Rocki’s road For ‘noodle-wave’ pioneer Rocki Rolletti, you can never be too old to play By: David Sanderson Posted: 4:00 PM CDT Friday, Jun. 5, 2026

Since 2022, veteran singer Jennifer Hanson has helped organize a benefit concert with all proceeds going toward humanitarian aid in Ukraine.

The annual affair attracts some of the city’s top musicians, only at the most recent sold-out gathering, held May 9 at the Assiniboine Gordon Inn on the Park, the lineup included a particularly special guest who Hanson laughingly introduced as, “the garlic toast of the town… the man of the hour… the tower of power… a legend in his own mind: Rocki Rolletti.”

“I’ve known Pete for most of my life and have wanted him to take part since the beginning, but it wasn’t until this year that the stars finally aligned,” Hanson says in reference to Peter Jordan, who in the early 1980s began appearing as Rocki Rolletti, the self-anointed king of noodle-wave music.

Hanson, the longtime leader of Top 40 dance band Jenerator, recalls joining Rolletti’s group as an unproven 18-year-old, fresh off a move to Winnipeg from her hometown of Flin Flon.

“Pete’s always been a real class act and if there’s one thing I learned from him it’s to treat the musicians in your group well,” says Hanson, who went by the name Anita Witness when she sang alongside Jordan/Rolletti.

(Fans of the group may recall Hanson’s late sister Susan Lethbridge — formerly of Graham Shaw and the Sincere Serenaders — filling the role of Frida People.)

“People were pretty darned excited when Pete came out,” Hanson continues. “One of my friends is a few years younger than me and missed Rocki at the height of his popularity. That night she was like, ‘Holy s—, this guy is amazing,’ and it’s true. He doesn’t perform that often any more but when he does, everybody pays attention.”

Jordan, in his 70s, chuckles, saying prior to stepping on stage that evening, he broke one of the cardinal rules of the Rocki Rolletti playbook: no rehearsals.

“The thing was, I hadn’t played with many of the people who were going to be there before, so it was necessary we go over a few things beforehand,” he says, settling his still-slim six-foot-three frame into a lawn chair resting in the front yard of his and his wife Pauline’s Wildwood Park home.

“Plus, even though I try to keep active by riding my bike and kayaking, I wasn’t entirely sure my hips and knees could handle all the old dance moves. So there were a few nerves involved, for sure.”

Jordan, the second eldest of four siblings, grew up in St. James. The father of two grown sons fell in love with theatre while attending Silver Heights Collegiate.

He continued to act at university, where he earned a master’s degree in religious studies. Not that Jordan had any intention of becoming a minister.

“Back then, you could take things at university simply because you found them interesting,” he explains. “I don’t remember my parents ever pressuring me to get a job or asking what I intended to be when I grew up. Check that: if I grew up.”

In the late 1970s — when he wasn’t pedalling a 10-speed bike from Winnipeg to Central America or navigating a home-built raft made of Styrofoam down the Mississippi River, from Minneapolis to New Orleans — Jordan was penning Enoch Horne, a live rock musical that made its world debut at what is now the Tom Hendry Warehouse Theatre.

Jordan starred as Horne, a reclusive rock star whose handlers encourage him to run for election as premier of Manitoba.

Concert promoter Gilles Paquin attended an early performance of the show. He reached out to Jordan soon thereafter to ask if he’d ever considered fronting a “real” band. Jordan was receptive to the idea.

And because he had previously devised a Halloween character dubbed Rocki Rolletti — a send-up of Grammy-nominated, Italo-Canadian singer Gino Vannelli (Powerful People, I Just Wanna Stop) — he suggested incorporating that persona into whatever Paquin had in mind.

Soon enough, Rocki Rolletti was filling the city’s largest nightclubs, as often as six nights a week. There, backed by a crack band that counted some of the most talented players available, Jordan-as-Rolletti would belt out timeless classics such as Sam and Dave’s Hold On, I’m Coming, the Kinks’ You Really Got Me, Them’s Gloria and the pièce de résistance — Werewolves of Lundar, his Interlake-laced take on the Warren Zevon smash Werewolves of London.

