In case you missed it, one of the more entertaining details behind the scenes at a recent event that won't be named here, was that comedic East Vancouver blues-rock duo Kitty & The Rooster were booked to play a stage that also featured performers that appealed to children.

“We went on right after a yo-yo champion,” guitarist and “cock” of the band, Noah Walker, tells the Straight. “The front row was all children sitting on bean bag chairs, but we didn’t change our act one bit.” (It’s not that bad—it’s just rude, opinionated, and very funny). “A few eyebrows went up, but no one left and everybody had a good time. In fact we ran into some parents, a few weeks later, who had brought their kids to the show and they thought it was hilarious.”

You can understand the confusion: the two promote themselves, and come onstage with, two rather cute full-head funny animal masks. Walker’s rooster is pretty much a rooster—there’s an outer limit on how expressive you can make a chicken’s head and still have a realistic chicken. But drummer-vocalist Jodie Ponto’s kitty is hilarious, blankly clued out and debauched, like she’s done too much catnip.

They ordered the masks, we learn, from stateoflatex.com, the name printed on the package when it arrived, piquantly evoking far kinkier contents than rubber masks.

“Hopefully our neighbours didn’t see it,” Walker quips.

But family-friendly as that might seem, you do have to think about the genitalia references behind their name, made overt earlier this summer, when they sold “pussy lickers” and “cock suckers” at their shows (that is, lollipops with their images emblazoned on the labels).

Walker explains that his mother came by one morning for coffee, and then offered up a suggestion. “The first thing she said was, ‘I’ve got a merch idea for you: Two words ... COCK SUCKERS!’ We thought it was genius. When we actually made them I think she was a bit mortified. Sorry, Mom, it was just too funny not to do!”

Ponto was the source of the band name, it transpires.

“Jodie has an infamous band name list that she’s been collecting for years with over 500 band names on it. Kitty & The Rooster was one of the first names on list. We had always joked that if we ever started a duo it should be called Kitty & The Rooster. Jodie even had the foresight to buy the web domain and secure the Facebook page just in case we ever did start a band, which we did some two years later.”

As for the masks, “Jodie is a professional photographer so we had to have a large visual component to the band. That’s where the masks and photoshopping came in—or PONTOshop as we like to call it.”

The masks work a charm in their many satiric album and magazine covers. 

So far no one has come at them over copyright violations. “Hopefully one day we’ll be famous enough that somebody will actually give a shit what we do,” Walker muses, “but no worry of that just yet. If and when that day comes, I think parody law will be our best friend.”

Ponto also makes “PONTOshop” publicity photos such as this one, Walker explains, “of Kitty & The Rooster as Mary and Joseph giving birth to a compact disc with the backup singers the Cockettes as the three wise men”. This ties into of a Saturday (September 22) CD-release gig, for the band's new One Gig Hard Drive.

“We got Jodie a cocktail drum kit a few months before our first gig," Walker says. "Much to my surprise she just knew how to play it right from the get-go. As a music teacher, this was quite a revelation because I know that’s not how it usually works.”

Walker, on the other hand, has been playing guitar professionally in Vancouver for a long time. “I love playing lots of styles of music and so being a gig whore is the life for me. You can see a greatest hits collection on my  website.”

While giving a sum total of projects he’s been involved with is impossible, bands he’s playing with in September 2018 alone include the Hank Pine Band, Prairie Cat, soul unit Brown Paper Bag, Jeff Gladstone and Colleen Rennison, Shaela Miller (“a real deal honky tonk singer from Alberta”), “perv-folk legend” Corwin Fox, the Company B Jazz Band (who will soon be touring “World War II-era jazz” through China, and the Walkman Brothers (whom he describes as “a blues duo with my brother from another mother Jesse Waldman.”). The Brothers can be found at the Libra Room most Sundays.

Walker also will be gigging this month with Petunia & the Vipers, whom he describes as his favourite band in the world. “I’m pretty honoured to be subbing in with them at the Rickshaw,” he says of the band’s upcoming gig on September 29.

Relatedly, he will also be playing with the Rocket Revellers, the house band at the Revel Room in Gastown, whose regular lineup usually includes Stephen Nikleva and Jimmy Roy of Petunia & the Vipers, as well as Mike van Eyes on piano. As Walker puts it, “the band is composed of some of my greatest musical heroes and some bona fide rockabilly legends. I’m just filling in, but you’ll see me grinning ear to ear all night.”

The connections with his “all-time guitar hero” Stephen Nikleva also include Nikleva’s instrumental solo project, written about in the Straight awhile back. 

So why did Kitty & The Rooster call their album One Gig Hard Drive?

“Like a lot of our material," Walker offers, "it comes from a joke: What do you get when you drive all the way from Vancouver to Calgary just to play one show? A ONE GIG HARD DRIVE.” (You can imagine Ponto doing a little drum riff after that, if you like). “Our musician friends know all too well what this song is about.”

You may begin to get a sense of Kitty & the Rooster’s humour, but if not, check out “Paid a Million Dollars (to Live Like You’re Poor),” the advance single from the album.

It may not be the only song about the Vancouver housing crisis—Walker points out Geoff Berner’s Fugs-referencing “Condos” and “That’s What Keeps The Rent Down, Baby” as other examples—but it’s one of the funniest, especially during the live invocation to chant along with the band, God Hates Home Owners (one wonders an eight year old at Khats asking his parents afterwards why this is so).

Sadly, the song is drawn from life. “We, like every other person we know, we were renovicted from our home [in 2016]. As fate would have it, we were asked to play a block party directly across the street from our old house. We wrote the song “Paid A Million Dollars (To Live Like You’re Poor)” for that occasion. It was an easy song to write—we just wrote down what happened. We thought we were just going to sing it that one time, but it turns out it’s one of our most requested songs.”

Things turned out okay: “We lucked out and are still living in the Commercial Drive area,” Walker says. “If it happens again, though, I think we might be screwed.”

What was “Damp Cold” inspired by? Ponto does a very funny ‘New York Jewish’ accent during that, which deals with griping about B.C. weather. Where is that coming from? “Jodie grew up in Northern BC in a town called Taylor [famous for the CBC reality TV show Village On A Diet].

Kitty & The Rooster’s upcoming release show will feature folk/roots duo Twin Peaks (which has shared stages with Kitty & The Rooster before) and Shirley Gnome.

“We asked ourselves, hypothetically, if we could have anyone in the world open the show who would it be?" Walker relates. "The first choice we both picked was Shirley Gnome. We didn’t think she would say 'yes' because she’s been touring all over the world and just released an album on 604 Records. She says it best herself: ‘Life is a joke, I write songs about it.’ ”

Is there anything else we should mention apropos the gig?

“We are planning some stuff that will only ever be performed at this one show so we hope people will come check it out,” Walker says. “ We will be joined by our backup singers the Cockettes who just happens to be none other than Twin Peaks [Lindsay Pratt and Naomi Shore] and everybody’s hero Carolyn Mark!”

After a minute, he adds, “Jodie and I probably aren’t going to get married so people should just come to this show instead.”

For more on the Kitty & the Rooster album release party for One Gig Hard Drive, Saturday (September 22) at the ANZA Club, go here.