Three years ago, a local London, ON rock and roll group called Bobnoxious recorded a song titled EOA (East of Adelaide). The self-deprecating, tongue in cheek lyrics attracted some criticism at the time, because it drew attention to many area problems that some of us would like to pretend don’t exist. When this band decided to use our Tree Trunk Tour in their lyrics as a sample of something good in our area, this started a chain of events that ultimately resulted in our most prominent and visible sculpture to date. We wanted to do something that would attract a new demographic group to our fan base and the EOA Sasquatch does that in almost every way imaginable.
The original concept or prototype sketch was done by East London’s very own famed tattoo artist Mike Austin. The sponsors are STIHL Canada and Tourism London, as always, but this time we used over $3,000 raised by the Fans of Bobnoxious through a go-fund-me account set-up by our local rock station FM96 and Taz the morning host. Summer’s Home Hardware stepped up and provided the ideal location or real estate for us to put it on. Each fan who contributed has their name included on plaques attached to the base (almost 250).
Robbin Wenzoski’s one-piece, hard maple sculpture is almost 14 ft. high from the tip of his raised hand, which forms the “Rock & Roll” hand sign, to the upside down shopping cart sitting on a base of granite quarried from Manitoulin Island. It weighs almost 2 tonnes. He plays the signature Bobnoxious Flying Arrow shaped guitar and displays an “I love EOA” (East of Adelaide) heart tattoo on his right chest. The Sasquatch stands upon an integral upside-down shopping cart that is contingent to the original song lyrics and provides the space for all the plaques.
The sponsorship by STIHL Canada has been essential to our success since we started the London Hamilton Road Tree Trunk Tour project over 7 years ago. We have funding set-up to do two more next year. They said it in Field of Dreams “build it and they will come” and what we have been able to do, with the assistance of STIHL Canada, proves that over and over again.
By Dave Broostad
www.hamroad.com