WHO WE ARE
Friendly Giants is musical collective with a rotating guest list of musicians and songwriters. "My roots come from sixties music", says the band's founder, John Wittmayer, "but because our band is cross-generational, every decade has been creatively mined for ideas and influences". Wittmayer (songwriting, vocals, guitar, bass, synth, percussion) met Shawn Fisher (production, violin, vocals, keyboard, percussion) in the winter of 2020 during the “Great Lockdown,” and the two began to collaborate musically. Friendly Giants was nearly born! Barry Jones (production, keyboard, trumpet, percussion), and James Stephens (production, vocals, guitar, bass, percussion) soon joined the collective, followed by Amy Heasman (songwriting, vocals) and Holly Schweitzer (vocals).
With that, Friendly Giants came to be.
"All band members contribute", Wittmayer says. “The sum of our parts creates music that we all identify with, and this sharing is what thrills us to keep creating.” Travis Yost (percussion) has also made appearances on some of the band’s tracks. Friendly Giants creates music with deep indie roots and an eclectic mixture of cross-generational roots-influenced hippie-pop. The group is endlessly inspired by the Slocan Valley’s lively artistic community and surrounding landscape, where music brings people together.
Friendly Giants is looking forward to releasing their first album in the spring of 2024.
JOHN WITTMAYER
songwriting, vocals, guitar, bass, synth, percussion
John was born in Ketchikan, Alaska, raised in Northern California, and immigrated to Canada in the early Seventies. His musical education was growing up in the Bay Area in the Sixties and absorbing the great music that he encountered there as a teenager. This included psychedelic bands like the Grateful Dead, and then Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Moby Grape, Steve Miller, Santana, The Doors, Allman Brothers, Eric Burden and The Animals, Creedence Clearwater, Taj Mahal, Elvin Bishop, he Charlatans, Tower of Power, and many more. Groups like Cream came through on tour, as well as John Lee Hooker, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and Canned Heat. The hippie subculture in the Bay Area was quickly introduced to Blues greats like Muddy Waters, James Cotton, Little Walter, Freddie King, BB King, Buddy Guy, and Albert King. He spent hours listening to Bay Area radio stations serving up a tasty mix of Rock & Roll, R&B, and Soul music 24 hours a day. Radio stations like KDIA and KFRC documented the era of the Summer of Love and seemly blasted out of every neighbourhood window.
Like many of his generation, the inspiration for his musical journey really began with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones when they first toured America. Swept up in the wave of Beatlemania, all the hip kids began to wear their hair long and wore pointy Beatle boots, paisley shirts, beads, amulets, and tight pants. He got his ear pierced and got beat up regularly by the ‘greasers”, as they were called. He spent many weekends going to shows at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, hung out at Golden Gate Park and the Haight Ashbury frequently, and attended free rock concerts that were held throughout the Bay Area. He was at the historic Human Be-in at Golden Gate Park in 1968.
John’s first guitar was a Silvertone Arch Top that he somehow magically plugged into his mother’s stereo, and then promptly blew out the speakers. She was not impressed. John’s music has its roots and its beginnings from his powers of observation gleaned from those magical and mystical times… and from more serious themes while practicing ‘adulting’ as the years passed. His wry and mildly sardonic songwriting is a direct reflection of his own personal experience; the triumphs, pain, and failures of relationships, yet he still finds optimism even in the darkest places where many of these stories lay waiting to be told. “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Now living in the Slocan Valley, nestled in the mountains of British Columbia, John continues to write songs and play with his band Friendly Giants. They are recording their first LP.
