Those of you still gnawing fiercely on your left arms for not getting tickets to the Co-Dependents' show at Festival Place a few months back, pull your teeth out. Of your arm, I mean.

The band, featuring Calgary's Billy Cowsill and guitarist and songwriter Steve Pineo, honky-tonks tonight at Tin Pan Alley.

The Cowsills, you've probably read here and there, were the inspiration for the Partridge Family, though no one was as nuclear-hot as Shirley Jones in her day, even if the tunes were a little silly.

It's a different kind of music being offered up on the weekend, more old-school rock and roll. Running with it, the Co-Dependents' CD is one of the most sucessful Alberta roots recordings in memory.

Their retro-tasty Live Recording Event is either incredibly popular or some obsessive millionaire is driving around the province buying up as many copies as he can, stopping only for drive-thru cheeseburgers and brief moments of sleep. Logic favours the former scenario, of course.

"Well," Pineo says over the phone, "it's actually opened the door for my CD.

"The Co-Dependents' disc has been on the charts for weeks straight and brought people down to our (non-Co-Dependents) shows that I've never seen before. It also has breathed new life into my A Perfectly Good Friendship CD that went back to No. 7 after being off the radar for about a year."

Because of this, Pineo doesn't suffer a Clark-Kent-jealous-of-Superman complex, the old formula of a solo artist not achieving the same success as his band. For one thing, before he ever came to the Co-Dependents, Pineo had it solidly together, having played on Stuart MacLean's Vinyl Cafe tour, as well as in the band with Jann Arden, the BNL and Blue Rodeo. He even penned Paul Brandt's Canadian Man.

In fact, everyone involved with the Co-Dependents, from Billy Cowsill to Tim Leacock to drummer Ross Watson, has other projects which keep them from lying in bed in their housecoats, wondering where the good days went.

Thus, Pineo's happy to talk about the canned concert, recorded last year over three nights at the Mecca on the outskirts of Calgary.

Barely a venue at all, orange light bathes what's essentially a few ATCO trailers stapled together, and music there is often magic.

"We had an awesome time.

"You can see on the CD jacket there's a lightning strike. I think it was caught on video. Bill did the best version of Slow Down, the Beatles' song, but because there was an electrical storm we ended up with all this white noise, which is too bad," Pineo shrugs. Though they did do some slight overdubbing, they decided not to re-record the missing sections.

"It would be a whole chunk of the entire thing that was gone.

"If we redid it, you could put it on, but it would be damaged goods."

That statement sums up the beauty of Live Recording Event, as does the title of both the album and the band. They're not looking to get rich and famous, just make something pure outside their own careers. Credible. And people picked up on it.

"We went in with energy and heart and made it sound like it all came from one night."

That's the only cheat, then, one which you can avoid by going to see it all happen at once tonight. Call 702-2060 for tickets.