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Cheap Trick at Rock The Park, July 22, 2010

2011-07-23T19:07:00.001-04:00

Less than a week after their truncated set / brush with death at the Ottawa Blues Festival (see pic at right) 70s pop rock kings Cheap Trick showed no signs of stage fright at London's annual fundraiser Rock The Park.

Although bandleader/ guitarist Rick Nielson made a few offhand comments about their close call (not counting their frequent exhortations of 'it's good to be alive') , the one-time hit-makers concentrated on bashing through their hits in spirited defiance of their birth certificates. Between the set bookends of Hello There / Good Night they spun out their own chestnuts such as I Want You To Want Me, the brilliant Surrender, Dream Police and Clock Strikes Ten as well as their definitive take on The Move's California Man and Big Star's In The Street (better known as the theme to That Seventies Show). And although about the only 'familiar tune they didn't play was their ubiquitous theme to the Colbert Report, few in the audience would quibble.

Although they haven't had a hit in years, Cheap Trick are still recording discs and scoring decent reviews unlike most of their then-contemporaries which is undoubtedly the key behind their almost absurdly enthusiastic performance Friday night. Although the cut they played from their recent release the cheekily titled The Latest was no hit in disguise it had enough hooks to fit in comfortably into their lengthy set. All of which is to say that as performers they were no less vital than when I caught them at Toronto's El Mocambo in November, of 1977.

Often lost in the smoothly run classic rock fest that is Rock The Park is the raison detre for the long-running annual fundraiser. The Bethany’s Hope Foundation was created to fund research into Metachromatic Leukodystrophy (MLD), the disease that claimed the life of David and Lindey McIntyre’s daughter. Event organizer Brad Jones of Jones Entertainment Group says that all funds from beer sales, sponsorships and such goes directly into London-based research. To date the event has raised over a million dollars.

And while the cause that underlies this now-iconic London summer celebration is its figurative DNA sets such as Cheap Trick's are a bracing reminder of why this event still works. Wonderfully so in this case.

Jack Richardson (January, 2002)

2011-05-19T22:03:00.003-04:00

I heard about Jack Richardson's passing from Burton Cummings last Saturday afternoon. No I don't know Cummings but he was playing at the John Labatt Centre that night and my friend Nick had an extra ducat. I go on Cummings website to check out the opening act and there was his heartfelt tribute to Richardson.

I quickly clicked the Facebook 'like' on his blog which was extremely inappropriate since I didn't like this news at all.

Like most of you reading this I was a fan of / grew up with the Guess Who's music and Jack Richardson's name was familiar to anyone (everyone?) who used to pore over the liner notes of albums.

An opportunity to interview Richardson came up via a Scene magazine article almost ten years ago and I jumped at the chance. The interview pared down to what's in the article reproduced here was good fun for me and to be truthful Richardson seemed to be having a chuckle or seven spinning the tales of his storied past.

I went to his home a few days later to pick up some pics for the article. Although I didn't want to take up too much of his time for what was to be a routine drop-by errand, he nonetheless ended up talking at length for almost an hour telling more tales - all off-the-record - about the ups and downs of some music biz careers and his days working as a studio gun-for-hire with some music / Mafia figures that haunted the industry at the time (read Tommy James recent biography for a terrific account of that era).

I always wish I had another chance to hear more of his stories but that never came to pass.

I post the article below in tribute to Jack Richardson, a music legend yes, London's adopted musical hero via the Jack Richardson Music Awards and not least of all a really nice guy.

Rest in peace Jack.

---------------------------------------------

You know Jack Richardson. Yes you do. We all do. His name goes in one ear and out the other but the music he’s brought to fruition is stuck in your brain. Stuck in your consciousness too. The Guess Who hits, Alice Cooper’s heyday, Bob Seger’s Night Moves. More too but that’s plenty. Jack Richardson is a legend.

Burton Cummings knows that. So does Billy Joel producer Phil Ramone. Ditto for the legendary Bob Ezrin who produced Pink Floyd’s The Wall among others. And Seger and plenty of others.

In fact he’s such a deal that they’ve made a documentary about his life, set to premiere January 31st on The NewPL and then MUCHMOREMUSIC afterwards. Richardson is alive, well and still teaching the Music Industry Arts program at Fanshawe College but the special on his life has him a bit wary. “Well its kinda weird to see fifty years of your life go by in forty seven minutes!" he says with a deep laugh. To be certain when documentary producer Bruce Carter approached Richardson a few years ago about examining his career on celluloid Richardson was taken aback. “I said "Why?"

To hear Jack Richardson tell it his career was just that of a guy struggling to make it. The documentary tells the tale very well: from an ad jingle producer to teen pop by the mid-Sixties. And then he stumbled across that Winnipeg pop band. And the hits started coming. “The success is what really makes the story interesting I guess" Richardson mutters matter-of-factly. “There's no question that we had some rather stellar success with the Guess Who and a couple of other acts that we took under our wings.

Acts that ranged from Alice Cooper to Bob Seger to the young Michael Bolotin (Bolton to the perm crowd). Richardson was such an in-demand producer that the documentary points out that his wife once placed a hand-scrawled full-page ad in Billboard asking Richardson to 'please come home!’

In order to make his life a bit saner, Richardson built Canada’s first world-class recording studio. Located in the heart of Yorkville Nimbus 9 was a raging success and hosted international acts of all stripes that either wanted the Richardson touch or who just wanted to record in Canada.

But Revenue Canada then reneged on a tax ruling for the studio and basically ran Richardson out of business. “We were prepared to accept their ruling but then they just got to be so obnoxious about it all that I just said 'to hell with it, I’ll get out’. I just had enough of it and it was beginning to affect my health so we just took off.”

Took off to London as it turned out. It was the early 80s and after almost 20 years building a career as a producer Jack Richardson saw the crayon scribbling on the wall. “I had reached a point in time where you don’t find 18 or 20 year old rock groups searching high and low for a 50 something producer. There's always that age gap.

There were some family issues to consider as well and Richardson decided to make London their home base. Fanshawe College hired him to develop their Music Industry Arts program and the lifestyle change fit Richardson like a velvet glove. Finally he would be able to drive home each day to be with his wife. “You have to remember that for years I would be out of town for nine ten months of the year. Its not a particularly pleasant way to raise a family," he says ruefully. And I’ve always been one who likes to give back. The business has been good to me. I thought that I had something to offer to the kids that were coming up.”

Jack Richardson is a humble decent man to talk to. It’s easy to understand the accolades that fall from the mouths of his admirers during the documentary and the effort they put into backing the video. Bruce Carter enlisted the help of Richardson’s son, producer Ggggarth Richardson and Bob Ezrin. Like some sort of parallel universe music biz remake of 'Its A Wonderful Life’ the money started pouring in: Alice Cooper, Ezrin, promoter Donald K Donald, producer Bruce Allen, the list is endless. “Some gave $500, others a lot more." Carter adds. “It all adds up!"

The day after the documentary airs Jack Richardson will likely celebrate - by going back to work. He’s down to something like three days a week now but retirement is as odd a concept to him as not being in a studio. “I have a hard time imagining it myself," he muses.

“Its more of an avocation than it is a job and you just sort of never really get it out of your blood. He pauses and laughs another of his deep chuckles. “Its one of those things that they’ll probably be nailing the lid down when we’re doing the last session!"

Gerry Dee

2010-04-09T18:34:00.002-04:00

You know Gerry Dee. You know you do even if you don’t think you do. Remember that guy with the ripped sweater in the Wiser’s commercial? Or that annoying faux-reporter on The Score? Or maybe the guy who played Wayne Cashman in the Canada/Russia 72 TV movie a few years back?

For Toronto-based comedian Gerry Dee the above roles –aside from his profile as a comedian - are the reason he gets the ‘hey you’re that guy’ treatment on the street by his fellow Canadians.

“I get stopped by couples in their 40s, in their 60s, by gay people, by young people, singles, black white, Chinese,” he laughs. “That’s a real important thing for me, that I try to keep my comedy as diverse for everybody.”

The other reason that people approach Dee is that he’s accessible, friendly, the kind of guy you might bump into at your kids soccer game or the grocery line. His everyman status is no coincidence either. Dee is in fact married, a father and a former teacher who gave up the chalkboard for comedy not so many years ago. Not surprisingly he plumbs his life for comedy on an ongoing basis.

“I think that’s what has separated me I guess,” he muses. ”A lot of comics are not married. A lot of them don’t have kids. A lot of them go on the road for 52 weeks a year. That’s their lifestyle but it’s not mine.

“My earlier act would be about a single guy in bars and being a teacher,” he says. “I still use a lot the of teaching stuff. My friends are teachers, my wife is a teacher and I’ve started drawing on more of the stories.”

Dee would likely still be shaping young minds in the school system today were it not for a feeling he had that he might have some talent as a comic.

“It was just one of those thing that everybody in the back of their mind thought they might be good at,” he says. In order to put this ambition to the test he gave it a try one night at a comedy club and “it went horrible.”

“It was not a fun experience but I guess the competitive side of me just wanted to do a better job. I just kept going up onstage and then I’d started thinking I could do this and then I just went with it.”

Dee says that despite his current success he keeps trying to grow and push himself to avoid growing stagnant. “I don't want to be a one hit wonder in comedy,” he says. “You can be a one hit wonder in music and make a lot of money from that but it doesn’t work that way in comedy.”

That urge to keep his career moving goes a long way to explaining his upcoming four-night stint at London’s Yuk-Yuks Club.

