Klanac Industries

Thornetta Davis

2006-11-01T22:27:00.000-05:00

This was the first piece I did for the Gazette at Western. Shortly after this I started writing features fairly constantly for an online music magazine (name long since forgotten), Chapters Online and Scene magazine.

Given that its the first feature I had done in something like ever, it doesn't seem as bad as I thought it might. Must have been the subject matter.

Thornetta Davis still performs around the Detroit area. Wish she would come back to London.

January 24, 1997

By Bob Klanac
Gazette Staff

Thornetta Davis, she of the rumbling blues gospel vocal chords, is chuckling on the phone line from Detroit. She's just been told by yours truly that someone recently referred to her as Sub Pop Records' dance-pop diva.

"It's because I'm black I guess," she says with amusement.

And why not? After all, isn't every black female artist a fledging dance-pop diva? Perhaps, perhaps not, but certainly not Davis.

Being a typical recording artist could have made things a lot easier for Davis. The Detroit-born-and-bred singer has made the Motor City her base of operations since she was a lass growing up. Detroit was once a major music force in American music, but that was before Berry Gordy packed Motown's bags and moved it to Los Angeles almost 20 years ago. Davis grew up in the shadow of Detroit's once mighty R & B legacy and sang blues and gospel-based rock with various groups – paying her proverbial dues.

And then legendary grunge label Sub Pop came a callin.' They'd heard her helm a song or two on a Big Chief album and were set on signing her. Trouble was she wasn't so sure she wanted them. The dream label for most fledging alternative bands worth their salt held some trepidation for Davis.

"It took me a long time [to decide]," she explains. "I wasn't used to that kind of music. When [head of Sub Pop] Jonathan Poneman came to Detroit and asked me to sign I asked him 'What do you want to do with me?' He told me, 'Don't worry about that. We'll take care of all of that.' I told them I didn't write. He told me, 'We have songwriters and we have musicians.' I told them I'd really like to work with the guys from Big Chief. And they said, 'No problem.'"

What might seem like unearned petulance from an unsigned artist is actually wizened pragmatism coming from the mouth of Davis. Her concerns were valid. What would a grunge label do with a blues and gospel diva? The answer to that lies in her Sub Pop debut Sunday Morning Music, a gorgeous paean to all things blues, gospel, soul, funk and rock. And while she covers all that territory on the album (and more, believe it or not), it's not a case of showing off. In fact, the astonishing thing is that she does it all wonderfully.

Then there was the matter of the lyrics. Big Chief's Phil Durr could come up with the music but the words were another matter entirely. Davis had never written a song. "When the project got underway, we didn't have any lyrics," she laughs. "And so I started writing."

And write she did. The lyrics on Sunday Morning Music are gripping in their depiction of inner-city grief but imbued with a moving hopefulness. The inner sleeve of the disc features a black and white photograph of a thriving, bustling Detroit circa 1950 – a stark contrast to the urban decay which has gripped the city for the past several decades.

"I've been here for 30 years," she notes. "I've watched it go from a very beautiful neighbourhood to being crack-infested with half the houses gone on the block. I remember going downtown and it being busy. It's not that way anymore, but it's coming back though."

If her musical versatility amazes, by contrast so does the variety of the music she remembers reverberating through the household of her youth. "Growing up, mom and dad were into Nancy Wilson, I liked Petula Clark," she confesses. "I remember the song 'Downtown' and lying on the floor bopping my head saying 'Yeah, I like this song."

And as for Davis' career in say, five years? "Oh, I'll have a Grammy," she says with a chuckle. "I'll probably be living in Detroit but in a nicer neighbourhood."

If there's any justice, with her promise, it should be a much nicer neighbourhood.

Bobby 'Blue' Bland

2006-11-01T22:13:00.000-05:00

There is a part in this story where the issue of Don Robey comes up that illustrates the character of Bobby Blue Bland. Its fairly clear to many people that Robey probably ripped off Bobby. What's wonderful about Bland is that he simply chooses to look at the positive aspects of his relationship with Robey. It really is often a choice. I wish I could be like that. I imagine many of us wish the same. We would probably all live longer and no doubt happier lives.

Summer, 2004

He had a problem with ‘blue’ but he had no problems with the ‘blues’. Legendary R&B pioneer Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland is stuck with his middle ‘name’. “I tried to have it changed so it would be just ‘Bobby Bland” he laughs over the phone from his Memphis home. “I didn’t want to be characterized as just one particular kind of singer” he sighs. “But I can’t get rid of it so its stuck with me forever!”

Although Bland insists that he’s always sung the blues, in truth it was his prowess with a ballad that was his triumph. His gospel influenced singing style could take a song from the church pews to the bedroom seamlessly. “Well I think so,” he agrees “Because the stories that I tell are kinda tilted towards the ladies. And once you get the ladies then you don’t have to worry about the guys coming along because they re going to follow. Once you get that down then you pretty much got it made!”

Bland’s attraction to the ladies as well as a perfect match of producers, arranger and musicians made his Fifties and Sixties tenure on Duke Records his artistic triumph. And while you may not have linked Bland with the songs, these blues staples all found their way into musician’s set-lists via Bland’s riveting originals. "Farther up the Road", "Turn on Your Lovelight," "Stormy Monday Blues “and” I’ll Take Care of You" are only a few of the Bland’s classic Duke Records hits.

Bland is a generous man and when it comes to his success he spreads the credit around fairly. “I have a lot to thank Joe Scott for because of the arrangements he was doing” Bland insists “He was a teacher and he was a person who could guide you to different things that you weren’t familiar with. He was very good at selecting material for me.”

“At that time we had a lot of good lyric writers in Texas” Bland recalls “And once you get a record out and it does pretty good throughout the country then some of them said ‘I’ll do a song for Bobby Bland’. Because they like the way I sing and my delivery. So I had a pretty good choice of lyrics from good writers.”

Oddly the one person that Bland is most grateful to is one that many of Bland’s fans find to be the most suspect. Duke Records head Don Robey has had many charges leveled against him by detractors including his tendency to take songwriting credits for songs not written by him, a common though dubious practice in the early days of the music industry. But over fifty years since he first met him, Bland has nothing but gratitude for the late Don Robey. “There really wasn’t anything to think about because he gave me an opportunity to be heard on record” Bland says firmly. “He was a business man like anybody else. It just so happened that he was a black man and I think it didn’t sit too well with his own people or anybody else. But I don’t have anything bad to say about him. He did some nice things also but you don’t ever see that.”

Last year’s Martin Scorsese PBS Blues series may have put the spotlight back on the impact of blues music on America’s cultural heritage but Bland still doesn’t feel it gets its due. “Well it has had a pick-me-up” he concedes, “But it still hasn’t had the world wide promotion that it should get because a lot of people pretend that they don’t like certain things like blues. They play it behind closed doors, when they’re at home. Blues has been kind of a downer for a lot of people. Its not the kind of thing that people want to identify with because its kind of a sad sort of story. Everybody have the blues but they don’t want to admit that”.

One of the ironies of blues enduring legacy is that the music and its fanbase is often practiced and popularized by a largely white fan base. Black audiences and musicians have mostly avoided blues music. “They don’t want to relate to it” Bland admits. “I’m very, very proud of it. But they’ll get into it when they understand. It. It’s the only thing that we have.”

Its also the only thing that Bland has. Although his touring schedule has been pared down from a year round schedule to five or six months its still quite an effort for a seventy four year old man. “There’s nothing like doing things that you like and especially get paid for it” Bland says proudly. “So I’d like to stay healthy and sing until I just can’t.”

Sarah Harmer

2006-11-01T22:04:00.000-05:00

October, 2006

Sarah Harmer really has it made. Oh she’s probably not a millionaire or anything but she’s doing fine. Its not about money, Its about life. She’s got a good life and a career any songwriter would kill for.

The darling of the Canadian indie scene, Harmer managed to skip from adored cult songwriter status to adored well-known songwriter without a single fan falling off her bandwagon.

When asked about her loyal fan base Harmer hesitates a moment. “I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, it’s really nice and I’m really grateful for it.”

It’s kind of an unfair question for Harmer, as she is possibly the last person who would be able to figure out the barometer of her fan’s loyalty.

“I think the thing about people being into my music might have something to do with the fact that I’m a fan too,” she notes. “There are artists I follow and listen to and I know what its like to have music really do it for you. It definitely makes me want to make more music. It’s a reciprocal thing.”

Another reason Harmer strikes fans as the real deal is that she does what she wants when she wants to. For example coming off the nicely produced full-sounding All of Our Names, one might have expected her to follow up on the nice notices she received for the album by repeating the process for the next disc.

Instead she wrote a couple of acoustic tunes, dug up a few more from the time of Songs For Clem and went into the recording studio with some musicians / friends and recorded the songs. The result was the rollicking, bare-bones I’m a Mountain.

“It took us four days to record it,” she says. “After that, we mixed and mastered it the week after. It was definitely quick. I had always wanted to record an album like that.”

“I wanted to do something that was kind of a sequel to Songs For Clem,” she says. “I had some songs left at the end of those sessions.”

Songs For Clem was recorded as a personal gift for her father, consisting as it did of favorite songs of his and some songs he taught her.

“He was actually involved on this album and sings on two songs,” she says. “We also did a duet together on a song, that you can get on itunes.

Next up from Harmer is a DVD called Escarpment Blues, out on October 31. She grew up near Burlington on the Niagara escarpment and that experience informs the story behind the film.

