A quiet Friday night in the Lochrie household near Moody Park nearly a fortnight ago turned into a whirlwind weekend almost as quickly as an Alex Burrows overtime goal.
Don and Marian Lochrie’s beloved Vancouver Canucks weren’t scheduled to start the Stanley Cup final until the following Wednesday. They were trying to find a way to get their two young daughters excited about the local puck lads having the chance to capture the sport’s holy grail.
The Lochries are teachers (Marian teaches in Surrey), but they also have a garage-style band that plays farmers markets, clubs and children’s venues around town called Kick in the Eye. They had already dreamed up a melody for a new song, but didn’t have any lyrics. So when they came up with one involving the Canucks, it started to flow.
“We’ve got a weekend, let’s put this all together,” they said.
So they hurriedly packed up the kids, sent them off to grandma’s and began to write. They had a lot of pent-up creativity. Since he was young, Don Lochrie’s nickname was Donnie Hockey. “I was playing hockey before I could walk.” He got his wife hooked on it during the Canucks’ run to the 1994 Stanley Cup final against the New York Rangers .
That night, the 38-year-olds stayed up until 2 a.m. writing lyrics like:
“Our Canucks, the Stanley Cup. We’ve waited 40 years, now our time has finally come. 1982, 1994, we’re never gonna have to cry about them anymore.”
And, “The wait is over, no more debate. No one is stopping us, it’s destiny and fate.”
They spent the Saturday doing the musical arrangements and then called up Bully’s Studios in New West to book a recording session for Sunday. That night, they did the video, with a Bob Dylan-like theme of lyrics on cue cards, into the wee hours of the morning in their apartment block’s weight room.
“We were pretty intense,” said Marian. “It’s amateur but it’s got the heart that we wanted.”
“We’ve waited 40 years and more, our time has finally come,” said Don.
In addition to uploading it to YouTube, they gave a copy to their six-year-old daughter Elyse to take to her morning kindergarten class. The teacher passed it on to the afternoon class and others as well.
“She just loves it, she’s so excited,” said Marian of their outgoing daughter who was more than willing to hand out flyers of the video to the crowd gathered to watch Saturday’s game at Surrey’s Central City plaza.
Marian said the reaction to Our Canucks has been up and down. A lot really like it, others say it’s too sing-songy, too much like children’s music.
“They’re simplistic lyrics, but we also wrote for older generations,” said Don.
Although they’ve sent it to several radio stations they hadn’t received much response as of Monday, but now have more than 1,000 hits on YouTube.
Marian and Don are superstitious so they do a lot of knocking on wood because there is a small fear the hockey gods won’t take too kindly to so much enthusiastic premature celebration.
However, they remain positive their Canucks will finally win it all.
As their lyrics say: “This is our team, this is our year. 2011, the Cup is coming here.”
– by Grant Granger
ggranger@newwestnewsleader.com