“What I do at Yuk-Yuks is work on the new stuff and have fun with the crowd,” explains Dee. “It’s a little different from the typical tour. I’ve retired a couple of old bits. I just feel its try to time to move on from them. I do have a following and I want the people who’ve been there before to hear some new stuff.”

Nels Cline of Wilco

2010-04-09T18:19:00.005-04:00

Talking to Wilco guitarist Nels Cline on an afternoon in early February, he expressed delight at their pending appearance at a Neil Young tribute concert that evening in Los Angeles, one of a few shows on tap before they hit London’s Centennial Hall on February 24. What he doesn’t know however is that their performance of Young’s Buffalo Springfield hit, Mr. Soul will later be acclaimed be the highlight of the entire show.

Music industry critic Bob Lefsetz wrote that “Wilco’s performance was a tour de force” noting that other guests such as James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Sheryl Crow phoned in their performances.

The seeming contradiction between Cline’s gratitude at being able to pay tribute to Young and their subsequent stunning and heartfelt performance is a perfect snapshot of why Wilco is so beloved by their fans. Their fans know that Wilco are themselves music fans, something that Cline readily admits.

“I think somehow Jeff (Tweedy) really has a handle on it,” he offers. "Jeff and Tony Margherita our manager who’s been with Jeff since the Uncle Tupelo days really understand how a rock band fits into society and whatever our fanbase is. There’s a nice connection there and boy I can’t argue it. There’s lot of loyalty there.”

That loyalty was put to the test almost 10 ten years ago when Warner Music refused to release Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Frustrated, the band made the album free for download on their website. After they cemented a deal with Nonesuch Records (comically enough, a Warner label) they released the music on disc. It went on to sell more copies than any of their previous releases despite the giveaway.

Cline saw much of this from the sidelines, not joining up with the band until 2004. Following the departure of the much-loved Jay Bennett, Cline shone with the band live, his post-blues experimental guitar playing fitting in extremely well with the trajectory of the band’s slow move away from their alt-country beginnings.

“I’m not trying to sound like a public relations man,” laughs Cline, “but my goal was to just fit in. They didn’t tell me anything but it worked out really well. Those were my concerns and it didn’t turn out to be all that much to be concerned about.

It’s been a long way since the alt-country leanings of their first few discs and with the band personnel switch-ups, Cline included, the band has made change a defacto policy. For fans of any specific style of Wilco’s music this can be a problem but Cline says it’s just something that happens.

“Jeff in the past has said that every record alienates someone or we lose a certain number of old fans and gain about the same number of new fans,” he says. “Very gradually it’s expanding but there’s certainly no effort to attempt to expand the fanbase. There’s kind of a - I hate to use this phrase - organic or natural phenomenon.

Cline has slid nicely into that organic mix, saying that the music he’s playing now is “what I was doing aesthetically prior to Wilco quite a bit.”

“It’s a little hard to explain but I can just tell you that it’s really lovely with an excellent band chemistry with a unified band approach to performing and playing and maybe life in general. You couldn’t ask for more.”

(photo note: the above pic was taken at the London Wilco show and taken from Flickr. To see more pics by this photographer go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/waltermassacre/4388442441/)

The 20th Annual Firehall Reunion

2010-04-09T18:14:00.003-04:00

It was the biggest little 98-seat club in London. The Firehall / Talbot Inn was such an iconic venue for London blues fans for so many years that when it was gone, it left a hole in the soul of London’s music scene that never really went away.

In 1997, seven years after it’s closing the Firehall was resurrected in spirit via a reunion concert that paid tribute to the blues-love that marked the club’s 60s, 70s and 80s heyday. It was such as success that 12 more reunions followed with this year marking the 20^thsuch since the club shuttered.

Although event organizers Brian Mortimer and Brad Harwood are responsible for pulling together the Firehall Reunion, Mortimer for one gives full credit to the work of the Great Lakes Blues Society for keeping the blues flame alive in London.

“It’s amazing that the Firehall which was only licensed for 98 people can attract six or seven hundred people for the reunion,” Mortimer chuckles.

“For the first seven years we never saw the need to have the reunion primarily because we had different bars open,” Mortimer adds. “It wasn’t until some time after that that we missed all our friends.”

A good time is most definitely on-tap for this years reunion taking place at the London Music Hall with performers including Jack De Keyzer, Paul James, Danny Brooks and many others (go to www.londonmusichall.com for the full list).

“It’s a real crowd-pleasing lineup,” says Mortimer. “The vibe will be unbelievable and all the musicians are friends of each other so they’ll be getting up to support each other while they’re playing. The jam possibilities are mind blowing.”

The event’s reputation has grown so much over the years that Mortimer says the reserved tables sold out almost instantly and he suspects the remaining tickets will move quickly.

The word ‘friends’ comes up a lot in a conversation with Mortimer. He calls many of the musicians friends and as well as the blues fans that he and his long-time staff have come to know over the years. That sense of community is another reason the event has retained its reputation.

Community has been an underlying theme for Mortimer since his Firehall days, which led him to have charities involved with all the events he’s been involved with over the years from Corporate Challenge and 24-hour Relay to the Rib and Balloon Fests.

The Tara ‘Boom’ Houston Children’s Foundation (www.tbhcf.com) will be the beneficiary of this year’s Firehall Reunion. The charity came to Mortimer’s attention appropriately enough from his business life. The parents of Tara ‘Boom’ Houston were customers at one of Mortimer’s establishments.

“When Tara was six or seven she got an inoperable brain tumour,” he explains. “Like most families they were devastated. Unlike most families they decided to do something about it.

“They were our customers and we grew to be friends with them and identified with their cause. We put charities to almost all of our shows but this is our biggest one and this is our favorite charity. That’s the kind of charity we like to be involved with. Blues people, close to the roots, helping children and helping families.

“It will be a love in I promise you that,” adds Mortimer, “and you will leave the event with your spirits soaring.”

The Light of East Ensemble

2010-04-09T18:08:00.002-04:00

Panayiotis Giannarapis was a mere boy when the music grabbed hold of his soul. A child of London-based Greek immigrants, he heard the music of his elders and heard in it a sound he not only loved but needed to make himself.

On the evening of November 13 at Aeolian Hall, Giannarapis and his Light of East Ensemble will honour that childhood muse and celebrate the music of not only Greece, but Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Armenia to name a few.

“We’ve been doing it for three years and its been going very well,” says Giannarapis in typically understated fashion.

The Light of East Ensemble has been a success far beyond Giannarapis’ modest ambitions, with appearances at festivals in Kitchener and London’s Sunfest and Home County, spreading the word far beyond the ethnic fanbase that is their defacto audience.

“We have had a bit of a crowd coming to follow us ever since Sunfest and we have different nationalities and all sorts of people coming out to enjoy our music”, Giannarapis says. “The people say ‘hey man, this is great music, this is something different, I love your sound, the instrumentation’”.

The music of the Light of East Ensemble as heard on their soon-to-be-released debut recording Beyond Our Shores pulls together Arabic, Turkish, something Giannarapis calls ‘Greek blues’ and other ethnic folk music into a hypnotic, spirited and extremely compelling mix.

Giannarapis credits his father’s ever-present reel-to-reel recorder with spurring his passion for all things music. The recorder was full of Greek music of all kinds and it would be ubiquitous at any family or Greek community gathering he went to.

“I didn’t know anything else other than Greek culture,” he says. “Everything was Greek at home. I was so involved in that. My parents went to Greek parties, with family and friends. My father would bring the reel-to-reel with all that music. He was going on all the time, in the car, at home about the music. It was just always there.”

What wasn’t here however was someone to teach Giannarapis the bouzouki. So after learning classical guitar (“flamenco style” he says) he went to Toronto to take bouzouki lessons. After the lessons Giannarapis hooked up with a like-minded Toronto band and hunkered down to learn from them.

“They were these monster musicians and players and I learned a lot from those guys,” he says. “I just said to myself, I’d like to bring something like this to London.

“I was in the London musicians’ association so I just called around and found musicians who wanted to do world music justice and from there it just started taking off.”

Those London musicians were and still are the current line-up of the Light of East Ensemble: Bryan Covey on clarinet, and various wind instruments, the flute of Jennifer Baetz Chester, Steve Clark on double bass, Mary Asthon on violin, Daniel Baerg on percussion and of course Giannarapis on bouzouki and baglama.

While Giannarapis came at the music from the perspective of personal heritage, he was delighted to find that his band-mates made up for in musicianship what they lacked in musical heritage.

“I was like ‘these people don’t know Greek but they play Greek music,’” laughs Giannarapis. “How did this happen? Well, they’re musicians, they’re musicians.”

Giannarapis told his band members that there’s a story behind each piece of music, a reality made apparent by audience reactions at some of their performances.

“I remember when we were playing this one piece, I saw this man while I was playing, and wondered if he’s Greek,” he recalls. “At the end of the concert his son said my father wants to talk to you. The guy hugs me, he had tears in his eyes and he said I haven’t heard that song since I left Greece. Where did you find it?”

Although Giannarapis recognizes that the music is nostalgic for those who grew up with it, “the mission is to bring back this music to those people but also those who have not heard this type of music.”

“Some people who are not from Middle Eastern countries, come up to me and say ‘hey man, this is great music, this is something different, I love your sound the instrumentation’.”

Despite his commitment to the Light of East Ensemble, Giannarapis hasn’t given up his day job at Ford, although, he insists “this is another full-time job.”

“I put my heart and soul into everything with practice, rehearsals, and get-togethers with the band to get the job done,” he says.

Lamb of God

2010-04-09T18:04:00.002-04:00

Lamb of God drummer Chris Adler is in the hometown of rock and roll or in any case the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame but regardless visiting popular music’s museum is not on his agenda.

