It was early summer last year when the ballad of the local roots
and roll super group The Surly Young Bucks began. Aaron
Goldstein bumped into Max Kerman and Mike DeAngelis on a bus
bound for Toronto and began the legend. They immediately
found common ground as McMaster University students and as
musicians, but couldn’t have predicted their common future.
“I remember thinking that I’ve got a few years on these boys,
but they know what they’re talking about,” smiles Goldstein on
the initial connection. “We hadn’t discussed working or making
music together or anything, I think we all just agreed that we
weren’t done figuring out what the others were about.”
So the trio kept in touch and while Goldstein worked on a
Led Zeppelin cover band, Red Zeppelin, and Kerman and
DeAngelis on Charlemagne. They hung out more and more with
Goldstein’s recording skills eventually enlisted to produce
Charlemagne.
“I went to see the band a number of times, and I had them
play in my basement a number of times so I could wrap my head
around the intricacies of their tunes,” recalls Goldstein. “Any time
that I could, I tried to inject bits of my massive knowledge of rock
history into their nubile young brains. I had just finished reading
Levon Helm’s autobiography This Wheel’s On Fire, and I told Max
what a solid read it was. He already knew a good number of Band
tunes, but I think reading the book really put their story into
perspective for him. We definitely bonded early on, especially
after Max read the book.”
When the full line up of Charlemagne couldn’t make a
benefit gig, Kerman enlisted Goldstein to help put together a
band for a one off performance. One gig turned into a couple and
with more people coming to join the down home jamboree
oriented party on stage, and the project took on a life of its own.
“Once we had the momentum, I think we all knew that this
