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Saskatoon’s Sheepdogs win Rolling Stone cover contest

When the Sheepdogs played Montreal’s Osheaga festival this weekend, they were given the unenviable task of opening the final day of the festival, warming the mainstage as fatigued partiers slowly filtered in (or didn’t). It was likely one of the last times they’ll ever play such an unfriendly slot.

Today, the Canadian rockers were announced as the winners of the first ever “Do You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star?” contest to become the first unsigned band to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. A group of hairy classic rock throwbacks from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan seemed like an unlikely prediction to win, but six months after the contest started the band has garnered more fan votes (reportedly over a million) than 1200 other entrants, including co-finalist Leila Broussard.

Then again, there are few bands that seem as perfectly suited to Rolling Stone as the Sheepdogs. When we caught them last week at Guelph’s Hillside Festival, their southern fried riffs and soothing psychedelic vocals recalled countless seventies bands – Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Band and Pink Floyd to name a few – but mostly they reminded us of Stillwater, the fictional band from Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, a film about a young journalist on assignment for Rolling Stone (the very same) in 1973. They even dressed the part with long hair, beards and sheepskin vests.

For Rolling Stone, putting the Sheepdogs on their cover signals a return to the publication’s hard rocking roots, before they grew more accustomed to featuring dinosaurs like Dylan and Springsteen and established stars from the pop realm like Rihanna and Lady Gaga. In recent years, the magazine has lost its status as unparalleled music authority to outlets like Pitchfork Media as print music coverage has had to share market with blogs and websites and the most innovative recent music has rarely come from the traditional bass-guitar-drums format that was once its editorial bread and butter.

But by putting the Sheepdogs on the cover on August 18 and hooking them up with a record deal with Atlantic, Rolling Stone will do its part to not only “break” a previously unknown band (that they’re from the often untapped Saskatoon market only furthers the point), but one that hearkens back to its golden era. If last week’s packed-to-the-rafters Hillside performance is any marker, it’s already paying off for the band as the buzz builds and their draw strengthens.

It’s a good news/bad news day for the Sheepdogs as they also learned their high-profile upcoming US tour opening for Kings Of Leon has been cancelled due to the band’s exhaustion. Either way, don’t be surprised to see the scraggly Saskatooners gracing large theatres across the continent in the near future.

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