“No I’m not going to get there,” he says over the phone from Cleveland. “It’s our one day off and we’re just resting.” Given that Lamb of God’s touring sched has had them on the road since late last year, Adler is forgiven for his day of rest.

The Richmond, Virginia metal band are currently riding high on the success of their latest disc, Wrath which debuted at the number two slot on the Billboard chart on its release last February, moving Lamb of God another rung up on their career ladder.

Their current tour, which includes a stop at the JLC October ?? sees them sharing the stage with Metallica, a band undoubtedly an inspiration when Wrath debuted in 1994.

“They actually came to several of our shows in the past,” Adler notes. “They’re fans of our band so to be recognized in that way, and to be asked to join them is very flattering. We couldn't be happier.”

It’s been 15 years since the band bowed albeit then under the name Burn The Priest and Adler is still quite stunned at how the years turned their passion into a living.

“It’s incredible that we’ve been able to do this as long as we have,” he says with a laugh. “We started out trying to find a place to sleep and a few beers to drink and its turned into quite the profession for all of us.

“I told my wife and my parents over and over that this can’t keep going and it’s going to end soon but it keeps going and going.”

Although Adler and his bandmates live and breath metal, they really couldn’t have chosen a healthier musical genre to find themselves in. Metal fans are notoriously loyal and Adler appreciates that it’s a two way street.

To that end, he set up webcams in the drum room studio while recording Wrath, allowing fans to check out the sessions live.

“For me just as a fan of the music, I did it really because when I was a kid I would have loved being a fly on the wall of the studio to see how that stuff really happens,” says Adler. “So I thought it would be a cool opportunity for the fans to see through the smoke and mirrors if you will. By the end of it we had almost half a million people check it out.”

Although Lamb of God have released half a dozen discs, they’ve also released three DVDs, Adler noting that they sell more DVDs than albums.

“A lot of the time kids parents say ‘I don’t listen to your music but I love your DVDs’,” he laughs. “You guys are funny or whatever. People connect with us on that level and I think with those DVDs they can see that we’re normal guys out here busting our humps to do what we love. Its not some debaucherous crazy rock and roll holiday dreamboat. There's s no golden helicopter out there picking us up. And I think people connect with the real guys that we are.”

Ronnie Hawkins (August, 2009)

2009-08-15T15:03:00.001-04:00

Although Arkansas born and bred, Ronnie Hawkins made his way to Canada so often during his 50-year musical career that it’s easy to understand why both Laurentian University and the University of Toronto gifted him with honorary degrees.

“I told them after I got it I went down to the drug store to fill myself out a prescription,” Hawkins jokes. “But they wouldn't let me. Well why do I have a doctoral degree if I can’t write out a prescription like all those other doctors do?”

Hawkins made the land of the maple leaf his home since the 60s and has been such a good-natured outsized personality that he was given the keys to the city to Peterborough (close to his Lakefield, Ontario home) and of course Toronto, his main stomping / performing grounds during his early career.

“They gave me the key to the city,” he laughs. “And everybody changed their locks. That key don’t open up nothing.”

Hawkins says he’s currently “dreaming of stardom. Big times just around the corner they keep telling me but it’s been a long corner,” he roars, rolling out the laugh.

Hawkins deep chuckle and dry Arkansas drawl are infectious and one suspects that’s why his address book has included so many notable musicians and public figures over his 50 years in music. From John Lennon and Pierre Trudeau to Bill Clinton and David Foster, Hawkins has stories about most of them.

Foster for example was so good that Hawkins fired him.

“That’s the story he tells everybody, that I was the only person to fire him,” Hawkins laughs. “He was so far ahead musically, he didn’t need the club business. The bars are where you groom talent to move on into the big time.”

Hawkins says Foster didn’t need mentoring so he sent him on his way telling him he wasn’t going to learn anything. But Hawkins laughs deeply as he adds with not a little pride that Foster says in interviews that he learned more from him than anyone he ever worked with. “But nothing to do with music.”

Others who learned from Hawkins both on and off the stage included late guitar legend Roy Buchanan, Blood, Sweat & Tears frontman David Clayton Thomas and of course the five sidemen who left his employ to back up Bob Dylan in the mid-60s, The Band.

“I look at it like this: they were helping me. I wouldn’t have hired them if I didn’t think they was the best I could get.”

And then there was the time Hawkins got a call from John Lennon asking to stay with Hawkins before he and Yoko Ono got on a ‘peace train’ across Canada.

“They lived with me for a couple of weeks,” says Hawkins adding dryly, “When that word got out I got most of my friends back. Everybody’s wanting to drop by and see me.”

Hawkins hospitality was returned in kind when he and his wife joined Lennon and Ono on the 1970 Peace Train which included a stop to visit Pierre Trudeau. “It was a special train with a car that was just for my wife and John and Yoko.”

One of the training grounds for Hawkins' bands in the late 50’s and early 60’s was London, which he called his ‘second home’ with regular gigs at bars such as Campbell’s and The Pump Room.

“We stayed there all winter because we didn’t want to travel,” he says. “When we first hit Canada we stayed in London a lot because they were nice to us, gave us good food and had cheap places to stay – the YMCA cost 20 dollars a week back then. London has been a good old place for us.”

When his brand of raucous rockabilly faded in the Seventies, his kinetic performance in The Band’s Last Waltz documentary made music fans sit up and salute him all over again.

Although his live reputation has always ensured a steady stream of bookings, Hawkins says that the wide availability of Martin Scorsese’s Last Waltz documentary introduced him to a new audience.

“Well that Waltz certainly has given me new fans because Robbie (Robertson) releases it every few years,” he says brightly. “I got young kids coming around to the shows, 16, 18, 20-years-old, that are into the Last Waltz,” he says with surprise.

Asked about retirement, Hawkins rolls out his whisky laugh once again. “Well,” he drawls, “I just sit back and dream of stardom.”

Hawksley Workman (July, 2009)

2009-08-03T21:10:00.004-04:00

He’s only been a professional musician for ten years but Hawksley Workman knows in the music business that’s the time it takes to start a career, make it and then slide to the bottom. That he’s still releasing albums at a dizzying pace, doing live dates (at London’s Grand Theatre July 30) and has a strong fan base strikes him as somewhat unbelievable.

“I'm pretty lucky because I think as Canadian musicians go they’re not giving jobs away to songwriters who want to make whatever the hell they think feels good at the time,” he states flatly. “I feel like I’m in my own lane a bit on that and I’m getting away with quite a bit.”

What Workman is getting away with, in his mind, is releasing 12 albums over the past decade, nine via normal retail outlets, three others available only at his concerts and website. They’re quite a varied lot by his own admission, one disc a ‘sad and boozy’ (his words) set of songs turned down by his record label with a warning that if released the disc would ruin his career.

Pointing out to him that in fact such eccentricity and wide ranging musical ambition is likely what has sustained his audience’s imagination, Workman chuckles knowingly.

“I can’t tell you how fortunate I feel,” he gulps. “I am lucky. My audience really has stuck with me. I feel like the luckiest guy alive to still have a job because the music business is really fickle. I’ve been able to stay not-fashionable just enough to not quite get spat out.”

Although he also writes for and produces other artists on the side, Workman still works with other producers on his own discs saying that working with people who he respects inspires him.

“I’ve been working with people that really bring something special out of me that I can’t do myself alone in the studio.”

Another reason that his growing fan-base finds Workman intriguing could well be his work ethic. In a music industry where an artist is lucky to get an album done every two years, Workman released two last year and says he has just put the finishing touches on two more. Oddly, he claims it’s a by-product of his lack of Big Fame, capitals intentional.

“I’ve kept a work ethic mostly because I never really blew up,” he explains. “I never really turned into a huge sensation, I’ve always sort of been a minor sideline sensation. And I think that’s really kept me working my ass off because I’m still out there trying to prove my point. It’s never really allowed me to relax and so consequently I end up writing more records than anyone cares to hear.”

It would be possible for the aptly named Workman to put the finished songs and recordings aside but the very idea of hiding them in a drawer drives him crazy.

“It honestly keeps me awake at night,” he chuckles. “To make records is one thing but to have them sit around while a label wonders what they’re going to do with them or because you want to lock into a good touring season just drives me mental. I just have to get that stuff out.”

P.W. Long

2009-07-20T21:50:00.002-04:00

(September 2003)

They’re sick of it, they really are. Ask any roots musician what they think of the term alt-country and they practically spit out their contempt. Troubled songwriter Richard Buckner once gave this scribe a good five minute rant on ‘that term’ which was both sad and hilarious. Over the phone from Fort Worth , Texas P.W. Long chuckles softly at the term used by his British record label to describe his music. ‘Whup-ass rockabilly? First time I heard of that!” He pauses a moment and adds, “I don’t call it anything.“

That’s not true and Long knows it. His ten years in the musical trenches must have found him fielding questions about his music with scribes such as moi and he must have forced his cerebellum into service once in awhile. “Well”, he admits, “I did kind of apply the phrase country metal to it a few months ago. It seems to be sticking because it turns up in reviews here and there.”

The primitive country tinged rock Long specializes in sounds like a world-weary Ronnie Van Zant fronting an early incarnation of Uncle Tupelo. Its really the same tough, tender and emotionally naked swaggering stomp that Long has specialized in since his early days with Mule. “We all liked country music and old timey music and delta blues and soul and R&B”, Long recounts. “We didn’t have the skills or experience to play R&B like Stevie Wonder or Sly Stone did so we just turned it up a notch and faked it!”