“It’s a documentary about the tour we did around there,” she says. “The issue underlying it is about protecting our last remaining ecological land. The Niagara escarpment is a big part of that.”

The issue, Harmer explains surrounds a new quarry proposal. “We started a local citizens group in Burlington,” she explains. “That’s what the documentary covers as well, why the tour came to be.”

For the time being however and up until around Christmas, life for Harmer will be a tour bus. Although Canada is where her strongest fan base is, she also made forays into the UK and Ireland.

“I look at the touring over there as a kind of an investment,” Harmer says. “Every time we go back we build on what he did the first time we were there. Just like it used to be for us in this country.”

Dwight Yoakam

2006-09-20T22:00:00.000-04:00

September, 2006

He used to be the young buck, the new kid on the country block. Long before there were more Stetsons on the charts than chickens in a henhouse, Dwight Yoakum was a new face of country. Hell back in the mid-Eighties when he released his debut album, the only new faces of country were Yoakam and Randy Travis, period.

Then came the boot-scootin' hat crowd, and the boomer fans who embraced them. And even though 85.3% of them stole his visual style ala the hats, none of them stole his thunder. Dwight Yoakam has had a hell of a run of success

“Knock wood,” laughs Yoakam over the phone from his tourbus. ”I try to always thanks the audience for my success. It’s been twenty years since Cadillac came out. It’s been a great pleasure to make a living playing music and after all these years, I’m doubly blessed.”
 Over twenty years Yoakam put out a string of albums on Reprise Records, an arm of Warner Brothers. He recently moved to the smaller New West label.

“I was signed to Warner and their philosophy was always completely artist driven,” says Yoakam. “They were sensitive in terms of being aware that you can’t ask an artist to violate the cardinal rule of going with their instinct and playing with their heart.”

Yoakam sold millions of albums and after his contract ended with Warners he fielded offers from other major labels but chose the roots boutique label New West for a canny reason.

“I think the paradigm has shifted”, he says referring to the increasingly digital musical landscape. “I don’t think anyone knows yet how it’s going to resolve itself. New West was there when I finished with Warner’s. The guy who runs it does it for the love of the music.”

As Yoakum talks, his tourbus is en route to a gig in San Diego. The tour has taken on another member en route. According to Yoakum, his friend, the late Buck Owens is still around.

“It feels like Buck is shadowing us on the tour,” he explains. “I had a wonderful conversation with him on the Tuesday before he died. We talked for three hours, told stories and laughed. I didn’t know he was sick. He was making plans for the future, talking about going forward with things to do. He was writing his memoirs for a publisher out of New York and we talk about that. Four days later he was gone.”

Buck Owens has been an enormous influence on Yoakam. Owens’
Bakersfield sound carries on in Yoakam’s music. And since Owens dies only this spring, he’s a constant on Yoakam’s mind.

“I’ll always cherish that three hours of conversation probably.”

Aside from the road and the studio, there’s another place you might find Dwight Yoakam: on a movie set. Over the last 15 years, Yoakam has won strong notices for performances in films such as Sling Blade, Panic Room, and the Wedding Crashers.

“I do it for the same reason I sing,” he says. “If I have the opportunity its very satisfying alternative for emotional expression. I’m able to leave myself hopefully and engage in expressing the thoughts and ideas and emotions of another being. I’ll keep doing it if the opportunities come up.”

But for now, it’s a tour bus for Yoakam, the very bus that brings him to London for a show at the JLC on October 3.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve played a lot of dates in Canada on an actual tour,” Yoakam says. “Probably the last actual tour was 90 or 91. We’re really looking to get back up there.”

Josh Ritter

2006-09-13T22:46:00.000-04:00

September, 2004

Its an old rock star joke to note that whatever your popularity in any given area, that ‘we’re big in Europe’. Songsmith Josh Ritter doesn’t make that joke but for better or worse he lives it. This Midwest born and raised twenty-seven year old up and comer is big in Ireland. Amsterdam too. His last concert in Ireland drew over three thousand people to a castle in Dublin.

Canadians however get a shot at savoring the music of Josh Ritter via his opening slot on Sarah Harmer’s tour which pulls into town on the night of September 25th. His tour with Ms. Harmer came about a lot like much of his career: coincidence and connections. A few years back Ritter heard Harmer on a New York radio station and sought her out to open for him on an Irish tour. And as they say turnabout is fair play. Harmer looked him up in her rolodex when the opening gig came up on this tour.

Chance and coincidence follow Ritter around like a lapdog. When he was starting out a few years back in the Boston area, one of his coffeehouse gigs found an Irish band called the Frames in the audience. When the set was over they walked up and asked him to open for them on their Irish tour. “So I got a ticket for $93 in the middle of January and went over there with them” he recalls. “It was something incredible to be suddenly playing for four hundred or eight hundred or a thousand.”

Some of those people liked what they heard and started showing up in droves for Ritter’s own shows. He played a few gigs in Amsterdam too and the same thing happened. “Its funny to be playing for 700 people in Amsterdam when I don’t where they heard me or anything” he admits. “Its really bizarre and doesn’t make any sense to me and its really cool but I’m trying not to figure out why!”

Its remarkable to note that Ritter only picked up the guitar at seventeen. Simultaneous with that, he heard Johnny Cash. “The one that caught me was him and Bob Dylan doing ‘Girl From the North Country’. They sounded like they were just messing around but it sounded so different from the music I heard on the radio that sounded like cartoons. That music never sounded like it was made by real people but Dylan and Cash sounded like they were real. It was love at first sight.”

“I didn’t really think I was going to do it for a living plus I still wanted to go to college” Ritter says. “ My parents are both scientists and I thought I would do that. It took two or three years of college before I realized it felt like such a waste of money. I talked to my folks and they were great about it.” He laughs and adds “I think they knew I wasn’t going to be a biologist or anything.”

Somewhere along the way Ritter scraped together enough money to record an album to sell at his shows.. Surprise, surprise a small record label snagged a copy and offered to release it. All of these lucky breaks would be unbearable save for one saving grace. Josh Ritter is a very unassuming guy who is equal parts grateful for the breaks and perplexed as to why so many people like his music.

His music is a very tuneful blend of folk, rock and some country flourishes permeated at times by a vague melancholy which is entrancing. People have responded to his music faster than the music industry has which puts Ritter in an enviable position in terms of his career. ‘I’ve never asked to be on a label” he explains. “You want them to want you to do what you want to do. I have friends who were sending music out to record labels and it never seemed to go anywhere. If they go out to see you, then they get to think they’ve discovered something.”

Ritter’s slow burn of success has been steady and based mostly on his live performances. But in conclusion, consider the story of how Ritter got one of his tunes placed on HBO’s brilliant Six Feet Under series. Once again, he didn’t find them, they found him. “We were recording ‘Hello Starling’ at the time and we had a pretty small budget. And the Six Feet Under people called and the money that they paid helped me finish the record. It came along with not a second too soon! Its amazing how that stuff happens.”

Amazing it seems unless you’re Josh Ritter!

Daniel Lanois

2006-09-13T22:39:00.000-04:00

This was an entertaining interview with a humourous side story that we both agreed would not be in the final article. It had to do with the then 17-year old Lanois backing up one-time folk up-and-comer Ray Materick in a London, Ontario folk club. Seems Mr. Materick was quite the ladies man. Whatever the reason, Mr. Lanois had a birds-eye view of one young lass in the front row whose hiked-up dress gave the band including the wide-eyed seventeen year old Lanois, an eyeful of life on the road.

May, 2003

Mention the name Daniel Lanois and most people rush to sing his praises as a producer. But the hidden secret of Lanois stunning career is that he’s also a remarkable recording artist. His albums including his latest ‘Shine’ are immaculately crafted gems that may skit from style to style but are always anchored by his warm intimate singing and melodies that linger in the skull long after the disc has spun to a stop.

There’s only one problem with Lanois’ recorded output. There’s precious little of it. Three studio albums in fourteen years is far too few and his knowing chuckle over the phone from his LA home implicitly confesses the point. “Its terrible! I know it’s a long time.” he blurts out. He exhales lightly then adds by way of defence, “The only justification is that I’ve been producing a lot of records and it ate up my time.”

In Lanois defence, his efforts as a producer are impressive enough to forgive his absence as a recording artist. Be it Dylan’s ’Time Out Of Mind’ or ’Oh Mercy’, Emmylou Harris’s ’Wrecking Ball’, Chris Whitley’s ’Living With The Law’, Willie Nelson’s ’Teatro’, The Neville Brothers’ ’Yellow Moon’ or any of U2’s albums, Lanois’ productions are legendary and distinctive.

“It’ll be quicker from here on..“ Lanois adds assuredly. “Also I had a little business disappointment. I was with Warner Brothers and the folks I was working with there had left. I just became sort of a number in a box. I’m out of that contract now and I’m with these new folks at Epitaph that I think are great. It makes a big difference.”

For all of his international producing fame, its easy to forget Daniel Lanois is a Canadian. Born and raised in Montreal, his mother moved him to Hamilton when he was ten, escaping a dicey domestic situation. His mother’s brother set them up in a small apartment and they scraped by as best they could.

