This '90s Newfoundland music festival was where Mark Critch and his BFF found their cool

Let's travel back to the glorious and grungy 1990s, when alternative music, social justice and grunge fashion shared a stage. 

It was a time when Gen X and older millennials reigned supreme, with a soundtrack composed by bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam who dominated the charts in the U.S. while across Canada, I Mother Earth, Our Lady Peace and The Tea Party blasted out of the local coffee shop speakers. From B.C. to Newfoundland, every region across the country was cooking up their own version of this scene.  

In Saint John's, Newfoundland, there was the Peace-A-Chord festival, filled with local talent and, as retold in Son of a Critch, a venue that helped shy kids like Mark and his best friend Ritche to get comfortable in the spotlight.

What was Peace-A-Chord?

Peace-A-Chord was a locally-organized youth festival in St. John's that started in the mid-1980s and ran until the early 2000s. It was a grassroots effort that served as a space for community engagement and expression and aimed to shine a light on the social, political and environmental hot-button issues of the day.

The festival was a launchpad for local music as well. Post-punk, alternative, you name it – the festival gave these bands a stage to introduce themselves to the world. It was raw, local energy. 

If you wonder what it was like to live through those turbulent times in Newfoundland, just ask Mark Critch, co-creator of Son of a Critch who worked at the real Peace-A-Chord festival as an emcee, doing comedy bits and introducing speakers and acts. Critch describes the social and political storms that rocked the province in the early '90s. "At the time, the fisheries moratorium was just around the corner. Fishermen and plant workers could see something had changed. A way of life was about to die and the economy was about to crash in our province." 

In the series, a young Mark Critch (played by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), works at the festival and meets a representative from the Coalition For Fisheries Survival, based on a real-life fisheries advocacy group.

While young Mark was coming into his own as a comedian and emcee, his best friend Ritche Perez was getting a chance to fulfill his music dreams at the Peace-A-Chord festival. "We were two shy kids at our old school but in the arts scene, we had kind of reinvented ourselves. It was nice to have someone there who knew '"my secret'," says Critch.

 "There was an explosion of alternative music in Newfoundland then and Ritche was always at the forefront. Ritche didn't shrink from being different. He embraced it. And I always admired him. He knew who he was."

In the series, Ritche's band, Potatobug, plays a song at the Peace-A-Chord festival.  The song is a nearly true-to-life version of Potatobug's song, "Misled." 

"That's a real Potatobug song in the show and the full band came out that day to watch the taping. I like to think they approved! The pretend band was also coached by Ritche and another member of the band who helped them find their groove," Critch says.

"I was asked to come in and kind of, like, just show them how, like, how, to Mark Rivera [who plays young Ritche in the series], how I moved around," says Perez, adding, " I was so shy being up on stage. I never thought of myself as the front person for a band. And so I kind of grew my hair and kept looking down and just masked everybody away from myself, just looking down, playing."

Perez also collaborated with Great Big Sea founding member (and Son of a Critch theme song creator) Alan Doyle, to create a version of the original song tailored to the episode. 

Being a young alternative musician in the early 1990s, Perez can tell you exactly what struck a chord with him at the time. "[W]e were influenced by Sonic Youth. One of my favourite bands was Dinosaur Jr. and a lot of the alternative stuff: Mudhoney, The Jesus Lizard. It was a lot of that kind of like noise-rock, garage rock kind of stuff," he notes.

What happened to Potatobug? They are still around even though the band has dispersed a little over the years. According to Ritche Perez, "We still do reunions. The boys are still here. I'm still here. I play with the drummer in a band called XIA-3. It's an instrumental fusion band. And, we just got back from Quebec City, playing a festival there called "Le Phoque Off."