Auburn Annie
11-16-2004, 07:08 AM
The birth of Blue Rodeo
Guitarist GREG KEELOR remembers how 20 years ago the five original members came together to form a band that would become a Canadian legend
By GREG KEELOR
Special to The Globe and Mail
UPDATED AT 7:07 AM EST Tuesday, Nov 16, 2004
We were living in New York. I was sick of it, but Jim Cuddy was still enraptured. It would have been 1984 and music everywhere seemed to have stalled. I was sitting in a bar, on a gloomy early-spring afternoon, listening to a recently purchased cassette of Gordon Lightfoot's Gord's Gold on my Walkman. At the time, I didn't own an acoustic guitar. I had a Ricky and a Gretsch, and I wrote all my songs on electric, thinking that acoustic guitars were obsolete, not compatible with New York's post-punk ethos.
We had moved to New York in the fall of 1981 because it seemed the Toronto music scene had disappeared. The Horseshoe Tavern had gone top-40 and The Edge, Larry's Hideaway, The Turning Point, all bars that we had played, had closed. Our band, the HiFis, had signed a deal with Ready Records, home of the Demics. We thought we had arrived, but on the eve of the recording session, the record company closed up shop. We didn't know what to do.
So, like the London, Ont.-born Demics snarl in their song, we decided that New York City was the place to be and for a while it was. We loved it! Just to pass out in the same bars as Dylan Thomas, Leonard Cohen and Sid Vicious had, walk down West Fourth Street, go to Gerde's Folk City, see where the fictional Glass family lived or play CBGB.
The experience was incredible, but three years later, sitting in that bar listening to Gord's Gold, swimming in the depths of its emotion, its harmonic resonance, the artistry of the song-writing, made me feel very superficial. It made me want to live deeper, to feel more, so that I might write a better song and because the music was Canadian, it was like a message from home and very inspiring.
So many of my Canadian heroes had moved to the States to "make it" and I felt I had to do the same. But sitting there weeping into my suds, I realized: First, I had to get an acoustic guitar; second, I had to go home. So I traded in the Ricky on a Gibson J200 1957 Sunburst. What a guitar. It was $1,200, a king's ransom at the time, and the first song I wrote on it was Heart Like Mine. I started wearing cowboy shirts and thinking about going home.
On July 4, I did a head full of mushrooms and had what is called a "bad trip." Don't get me wrong, it was fantastic, just scary. New York felt like a war zone. It was hot and muggy and stank the way only New York can stink. It felt as if the Earth had cracked open and Hell had poured out, covering Manhattan in its wrath. I longed for a quiet green place to rest my soul -- Canada.
Now you can only thank fate, because at the same time Jim's talented and lovely wife, Rena, whose acting courses were winding up, was done with that actress/waitress world in New York as well. Jim, on the other hand, still loved the adventure, the possibilities of the Big Apple. He left reluctantly, kicking and screaming, the asphalt of his beloved Little Italy imbedded under his fingernails as we dragged him away.
Just before we left, we did a demo with the rhythm section of a New Zealand band called The Drongos. We recorded three songs with them; A Question of Love, 5 Will Get You 6 and Heart Like Mine. With this demo tape, we officially changed the name of our band to Blue Rodeo and made all the usual deliveries to the A&R offices around Manhattan.
It wasn't long after that we packed up and headed back to the Great White North, arriving in Toronto to find a small but very exciting scene centred around Handsome Ned. He had this great band of ex-punks gone country. It seemed everybody was reading Lost Highway by American music chronicler Peter Guralnick and Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll by Nick Tosches. Everybody was listening to Gram Parsons, Merle Haggard, The Byrds and Johnny Cash.
Ned did a matinee every Saturday at the Cameron House. It was a drunkard's dream, a great collection of artists, musicians, drug addicts and writers. He would start around 4 p.m. and leave only when the nighttime band kicked him off the stage. We all knew these were "good times" -- a strange sense of community and creativity. Half in the bag, you would look high on the wall of the front bar to the inscription that read "This is Paradise" and you would smile. In this atmosphere, Jim and I found the other three members for our new band pretty easily. One night, Chris Houston of the Hamilton band Forgotten Rebels, Jim and I went to a bar, The Metropolitan I believe, to ask local hero and bartender extraordinaire Teddy Fury of the Bopcats to be our new drummer. He said he was too busy but as he turned to shake another martini, in walked Cleave Anderson, a great postman and even greater drummer. He said he'd love to and we concurred.
Around the same time, we had an ad in NOW Magazine: "If you have dropped acid at least 20 times, lost two good years to drugs and another three to five to booze, play a bass or drums and can still manage to keep time like a metronome, call Blue Rodeo."
Enter Bazil Donovan. Now the story is told of how the bass player was sitting at home one day when one of his buddies said, "Hey Baz, you should call these guys," which is true and he did. But what isn't told is that he and Cleave were old band-mates and Cleave had already suggested he call those guys from The HiFis who were starting a new band. At the time, Bazil was playing in real country bands all over Ontario. When I first met him, there were five or six country bars on Queen Street West between Ossington and Roncesvalles, Parkdale country. Bazil was a veteran, he'd been around and he knew all the right chords.
In New York, Jim and I had often practised at our friend Howard Wiseman's apartment because he had a piano and he was such a great guy. He also had a house in Toronto on Major Street he shared with his brother Bob and he suggested that I take his room until I found a place of my own.
I was sitting in the living room one afternoon writing songs on my new J200, when down the stairs comes Bob Wiseman. We start talking and he says I should sing him a song. So he sits down at the piano and I start to sing Rose Coloured Glasses. Well, it just sorta blew my mind. He took me to places I'd never visited before in music and it was very exciting.