Despite the appearance of Long’s recently released ‘Remembered’ and the tour that brings him to Call The Office on October 19^th, Long is not another battered ‘new cd and tour’ road slave. He’s coming off five years of a self-imposed sabbatical from music. The long answer as to why he went into hiding is fascinating but the short one is more blunt. He was sick of himself. Or rather he was afraid of what he was turning into: a professional musician.

Listening to Long talk about this time is rather awkward. He’s determined to explain why but that only makes him more careful. Sentences start slowly and dribble to an end before he finishes them. “I think I was trying to do something with music that wasn’t coming truly from me” he explains. “ I was contriving to turn my music into merchandise. It just doesn’t come natural to me. You’re going to be found out.” He chuckles sheepishly and adds “It didn’t take long for people to smell it on me that I didn’t really give a fuck about being famous! When I go to the parties I don’t say the right things, I don’t know what fork to use with the salad or desert. They can smell a hillbilly out. They don’t want you there.”

So Long wandered down to New Orleans for awhile but found it both too hot and too close to the music meccas of New York and Los Angeles. After a brief stint in New York pitching sitcom scenarios to a friend of his at HBO, he decided to hide out. And where better than Buffalo? “You know in the movies when gangster or murderers or fugitives go to hang out , they go to Buffalo” he explains laughing.

In Buffalo he toiled at a humour news rag called ‘The Beast’ where his duties included penning a regular column under the guise of an ‘amazon buxom bisexual violent factory worker chick’ as Long describes it. “It got a lot of perverted response. I couldn’t even read the mail.” Long says laughing. “A lot of people actually thought this chick existed!”

But his old life beckoned. A friend corralled him into playing a festival in England. That led to a few more live dates in the UK and when he got back from England, he contacted his record company and started another album. The album was recorded in Texas and by the time it was finished Long shuffled off from Buffalo to Fort Worth.

No sooner has Long hung his hat in Fort Worth than he’s packing it in a suitcase again. As he walks around his Texas home telling his tale, he’s polishing his shoes and packing his bag for a brief tour. And even though this Detroit born transplanted Southerner is looking forward to visiting London again, they haven’t all been pleasant memories. A gig at the Embassy a few years back meant he stayed in one of their renown ‘guest rooms’. Although Long insists he loved playing there and even the artful accommodations, he still recalls vividly his stay there. “The whole room was painted blood red!” he says chuckling his way through the memory. “ I couldn’t sleep all night. That’s not peaceful dreaming!”

Nashville Pussy

2009-07-20T21:47:00.004-04:00

(November 2003)

Nashville Pussy. The name says it all really. Save for a few naïve grandmas who might presume it’s a new line of cute country themed feline collectables, Nashville Pussy is one of the most unequivocal band names in rock and roll. Their album titles are equally, ahem - direct. Their 1998 debut was titled ‘Let Them Eat Pussy’ while their new live DVD is called ‘Keep On F*cking In Paris’.

Equally blunt is their lead singer and guitarist Ruyter Suys (pronounced ‘Rider Sighs’). She’s an extremely likable ‘how ya doing’ gal with a penchant for ending virtually every sentence with a throaty chuckle or full-on laugh.

Sitting in a diner in Ventura California waiting for her pancakes to arrive, Suys tells the tale of how three Americans from the deep south fronted by a Canadian became one of the most ferocious rock and roll bands tearing up bars coast to coast. “It came out of me and Blaine (Cartwright) wanting to play together because were a couple. It also came out of sheer desperation.”

The problem for Suys and Cartwright was that nobody in their hometown of Nashville was playing rock and roll. Not real rock and roll. And not by their standards to say the least. “In Nashville they’ve got the most talented musicians in the world.“ Suys says in amazement. “And they don’t know how to perform at all. They’re all used to playing in studios.“she says matter-of-factly. “You want to be entertained when you go out. I want to be entertained. I want to get turned on. I want to fall in love and want to fuck the guitar player!” She chuckles adding, “Nothings changed since high school!”

Although Cartwright had laboured in Nine Pound Hammer for about ten years Suys had yet to be in a band. She and Cartwright realized that they just might have to take matters into their own hands. “I assumed there’d be some other hot chick guitar player out there just rocking it up making me jealous but it never happened. It never fucking happened. Both of us were like, I guess its up to us now. Like shit! I guess we’re the rock band!”

Since their late Nineties bow, Nashville Pussy have wowed both critics and fans alike with their balls-to-the-wall rock and roll. Oh sure the name has helped. But it has also caused some confusion. “There’s definitely a problem with people thinking it’s a full on porn show” Suys laments, “and that were out there deep throating our guitars or something. But generally if you’re into that kind of thing, you’ll put up with the show and then go to a strip club or something. The lovers of true rock stick around and come back for more.”

A band with a name like Nashville Pussy seems almost entirely like an American invention. Their very existence seems to be a defacto reaction to Midwest America’s conservative religious values. And the most part that seems apparent. So it’s a little odd that Suys is 100% north of the border Canadian. “You know the rule 25% Canadian content rule?” she laughs. “That’s me. Born and raised in Vancouver, educated in Saskatoon and then I got the hell out of here. I had my redneck training in Saskatchewan. I worked on a farm for years. That bible belt stretches all the way from San Diego to Halifax. That’s one big pair of pants its holding up.”

Despite the seeming incongruity of a transplanted Canadian fronting a uniquely American rock and roll band Suys insists that only a Canadian woman could do the job. “I know that I couldn’t have done this if I hadn’t come from Canada” she insists. “If I hadn’t been raised thinking that I was a complete equal, if not slight superior in my sexuality to the rest of the world, then I don’t think I would have been able to do this. I don’t think I could have been born in the States and pull this one off.”

One would assume that Suys would get some flack from card-carrying feminists and in fact she does. “There are people who try to do that but they do that before they even see us play“ she notes. “And as soon as they actually see the show they eat their words” she adds with not a little pride. “I was raised by a classic fist waving feminist bra burning hippie mom!” she adds by way of explanation. “I could not be the woman I am onstage without my extreme feminist upbringing. I truly do believe that me and (bassist) Katie Campbell represent the newest and most boldest wave of feminism out there.”

Further complicating the gender issues is the sexually varied demographic of their audience. Suys admits that their audience is predominantly male. But there are also fans of the female gender who like to watch Suys in action. “Most definitely” she agrees. “Lesbians and wannabe lesbians. There are a hell of lot of cool chicks who come to our shows. I would say that the women who come to our shows rank among the coolest females I’ve even met in my life.”

But back to the name. Why the name? I mean it certainly makes things fairly clear that the band means to grab you by the lapels and not let go but it could also cause a few problems. Why ‘Nashville Pussy’? “Besides that it kicked so much ass?“ Suys laughs. “The reason behind it besides us thinking that it was a great fucking name is that it’s a line from a Ted Nugent song” she explains. “Its like one of those one percenter things like one out of every hundred people know what the hell you’re talking about and the other 99 percent just think its cool. Well I don’t know about the ninety nine…but ….okay maybe five percent are pissed off and vocal about it.”

The ‘pissed off and vocal’ non-fans are the usual gang of puritanical zealots that the very band was formed to irritate. “We had a preacher turn up at a show one time in Chattanooga Tennessee.” Suys says bemusedly. “I swear the guy was just going home and he saw our sign in the window of a club and decided, ‘hey my work is not done’! He just stood outside the club and told everybody going into our show that they were going to hell” She laughs at the memory and adds, “I think people thought we hired the guy. It was a great idea!”

But surely the name must limit any ambitions for mass appeal. This is after all a band whose repertoire includes the gems ‘All Fucked Up’ and ‘Go Motherfucker Go’. It wouldn’t seem too likely that you’d be able to pick up a Nashville Pussy album at your local Wal-mart. And in fact that’s true but not the reason you might think. “We were on some compilation that came out in Wal-Mart” Suys explains. “They edited the word ‘motherfucker’ twenty six times. It sounded like the cd was skipping. So we told the record company that put it out that we didn’t want to have anything to do with it and they had to pull all these records from Wal-Mart.” Suys chuckles at the absurdity of it adding “Not because Wal-Mart didn’t want it but because we didn’t want them!”

We’ve been talking for about twenty minutes now and Suys’s pancakes finally make it off the griddle and onto her plate. But before she slathers them with syrup and butter she’s determined to let me in on the most shocking thing about Nashville Pussy. “You know what, I swear this is true” Suys says quietly. “People are shocked… by our ability to truly rock.“ She pauses to let it sink in. “That’s the most shocking thing about Nashville Pussy. People come out and they really truly expect that we’re going to suck. Cause we got such a great fucking name and its all about shock or whatever but the truly shocking thing about us is that we get down and fucking rock! That’s what we get after the shows: ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe you guys actually rocked!’ We get it from everybody. We get it from the chicks, the boyfriends, everybody.“ Satisfied that she’s made her point, she growls out another guttural laugh. “That’s the shocking thing about Nashville Pussy!”

London, Ontario's Musical Heritage Savagely Condensed to 1300 Words

2009-07-20T21:36:00.005-04:00

(March 2003)

The below was written as an attempt to give a brief overview of London (Ontario) and it's pop music history. If it has any value it's because of the tales of the people I spoke to for the article. In posting this, I thank them once again.)

Thirteen hundred words. I have to summarize the history of the London music scene in thirteen hundred words. Insane task really but such is the editor I work for. Thirteen hundred words wouldn’t even cover a list of the musicians who’ve played in London in the past decade let alone four of them. Insane perhaps, or just impossible.

