Grady

For those too busy having a life to keep track, Grady is what happened to Gordie Johnson after Big Sugar ended.

June, 2005


A few years ago Big Sugar’s Gordie Johnson had a problem. His day job with Canada’s premier club act was everything he should want. He had regular gigs, good selling albums, and all of the perks of mid-level Canadian rock and roll success.

Johnson’s problem is that it kinda sucked. In his eyes anyway. Over the phone from his new home in Austin, he explains what life was like in the Big Sugar bubble around the turn of the millennium. “Big Sugar was kind of getting to a place where people were demanding that we should sound a certain way or like we always had. Big Sugar was not going to get worse; it just wasn't going to get any better. I could see into the future when that might happen. I didn’t want to see it dwindle away.”

But Johnson had a plan. You see while he had his Big Sugar life, he also had another musical life. It was called Grady. Grady was just a few guys he used to play with between Big Sugar gigs, basically Johnson, their soundman ‘Big Ben’ Richardson and occasionally Texas friend Whipper Layton when he was in Toronto.

One of those gigs was at Grossman’s Tavern on Toronto’s Spadina Street. Some enterprising wag recorded the high octane blues rock gig and it started being passed around via CDR. One of those discs actually made it back to Whipper Watson in Texas. He called up Johnson and told him that it actually sounded on the disc like they had something. With Big Sugar fading in his personal rear view mirror, Gordie Johnson grabbed his guitars and decided to make Austin, Texas his new postal code. And Grady was officially upgraded from Gordie Johnson’s part time job to his full-time obsession.

“Shortly after we got there we recorded a disc in like a week, then we went to the South by Southwest music festival and tossed like 500 of the discs off of the back of a truck” he shrugs. “Then Waterloo Records in Austin wanted to release it. And then it kind of took off.”

Took off is a bit of an understatement. The album and the band captured the hearts of Austin’s roots community like a true Southern belle. They placed 5th on the list for the Austin Music Awards’ Album of the Year, seventh for Best Band, and did top ten in seven other categories.

“I went to the awards show and a friend told me to dress up real nice” Johnson says. Good advice that: Grady took home the Best New Band Award. “Man, oh man I was dancing around in a circle” Johnson says excitedly. “That was really a great moment of being accepted after only one and a half years”.

So after their newfound Texas success, Johnson and Grady are coming back home for some gigs back in Canada, one of which brings them to the Drink on June ??. As for his new home, Johnson shrugs off the change. “Oh, it’s not that big of a change from where we used to live in Alberta” he insists. He pauses a moment and then laughs “Summer in Canada is not that much different than Texas in winter!”