Playing With Fire

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on "Playing With Fire" by The Wild!, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any length of time you already know the kind of record that gets the green light in this room. This one came out of Kelowna, British Columbia, a lakeside town up in the Okanagan that the boys still treat like home base. The cut first hit as a single in the summer of 2019, the third time the band sat down with JUNO-winning producer Mike Fraser, the same man who has worked the board for AC/DC, Aerosmith, and Van Halen. It followed their spring single "Helluva Ride," and when the full record arrived on March 20, 2020, the song was sitting on Still Believe In Rock And Roll. Folks sometimes call the record by the single's name. The sleeve says otherwise, and the band's own pages back that up. Either way, it is a dirty little package of blues-based rock, punk bite, and a streak of country, built for a room with the lights down and the volume up.

Frontman Dylan Villain told the press, when the Canadian dates were posted, that the band had just come off the biggest tour of their career in Europe and could not help being reminded of where it all began. The fix, in his words, was to go back to the clubs in their home country that got them there in the first place. That fall run had a sold-out night at Doc Willoughby's in Kelowna and another sellout at House of Targ in Ottawa, with stops through Vancouver, Kamloops, Lethbridge, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Red Deer, St. Catharines, and Toronto's Bovine Sex Club. The video landed in September 2019, and the lineup on the sleeve was the one Zoo Freaks still picture: Villain on vocals and lead guitar, Benny The Kid on guitar, Boozus on bass and vocals, and Crash Anderson on drums. Press copy at the time called the song a testament to keeping the flame going, a road paved by fast times and loose morals on the hunt for personal freedom. That is not marketing talk so much as a job description.

The record that holds the song was the one Villain sweated over. Talking with Subculture Entertainment in 2020, he said the difference people were hearing was the attention paid to lyrics and melodies, and that he had put real pressure on himself, from the team, from the fans, and from his own head, to make something better than good. Wild At Heart had been on the road for three years and taken them around the world. That momentum, he said, created the demand for a record that would stand the test of time. He told the interviewer they left no stone unturned, that the obsession cost him sleep, about three hours a night for three months, because he wanted to give everybody something great instead of throwing songs in a pile and calling it a day. He also said the finished thing was an honest record, full of conviction, because the stuff he sings about is true and lived. They were not writing the flavor of the week. Classic Rock later put it about as plain as a magazine can: The Wild! celebrate the spirit of rock and roll and flatten everything that stands in their way.

How they got to that point is a better story than the bio sheet. Villain has said he grew up in the middle of nowhere and had his first band at twelve, playing bars, which is a heck of a way to learn a room. Out of high school he went to Toronto and played punk, metal, and hardcore, then headed for Vancouver and stalled out in Kelowna. In a 2015 sit-down with Sleaze Roxx he remembered the house party where it started. He had just moved from Ontario, drove up, and watched a band of teenagers, the oldest maybe twenty. Those players, and bassist Boozus, became the crew. A later interview with Live Metal put the same night in plainer clothes: he met Boozus and drummer Reese Lightning on the way to the big city and never left. The Kelowna version of growing up, the way he has told it, was crappy vehicles, dirt roads, old rock and roll, punk and metal records, bush parties, hunting and fishing. Asked once if it was hard to get noticed out of a backwater, he laughed and said the drives are long and the highways are rough, and that never slowed them down. They played everywhere, with anyone, until Canada noticed.

The break was a song called "Roadhouse." Without a label, a booking agent, or a paid promo team, that single landed on the Canadian Active Rock charts in 2015. Villain has told the story of a radio guy asking the band's name, hearing "Roadhouse," and calling back with a yes. The spins climbed, the phone started ringing, and producer Mike Fraser was on the other end. The old line, repeated in the band's own press, is that Fraser was offered Villain's '65 Cadillac DeVille in place of a label budget to make the first record. They did not have to hand over the car. They did get Fraser, who Villain has called an older brother and one of his best friends outside the studio, the kind of producer who already knows where a song is headed. Agent Ralph James came on around the same time, and a deal followed with Entertainment One.

The debut, GxDxWxB, is not a secret code so much as a family joke. Villain told Screamer Magazine it stands for God Damn Wild Boys. On the early tours they kept bringing Boozus home good and drunk, and his old lady would curse the lot of them with that phrase. The crew kept it, the fans started yelling it at shows, it landed on the merch, and when it was time to name the record they put it on the cover. "Slow Burn" from that album peaked at number 5 on Canadian Active Rock, with "Straight to Hell" and "What About You?" both cracking the top 20. Wild At Heart, the 2017 follow-up, knocked Metallica out of the number 2 spot on the iTunes rock chart the week it arrived. By the time "Playing With Fire" showed up they had already shared stages with Airbourne, Steel Panther, Buckcherry, Godsmack, Korn, Rise Against, and Wolfmother, and played Carolina Rebellion, Welcome to Rockville, Wacken Open Air, and Sweden Rock. In May 2026 they were back posting about a hometown Kelowna show, the first in seven years, still calling themselves the best rock and roll band in that city. The highway did not retire them.

If you want the band in their own words, the longtime site at thewildrocknroll.com is no longer serving their pages, so it stays off this copy. The rooms that still open are the ones they actually use. Find them on Facebook, on Instagram, and on X. No separate fan site or active fan group turned up that we could stand behind, so the official pages are the place to park. And when the Crew is done with this one, the rest of the freeform rock lives over at THE ZOO, same as it ever was, commercial-free and built for Zoo Freaks who still believe a song can start a night.