When Our Lady Peace scored a coup of a lineup for this year's Summersault 2000 travelling festival, it's easy to say they were lucky.
As OLP guitarist Mike Turner sees it: "(Summersault) is a selfish accomplishment."
In what way?
"Uh, we really wanted to see all these cool bands," he whispers into the phone from his Toronto base before breaking out into laughter.
And who can argue with the choices made by him, Raine Maida, Jeremy Taggart and Duncan Coutts?
"Cool" bands such as The Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters, Britain's The Catherine Wheel, alt-rock supergroup A Perfect Circle, treble charger, Eve 6, Finger Eleven and Sum 41 will join Our Lady Peace for Summersault's eight-city Canadian tour, which kicks off tonight in Vancouver (with the addition of The Deftones). The tour includes a stop at Rideau Carleton Raceway on Aug. 13 and wraps up in Halifax Aug. 16.
"From a logistical standpoint, it's very, very difficult just to make a festival of this calibre go coast-to-coast with all these bands, all the gear and all the other stuff," says Turner, whose group stopped by these parts for a Canada Day bash.
"I think there's more effort gone into making sure that, with these bands, there wasn't any filler. There's no, 'Well, you know, the promoter's friends manage this band and ...' We were lucky enough to avoid all that crap."
No strangers to organized festivals, OLP exercised plenty of their own good-music judgment in hand-picking the aforementioned groups.
"Early on, the idea of the Pumpkins and The Foo Fighters came up," Turner says. "If we get those two, we could pretty much convince the promoters to give us free rein. They know they're going to sell tickets. They're gonna look at their bottom line and go, 'Yeah, I think theses guys are gonna do all right.' Then we started filling in the list with some more eclectic groups."
In choosing A Perfect Circle, for instance, Turner says: "Four or five months ago, all I knew was (Maynard James Keenan) from Tool and had a side project with (Billy Howerdel), the guitar tech from Nine Inch Nails. We had this suspicion that it was going to be awesome -- they've got a ripping debut record.
"If they're as good as I hope, I'm gonna be that jumping-up-and-down idiot on the side of the stage every day."
Meanwhile, Finger Eleven (the artists formerly known as The Rainbow Butt Monkeys), treble charger, Eve 6 and The Deftones will all be supporting albums released within the past couple of months.
Though attempts to lure British rockers Supergrass didn't pan out, not to mention OLP "couldn't get The Deftones to come all the way across the country," Turner contends the biggest shocker of Summersault 2000 was The Smashing Pumpkins' bittersweet announcement this would be their farewell tour.
"What a shame," a melancholy Turner says. "Billy (Corgan) wrote a fairly touching letter in the program for the festival. Bittersweet is a good way to put it.
"A little tiny part of me hopes he is thrilled by the fact that rock isn't dead, and maybe we're not selling as much as the Britney Spears of the world, but we're not eating cat food either.
"And it's not like Billy and James (Iha) and company are suddenly going to stop being musicians. I expect solo records out of both Billy and James. Melissa (Auf Der Maur) is just, like, a rock goddess, so she'll turn up somewhere."
Tickets for the Ottawa show, at $39.50, are still available at all Ticketmaster outlets.