“Obviously I was affected by it emotionally” Lanois says quietly. “I didn’t let it show or let it get to me and I just sort of dove into the music and the work.“ He pauses a moment and then adds “I’ve been working since I was ten. I delivered the morning paper for years, I taught guitar, I was a caddy, I set up pins at a bowling alley, I was cutting grass, I was a little work dog. I don’t know where the determination came from but its almost like a sort of channelling that I was feeling since I was a kid. I used to feel it when I was delivering the papers. These ideas would come into my head, these overwhelming sort of moments or ideas, like a half hour of almost being hit by light. Not knowing where it came from. I’m not bragging about it. Its actually kind of an awful thing for a kid to go through, to feel possessed almost.”

“The amount of ambition that I had then and still have today is strange to even me” he says slowly. “This need to be productive and to be building something . My capacity to create a scene is very powerful, whether its building a recording studio or inviting an artist to work with me. I think that’s where I get my power as a record producer.” He pauses and sighs before adding “I’m sure the break-up of my family is part of the fuel, the insecurities, wanting to be special, wanting to be noticed, wanting to be loved and on and on. Its so psychologically complicated that I’m almost afraid to talk about it.”

Lanois past and especially his Canadian roots are on his mind as he embarks on a rare concert tour which brings him to London’s Grand Theatre on May 27th. “I haven’t been to London awhile but I used to go to London a lot. I used to play at Smale’s Place there. I used to play with Ray Materick, David Bradstreet, Shirley Elkhart, Sylvia Tyson. I was sort of at hired-gun guitar player when I was a kid. It was a cool scene.

As for the future Lanois insists that his name will be spotted on the front of more albums than on the back. “I’ve stopped the productions for awhile because obviously I’m going to be touring.” he says brightly. “I want to put out another record quite quickly. I’m trying to find a way to make use of these lovely invitations I get. Maybe the thing to do is do more collaborative work” he muses. “I just want to get more records out and keep putting out my things.”

Hawksley Workman

2006-09-11T18:23:00.000-04:00

August, 2003

Its just after midnight in Paris and Canadian singer songwriter Hawksley Workman is exhausted. Since his plane hit the tarmac at Charles DeGaul Airport that morning, Workman and band have been doing radio and TV appearances non-stop. “I went into the washroom tonight in a really nice restaurant I just came from and I looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t recognize myself.” he says in wonder. “It was kind of a scary moment.”

Scary but nice too and not entirely unexpected. Workman spent a year in France playing European venues and making fans out of the concert attendees. On the cusp of the release of his new disc ‘lover / fighter’ Workman is back and reaping some of the rewards of his hard work. “The first single off the record is kinda racing up the charts here” Workman says bashfully. “Its actually quite an experience. Its probably the first time I’ve sort of felt that. I got off the plane and every radio station I turn to, the song is on. It’s a bit of a buzz moment.

It is indeed Hawksley Workman’s buzz moment. After his jaunt to France, its off to the UK to play their prestigious Top Of The Pops television show and more interviews. Then begins what Workman dubs ‘lunacy for the next two years’: a never-ending tour which bring him to London’s Phoenix Club on September ??.

Workman was best known in this country as yet another eccentric Canadian singer songwriter until his faux glam disc ‘(Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves’ yielded a Canadian hit single with ‘Striptease’. “That was a huge turning point.“ gulps Workman. “I would go into cities where I had earned one to two hundred solid fans, to being able to do somewhere in the neighbourhood of five hundred to twelve hundred people. Canadian radio really did that for me. It was really unprecedented. It wasn’t just every day that you were hearing a relatively obscure indie artist on the radio. “

Hawksley Workman is quite a lovely man to talk to, quick to jump to a topic and just as eager to quiz you on same topic. But despite it all he’s a bit of a work of fiction. By normal standards of fact, most of his past bios play as fast and loose with the facts as a politician’s expense form. For example an early bio claims he was “born and raised on an old highway near a cold, spring-fed lake”. Workman only admits to being born in near northern Ontario, north of Muskoka. “I was literally born in the middle of nowhere and raised in the middle of nowhere.” he says with his tongue in the region of his cheek. And while this poetic spin of the facts might seem sly or even coy in another artists hands, in Workman’s it comes across as self-deprecating and even charming.

Not surprisingly Hawksley Workman isn’t his birth name. Well not all of it anyway. His surname is as it always was. Hawksley however was his mother’s maiden name. He changed it so that his artistic creations would have validity to him. “I had been a hired musician and I couldn’t justify spending time on my own project until I gave it its own name and I could treat it like a gig” he insists. So ‘Hawksley Workman’ became his musical identity separate from his birth name which he hints is “a good old fashioned Irish name”.

“As much as its me, when someone calls my birth name to me, it shocks me.” he admits. “ I don’t hear my birth name any more. ‘Hawksley’ does allow me a very enviable buffer between the brutal outside and the soft and gooshy inside” he laughs.

As for Workman’s age, “I guess I’m 27” he shrugs. “Its hard to get to be 27 because at a certain point of my life I was like this ’young phenomenon’ and now I feel at 27 that I don’t have the right to claim ‘young phenomenon’ status anymore. Which I did sort of suffer with a bit with the first record definitely. It was like ‘twenty two years old and oh my God!’

Ironically for such a paragon of Canadian hip, Hawksley Workman’s upbringing was blissfully rustic, and gloriously primitive by 2003 standards. “I remember when my brother and I would get out of school in June, we would literally get on our bicycles and ride relentlessly” Workman says fondly, “stopping only to sleep and eat until we got back to school. You don’t realize you’re lonely, you don’t realize you’re alone: I had a dog and a brother. All you know is that every day is filled with wonder.”

“For me video games were awfully boring” he laughs. “For my brother and I, the Atari video games didn’t look all that interesting especially on our parents black and white television. Growing up there we only got two channels and one of them was French. My brother and I had to make up our own fun. We didn’t have artificial means as a way of wasting time.”

“I was also lucky that I grew up in the church and stuff too”, he adds thoughtfully. “Church ladies love to see kids. I used to play Metallica songs in church - I’m using that as an expression, I didn’t really - but I could kind of do what I wanted to do. And growing up in a supportive community where I was allowed to do my own thing, I think contributed immeasurably. I was just confident in who I was because I was allowed to explore it fully without judgement of my peers.”

“You frown on it when you’re a teenager because its like ‘aw fuck I wish I could live in a city where I can be close to ‘what’s going on’” Workman says with a growl. “Growing up you think you’re living in the worst place in the world because you’re not close to anything. In hindsight you realize how key that time and space was to your development and growth as a person.”

Perhaps its was out of this ‘make your own fun’ ethic that Workman developed his penchant for working alone in the recording studio. Despite the sprawling rock ambitions of ‘…Delicious Wolves’ and his new album ‘lover / fighter’ he recorded almost everything by himself in his country studio. Although it could be taken as a control freak strategy the enthusiasm in his voice as he talks about the recording process belies that notion.

“I’m like a kid in the studio” he gasps. “I’m so happy to be there! When I’m writing I can hardly wait to play the drums. And after I get the drums done I can hardly wait to add the bass. And after that I can hardly wait to play the next thing.“ He pauses a moment and then muses aloud, “Rock and roll is probably not a democracy. And when you’re trying to exercise diplomacy in the studio it just probably kills momentum and takes up more time than its often worth. I generally make my decisions within milliseconds of each other and I let my gut do the talking and try to shut my head off. Really, intellect doesn’t have a place in the studio most of the time.”

Workman found an old schoolhouse up north that his grandmother used to attend. He bought it, gutted it and renovated it for a song, pun intended. “That was my little escape” Workman confesses. “When I got off the road from this lifestyle of booze drugs and rock and roll it was a place to unwind and be alone and come clean with myself. Its hard to make rock and roll in the city when everybody’s telling you to shut up and there’s noise bylaws. Its far easier to make the size of record I wanted to make sound wise in the country where I recorded with the doors and windows open all day and there wasn’t anybody within ear-range.

The album that resulted from those sessions is the blueprint for what will undoubtedly be a superb show at the Phoenix Club. “The last couple years of touring have really lent themselves in a really valuable way to helping me conceive of this new record and helping me maintain patience.” he says calmly. A beat passes and then Workman chuckles to himself. “I think ultimately I’m so excited about this record you can’t even imagine!”

Rufus Wainwright 2

2006-09-11T18:15:00.000-04:00

I had previously interviewed Rufus Wainwright in the late Nineties on the day of his television network debut on Conan. He had just released his debut disc and the interview was tied into a show at a small club called Call The Office in London. He was funny and charming and the substance abuse referred to in the piece below was just about to start.

March, 2004

Meet Rufus Wainwright. Scene Magazine in the person of myself spoke to a young man named Rufus Wainwright some six years ago but that was a different person. That young man was deliriously wrapped up in the mechanics of what Joni Mitchell so astutely dubbed ‘the star maker machinery’. Even at the time it seemed clear to this interviewer that the then-fledging singer songwriter was in the thrall of his first taste of stardom. But stardom wasn’t the only thing that Rufus Wainwright was taking in at the time. There was the pressure. And then there were the pharmacological and alcoholic particulars that make the pressure go away. For awhile at least.

“Its very astute of you” chuckles Wainwright. “I was aware of the pressure on one hand but thank God I was completely fucked up!” he says before indulging himself in some rueful laughter. “In a myriad of ways” he continues.” Whether it was drinking or self delusion or illusions of grandeur. Or whether it was that applause meant love. At least at the beginning and for a while I was quite pleasantly wrapped up into the whole circus. And I think you’ve got to be fucked up in the business when you start out. The pressure requires a kind of consistent diet of fuckedup-ness. So I kind of did that for awhile and it really worked and it was fine. And then I along with pretty much the world crashed at about the same time.”.”

