The Sheepdogs Return to Burlington for Royal Botanical Gardens Show

The Sheepdogs play the Royal Botanical Gardens on Thursday, and the Saskatoon band has more Burlington history than the billing suggests.

Long before the four-time JUNO winners were headlining garden shows, they were making the drive east to play The Legendary Red Rooster at 484 Plains Rd. E., a bar that shut down in 2011. Five bands a night, and the pay was food and drink, deducted from whatever the band earned.

"They had these things called 'Roosterjitos' that were so good, and we were so broke that we didn't get paid some nights because we ate so many," bassist Ryan Gullen told BurlingtonToday. "Burlington is the place we played a lot when nobody knew who we were, so it's really fun to come back."

The band formed in Saskatchewan in 2004, when Gullen, singer and guitarist Ewan Currie and drummer Sam Corbett were finishing high school and none of them were practiced musicians. It took seven years of playing before they quit their jobs for music. They headlined opening night of the Sound of Music Festival in 2014.

Twenty-two years in, there are nine albums. The latest, Keep Out Of The Storm, arrived in February as the first release on the band's own label, Right On Records. It was recorded around the time Corbett stepped away, so five different drummers play across it, which Gullen compared to a musical blind date.