What were the achievements? The records? Sorry but the recorded materials left behind are but aural artefacts of a time. Of many times. Does a recording by Stan Rogers tell you anything about the amazing folk scene in London? Or a spin of Thundermug’s hit? Nah. Not even a bit. And photos are nice but ultimately just odd curiosities, more archaeological offal.

What's needed is a Zelig, the fictitious Woody Allen creation who was there for the key moments of history. In truth, London has plenty of Zeligs. People such as Nick Panaseiko, Greg Simpson and Ken Palmer. They were there, near the centre of the maelstrom. It wasn’t just a part of their life, it was their life. And its through them that one can get a glimpse of the times that were.

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Of course there was Guy Lombardo. Can’t forget him. He sold more records than just about anybody in his day and while there were plenty of imitators of his light big band sound, he was a musical end point in London’s musical history. He came, he went, he left us his speedboat.

As the Sixties dawned, the first post war generation fell under the sway of the Kingston Trio and coffeehouse folk in general. London was no different. Londoner Paul Mills Balladeers were the toast of Southwestern Ontario. As Palmer notes, “They just didn’t do the Kingston Trio thing. They all wrote their own songs. They got a fair amount of airplay. You’d hear them on Bill Brady’s show every day.“ There was also Londoner Bob Cunningham whose Tranby Croft held sway in town as well. Shortly afterwards the Beatles came and changed everything for awhile.

Ronnie Hawkins dubbed Nick Panaseiko, Nick Panasonic: ‘just slightly ahead of his time’ riffing on the then-current marketing slogan of the electronics giant. Its hard to argue the point. Panaseiko got his start managing London’s top acts in the Sixties, opened up Wong's Restaurant and subsequently Thee Image, important London venues in the Sixties as well as stints with Decca, Polydor and Warners.

When Panaseiko talks about those days, a different London comes into focus. A London that was almost as swinging as its British namesake. Panaseiko laughs as he says “If you had a copy of ‘Twist & Shout’ and were wearing stove pipe pants and needle pointed shoes, you were hot!” Radio DJs were stars in themselves with Dick Williams, ‘The Tall One’ one of the biggest. And those DJs would play the hits including London’s Grant Smith & The Power’s cover of ‘Keep On Running’ or UWO students Gary And Dave’s ‘Could You Love Me Again?’.

"That one went top ten on CHUM in Toronto!" Panaseiko says. "Imagine that! CHUM!"

But the real star system was being built in Toronto with acts like Dominic Troiano’s The Rogues (later to turn into Mandela - Neil Young would briefly be a member). Richie Knight and The Midnights and Little Ceasar and the Councils. And the only way Londoners would be able to catch these Toronto R&B mavens as well as Detroit ‘s best was through people like Panaseiko and Don Jones. But London was starting to turn out its own hitmakers. CJBK’s Jim Chapman was a member of The Bluesman Revue who snagged some London airplay with their Spin The Bottle Of Love. Grant Smith & The Power turned into Motherlode who had a major hit with ’When I Die’. And so it went into the early Seventies. Thundermug made a national splash. Ocean’s Put Your Hand In The Hand Of The Man was AM radio’s friendly face of late Sixties optimism. And Ronnie Hawkins made London a second home firstly opening up Campbell's bar in downtown London followed by the Hawk's Nest on the second floor of what Londoners call the 'old City Hall' at Dundas & Wellington.

Sometime around the turn of the decade Londoner John Smale opened up a coffee house on Clarence Street in what is now known as the lunch spot Nooner’s. In the view of London Folk Festival Director Ken Palmer, Smale’s Pace became the focal point of Canadian folk music after the Toronto’s famed Riverboat fell victim to the early stages of Yorkville’s urban gentrification.

The biggest names in Canadian folk music huddled around John Smale’s humble performance space like a shrine. Willie P Bennett lived upstairs from Smale’s Pace. Stan Rogers made London home for awhile because of the scene and the musicians. So did Valdy. David Bradstreet was a Smale’s regular. Laura Smith, now a noted East Coast singer / songwriter was a cook at Smale‘s, too timid to showcase the compositions that she would play for Palmer and friends each workday morning. London’s own Doug MacArthur already receiving some national notoriety because of his own remarkable talent stayed put. Why leave home when home is the hotbed of the music you play?

If there’s any one anecdote that drives home the status of Smale‘s pace and the London folk scene, its Ken Palmer’s tale about what happened one night in the early Seventies. Palmer was Smale’s music booker at the time and he was sitting in his office one evening when he heard someone rapping on his door. “Leonard Cohen is standing there” chuckles Palmer. He had been playing at Alumni Hall that night. “He asks me ‘Are you the guy who books the place? Well we’re going out for a bite. Where’s a good place to eat?’ So we went next door to Mario’s. All we talked about was Hank Williams and Earl Monroe.” Palmer says savouring the memory.

Palmer also recalls the genesis of London’s famed blues scene. Before the Firehall blues singers would come to Fryfogles (geography lesson: where the new library is). “Muddy Waters would play for a week.” Palmer recalls. You’d go in there in the afternoon and Muddy would be sitting there drinking champagne!” he laughs. “ I met Howlin Wolf there once. Hound-dog Taylor, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, they all played there”.

Meanwhile of course Panaseiko and Jones are booking shows in town and making fast friends out of some of the stars of the day. Greg Simpson recalls that two members of Alice Cooper’s band used to come to London on a regular basis just to hang out incognito. “They just loved London” shrugs Simpson. And Palmer recalls that Don Jones and Frank Zappa used to go waterskiing on the Thames.

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By the late Seventies Scott Bentley had a dream. His dream was to become London’s nightmare. Fueled no doubt by Iggy Pop’s punk and the New York Dolls glam he starting gigging in bands eventually forming his ubiquitous ‘63 Monroe’. Bentley was punk’s bleeding edge, attracting a lot of attention by virtue of being one of the first of his kind. His spiritual compatriots were to take hold a few years later as London developed its own thriving punk scene.

The Demics were the symbolic figurehead of the movement. Their song ‘New York City’ was one of the first Canadian punk classics, a fact not unnoticed by Chart Magazine editors who once picked it as the best Canadian single of all time. Following the Demics came The Regulators, Napalm Baby, N.F.G., U.I.C. and numerous others many of which celebrated their legacy last summer at Call The Office’s ‘Boot To The Head’ reunion concert.

Now? London is still producing fine acts Kitty notwithstanding. Kitty were almost purely a product of the star making machinery, signing to Artemis without having made much of a dent in the local scene whatsoever. In that they may be significant having bypassed this city almost entirely. Andy McGoffin’s House Of Miracles recording facility has played host to many fledging bands, most notably The Constantines who have grown in stature since the release of that album. Ditto for The Weekend. Is this a trend? What does this mean? Check back in twenty years and we’ll let you know.

Thirteen hundred words. And so much missing. The success of Tommy Hunter. The tale of the Nihilist Spasm Band is worthy of a book in an of itself. You want more of the history of music in London? Here’s what you do. Go to the London Music Awards on March 30 and sidle up to Ken Palmer, Greg Simpson, Nick Panaseiko, Dan Husband, John Sharpe or just about anyone with speckles of gray on the sides of their head. And listen.

With thanks to Nick Panaseiko, Greg Simpson, Ken Palmer, Dan Husband’s London Punk Rock Archive and the London Music Archive (both at www.radio western.com).

July, 2009 UPDATE: Thanks once again to Nick Panaseiko whose keen eye spotted a few factual errors in the article above. These have been corrected. If any other readers see other factual screw-ups, drop me a line via the comments link.

The Weakerthans

2009-07-20T21:31:00.003-04:00

(March 2009)

While some musical careers have all but disappeared in these post-record-label times, for Winnipeg’s Weakerthans, it means nothing. To listen to drummer Jason Tait tell it, not only have they never had a big-time label deal; the Weakerthans never had a career plan.

“I know when we first started playing in a band we had no intention of making a living with it,” he says flatly. “We had no pretensions of being any kind of a thing.”

No pretensions perhaps, but certainly political and social ideals which the band expressed on and off-stage. Their first four albums were always critic’s favourites although some argued that they were a band easier to admire than actually love.

However with the release of 2007’s Reunion Tour disc, something changed. The Weakerthans sounded enervated, driven, and one hates to use such a frothy term but they sounded like they were having fun. The disc generated some of the best reviews in their career to date and was nominated for last year’s Polaris Music Prize.

Pausing a moment he laughs and confesses, “The first records were kind of bummers.”

Taking a more serious tack, Tait says that the process of making the album may have played a part in its offhand vitality.

“Whereas before when we went to make a record, we had everything mapped out. Maybe that had something to do with it. I don’t know. “

“I don’t think there’s a drastic change in the basics in how we approach things,” he demurs. “The instrumentation might have changed a bit and John’s (Samson) lyrical content has changed for sure, definitely with more humour.”

They band has been doing some touring behind the record, with one of those dates at London’s Music Hall on April 5.

What makes this tour different is that the Weakerthans will be recruiting their fans to help them make it a green road trip. In an attempt to offset the environmental impact of a touring rock band, they’ve calculated what they use on the road from lighting to fuel and while doing their own green diligence are also asking their fans to help reduce the tour’s carbon footprint by walking, biking or taking public transit to the shows.

“Unfortunately the biodiesel industry is not really set up to cater to a tour like we’re about to do,” he explains. “So we’re encouraging everybody to find alternate means of transportation to come to our show to offset our emissions operating this gas-guzzling bus that’s going across the country.”

It’s a lot of work and it will cost the band a bit in various ways but Tait says they’re doing it because they can do it.

