in the ’80s,” the surprisingly soft-spoken Felhaber says without shame, over the horn from Halifax, Cruce’s first tour stop. “That’s when everything was going on in the metal world, you know? I listen to some of the newer stuff out there and it really doesn’t do anything for me. Then I go back and listen to Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Motörhead, what have you, and it moves me. It still does, to this day.”

Matching that timeless quality is what obligated Durand and the Zadorozny brothers to make sure every riff on the new, debut Cruce CD passed what Durand calls “the test of Bruce”—“He knows what he likes and dislikes. We just listened.”

“I guess because I don’t play any instruments,” says Felhaber, “I rely a lot on my feelings. I gotta feel it. I gotta feel that it matches the lyrics and it draws some sort of emotion out, eh? We’ve come across a certain formula now in the tunes, the bigger choruses and that, and I’m liking the direction it’s taking.”

Jordon Zadorozny admits that doing Cruce harbours its challenges. “Bruce has little patience for rehearsing a song more than twice, so it keeps things fresh when we play live. In the studio, Bruce is a work in progress. He learns quickly when he’s not obliterated on booze and drugs.”

Not that he would have expected otherwise from Felhaber, because when it comes to good times, he ain’t getting older, he’s getting better. Posed the bottom-line metal question—who parties hardest in Cruce?—Felhaber humbly mumbles, “I guess it’s me. I’m an old diehard, eh!”

With Sons of Butcher at les Saints
on Saturday, Oct. 28, 9 p.m., $15

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