Wurdsand, Inc. as a Promotion Company #

Well, the partnership with Al was falling apart as we just weren’t bringing enough money in to continue to pay rent in the little office/warehouse that we were renting to run our printing business out of. During the last night of the Haunted House, my friend Dave Sommers and I went down to the office for the last time to get the few things that I had purchased like the front counter, piled it into my van and unloaded it in my apartment which was on the West End of Edmonton, overlooking the West Edmonton Mall. I would continue to run the company Wurdsand, Inc but I found that I could rent time on an offset press so in some ways it was business as usual but without the huge rent. I can’t remember the name of the place but it was run by a guy with a very thick European Accent named Nick.

Out of my apartment, I do remember getting into a bit of the publishing game with Dave Summers. There was an artist that was about to record at Damon Studio and we tried to pitch some songs that would be suitable for the artist. It was a hard pass on the songs we were pitching. That was about it with my projects with Dave Summers and we fell out of touch over time.

I did have a lot of things going with David Barns as he would be bringing in work as far as printing jobs and I would go down to Nick’s rent a press place and rent some time on the press and equipment to deliver the final product. Somewhere along the way I met a band that was called “The Heat”. This was kind of a weird story, because I planned to meet them after I saw a picture of the main singer in the band named Kim and she possed in the page 6 section as a Sunshine girl in the Edmonton Sun newspaper. In the write up it mentioned that she was the lead singer for a band called The Heat. So, I kept looking through the entertainment section of the newspaper for any indication that “The Heat” was playing somewhere in Edmonton. I found out later that they did not play in Edmonton very often, lot of rural places in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the NorthWest Territories.

It was probably several months before I finally saw that they were playing at a hotel lounge in the west end of Edmonton. I went down to hear them and met with Kim Federoff and Dave Simpson between sets and even after the show. We talked a bit about my background and they shared with me that they were going to change the name of the band and focus it more around Kim. The new band name was to be “The Kim Kastle Band”. The timing could not have been any better as I would be able to help with their rebranding efforts. David Barns took some pictures of Kim which we got blown up to poster side and then Jim Beverage went to work on the photograph and airbrushed the hell out of it. It turned into a gorgeous master piece.

We got prints made of the final picture and I got color separations made for the 11x17 size posters we were planning to make. I took the negs over to Nicks, where he had a really nice Heidelberg press that was quite capable of handling the size and the job. This time Nick ran the job for me as this was not a press that he ever rents out. Now that we had prints and posters on the way, it was time for me to interview Kim to get some background information so I could put together a press release. This was something else that none of the bands or even the record companies were doing, so I think the papers and magazines that I sent this all to were really taken aback to receive a press release that was this exciting.

In the interview I found out that before joining the band she was living in Pine Point, North West Territories. Don’t bother looking it up, it does not exist any more, I’ll explain that part of the story a little later but first here is the real interesting part. Kim was working in a Lead Zinc Mine and as she was telling me this she said, but you can’t use that. I pleaded with her until she gave in, because the title of my press release was just too perfect. The heading read, “From Lead and Zinc to Rock and Roll”. I don’t remember just how the rest of the details all went but it would have put this all into context. We packaged up the press release along with the airbrushed photo of Kim and set it out to the newspapers and magazines.

I was going to wait a couple of weeks and then start to follow-up on all the media places that we sent the press release to. I didn’t even have to do that because they started calling me, and I turned it over to the band and they scheduled interviews with the Alberta Report, City Center Magazine and the major newspapers, it was a lot of activating and interest that was spun off from this one press release.