“We’re at a spot in our career where we can make choices –anybody can make choices in that direction – and we want to draw attention to how much waste the average rock and roll band makes on the road,” he says.

“We’re going to keep close tabs of how much fuel were actually burning and see what the carbon footprint of a touring rock band really is.”

Slipknot

2009-07-20T21:28:00.000-04:00

(April 2009)

You’re a teenager living in Des Moines, Iowa, a city of about 200,000 midwesterners. You don’t want to join one of the myriad of insurance companies that have made Des Moines their head office. And you don’t even like corn which is growing all around you for miles to see.

Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison was one of nine of Des Moines finest who took the bland Midwestern values as an artistic challenge.

“One of the reasons we created this band is because in Des Moines, Iowa it’s pretty much a void for a lot of outlets as far as frustration, sadness and whatever,” he says flatly.

“Before we started we were all in different bands, starting to disband or break up around the same time. I think that’s where the initial integrity of what Slipknot would become came along.”

Jordison and some like-minded musicians began to cast about looking for a new sound. It started with a small number of musicians but kept growing out of an artistic necessity.

“It ended up being nine people because it took that many to find the sound we wanted,” he explains. “Every time we would start with five or six and it became seven. Once the whole nine got together it was like ‘now we will destroy the world’.”

Although in hindsight Slipknot’s grinding altmetal combined with their penchant for ah, unique facial coverings seems like a brilliant marketing masterstroke, Jordison insists it was never intentional.

“With the masks and the music we were creating with all these extreme personalities in the band, it just happened,” he says. “It was not like ‘okay this is what we are going to look like, here’s the concept…’”

“That was never going to be the concept of the band. The way we look are extensions of our personalities, darkness, sadness happiness, things from our childhoods.”

And true to the idea of the masks as key to the band personalities, they’ve changed over the years., something Jordison is as natural as the changes in their music.

“Every time we put out an album we’re a little bit different people than we were before, with the same integrity and the same attitude. But people change and the music will change.”

What makes Slipknot’s success something to savour for Jordison is that it happened with both eyeballs shut as to what was going on in the music industry. They’ve been on independent Roadrunner Records since the beginning and have followed their own fractured musical muse since Des Moines.

“We’ve never compromised our integrity or our music or any influence from anyone from the industry,” Jordison says defiantly. “We make a record, we turn it in and that’s that.”

As to the future, Jordison sees more of what Slipknot has wrought over the past 15 years. Further he insists there’s no better gig for him than with his masked comrades.

“When we get in a room together and its the initial click of the right riff, drumbeat or whatever, it starts and we’re right back in to the Slipknot moment which is different than any other band that we have ever played in,” he says.

“It’s more special than anything that I could possibly explain to you in a matter of words. You can’t put a finger on it, you can’t.”

Holly Cole

2009-07-20T21:24:00.001-04:00

(November 2008)

Holly Cole has heard it before, many, many times to be certain.

With the name Holly, she was born to do Christmas shows.

But as she prepares to hit many Canadian roads on her annual holiday show, the renowned

Canadian jazz singer begs to differ.

“The thing is that I had absolutely no plan to do Christmas shows at all,” she says. “What happened was not any of my doing.

“I just decided to do a Christmas tour and it became really popular, much to my surprise.”

Cole’s tours are always a hit with audiences but what makes her Christmas shows a source of pride to the Canadian chanteuse is that the demand came from her fans.

“That’s the good way for things to happen, in a grass roots sway,” she says. “The first year I did it was a one-off and it just became beyond my control. It was such a natural thing and not part of the machine.”

Her love of good songwriting dovetails nicely with her love of the snow and the reindeer and all. Cole admits to being an avid music researcher and as such she explores the holiday music genre rather extensively despite the occupational hazards.

“There’s lots of Christmas music,” she says flatly “and lots of it sucks.”

But for Cole it’s the gems she finds that makes it worth wading through the dreck. Currently she says Patti Larkin’s Winter Wind is a favorite in her live show, Larkin being a songwriter to watch in her view.

Cole notes that while all of the songs she sings in her holiday show steer away from the religious roots of the season, she doesn’t mean to offend by excluding the O Holy Nights and Joy To The Worlds.

“Its partly because not everybody 's Christian and I’m not interested in singing about any organized religion, be it Muslim or Christianity or whatever it might be,” she says. “I'm not trying to dis any religion.”

Cole says that the reason the holiday shows have become hits with her fans is due to the fact that “people have a variety of feelings and memories about Christmas.”

She is especially struck by how the holidays “make this part of the world completely stop.”

“I'm a bit of a workaholic and I will go and go and go and go and never do what I should be doing which is stopping for a minute and prioritizing and appreciating what’s important in my life like family and friends,” she explains.

“Christmas forces me to do it. You can't keep doing it because Christmas is here.”

Cole says that regardless of whether one celebrates the religious festivities of the season, it’s an emotional time of year for most people.

“One of the songs that we do and I'll be doing it in London is called Come Come Whoever You Are. It talks about the spirit of Christmas, what the spirit of Christmas should be about. And that’s about accepting other people forgiving other people, letting things go and appreciating the people that you love and are around you and letting them know."

She pauses a moment and then adds, “My Christmas shows also give me a chance to poke a stick at Christmas too, poking a stick at the hellish commercialism of Christmas.”

“I’m also working hard, really hard to make Santa Claus sexy.”

Chris Cornell

2009-07-20T21:20:00.003-04:00

(November 2008)

Three hours before show time at San Francisco’s famed Fillmore and Chris Cornell is trying to figure out how my 15-year-old daughter knows his music.

“I don’t know what the demographic are of any particular TV show,” he says. “It could be One Tree Hill. But no matter what’s changed about where they hear about it, young people still like to discover music, music that leads somewhere.”

For fans of Cornell’s music that somewhere leads back to his early days with Soundgarden, through Audioslave and two solo stints, the latest of which brings him to London’s Centennial Hall on November 18.

Musing about where people hear about music fascinates the usually laconic Cornell. He believes that television programs have replaced MTV in the United States as the place where young people pick up on new music. His most recent foray into television has been via the critically acclaimed TV fave Life On Mars, for which he created a video incorporating show footage and performance material of a Cornell composition. The video is currently played as a promo for the show on ABC.

“That’s a new thing in the states and it replaces rock videos,” he says. “Its gone up to the level now that I have people talking to me about taking a song from my album and going in and using parts of that song and replaying it in different keys or tempos for a particular character. It’s a strange new mutation of popular culture and music.”

“These days there’s so much information to wander through and so much music to wander thorough to get to just across any individual's radar.”

Cornell goes on to explain how he discovered The Beatles as a ten-year old and played their albums repeatedly.

“That goes on and on over and over again,” he says. “Someone is discovering The Cure again right now for the first time.

“It’s interesting for you and me because you realize that its no longer a scenario of cultural entitles coming together. It’s just the music. It has nothing to do with the late sixties or anything happening culturally or politically. They’re just songs now.”

Speaking of songs, Cornell has an hour’s worth being readied for release next February, the results of his collaboration with producer Timbaland who has called the sessions the best work he’s done in his career.

“He wanted to do a couple of new songs,” he says. “My thought was ‘if we’re going to put equipment in a studio why don’t we do a full album?’ His response was ‘great, let's do it’.

“Nobody knew about it, my record company didn’t know about it, it just came out of that phone call.”

“It became something that was not even anything that we were imagining,” he explains. “We were imagining a collection of songs that would be the next Chris Cornell solo album. Then it grew into this very ambitious one-idea album where the music never stops from beginning to end.”

Cornell says it reminds him of the albums he listened to as a kid, one made to be listened to from beginning to end.

“It takes you until about the third song to realize that the music has never stopped and you’re actually in the third song.”

Buckwheat Zydeco

2009-07-20T21:15:00.001-04:00

(June 2009)

New Orleans legend Buckwheat Zydeco may laugh now at his first youthful take on the accordion that is now his signature instrument but as a young man, it was kryptonite to him.

“I never played that instrument,” he says from his Lafayette, Louisiana home. “If it was around the house, I went three miles around it.”

Zydeco, born Stanley Dural, has learned a lot about how strange life can be since those early days. Consider the story he tells about his adopted name.

“When I was in grammar school around the fourth grade my friend says I got a name for you: Buckwheat,” he explains. Zydeco chuckles at the memory adding; “we broke up our friendship over that. I hated it you know. But it stuck and I couldn’t shake it so I decided to embrace it.”

The same was true of his introduction to zydeco music. Although his father played it around the house, that full immersion only served to drive young Stanley Dural further from the accordion and washboard sound.

“He would play in the morning before he went to work, at lunch when he come in and at night when he come back and that was enough accordion for me,” Zydeco says flatly.

So Dural went on his own musical way, starting a number of funk and jazz bands in his twenties. After five years of that, he decided to take a year off to mull over his future. Right about that time, Clifton Chenier the then-reigning king of zydeco music and a close friend of Dural’s father called him up with an offer to hire him as an organist in his band.

“He said if you like it you can stay and if you don’t I understand,” recalls Zydeco.

Although Dural had heard zydeco around the house as played by both his father and Chenier, what he saw when he auditioned for Chenier was another thing entirely.

“Clifton had a bass player, a guitar player, horns, drums and his brother Cleavon Chenier had a washboard on his chest that looked like a bullet proof vest and he was playing it with can openers,” he says.

If what he saw when he showed up to audition did not look like the kind of band that would play zydeco, what he heard spun him around. This was decidedly not his father’s zydeco music.

“We played four hours nonstop that night and when he was saying good night to the people, I asked ‘what do you mean’, Zydeco says laughing at the memory. “I didn’t know that we had played four hours already. That shows you much fun I had.”