“We also got on the social circuit, big time,” Jordan recalls, mentioning an especially memorable gig at the University of Winnipeg, his old alma mater, when six people dressed as Roman guardsmen carried him into the hall on an oversized platter of spaghetti. His get-up? A giant meatball.

“Of course, as the night moved along, the spaghetti ended up getting thrown around until probably 90 per cent of the crowd was covered in it.”

In 1982, the group entered a songwriting contest run by the Canadian wing of A&M Records. Over 500 entries were received and when the votes were counted, Rocki Rolletti was the lone winner from the Prairie provinces.

Two original compositions — Goof on the Roof and Sex Wars — produced by studio whiz Bob Ezrin (Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, Kiss) appeared on a compilation album titled Trans-Canada Rock. As honoured as he was, Jordan believes that was the beginning of the end for that iteration of the band.

“Overnight, we went from that group of friends that was just out there to have a blast, to having to be semi-serious,” he says, leaning forward.

“Now there were record companies involved. And the pressure to come up with hit singles, or to fire so-and-so from the band, or for it to be just me and the girls. It evolved into a ‘busted, disgusted, agents-can’t-be-trusted’ sort of thing, which I wasn’t into.”

As luck would have it, Rocki Rolletti had by then caught the attention of CBC Manitoba. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Jordan — still in character as Rocki — became a familiar face on nightly newscasts, where he would invoke his unique brand of humour into that evening’s headlines.

That led to national bits with the likes of This Hour Has 22 Minutes star Rick Mercer and ultimately to It’s a Living, the Gemini Award-winning program that ran on CBC from 1998 to 2004 that featured Jordan — finally under his own name — trying his hand at different occupations, week in and week out.

“Because of my TV schedule, it had been a while since we played in clubs, but what we eventually discovered was that the act worked just as well with a younger audience, so we started doing children’s festivals and one-offs as Rocki Rolletti and the Junior Noodle Wave, travelling as far as New York state,” Jordan says.

(When informed that Do the Rolletti, an album he and his band released in 1992, is currently commanding $35 on the online music marketplace Discogs, he cracks, “Holy smokes! For 35 bucks, I’ll come to your place and play.”)

Jordan is immensely proud of what he accomplished on It’s a Living but when the show wasn’t renewed after seven seasons and 586 episodes, he was ready for a change.

It wasn’t uncommon that he was away from home for weeks at a time, given the requirement to highlight jobs from coast to coast.

That made things difficult for his wife, he says, with her having to endlessly run their sons to activities while trying to maintain a household on her own.

For the last two decades, Jordan has split his time between acting in locally shot movies — he appeared in 2007’s The Stone Angel with Ellen Burstyn and in 2009’s New in Town alongside Harry Connick Jr. and Renée Zellweger — playing the occasional musical gig with his nephews’ group the Retro Rhythm Revue and producing short films for Birch Bark Productions, a company he runs in tandem with his sons.

Birch Bark Productions recently joined forces with the New World Ideas Project, a body that, according to its website, “develop(s) educational resources that encourage and celebrate Indigenous knowledge in the classroom and workplace.”

“Instructors in Manitoba are keen to include Indigenous perspectives in their curriculums and what we do is come up with teaching tools that facilitate just that,” he says.

Jordan, who was once vacationing in Thailand with Pauline, only to hear a passer-by shout out, “Hey, Rocki!,” smiles when asked if the newfound association gives him a reason to get up in the morning.

“In all honesty, I’ve never needed a reason. I’m pretty easy on myself with the goal being to accomplish one thing a day, even if that’s shaving,” he says.

“My big problem is that I’ve always had a really strong sense of play, feeling that the more I play in life, the better it would be. And so far, it’s pretty darned great.”

winnipegfreepress.com/davidsanderson