Slo-pitch teams and music lovers are about to rock out to some classic tunes when the artists that made them famous headline this year’s A&W Funtastic Music Festival at the Vernon DND grounds Canada Day weekend.
“Fans can expect the 2012 Funtastic will feature the best headliner lineup ever,” said Jim McEwan, executive director with the Funtastic Sports Society.
Lou Gramm and three of Canada’s most famous party bands, The Headpins, Kenny Shields and Streetheart and Trooper are all expected to perform.
“It is great to have Trooper back after an eight- year hiatus. What a better way to celebrate Canada Day. They are still one of the most beloved bands in Canada and wrote one of rock and roll’s greatest party anthems, We’re Here for a Good Time (Not a Long Time),” said McEwan.
Also known for hits Raise a Little Hell, The Boys in the Bright White Sports Car, 3 Dressed Up as a 9 and many more, Trooper will headline the fireworks show on Canada Day, which this year takes place on a Sunday, to close the festival.
Opening for the band will be tribute act Aerosmith Rocks, playing all of that band’s venerable hits.
Rock legend Lou Gramm, best known as the lead vocalist on all of Foreigner’s hit songs, headlines Saturday, June 30.
Gramm co-wrote two of Foreigner’s biggest hits with the ballads Waiting for a Girl Like You, which spent 10 weeks at No. 2 on the 1981-82 American Hot 100 charts, and I Want to Know What Love Is, which was a No. 1 hit internationally in 1985.
He also sang on such classics as Feels Like the First Time, Cold as Ice, Long, Long Way from Home, Hot Blooded, Double Vision, Blue Morning, Blue Day, Head Games, Dirty White Boy, Urgent, Juke Box Hero, Break It Up and Say You Will.
The festival opens Friday, June 29 with one of Canada’s “loudest” bands, The Headpins, featuring Vernon’s own Darby Mills, and another Canadian classic, Kenny Shields and Streetheart, whose best known songs include Action, Hollywood, Teenage Rage, One More Time, Tin Soldier, What Kind of Love is This, and their disco remake of The Rolling Stone’s hit Under My Thumb.
Tickets for the A&W Funtastic Music Festival go on general sale at 9 a.m. on June 1 at local A&W restaurants, or go to www.funtastic.org to for more information.