“The most important thing that was ever told to me at one point was by Elton John when I was having my problems” he says quietly. “I was like ‘oh what about my album, what about my music. And he was like fuck your album, fuck the music, take care of yourself’. So that served as a major realization to me.”

The short version of this story is that basically Rufus Wainwright survived his twenties. And in the process he seemed to discover something resembling wisdom. “My professional life in show business or business in general, making money has nothing whatsoever to do with my personal life or how good or bad or happy or sad as a person I am. There is no way to find fulfillment in that arena, in the arena of the ego. Happiness requires real honest to God work.” He pauses a moment and sighs. “I think this is something that you can only really learn when you get to a certain age, when you hit thirty basically.”

Thirty is indeed usually a time for figuring out a few things about love and the things that often are mistaken for it. And on the other hand, there’s Courtney Love. “I’ve known Courtney for awhile” Wainwright says quietly. “I don’t know her very well personally but I know a lot of people who know her personally. I’ve hung out with her as well.” He pauses as he tries to pick his words before they reach leave his mouth. “But it is certainly an example of…. the destruction of drug abuse and fame. Not so much the destruction, it’s the dullness, the bore. I think at one point her behavior was fun and great and kind of interesting and exciting. At this point, especially this year, its pathetic” he says without a trace of condemnation. “Poor Courtney.” Wainwright pauses a beat. “I feel bad for her. I think all you can is pray for her.”

If Wainwright’s twenties were occupied with himself, his thirties are preoccupied with the aftermath of the United States crash. Although his acclaimed ‘Want One’ dealt mainly with his internal life, many of the unreleased songs on the companion disc ‘Want Two’ are firmly focused on Wainright’s relationship and views with the country that is currently his home. “Right now I’m living in an empire, the American empire and we are sort of the verge of –well, its going down. I really see that getting rid of Bush honestly right now is the most important thing in the world. Getting a democratic president in, John Kerry is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what the country has gotten into, not necessarily even since the Iraq war but since the Second World War. Basically, the imperialist military that we have is terrorizing the planet.”

When Wainwright made his debut in the late Nineties, he wasn’t shy about letting people know that he was gay. And while his fans really couldn’t care one way or the other given his remarkable talent, Wainwright has regardless refused to sideline the issue. In fact due to the current climate in American culture its become more important than ever to him. “I’m going to use that gay card a little bit this year because its a personal attack on us to amend the constitution to prevent gay marriage. Its very, very dangerous. I think the decision that the president made to amend the constitution is so much going to blow up in his face. Even for people who are homophobic, I think they prefer to just not think about it. Hopefully they want to come to terms with it. Because I think everybody likes gay people even if they say they hate them.”

Which brings us back to the topic of the unreleased cousin of the recent ‘Want One’? “Some of the songs from ‘Want Two’ that I have to release before the election are specifically gay themed.” Wainright says. “There’s one song called “Gay Messiah. There's another song I wrote about being gay called ‘As In Happy’. So the gay card is still alive and well!” Although Wainwright was elusive on how the songs would come out, he hinted strongly that they might show up on a file-sharing program near you. The record company doesn’t want to create confusion with ‘Want One’ doing so well and neither does Wainwright.

Also on Wainwright’s agenda is the equally serious albeit frivolous desire to have a hit record. Its apparent that the powers that be want Wainwright to consolidate his success with a bonafide chart-stomper. And Wainwright is game even if he has no idea how to do it by himself. “I’m basically taking a song that I've written and saying to a producer ‘do whatever the hell you want to do with it’. Chop it up, put a rap in the middle of it, put a bunch of black ladies singing, just try that and then we’ll see. Because I do think that I am mentally incapable of grasping that whole genre: the big unabashed filthy idiot hits. Its nothing that I want to do personally, not anything I have to go into the studio for. But if a producer is willing to make an attempt of it, maybe we’ll see.”

But of course the cautionary tale in having a hit that doesn’t really represent what you do is best exemplified in the story of his father’s career. Loudon Wainwright III had a chart smash in the early Seventies with the delightfully comic ‘Dead Skunk’. And thereafter Wainwright the senior became known as that ‘dead skunk’ guy. Problem was that Loudon was a witty, moving songwriter on a par with the renown John Prine. He really wasn’t a ‘dead skunk’ kind of guy at all.

“Oh I know” he says ruefully. “I could be playing with fire. I do have my father’s example to live to know. I’ve seen the dark side of that firsthand. Just having a hit and people now knowing your other material. It’s a real wild card. I would say that I hope that I’ve got enough of a career already and enough of a backlog of material to prove to anyone who’s interested that I’m an able artist.

Oddly enough some of Wainwright’s work has had brushes with monster success. Like his take on Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ on the Shrek soundtrack. And his cover of ‘Across The Universe’ on the all-Beatle-covers soundtrack to ‘I Am Sam’. So maybe its no coincidence that Rufus Wainwright’s latest venture has been in front of the camera in some upcoming films. “I’m in the new Martin Scorsese movie called The Aviator” he says with a kind of sheepishness. “I play kind of a Bing Crosby type character. I’m also in a new Merchant / Ivory movie and I’ve got a scene with Glenn Close”. He laughs faux-sardonically and quips “I’m a lethal superstar!”

But for now it’s the second leg of the tour that brings him to London’s The Drink on April ??.
Unlike his previous solo gig at Call The Office, this time he’s bringing a band to do justice to the sumptuous work on Want One. “Its great, its really, really great” he says proudly. “I have a band, a huge band, there’s six of us on stage, and it’s a two hour show, with costumes and parts of the album sequenced.” He pauses after this unabashed blast of exuberance and then laughs to himself again. “It’s a big, big show!”

Johnny Winter

2006-09-11T18:13:00.000-04:00

January, 2004

They warned me, they really did. Don’t’ talk to Johnny Winter about any personal issues, health, long-ago drug woes, nothing. He just wants to talk about the music.

Well they needn’t have told me a thing. No matter what any manager says, a productive conversation with Winter revolves around one thing. It’s not for nothing that one of his finest recordings was called ‘Nothin’ But The Blues’. Johnny Winter is interested in that and that alone.

Although Winter is renown circa 2004 for being a bluesman it wasn’t always that way. When he blasted onto the music scene in the late Sixties, he was a blazing blues rocker all flash style and high energy. His covers of the Stones ‘Jumpin Jack Flash’ and Dylan’s ‘Highway 61’ were blues rock staples and his vaguely surreal albino features replete with long flowing white hair were iconic images of the Sixties.

But the little secret behind Winter’s Sixties and Seventies success lay in his past. As Winter tells it over the line from his Connecticut home in his laconic southern drawl, as a child he laid awake under the covers at night tuning in the stations that changed his life. “It just got under my skin” he recalls. “The first stuff I heard was Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters and I just loved them. I just loved it immediately. There were some real good blues stations that you could pick up in Beaumont. WLAC in Nashville, WCRS in Mexico and this one station coming out of Shreveport Louisiana.”

The blues of Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf have been known to put a hold over many a young soul. It hits them like a punch to their figurative solar plexus and they spend all their waking hours trying to figure out what that sound is and how to make it themselves. “That’s what it did to me!” laughs Winter. “It sure did.”

But Muddy Waters wasn’t done with Winter just yet. He was to have a transformative effect on Winter one more time. It was the late Seventies when Winter got the chance to work with his childhood idol producing some of Waters finest recordings including the classic ‘Hard Again’. “Well when I started working with Muddy Waters, it just made me realize that I could make it playing straight blues.” Winters says quietly. “That’s what I wanted to do.”

And since then, for over twenty five years in fact, Johnny Winters has played the blues. He turns sixty in a few weeks (February 23rd for those keeping score) and he can hardly believe it himself. “”Doesn’t feel like I could possibly be sixty!” he chuckles softly. In fact he’s almost the age at Muddy Waters was when Winter first produced him.

“I’m going to have my brother come up and stay with me for my birthday” he adds. “That’ll be nice. I don’t get to see him very often.” His brother Edgar had also followed in his brother’s musical footsteps save for the focus. Edgar pursued a glam-rock route replete with pop hits like ‘Free Ride’ and ‘Frankenstein’. Early on however he was a sideman in Johnny’s band. “When he was playing with me he played what I wanted to hear!” brags Winter with a laugh. “He played with me for a long time on piano.”

Despite his current vitality – he’s got a new album coming out on Virgin in the spring – the past is currently something on Winter’s mind. He’s writing an autobiography. “We got a girl that’s a real good writer. I just talk to her and she writes it all down.” He pauses a moment and then chuckles to himself. “It’s hard to remember everything. I can’t remember all of it but I try!”

And then there’s the road. Winter is doing three Canadian dates and then a full tour when the album comes out. But since a hip injury sidelined him a few years ago there are a few drawbacks for him. “I can’t stand up when I play. I have to sit down” he admits. “But its still fun on the road.”

Being one of the elder statesmen of blues these days is a wonderful thing for Winter. “It’s a great feeling,” As such he gets asked for advice by younger bluesman. “Practice and listen to as much stuff as you can” he says slowly. And play as much as you can. I listened to everything I could. I think it’s important to listen to a lot of different styles. I couldn’t just take one or two people that I liked. I had to listen to everybody!”