“I knew I loved that sound so much and it projected so much energy, that I decided that I was going to play the accordion.”

He spent two years with the legendary Chenier before deciding in 1979 to take the name Buckwheat Zydeco and start his own band, this time with an accordion on his chest. The zydeco music he plays is his own take on it, with more than a little R&B mixed in, something that Zydeco says was intentional.

“I decided that when I started to play this in 1979 I was going to give 50 per cent to the younger generation and 50 per cent to the older generation,” he says. “See I was going to take my dad from the old school and put it with my background where I came from. I described it like making a gumbo. You can’t just make it with the chicken, you got to have the sauces and mix it up like that. And it worked.”

Buckwheat Zydeco is bringing his gumbo to the London Music Hall on June 30 as part of a tour celebrating his 30 years playing his music. He’s played London before and describes it as a home away from home.

“You know what I love when I’m on stage?’ he says. “People having a good time and a big smile on their faces. So many people are bothered sometimes so that if I can give them just that moment to enjoy themselves, to have a good time, then that’s my reward.”

Great Big Sea

2009-07-20T21:14:00.000-04:00

(February 2009)

For Canada’s hardest working band, Great Big Sea sure knows how to relax in style. Bob Hallett, multi-instrumentalist of the energetic quintet is squeezing in this interview en route with the band for a day of R and R on Martha’s Vineyard a few days before their gig at Vienna, Vermont’s famed Wolf Trap venue.

“We’re going to go out on a boat today,” he says. “Should be good.”

Hallett and the band have spent the summer touring around the U.S. hitting a number of halls that he says are up to 5,000 in capacity. Not bad for a band whose east coast roots hearken so closely to Canada that American interest would seem improbable.

Not so says Hallett.

“We just kept playing places and it seems like the next time we go back they’ve told their friends and the audiences get bigger,” he says.

Hallett says that it may seem that they’re not on the music scene radar but that’s mainly because of the nature of the music business these days.

To that end the band decided to distribute their latest album in the U.S. via a one-time commitment with a distributor, while maintaining their long-term arrangement with Warner Canada.

“The music business is a lot different now than it used to be,” Hallett says. “There used to be over a dozen Canadian acts on Warner Canada. Now it’s just us and Blue Rodeo.”

“A record label used to be great for all kinds of support but now they’ve trimmed back so much that it just made us think we’d try and do this a different way in the U.S.”

His logic is hard to argue with especially for a band whose constant touring makes as many converts to their music as their discs.

Despite that, their latest disc, the recently released Fortune’s Favour tweaks with the formula to a slight degree. While praising the disc, critics have noted a slight shift in their sound that de-emphasizes the Celtic in favour of the pop, a change that Hallett admits to.

“We always like to change things up a bit and this time we worked with Hawksley Workman who produced the disc,” he says.

“We always try and change things a bit to keep it interesting. If it isn’t interesting to us, it won’t be interesting to our fans.”

Great Big Sea’s relationship with its fans, among the strongest in Canada, predates the technological bonding that’s occurred with the rise of the internet and tools such as MySpace and Facebook.

Hallett agrees that their fans are strong and in truth their website, dubbed ‘the home of the Great Big Sea community’ acts as both a clearinghouse for GBS info and a home for the band’s fans to talk to each other and band members.

That noted, there’s no better way for Hallett and Great Big Sea to reach their fans than face to face and in fact touring is front and centre for the band this fall. They’ll be heading straight from their September 9 date at the Western Fair Grandstand to dates throughout the U.S. and Western Canada finishing off in Vancouver in December.

“We’ve done pretty good at making fans wherever we’ve played,” says Hallett. “It’s what we like to do.”

Sass Jordan

2009-07-20T21:08:00.001-04:00

Just before slowly receding into ‘what ever happened to’ status, something odd happened to Nineties rocker Sass Jordan. She became more famous than ever. All it took was Canadian Idol. Yes the very show that makes somebodies out of nobodies (albeit on a Canadian scale) took already-known Sass Jordan out of the early Nineties musical closet and made her as well known as you can be while still living north of the 49^th parallel.

Her audience used to be the youthful rock crowd. Now she’s recognized by Walmart Nation. “It’s true!” she cackles over the phone from her Toronto home. “I was in there the other day and I almost couldn’t get out!”

Jordan has seen fame before and it seems to bore her. When she laughs at the Walmart Nation reference it’s in a kind of ‘isn’t this ridiculous’ tone. Its not faux modesty. Its distinctly non-faux absurdity. “It’s been three years of it now” she demurs. “It’s hard to reconcile the two things: the idea of being well known and the fact that it’s just because I’m on TV show. But I’m over that now.”

Despite the fact that she’s widely assumed to be a Canadian, Jordan was born in England before her parents hopped across the pond to make Montreal their home. Although originally a classically trained musician, she turned to rock as a teen. Its hard today to imagine that she could have been anything else than a rock star. Her informal way of talking (the odd expletive pops up) and her no-nonsense sincerity (we riffed on the early days of Little Feat like prototypical music geeks) coupled with that whisky laugh are nothing less than rock and roll directness. Although I’m sure Yo Yo Ma can tell a good joke as well as anyone, Sass Jordan makes a more convincing rock star than classical musician.

Jordan went in short order in the late Eighties from singing backup for The Box to going it alone, running through the first half of the Nineties like a female rock and roll banshee leaving in her wake a hit or two and a whole lot of fans smitten by her blonde babeshell good looks and her crackling live show.

By the late Nineties however the music business had changed and so had her audience. While they were off getting married and procreating, Jordan did the same. But her management got nervous about her declining profile. She even recorded an entire rock album which was shelved by her record company who in term asked for a pop album instead. Sass Jordan was at a crossroads.

“I stopped caring past mid-1997” she sighs. I don’t really pay much attention any more. The music business was so dark for such a long time. It was filled with people with no integrity. I was part of that scene for long enough to decide that it was not for me. I had to go through that whole rejection thing. I came to a peace with it. I know that the kind of people who are in frequency with me and my kind of music will find out about me.”

Never one to do anything except what she wanted to, Jordan decide to take a brief breather rather than play the increasingly desperate music biz image-athon game. But no sooner had she decided to re-strategize than Canadian Idol came calling. Who better than a done-it-all, seen-it-all Canadian music biz survivor to act as a guide for fledging stars of our Can-con future?

It would seem obvious that with her wizened view of the seemingly wonderful music biz as one of the Canadian Idol judges, she would want to just tell the fresh-faced warbling chippees in front of her to take their covers of ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ and just run as fast as they can away from the music biz. “Do you know what?” she says before pausing. “No! I want them to have whatever experience they are going to have. They were drawn to this. This is their chance. These are their lives. They’ve earned their right to be there and do it.”

As for career advice, not surprisingly Jordan would simply want to give attitude advice to the young chart-climbing wannabees. “Enjoy yourself and lighten up” she laughs. “Just do what you want to do. I’m not trying to be flippant: I truly believe that. Enjoy what you want to do. Just lighten up!”

Despite her gritty image as a rocker, Jordan is oddly enough known as being the ‘nice’ one of the Canadian Idol thumbs-up / thumbs-down panel. She bristles a bit at the notion of having the tag hung around her neck. “I don’t think I’m either the touch rock chick or the nice one. I’m really kind of both” she insists. “But I have yet to show the amalgamated version in public. I guess it started when the show started. It didn’t come easily to me to criticize and judge others. I would usually want to say ‘go ahead and do it dude!’ But that of course is not good TV. It’s really all about the chemistry that happens between the four people involved on the panel. I have no desire to be that way to other people. Jake (Gold) can do it!”

She’s known as the edgy rock chick of the late Eighties and early Nineties to her older fans and that nice looking lady with the blonde hair on the Canadian Idol panel. And for the most part (so far) the two worlds haven’t collided. But her younger fans are starting to figure out that Jordan is still a ferocious live performer. “Come to think of it” she muses out loud, “I just did a show the other night and they yelled out ‘Canadian Idol’ so I guess they’re starting to come out.”

But if long-time Jordan fans fear that she might be influenced by the young performing neophytes that parade in front of her on Canadian Idol each week, they can rest assured that the skating party in hell will commence well before that happens. “Oh my God” Jordan gasps. “I’m not remotely interested in the music of the kids today. I’m going to let the kids handle that. I’m going to make music for kids like me.”

To that end, she’s currently writing for her new album. “We’re going into deep dark seclusion and just working hard on it. It should be done by the end of September.” She pauses and then laughs. “Oh no! I’ve said September! Now that means that I have to finish it by then!”

“The music is pretty much the same kind of thing I used to do” she says proudly. “Its soul music coming from the heart but its usually described these days as something like Americana, that sort of thing, heartland, roots music. It has a very close affinity to Arkansas and Texas, that sort of thing. It’s my kind of music. I love it and adore it and love singing it. That’s what I’ll be touring with.”

In an interview a few years ago, she described her career as being ‘crappy, then great, then crappy, then great’. Jordan recalls the comment and offers her take on Sass Jordan circa 2005. “This is definitely great” she says firmly. “I really don’t see it as being crappy again. It’s all about attitude. Definitely! I didn’t used to feel that way but as the years have gone by, it’s changed” Jordan pauses and laughs that gutsy laugh again. “How great is that?!”

Phil Guy

2009-07-20T21:05:00.001-04:00

There really isn’t’ anything like a big brother when you’re a kid. You look up to them and do what they do for as long as it takes until you figure out who you are. Phil Guy knows all about big brothers. One of his is legendary blues guitarist and singer Buddy Guy. And when Buddy played the blues, young Phil Guy listened. And when Buddy Guy hit the road, so did Phil.

