A March gig at Waco’s 5th Street Icehouse has led Canadian rock guitarist and songwriter Val Halla to what she anticipates will be a memorable 26th birthday on June 16th and a big step up in her career.

That’s when she and a newly assembled rock band will open Ted Nugent’s “Trample the Weak, Hurdle the Dead” summer tour in June. It’s the first of several dates that the female guitarist will open for the veteran hard rocker, an opportunity that came about thanks to that Waco show.

Calvin Ross, owner of Waco’s Lone Star Music and a close friend of Nugent, had met the guitarist when she came to his store looking for a guitar amplifier. He had been working with Nugent on a song, “Never Stop Dreaming,” that he thought needed a female vocalist for a demo, so he decided to catch her Icehouse show preceding her appearance at Austin’s annual South By Southwest Music Festival.

Val Halla and a newly assembled rock band will open Ted Nugent’s “Trample the Weak, Hurdle the Dead” summer tour in June.

In short, she rocked.

“I was completely blown away with her talent: her songwriting, her vocals, her guitar playing,” Ross said.

After SXSW, he helped set up that demo, recorded at Central Texas’ Bigmouth Studio. That, in turn, caught Nugent’s ear and led his tour manager Nathan Gregory to catch her performance at a Los Angeles date, Ross said. The Nashville transplant’s ability to captivate a crowd, plus her individual drive to manage her own career, were big selling points.

Seal of approval

In short, she’ll rock. For Ted.

Nugent was quick to sing her praises. “She has the Uncle Ted seal of approval,” he said. “I’m always looking for new artists who have the passion of my black heroes and when I heard her play, I said all right. There’s hope.”

Her versatility was another point in her favor. “Her music is so diverse: rock and roll, pop and — my lips find it difficult to form these words — country . . . When Val does it, she puts herself into it. The bottom line is, she deserves me.”

Canada to Nashville

The female rock guitarist grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, moving to Vancouver, British Columbia, to pursue a music career. In addition to developing her playing and song writing there, she apprenticed in audio engineering and has helped produce CDs for more than a half dozen Canadian bands.

But when promoters and media assumed all rock bands in Vancouver sounded like Nickleback, Theory of a Deadman or 3 Doors Down, Halla packed her bags and moved to Nashville. There, she realized the roots of her musical upbringing.

“Most of my influences were from the South and I just didn’t know that,” she said. “I grew up listening to (Lynyrd) Skynyrd, CCR (Creedance Clearwater Revival) and the Doobie Brothers.”

Val Halla’s her stage name — she doesn’t want to release her given name for the privacy of her family back home in Canada — and it references a point of family pride: an early Viking ancestor named Harold the Black.

Being a woman in a macho rock world hasn’t presented a problem, she said, but being taken seriously as a musician is another matter, she said.

Halla started this week playing with a band of Austin musicians who’ll back her in Nugent’s summer tour: lead guitarist and Woodway native Neal Davis, bassist Alex Ferreiro and drummer Marty Higman.

“They all dropped out of music school — that’s what sold me on them,” she said with a laugh. Even better, the tour opens in Boston, the home of Berklee College of Music. “All the Berklee boys in the band are going back to show them off,” she said.

choover@wacotrib.com

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