And even though its been almost fifty years since the young Johnny Winter stuck his ear up to his radio in those dark nights in little Beaumont, Texas he still insists he had no choice in his chosen career. “I loved the music” he says quietly. “It was something that I just wanted to do.” He pauses a moment and shrugs “It was music or nothing.”

Bobby Rush

2006-09-11T18:09:00.000-04:00

April, 2004

Bobby Rush is arguably the bluesman’s bluesman for one simple reason. He doesn’t talk about it as much as he plays it: constantly. “I’ve had about six weeks off in forty-six years!” Rush laughs over the line from his Jackson, Mississippi home. “I do about 330 shows a year.”

As we speak Rush is taking a dinner break from recording his 239th album. No typo there: two hundred and thirty ninth album. Okay admit it now, the question is there right smack in front of your cerebellum. Go on ask it: ‘who the hell is Bobby Rush and why haven’t I heard of him’?

Born in the thirties in Homer, Louisiana the young Emmett Ellis Jr., saw his uncle performing blues tunes and started mimicking him. Muddy Water, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Big Joe Turner and Ivory Joe Hunter records became his bible and out of respect for his preacher father he changed his name to Bobby Rush.

Rush almost exclusively haunted what was called the ‘chitlin circuit’, a string of southern clubs with predominantly black clientele. Through a combination of music and showmanship, he became known as the ‘king of the chitlin circuit’. “The chitlin circuit was named by some writer and I don’t think he was planning that to be something nice.” Rush says quietly. “When someone said that I was the ‘king of the chitlin circuit’ I was saying 'I am, I am'!” Rush pauses a moment and adds with a chuckle, “I took it to be something good but it was supposed to be something negative.”

“You played in a place where they cooked chitlins, which were hog intestines, and later on came fish and chicken sandwiches” Rush explains. “So I played many times for a fish sandwich. If I played real good, I got two fish sandwiches. If I didn’t play good at all I didn’t get nothing to eat! Sometimes I would make two sandwiches a set and sell them. I’d make $1.50 a night and a couple of sandwiches.”

Rush laughs about it now but then again he can afford to. Life has gotten good for Bobby Rush. Although he had some hits in the late Sixties and early Seventies, most average blues fans had only a passing knowledge of Rush. His upcoming performance as part of the ?????? blues night at the JLC will only be the second time that Rush has visited Canada.

And then came Martin Scorsese. Through what Rush admits was just a case of being in the right place at the right time, Rush’s name and performances were a crucial part of the ‘Road to Memphis’ segment of Scorsese’s PBS venture ‘The Blues’. Rush is unabashedly grateful for what the show did for him. “It gave people a chance to see me that hadn’t seen me and it gave me a chance to cross over” he says excitedly. “I mean that I crossed over as a black entertainer, as a chitlin circuit artist. It crossed me over to a white audience which I wanted. I wanted to cross over but I didn’t want to cross out.”

Cross out? “So many times black entertainers of my age cross over to the white audience but they leave behind the black audience that they had” Rush explains. “My plan is to give it back to the guys who can’t afford Bobby Rush. A lot of times the big blues singers get the big money and forget the little juke joints and the guys who can’t afford it. We’ll come into town and play for them during the year. We gotta keep these blues bars and the chitlin circuit alive.”

For now though, Bobby Rush is spending his summer going to Spain, Australia, Norway, Hong Kong and England. And its all because of PBS’s influential ‘The Blues’. “I’m so glad that God put me in the right place in the right time to be part of this. I don’t really think I was picked for this. I was just playing in a place where things came off and I was just there. I don’t think they were aiming for me. Something just happened.”

His Jackson, Mississippi home is important to Rush. He grew up there and returned late in his career to make it his home. In the Fifties and Sixties, it wasn’t always the easiest place to live with a black skin. But that was exactly why Rush returned: to make a difference. “I can take it farther by introducing mmyself as a black man, as a blues singer and being proud of what I do and be proud of who I” Rush says quietly. “I’m sick of tired of some of the black guys saying 'I’m going to go to the studio and record this because I think this is what white people like’. No! Just record what you feel and what you love and what you do best and pray that everybody likes it.” Rush stops and snorts with a chuckle. “Don’t make no white or black record!”

Blackie & The Rodeo Kings

2006-09-11T18:06:00.000-04:00

Although I like all of the musicians in Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, with the possible exception of Colin Linden, I prefer to hear their work in BARK more often than their individual work. Given how well they're doing, I suspect I'm not alone.

May, 2004

It really started as a lark, an artistic lark, but a lark nonetheless. In 1996 Canadian roots musician extraordinaire Colin Linden, ex Junkhouse rocker Tom Wilson and folk maven Stephen Fearing banded together under the moniker Blackie and the Rodeo Kings to record and play the songs of folk icon Willie P Bennett. Naming themselves after a Bennett song, their ‘High or Hurtin: The Songs of Willie P. Bennett’ was released to some acclaim and then they quietly went back to their solo day jobs.

Except a funny thing happened. As the months went by the critical kudos rang in their ears and more importantly they realized that their love for Bennett’s material aside, they really loved playing with each other. So they recorded another album, a double that was even better than the first. High praise followed and more significantly people bought it. There was something there.

For ex-Junkhouse rocker Tom Wilson it’s been a kind of musical vindication. As a self-described middle-aged man Wilson remembers the days when music meant something to his generation. And for him the growing success of Blackie is all about his generation and their hunger for quality music. “Blackie and the Rodeo Kings are fitting into that demographic that is not being catered to” Wilson says firmly over the phone from his Halifax home. “The fact that we get so many people following us who have come to the table for us and bought our album because its passed along at dinner parties or people coming over to other peoples houses. There’s still a human element in the way that our music communicates to people. It doesn’t rely on Muchmusic or Muchmoremusic. It doesn’t rely on radio play even though they’ve been so good to us on this record. It relies on human contact, on people saying to each other ‘you’ve got to hear this fucking record!’.”

The record he’s referring to is last year’s ‘BARK’ which has not only consolidated their fanbase but in fact expanded it. Without losing an ounce of their raw rootsy charm, it’s a more raucous affair with some out and out barnstormers tossed in there for flavour.

The artistic growth has paid off in more than one way. Nice reviews aside, BARK (which by the way doubles as the acronym for the band) surprised everyone by getting on the radio. “’Had Enough Of You Today’ went to number fourteen on the rock charts” laughs Wilson, “Which was unheard of because we were competing with Nickelback and Sam Roberts! We’re like middle-aged guys in matching suits. It’s ridiculous that we made it onto the rock charts!”

“We were up for a Juno this year but we lost obviously because we started to get too popular for our own category” Wilson muses. “I think it’s typically Canadian. Have you ever seen Blackie and the Rodeo Kings at the Home County Folk Festival? Have we ever even had a phone call from the Home County Folk Festival to play? Well guess what? Once you’ve had a top twenty hit on radio, then you’re getting a little big for your britches.”

With their current success (their latest single ‘Water or Gasoline’ is one of the top radio adds in the Americana format in the US) and their current tour opening for Merle Haggard (May 27 at London’s JLC), Linden, Fearing and Wilson are finding Blackie and the Rodeo Kings less of a side job and more of their main gig. “With this record there’s more and more and more” Wilson says in wonderment. “The traditional path with Blackie and the Rodeo Kings is that we make a record because we like hanging out with each other, release it do a bunch of festivals in the summer, do a little tour in the fall and that’s it. But it’s taking on a new life right now. We’re devoted to it. This is obviously something that people like.”

For Wilson himself, life is good. He’s blissfully smitten with his new paramour Cathy Jones of ‘This Hour Has 22 Minutes’, he’s healthy, doesn’t do drugs, and proudly proclaims that he hasn’t had a drink in four and a half years. As for his career, Wilson’s blast of demi-fame with Junkhouse was nice but he admits it doesn’t compare to his work with Blackie and The Rodeo Kings. “It was less rewarding than what I’m doing now” he gulps. “I hate to say that about Junkhouse but it is. This is very rewarding.”

Jeremy Fisher

2006-09-11T18:01:00.000-04:00

Young guy from Vancouver who despite being a fine singer / songwriter also has a schtick. He used to bike from gig to gig and whenver possible still does. Wisely his management hasn't made too big a deal out of it. I mean who wants to be known as the bike guy if you're trying to be known as a musician? Okay, you're right: plenty would. I think that's why I liked Fisher better than most. He lacked desperation.

February, 2005

As Jeremy Fisher took the stage at Centennial Hall on Saturday February 4th, it was a little like the proverbial Christian wandering into the arena wondering what the deal was with all the lions. Fisher was doing the opening act thing for Canadian Idol boy Kalan Porter. An opening slot at a concert is a lot like the cold call list at a telemarketing company. The responses can range from indifferent to unspeakable with a slight stopover at loathing. Sixteen hundred pre-teens are waiting with breath bated see their love-object and this OTHER guy shows up?

It could have gone very badly but it says something about Fisher and his songs that he pulled off an impossible task. “It went great!” he laughs over the phone from his Victoria home. “They were a great audience. They really were” he adds with just a little disbelief. “I wasn’t sure what his audience was going to be like. From what I could gather it was a lot of people for whom this was their first concert ever. They were clapping along and singing along and it was really pleasant actually.” Fisher pauses as he mulls over the memory before adding with a chuckle, “I loved it!”