“We all grew up in Lexworth, Louisiana” Guy drawls over the line from his Chicago home, “And then when I was fifteen I moved up to Baton Rouge when Buddy did. Buddy played for Raful Neal for a little while. So he told him that he had a brother that played a little and that’s how I got the gig.

Guy played with Neal for about fifteen years before he decided to join up with big brother Buddy up in Chicago. But Guy’s fondness for the chugging boogie that went over so well in the southern clubs wasn’t what Chicago was all about. “Up in Chicago they liked it slow” Guy recalls drawing out the last word to emphasize the point. “So I come into Chicago and the blues was so strong and the kids would be sitting there listening to you when we played the universities. So I had to learn that Muddy Waters sound, that slow sound. Its simple but its hard to catch on to, to get that feel.

Guy continued to be rhythm guitarist for a number of Chicago players until around 1980 when he got around to recording an album. The success of the record pushed him from the comfortable background of the stage right out front where he’s been for over twenty-five years.

What perplexes Guy is that most of his audience is white, not only in places like London, Ontario where he visits on ????? but in fact right around the world. He’s very appreciate of their support but when pressed as to why blues has mostly evaded modern black culture he’s quick to respond. “When I find out I’m gonna write the book!” he chuckles ruefully. “That the biggest question I get asked when I go to Europe: ‘Why, why, why don’t black people come to the club and support the blues?’

Guy sighs and ponders the question himself. “From what I see they like the blues but they a little ashamed of it or something” he muses quietly. “They think it’s down and something that comes from slavery or something to do with that. But it’s their roots.

Guy laughs adding, “But when they see white kids do great at it, they say ‘you stole our music!’. I say’ shut your mouth!’ If it wasn’t for them boys I wouldn’t be working! I’m glad to see the white boys doing it because it keeps it alive.”

Joking with Guy about being sixty-five and time to retire, he laughs long and steady. “Oh musicians don’t retire!” he guffaws. “I never give up. I just keep going!”

Matt Dusk

2009-07-20T21:03:00.001-04:00

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!”

Grady

2009-07-20T20:54:00.000-04:00

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 5^th 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!”

George Olliver

2009-07-20T20:51:00.001-04:00

In London the name George Olliver is a kind of musical litmus test. For those who came of age in the mid Sixties to the mid Seventies, George Olliver needs no introduction. They can skip these two paragraphs and go right to the third one. For those not young enough to have been caught up in the R&B Sixties, here’s a quick primer.

Through his tenure in the bands Mandala (mid-Sixties) and Natural Gas (late-Sixties) George Olliver established himself as the ‘Crown Prince of R&B’. He didn’t give himself the title: others did. And no one did so lightly. Simply put he was the finest R&B shouter of an era, the pre-eminent voice of what was once dubbed ‘The Toronto Sound’. The R&B trend faded but George Olliver never did. He really hasn’t stopped at all. To be certain George Olliver will be playing Max Silver’s on the last day of this month.

Over the phone from his home outside Toronto , Olliver admits “I’ve been playing London now for twenty five years plus”. The ‘plus’ is a conceptual joke that Olliver plays with himself to hold back the years. Press him that the plus might be closer to fourty plus years and he quickly laughs “No it’s always twenty five years plus!”

Well it may be twenty five years ‘plus’ but it seems that London fans never forget. “The last time we played Max Silver’s a multitude of Natural Gas and Mandala fans came out” he says. “Natural gas was originally from London . We were based in Montreal later but we originally formed in London .”

London was a part of the circuit that Mandala and Natural Gas worked constantly. “One of the first engagements we did with the Five Rogues (pre-Mandala) was at a place in London called Campbell ’s. We did so well there that we did a big show on the Windjammer Room. It was on the other side of the 401. It was a big, big room back then.”

The rooms may be big or small but George Olliver plays them all these days from corporate gigs, to blues clubs, to festivals. And the repertoire comes straight from his history. “We go right from the late Sixties up until the millennium. We do a lot of covers, quite a few originals, the Mandala stuff, some Natural Gas stuff.”

Olliver’s latest musical obsession is one linked to his conversion to Christianity over ten years ago. “My new direction in music is R&B / gospel..” he says quietly. “Three years ago, I put together a twelve piece ensemble called ‘Caught Away with George Olliver’. Its four voices, four rhythm and four horns. It’s given me a new direction. In your fifties a lot of people think about retiring in this business. But I never thought in those terms. I have all of this experience: where am I going to take it? Being a born again Christian I knew exactly what God was telling me to do. It’s a new repertoire but it’s coming from my roots.”

Buck 65

2009-07-20T20:48:00.002-04:00

(July 2005)

Buck 65 is a musical outsider but he’s okay with it. Touring with his second release ‘Secret House Against the World’ Buck 65 aka Richard Terfry is calling from the Ottawa Blues Festival where he’s an hour away from performing on something called the ‘Blacksheep’ Stage. He chuckles a little and says “I heard that and thought it was very appropriate”.

It was just an offhand observation but Terfry mulls it over enthusiastically. “There’s a couple ways to slice an idea like that” he laughs. “Okay I’m at a blues festival and some might say, what the hell is this guy doing here? But I study this stuff and it works it’s way into what I do. Maybe some of these blues nerds might pick up on this and say ‘hey, this is interesting’.

It’s not a surprise that Terfry’s genre-hopping work as Buck 65 is interesting. Even on paper he’s interesting. Born and raised in small town Nova Scotia , Richard Terfry wasn’t one of those kids who wanted to get out and go to the big city. He found his hometown fascinating along with everyone in it. He really didn’t want to leave. He invested emotionally in his home and as such the pull of it and his friends and family haunt him still. “I think for anyone where you live out your formative years is really important” Terfry insists. “The fact that I didn’t sign a record deal until I was thirty. If I had one when I was seventeen , it would have been a whole lot different. I had a whole life and struggles, fell in love, lost some members of my family. I lived a whole life before I did this.”

Not insignificantly the life that he lived was free of the mass media which typically tells teens what is ‘cool’ or ‘hip’. In Richard Terfry’s life, the music and culture he experienced would come without descriptors or pop cultural signifiers. Be it blues, folk, rock, hip-hop whatever, it was just music without context to Terfry. “That’s very, very true” he says quietly. “I was never a trendy person. There was no scene where I grew up. I just took it as I came. When I went into a record store, there was no billboard or hype machine telling me what to do.”

He stops and moment and then adds by way of explanation, “I’m a person very much attached to my childhood. I grew up in this rural place where my imagination just went bananas.

But as attached to his east coast roots as he is, Terfry is currently concentrating on Buck 65 with all of the criss-crossing of North American that comes with it. With a new album just in the shops, he’s got another in the pipeline. But first as he puts it firmly, “There’s a whole lot of touring!”. That's basically the long and the short of it. The record comes out in like twenty different markets from here on. I’m pretty much keeping my shoulder to the wheel.” He chuckles a moment and adds “Hopefully we can take some time next year and take a break and I can get married.”.

Big Bill Morganfield

2009-07-20T20:44:00.003-04:00

The woes of the offspring of the rich and / or famous are part of pop culture folklore by now. But that noted there’s a world of difference between being Britney Spears’ kid and Einstein’s.

Such is the life of Big Bill Morganfield. As the son of iconic bluesman Muddy Waters, Morganfield sidestepped the entire issue for a long time. Perhaps cowed by his father’s towering reputation or just wanting to be his own man, Morganfield did pretty much anything but music for almost thirty-five years of his life.

And then as he recalls over the line from his Atlanta home, something happened. “It was kinda something” he laughs. “I got up onstage one time and did a song and I just loved it”.

So he picked up the guitar and started playing some blues. He hit the road but soon became dissatisfied with the ‘modern blues’ he was playing. So he undertook a musical retreat of sorts. “I wanted to get to really understand how to play the real blues” he explains. “I had always wanted to pay tribute to my father and this was how to do it”

After his musical self-improvement, Morganfield hit the road and in 1999 at the age of 43, launched his musical career. But despite the fact that Morganfield’s blues are getting the kind of raves normally reserved for his father, Muddy’s shadow still falls close to his son. “Some people have been easy on me but some have also been a bit tougher” he admits. “Like ‘oh you’re Muddy’s son. So show me’. But overall it hasn’t been too bad”.

But show them he has. And regardless of the time it took Morganfield to get to the blues of his father, it seems to him that it was kind of inevitable. “It was never anything but the blues for me” he explains. “It was around me when I was growing up but I guess it just took some time for me to find my way to it”.

What complicated the situation for Morganfield was the reality that his father wasn’t really in the picture. “I was in a broken home” he says quietly. “I’ve never really put it like that before but that’s what it was. I didn’t get to see my dad that much because of what the courts said. But it was what it was.”

Growing up Morganfield may not have gotten to know his father in the way he wished he had but his recent career has brought about an unexpected side benefit for him. “I feel closer to my father now since I started playing the blues” he admits.

Like his father Morganfield has started to concentrate on songwriting more then ever before. “I’d like to kind of write songs that mean something” he says earnestly. “Songs that are about what’s going on today, in people’s lives. Kind of like the way it was back in the Sixties and all.”

He never got to see it but Muddy Waters’ dream came true. He had always wanted one of his children to become a musician and although it took some time, Big Bill Morganfield is the living embodiment of Muddy’s wish. “Yeah” Morganfield chuckles, “It took some time but I got there.”

Thornetta Davis

2006-11-01T22:27:00.001-05:00

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

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!”