The pride of Couqitlam, BC, Matthew Good Band have always been Underdogs in the music industry, and have paid their dues to make it big. "It was a very surreal night. We'd been out for 30 days, and I was so stressed out about the situation that I had a stress attack between sets. Passed out cold. I went back to the hotel, had a shower and decided that I just couldn't deal with this shit anymore. I'm just going to tell everyone I'm out." Those were the words of Matthew Frederick Robert Good one night in an Edmonton Hotel. Matthew Good Band went from being called a folk band to a group with two top ten singles on Canada’s Muchmusic.
"When I first got a band together, it lent an instrumentation - piano, violin, cello - to what I thought would go with the fact that I played a solo acoustic guitar." In the beginning, Matthew Good Band were used to play half-filled bar rooms. "Luckily, my tolerance for that ran out fairly quickly," Matt says. "It didn't have the oomph I wanted. The dynamic was all wrong. You've gotta wonder, when you're playing an acoustic guitar through a jazz chorus and distortion pedals, whether you should just get an electric and do it properly." After that, Matthew Good called his bassist Geoff Lloyd and drummer Charlie Quitana to put the new Matthew Good Band together. Quitana later went on to play in Joan Osborne’s band, and so Matt got Ian Browne, an old school mate, to fill in.
Dave Genn was to play keyboard and guitar, and The Matthew Good Band were ready to record Last of The Ghetto Astronauts. Still, Matthew doesn’t consider LotGA his one of his greatest accomplishments to date. "I was never really satisfied with that album. I was so mired in what I was doing before, there were elements of that I couldn't leave behind. They were sewn into the record without me even thinking about it." Indie promoter Bobby Gale took heed and convinced Vancouver’s CFOX radio station to add the track “Alabama Motel Room” onto their playlist in December ’95. This song stuck, and CFOX ended up having a Matthew Good Band track on their playlist for a whole 18 months. Sales of LotGA soared up to 25, 000, amazing for an indie band considering most of the buyer’s came from CFOX’s listeners.
A year later, the band was signed with Private Music in the USA. The band had the Raygun EP all ready to release in the states and things were going smoothly. MGB was ready to prepare for Underdogs with Wayne Livesey. The band then found out that Private Record’s parent company had joined Windham Hill Records, a label doing New Age music. Things picked up at Music West for MGB, when they played in front of a bunch of A&R reps, John Reid and Dave Porter among the crowd. Later in 1997, MGB released Underdogs, and followed by that, the huge hit single Apparitions. Matthew Good Band has achieved much success since then, and are headlining this year’s Edge Fest. Matthew Good Band are underdogs no more.