Hamilton-born Fisher hasn’t done things the wham-bam way that Porter has however. Fisher had been doing the busking thing while writing and recording bedroom for some years all the while making a name for himself in his adopted city of Victoria. Convinced that it was time he decided about two years ago to get down to recording a full-fledged album.

“I was living in Victoria all that year working full-time in a bike shop” he explains. “I spent all of our savings recording the album on weekends in Vancouver. The whole time we were applying for grants and stuff like that to help things out. I kept telling my wife something’s going to come through. I used to say ‘It’s an investment, it’s an investment!’” he laughs. “We just spent everything we had. I can’t believe she let me do it!”

Then the dominoes started to fall. He got the ear of the head of Sony Publishing who promptly arranged for him to get signed to the label itself. The album he recorded during those weekends in Vancouver was released with only a few new additions. For those who’ve seen Fisher’s solo live show ‘Let It Shine’ is a revelation. The disc is littered with hook-laden pop gems from the opener ‘Lemon Meringue Pie’ to his current single ‘High School’ which has struck a chord with radio programmers and live audiences alike.

There are basically two things Jeremy Fisher is almost never without: a guitar and a bicycle. Put simply, if he could Fisher would ride to every gig he plays. To be certain he basically did for much of his early career. In fact on an early trek across this country (he’s crossed it twice) he and a friend found themselves marooned in Regina with a bank card that wouldn’t work. The resourceful Fisher borrowed a guitar from someone and busked his way to a meal or three. “That’s when it clicked for me” he recalls. “If I had a guitar with me all the time, I could travel all year round and never go hungry. I wanted to be fed and dry when it was raining. Those were my only concerns in life.”

Regardless of his mode of transportation, the road will be Fisher’s home for the coming year. His current trek brings him to London two times in the next month, Feb ?? opening for Sara Slean at Fanshawe’s Outback Shack and a solo gig at the London Music Club on Feb. ??. In the spring he’ll be back with his band in tow.

Earlier in the interview I had jokingly asked if opening for Kalan Porter made him envious for that kind of instant success. It was more of a statement than a question but Fisher came back to the question regardless. “In this last year I’ve had so many breaks that for me to envy anybody would be so ungrateful” he laughs. “I’ve been playing music all my life. The job at the bike shop was on the only job I’ve ever had that hasn’t been music related. Every little bit of it is a piece of the story.”

Stacey Earle & Mark Stuart

2006-09-11T17:38:00.000-04:00

For husband and wife recording artists Stacey Earle and Mark Stuart, marriage was easy. Becoming a musical duo took awhile longer. Although guitarist Mark Stuart backed up Stacey Earle when she toured as well as holding down a day job as six stringer in her brother Steve Earle’s band, figuring out that they belonged together musically wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

“I had always seen it as Stacey’s show” Stuart explains over the wire from their Nashville home, “and I was her sideman in a way. But over the course of time it really grew into a duo.”

“It took touring without each other to realize that we had developed a sound” adds Earle. “When two people tour with each other for something like fourteen years you’re going to lock in and a sound is going to be developed. There’s a definite Stacey Earle sound, a definite Mark Stuart sound and then there’s the sound we make together.”

That sound brings together the country roots that Stuart picked as a boy while gigging in his father’s bands as well as Earle’s singer-songwriter twang. The end result isn’t pure country or pure verse-chorus-verse songwriter laments. It’s a fairly unclassifiable middle ground which Earle learned can be tricky to walk on.

“Unfortunately it’s very dangerous in the music industry sense” she explains. “They said we had to have a category. And I didn’t understand that for some time. But one day I walked into a record story and realized that if you don’t have a category they don’t know where to put you. Where are we gonna fit in that record store? They can’t market you to everyone. That’s kind of why we did our own records on our own label. The record companies didn’t know what to do with us! “

Earle pauses and then adds with a laugh, “We refer to ourselves as one of everything!”

One thing that Stacey Earle is not is her brother Steve. “I do a different thing” she shrugs when asked about the comparisons. “He does his thing. Nothing alike. He’s a boy. I’m a girl. Every once in awhile I see a review that says something like ‘well she’s a bit folkie’”. Earle chuckles, adding “And I’m like ‘duh!'. Maybe they want me to get up there and sing ‘Copperhead Road or something!”

“When we first started touring Stacey’s record we would get like a contingency of people, curiosity seekers we called them” recalls Stuart. “They were fans of Steve’s. But slowly and surely they’ve fallen away. We have sort of our own army of a fan base and it’s smaller than Steve's but they come to hear our stuff so we’re not dogged by that at all.”

Although they recently released another Earle & Stuart studio disc, they’re currently busy putting together another live disc as well as a tour which brings them to the London Music Club on February ??. “We’re performers” explains Earle. “Records come second. We do the best we can do to get it on tape but our thing is live performance.”

“The audience always gravitates toward that and wants to take that home at night” adds Stuart. “What they saw and heard, the energy and the magic.” Stacey Earle laughs lightly and adds, “It’s kind of like vaudeville to me!”

Grady

2006-09-10T23:02:00.000-04:00

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!”

Stuart McLean

2006-09-10T22:58:00.000-04:00

November, 2004

Stuart McLean doesn’t have a clue and he loves it. Oh he’s an exceptionally bright human being alright and a wonderfully gentle one. But he doesn’t have an idea about how he does his job. OK well that’s not entirely true. It’s just that this CBC radio star and best-selling author doesn’t know why what he does connects so well with his Canadian fan base. “I haven’t a clue” McLean says flatly. “You’d have to ask other people. Maybe you have some ideas yourself.”

The world of Stuart McLean revolves around a guy named Dave who runs a used record store called the Vinyl Café, his wife Morley, and his kids Sam and Stephanie. The show’s fans just smiled as they read that because they know all about the occasionally hapless but loveable Dave and their children and neighbors. The stories read damn fine in print but in the hands or rather the voice of Stuart McLean the stories leap from the page to life.

The story of how this award winning author and performer came into his career is as charmed as the tales he tells. When McLean started out in 1979 it was indeed in radio but as a documentary producer. “I was the Executive Producer of the Sunday Morning show for a couple of years. I got fired from that” he shrugs. “I had one vision of the show; they had another vision of the show. It was their prerogative. I went to Morningside and spent about ten years doing a kind of personal journalism, sort of like a ‘page three’ column in a newspaper. And at one point in Morningside I tried a few fictional pieces; it was the next thing to try out.”

Those fictional pieces led to the Vinyl Café program. “It started off on Monday nights in the summertime” McLean explains. “For two seasons it was a summer replacement show. And in the third season we only did a couple of shows. It wasn’t until the fourth season that we really sort of cut loose on Saturday and Sunday at the same time.”

The ‘cutting loose’ McLean refers to dovetailed with the beginning of the growth of his audience. The motto of Dave’s record shop was "We may not be big, but we're small”. In an odd way that unassuming charm could double for McLean’s credo as well. Whatever the reason ‘The Vinyl Café’ is now a bonafide Canadian institution binding together this country in much the same way that Peter Gzowski did.

One would assume that McLean would have been at the least surprised at the devoted following of his show. “Surprise” he begins slowly in that patented drawl of his, “would indicate that I gave a lot of thought to it. And I didn’t.”

“We held steady at the beginning” he says flatly. “And I thought ‘well that's pretty cool’. And then I didn’t give it a lot of thought. So no, it didn’t surprise me a bit, not because I expected it, but simply because I didn’t think about it. If I thought about the show it didn’t go much further than ‘I gotta do another show. It better be good!’ That’s sort of as far as the strategic thought went.”

It was several years into the show’s rise in popularity when the idea of a live concert came up. “It wasn’t my idea. It was my producer’s idea.” McLean admits. “We were doing these studio shows and I think he was intrigued by the idea of working with live music and I was intrigued by the idea of working with an audience with the stories. And so we just tried one and it worked like gangbusters and it was fun! So we tried another one. So we decided that we should only do the stories in front of an audience. And that was that.”

The concerts are a pleasure apart from McLean’s storytelling finesse. There’s music and of course the storytelling during which McLean conjures up Dave, Morley, Sam and Stephanie in the audience’s imagination. One might assume that McLean has an image of what his characters look like. But he admits, “I don’t have a clear picture of what Dave looks like or what the other characters look like. I think maybe that serves me well because it allows people to fill in the blanks for themselves. But”, he admits, “I think the closest person to me is the little twelve year old boy Sam. I feel very sympathetic and very close to him as a character.”

And although he admits that in a few of the early stories “the details of my life were pasted onto the arc of the story” most of the stories since are pure works of McLean’s imagination and not insignificantly, his heart. As such despite the yearnings of many a fan, there really wasn’t a record store that supplied the inspiration for Dave’s business. “There was a second hand record store around the corner from my house” he admits “and a couple of times I went and visited it and sort of hung out in it to try and get a feel for what that might be like. But I always painted it in the broadest of strokes.”

What comes across when talking to McLean is how protective he is about not only his show but his responsibility to his fans, Dave and Morley’s fans. “It’s not a serious show but I take it very seriously” he explains. “I try to give it the respect that it deserves.”

A sign of that respect has been his response to the inevitable requests to bring Dave and Morley to tangible visual life via TV or film. “I’ve had a lot of offers and I’ve always turned them down” McLean says flatly. “I thought they reside in the imagination much stronger than they would on TV. I think they would destroy it. There was an offer to do it as animation and to that I said yes to because I thought that animation like fiction is an act of imagination so I didn’t think that would get in the way of what I was doing. But” he sighs with perhaps a touch of relief, “the project is on life support right now so it may not happen.”

What’s in Stuart McLean’s daytimer right now is a few more Vinyl Café live shows, then his renown Christmas shows, two nights of which grace London’s Centennial Hall on November 26th and 27th. The highlights of the shows are the musical surprises, Canadian musicians as unknown as they are remarkable. “I’m bringing with me the three best young artists that I’ve seen in the last year.” McLean says with no little pride. “A fourteen year old blues player Jimmy Bowskill, who does the blues as well as anyone I’ve ever heard do the blues. A violin player, Owen Pallet, who is classically trained but has written an opera and experimental avante garde music but does this kind of thing that I can’t even describe. He has a sampling machine that loops what he plays while he sings. And I’ve got a young singer songwriter, a woman by the name of Harmony Trowbridge. She reminds me of a young Joni Mitchell, a kind of jazzy folk musician.” McLean pauses a moment for breath and adds, “I want people, to leave the show going ‘wow’. And I think they will!”

So a capable CBC radio documentary producer becomes a renown Canadian author and performer. Was that always the plan? “Oh none of this was planned” McLean chuckles to himself. “Even as it grows and still grows, there’s no plan, there’s no strategy. I had no idea where I was going, I still don’t” he says with a kind of helpless pride. “I love the Neil Young quote about when he had a hit, he was heading for the middle of the road and as soon as he got there he headed for the ditch because it was more comfortable there. I really understand that. As soon as it gets easy, it’s not interesting anymore. So you have to make it harder. That’s really how all of my decisions have been made. There’s been no plan!”

Matt Dusk

2006-09-10T22:55:00.000-04:00

Matt Dusk was doing a promo show at an extremely small club, hence this interview. I think there were at least twenty potential buyers for all 125 tickets. Heard it was a good show. Didn't make it.

August, 2004

Matt Dusk is on the road to Espanola. It sounds like a lyric from the kind of barroom ballad Dusk excels in but in fact it’s the mundane reality of this late August evening. Dusk is en route to his gig an hour down the road and he’s upbeat and happy as he talks over the sometimes shaky cell connection. “Its very overwhelming” he chuckles lightly “but its all excellent. Its non stop action. There's always something going on, there’s always something to do.”

Matt Dusk has had a very good year. His major label debut ‘Two Shots’ is number 3 on the jazz charts and as Dusk notes during the conversation ‘about fifteen thousand copies from going gold’. His role as the singer in the hit reality show ‘The Casino’ has given him a profile most musicians would gladly pay for. Oh yes and then there’s the theme to the show, Dusk’s recording of a U2 B-side that Bono gave his blessing to. The song is ‘Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad’ but so far its all of the former and none of the latter for Dusk. “Even today I have to pinch myself because every night I get to sing ‘Two Shots’ at every gig. It still gets to me, its hilarious!”

Dusk may appear to have come out of nowhere but in fact he’s recorded four independent releases and been haunting Toronto clubs since he was seventeen, a whole eight years ago. And even though things have changed with the heightened profile that The Casino brings he takes it in stride. “It definitely has been different because I can't walk into a grocery store or a coffee shop without someone going ‘Oh are you that guy from the TV show?’ or ‘I’ve heard your music’. But it doesn't really faze me very much”. He laughs and then adds ”It basically makes it a lot easier to meet chicks!”

Dusk has heard the Sinatra talk and is too ‘aw shucks’ to take exception to the comparisons but he’s respectful of it. “I hold Sinatra in such esteem that to be compared or even mentioned in the same sentence is an honour’ he says quietly. “At the same time it can be a curse because people can say ‘you’re imitating him’. That’s not true. I never try to imitate him. I just came from the same school of training that Sinatra came from. That’s where the curse lies.”

The other curse is that Dusk’s music which wanders comfortably between jazz and old fashioned (ie Fourties) crooning gets very little radio airplay. “We knew that if we were going to drive albums sales it would have to be based on a TV and film based approach because this music for some odd reason does not get played on radio as much as we think it should.”

Yet audiences respond to Dusk’s music in much the same way they did the classic crooners. “I think it appeals to such a wide age group” Dusk observes.
”The older people enjoy seeing the younger people do it because it makes them feel young. And the younger people come because you’re a younger performer and they can relate to you. Its really cool how you get the blend of people.”

That blend of people will be apparent to any who can snag a ticket to Matt Dusk’s two shows at the London Music Club. Its part of a small tour of clubs that Dusk is doing for the noblest of reasons: he likes to play small rooms. “When we play smaller venues it gives us a chance to really meet the people we’re performing to” he notes. “And I think that’s the best part. As a performer if you didn’t have an audience to listen to you, you wouldn’t be anywhere. It’s a chance to get some good positive feedback and just hang out with the crew. You get a chance to meet some really great people on the road when you’re signing autographs after the show.”

After this short jaunt through Ontario and environs, Matt Dusk will be heading to the United States to promote the record there. “We’ve got quite a number of places to tour.” he says. “I don’t think the next record will be out until maybe November of next year or 2006. We’ve got the whole eastern seaboard, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.” He pauses for a breath and exhales. “Still a lot of work to do!”

Bobby Blue Bland

2006-09-10T22:50:00.000-04:00

This is one of those interviews that make the duff ones worth it. Bobby Blue Bland. For a R&B fan, he's the real deal. He was also a gentleman. Most people suspect that Don Robey ripped him off but Bland takes the high road.

The article was tied into his visit to the London Blues Fest.

July, 2005

He had a problem with ‘blue’ but he had no problems with the ‘blues’. Legendary R&B pioneer Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland is stuck with his middle ‘name’. “I tried to have it changed so it would be just ‘Bobby Bland” he laughs over the phone from his Memphis home. “I didn’t want to be characterized as just one particular kind of singer” he sighs. “But I can’t get rid of it so its stuck with me forever!”

Although Bland insists that he’s always sung the blues, in truth it was his prowess with a ballad that was his triumph. His gospel influenced singing style could take a song from the church pews to the bedroom seamlessly. “Well I think so,” he agrees “Because the stories that I tell are kinda tilted towards the ladies. And once you get the ladies then you don’t have to worry about the guys coming along because they re going to follow. Once you get that down then you pretty much got it made!”

Bland’s attraction to the ladies as well as a perfect match of producers, arranger and musicians made his Fifties and Sixties tenure on Duke Records his artistic triumph. And while you may not have linked Bland with the songs, these blues staples all found their way into musician’s set-lists via Bland’s riveting originals. "Farther up the Road", "Turn on Your Lovelight," "Stormy Monday Blues “and” I’ll Take Care of You" are only a few of the Bland’s classic Duke Records hits.

Bland is a generous man and when it comes to his success he spreads the credit around fairly. “I have a lot to thank Joe Scott for because of the arrangements he was doing” Bland insists “He was a teacher and he was a person who could guide you to different things that you weren’t familiar with. He was very good at selecting material for me.”

“At that time we had a lot of good lyric writers in Texas” Bland recalls “And once you get a record out and it does pretty good throughout the country then some of them said ‘I’ll do a song for Bobby Bland’. Because they like the way I sing and my delivery. So I had a pretty good choice of lyrics from good writers.”

Oddly the one person that Bland is most grateful to is one that many of Bland’s fans find to be the most suspect. Duke Records head Don Robey has had many charges leveled against him by detractors including his tendency to take songwriting credits for songs not written by him, a common though dubious practice in the early days of the music industry. But over fifty years since he first met him, Bland has nothing but gratitude for the late Don Robey. “There really wasn’t anything to think about because he gave me an opportunity to be heard on record” Bland says firmly. “He was a business man like anybody else. It just so happened that he was a black man and I think it didn’t sit too well with his own people or anybody else. But I don’t have anything bad to say about him. He did some nice things also but you don’t ever see that.”

Last year’s Martin Scorsese PBS Blues series may have put the spotlight back on the impact of blues music on America’s cultural heritage but Bland still doesn’t feel it gets its due. “Well it has had a pick-me-up” he concedes, “But it still hasn’t had the world wide promotion that it should get because a lot of people pretend that they don’t like certain things like blues. They play it behind closed doors, when they’re at home. Blues has been kind of a downer for a lot of people. Its not the kind of thing that people want to identify with because its kind of a sad sort of story. Everybody have the blues but they don’t want to admit that”.

One of the ironies of blues enduring legacy is that the music and its fanbase is often practiced and popularized by a largely white fan base. Black audiences and musicians have mostly avoided blues music. “They don’t want to relate to it” Bland admits. “I’m very, very proud of it. But they’ll get into it when they understand. It. It’s the only thing that we have.”

Its also the only thing that Bland has. Although his touring schedule has been pared down from a year round schedule to five or six months its still quite an effort for a seventy four year old man. “There’s nothing like doing things that you like and especially get paid for it” Bland says proudly. “So I’d like to stay healthy and sing until I just can’t.”

Sarah Slean

2006-09-10T22:48:00.000-04:00

January, 2005

Two years ago, singer songwriter Sarah Slean was having a bad year. Although with her solo debut release on Atlantic Records, she had been accepted by the Canadian and American music industries, she wasn’t so sure about them. In fact she wasn’t so thrilled about what she did for a living, period. “I didn’t believe in this as an occupation any more” she says earnestly. “I thought it was grotesque in its vanity and its self indulgence. I thought, ‘my God - why am I an artist? Why am I not using my brain and heart to help cure sick people or do something of worth?’ I completely turned on this as a way of life.”

So in July of 2003, Slean pretty much dropped everything and headed up north for a self-imposed four month sabattical. “I gave away most of my shit, or I just left it in my apartment” she explains. “I got movers to put my piano in the back of a truck and up I drove with just the essentials. I had no idea of what the place was that I had picked. I had never seen it before.”

Slean spent the days just staring at the trees, reading, writing and just thinking. “I would wake up with the sun and go to bed when it got dark” she recalls. “I felt like I went up there with all of these questions and no answers were coming in. It was a last ditch attempt. And I was pleasantly surprised that it was not like that at all. All of the answers were there but in ways that I didn’t expect.”

It should be made clear that although Slean ended up spending four months in the woods in northeastern Ontario, the retreat as planned didn’t have an end date. Slean was going to stay up there for as long as she felt it was necessary. But there always was the notion that she might never want to return to her life. “I had those fears” she gulps. “I knew that it wouldn’t be a good thing if I went there and stayed forever. Because I think you have to go back to the world and tell the story. It’s like Homer and ‘The Odyssey’.

So when Slean returned to the world in the fall of 2003, she was a changed person. “It was just like I was unclenched” she laughs. “The permanent pain in my neck was gone. All of these things that were so much struggle, and so much conflict and striving and desire and all of those really antagonizing forces. They just vanished. I didn’t have it in me. I didn’t have anything to rail against. I didn’t have a face looking back at me. I just had this beautiful blank slate of nature. It was such a lesson to me.”

Refreshed and reinspired she then recorded her second album not insignificantly titled ‘Day One’ which was released this past fall. She also published ‘Raven’ a book of the paintings she did in the cabin during her self-imposed sabattical. “When I was in the cabin I was becoming acquainted with how I wanted to create an artwork that I could finish in one sitting” she says. “I was making lots and lots of them. I thought I should put out the book as a sort of memory of the time I spent at the cabin.”

And then she became the ‘Black Widow’. Canadian film Director David Norton was casting about for someone to play the lead role in a cinematic telling of the story of Eve Hardwicke who murdered her husband and child in Hamilton some fifty years ago. Norton’s friend, musician Hawksley Workman remembered his friend Slean and one audition later, she had the part. “I was terrified and I said to them ‘hey you know I don’t know how to act, eh??’” she chuckles. “I mean I acted in plays in high school and I loved it but I wouldn’t consider myself an actress!”

The film ‘Black Widow’ comes out later this year and despite her initial reticence, Slean is excited. ”I’ve got the bug now” she laughs “I’m hoping that when it gets released I start getting some calls about some more parts!”

In the immediate future however its back to touring, her current trek finding her paired with rising songwriter Jeremy Fisher on a tour that stops in London on February ??. But despite her four month retreat, Sarah Slean still struggles to ensure that her work has meaning for her. “It’s an everyday struggle” she shrugs. “People think I’m being dramatic, but its just part of the way I think. Everyday I have to come back to not hating it because I think it’s superficial.” She pauses for a moment and then adds “I have to find its nobility in it somewhere, every single day or it’s too much to me.”

Bif Naked

2006-09-09T10:45:00.000-04:00

August, 2005

Bif Naked frightens most of us instinctively. Admit it. She’s tattooed in places most of us never even see, she can look rather fearsome in most photos and one suspects that there’s bloodstains under those black fingernails.

But the truth of the matter is that in truth Bif Naked is Canada’s Sweetheart. Truly, truly. She doesn’t smoke or drink, she’s ‘straight edge’ and save for her penchant for ahem, colourful language, she’s as charming as they come. It is not for nothing that her new album is called ‘Superbeautiful Monster’ insomuch as that verbal oxymoron doubles as a defacto description of Bif Naked herself.

While careening around curves on the New Jersey Turnpike, BN (writer’s note: BN is a helluva lot better than referring to her as ‘Naked’ don’t you think?) laughs at what her image has wrought over the years. “I've been dealing with that since my first record” she chuckles. “People say ‘when we look at you we think you’re in a trash band and when we hear the record its entirely different’. I just sigh and say 'yeah I know’. I don’t know what to say. I just like making my little songs.”

Those ‘little songs’ have been coming from BN for something like fifteen years to date. “Since I was eighteen years old!” she notes. “I was a theater major at the University of Winnipeg. I met some guys in my class that were playing in a band. I dropped out of university to go on tour and I’m still on tour!”

Her infamous name made its debut at roughly the same time that her boots hit the stage. “That was kind of bestowed upon me” BN shrugs. “Bif was a nickname for Beth. I had the nickname since about grade 10. When I joined a band with these guys, everyone had these cool names. It was just kind of what was up with me at the time. I was a young person taking on a punk hard core provocative name because I just wanted to be different. When the band I was in, Gorilla Gorilla had a show on Valentines Day back at the Royal Albert in Winnipeg back around 1990 they made a poster and it said ‘Come see Bif Naked with Gorilla Gorilla. So its just stuck over the years through thick and thin.”

The other thing that stuck for BN was playing music. She is that seeming contradiction, a musician that loves the road. Playing live is BN’s raison detra. “I don’t know what else to do with myself!” she laughs. “I just really love playing shows! I just love it! That connection you have with other people with music is just the deepest connection you can ever have. And the audience and the performers, honestly, they become one. They’re having the same moment together. It makes you feel like you’re all friends, like you all can relate. Its extremely fulfilling.”

And as large as Canada is, there’s just not enough places to play for BN. So of course Europe and the US are also on her radar. “Europe?” she blurts out. “Its awesome. I sold records in Europe before I sold any in Canada. I lost my Canadian deal in ‘95, bought the record back, formed a company and started licensing the record in Canada. It also came out in Italy and Germany. So I went where the work was. I was great fun. It was a very serendipitous time.”

She’s also broadened her horizons south of the border. “I have a great time down here” she says brightly. “I’ve always been really, really lucky. I can die happy. I got to do the Tonight show, Total Request Live, MTV, the Buffy show. Its been a great ride”.

Its occasionally unsettling to hear BN make passing references to ‘dying happy’, and refer to her career in the past tense. It’s less odd when one considers that she discovered a few years back that she has a heart aneurysm. Its operable but, well, complicated. “Its just that the risks outweigh just waiting it out” she says quietly. “I discussed it with my parents. We looked into a lot of options….”she trails off. “You know maybe as time goes on they’ll develop better systems and technologies. The odds for the surgery were not encouraging at all. It was like 68% of patients die on the table. So it was like ‘screw that’. Who wants to do that? I’m going to do the Tonight Show!”

Interestingly enough BN’s reminder of her own mortality has enriched her life. To paraphrase the late Warren Zevon, she seems to be able to ‘enjoy every sandwich’. “Ultimately what I always thought was that I’ve had such an extraordinary life” she insists. “After my twenties I was very ensconced in studying Buddhism. I’ve never had a fear of death. I’ve never had any issues with it. So when it comes to the aneurysm I’m like ‘eh’.

They say that with age comes wisdom and despite her seeming toughness, Bif Naked is enjoying her newfound wisdom. “You know what?” she laughs. “I love being in my thirties! It rocks, it rules so hard. And now I just find that my mother was right about so many things. You smile more, things get easier to deal with, your coping mechanisms are better.”

But despite her love of live performance and her que-sera-sera philosophy, the idea of taking a break and having children is not far from her mind. “I pray for it everyday” BN says flatly, adding dryly, “Do you know where my husband lives? Tell him to call me!
My imaginary one!” She’s laughing deeply by this point and hilariously unstoppable. “I keep looking at my watch going, you sonovabitch, get here so I can have a couple of puppies. Tell him to call me!”

As she slows down and the chuckles abate she admits “I’ve been in love several times in my life. I’ve enjoyed being engaged to be married several times and you know God bless them all. I’m glad that I got out when I did.”

As you can tell by a glance of the cover of this magazine, Bif Naked has about 579% more tattoos than the average woman. And of course like most such things, it started rather innocently. ”I just wanted one tattoo, when I was seventeen years old” she say slowly. “And then…” she dryly notes, “I needed one on the other side for the symmetry. And then I needed ANOTHER for the symmetry. I also studied different theologies and different images and I wanted to record them on my skin.

“Ultimately I incurred a lot of misadventure when I was a child and when I was a teenager and honestly all along with hindsight now I think it was my armor” she says quietly. “I was never going to be mean to anybody. I think I just didn’t want anyone to keep hurting me. I think I started getting tattoos when I was young to make sure that people wouldn’t talk to me or hurt me or….”. BN pauses and starts to laugh at herself. “I really am a therapists dream Bob! Someone is out there waiting to make a fucking fortune off of me!”

“It was kinda about being a sexual abuse survivor, a violence survivor and so I just put a big smile on my face and carried on” she admits. “I think I just compartmentalized so well that I didn’t deal with a lot of things and I started getting tattoos. I never thought that was why. I just think that now I look back and say 'ohhhh...'! There’s a lot of light bulbs go on for me as I get older. I love it and enjoy it. Its fascinating for anyone. I’m glad to be at the place that I am.”

Not surprisingly the next thing on Bif Naked’s agenda is uh, more touring. “We’re playing with Nickelback in the west and with Billy idol in the east” she notes, referring of course to the show that brings her to the John Labatt Centre on September ??. “I’m thrilled, just thrilled to be opening for him. I’m such a big fan, but I’m a little nervous. I just want to be able to do a good job!”