With the band together, I got a space in those warehouses on Sorauren Avenue just below Dundas Street -- 1,000 square feet for $350 a month. It seemed like heaven after New York, just sitting there listening to CBC Radio and the trains outside my window. We made a lot of great music in that space. The cover of our first record (a Robert Frank rip-off) was shot there as well.
Our first gig as Blue Rodeo was at the Rivoli on Feb. 7, 1985. On Feb. 14, we played the Rivoli again, opening for Ned at his Valentine's Day Party, for which Ned had hired a trick roper, a yodeler and a quick-gun artist. The next day, we loaded the gear into my Dad's car and drove to New York for a showcase that night we'd set up at CBGB, because an A&R type had called and said he'd like to see the band. Of course, the A&R guy never showed up.
And now, 20 years and a few thousand shows later, I can honestly say it has been a good ride. The white-line fever has served me well. And if I could offer but one small piece of advice, it would have to be that if you're feeling down and not too sure of yourself, just listen to Gord.
To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Blue Rodeo releases its first-ever DVD, directed by Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann, today. A Blue Reunion concert will be held tomorrow at Lee's Palace, 529 Bloor St. W. (http://www.bluerodeo.com). Tickets cost $20 and are available at the venue on the day of the show only. Representatives of the Daily Bread Food Bank will be on hand to accept donations.
© 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Guitarist GREG KEELOR remembers how 20 years ago the five original members came together to form a band that would become a Canadian legend
By GREG KEELOR
Special to The Globe and Mail
UPDATED AT 7:07 AM EST Tuesday, Nov 16, 2004
We were living in New York. I was sick of it, but Jim Cuddy was still enraptured. It would have been 1984 and music everywhere seemed to have stalled. I was sitting in a bar, on a gloomy early-spring afternoon, listening to a recently purchased cassette of Gordon Lightfoot's Gord's Gold on my Walkman. At the time, I didn't own an acoustic guitar. I had a Ricky and a Gretsch, and I wrote all my songs on electric, thinking that acoustic guitars were obsolete, not compatible with New York's post-punk ethos.
We had moved to New York in the fall of 1981 because it seemed the Toronto music scene had disappeared. The Horseshoe Tavern had gone top-40 and The Edge, Larry's Hideaway, The Turning Point, all bars that we had played, had closed. Our band, the HiFis, had signed a deal with Ready Records, home of the Demics. We thought we had arrived, but on the eve of the recording session, the record company closed up shop. We didn't know what to do.
So, like the London, Ont.-born Demics snarl in their song, we decided that New York City was the place to be and for a while it was. We loved it! Just to pass out in the same bars as Dylan Thomas, Leonard Cohen and Sid Vicious had, walk down West Fourth Street, go to Gerde's Folk City, see where the fictional Glass family lived or play CBGB.
The experience was incredible, but three years later, sitting in that bar listening to Gord's Gold, swimming in the depths of its emotion, its harmonic resonance, the artistry of the song-writing, made me feel very superficial. It made me want to live deeper, to feel more, so that I might write a better song and because the music was Canadian, it was like a message from home and very inspiring.
So many of my Canadian heroes had moved to the States to "make it" and I felt I had to do the same. But sitting there weeping into my suds, I realized: First, I had to get an acoustic guitar; second, I had to go home. So I traded in the Ricky on a Gibson J200 1957 Sunburst. What a guitar. It was $1,200, a king's ransom at the time, and the first song I wrote on it was Heart Like Mine. I started wearing cowboy shirts and thinking about going home.
On July 4, I did a head full of mushrooms and had what is called a "bad trip." Don't get me wrong, it was fantastic, just scary. New York felt like a war zone. It was hot and muggy and stank the way only New York can stink. It felt as if the Earth had cracked open and Hell had poured out, covering Manhattan in its wrath. I longed for a quiet green place to rest my soul -- Canada.
Now you can only thank fate, because at the same time Jim's talented and lovely wife, Rena, whose acting courses were winding up, was done with that actress/waitress world in New York as well. Jim, on the other hand, still loved the adventure, the possibilities of the Big Apple. He left reluctantly, kicking and screaming, the asphalt of his beloved Little Italy imbedded under his fingernails as we dragged him away.
Just before we left, we did a demo with the rhythm section of a New Zealand band called The Drongos. We recorded three songs with them; A Question of Love, 5 Will Get You 6 and Heart Like Mine. With this demo tape, we officially changed the name of our band to Blue Rodeo and made all the usual deliveries to the A&R offices around Manhattan.
It wasn't long after that we packed up and headed back to the Great White North, arriving in Toronto to find a small but very exciting scene centred around Handsome Ned. He had this great band of ex-punks gone country. It seemed everybody was reading Lost Highway by American music chronicler Peter Guralnick and Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll by Nick Tosches. Everybody was listening to Gram Parsons, Merle Haggard, The Byrds and Johnny Cash.
Ned did a matinee every Saturday at the Cameron House. It was a drunkard's dream, a great collection of artists, musicians, drug addicts and writers. He would start around 4 p.m. and leave only when the nighttime band kicked him off the stage. We all knew these were "good times" -- a strange sense of community and creativity. Half in the bag, you would look high on the wall of the front bar to the inscription that read "This is Paradise" and you would smile. In this atmosphere, Jim and I found the other three members for our new band pretty easily. One night, Chris Houston of the Hamilton band Forgotten Rebels, Jim and I went to a bar, The Metropolitan I believe, to ask local hero and bartender extraordinaire Teddy Fury of the Bopcats to be our new drummer. He said he was too busy but as he turned to shake another martini, in walked Cleave Anderson, a great postman and even greater drummer. He said he'd love to and we concurred.
Around the same time, we had an ad in NOW Magazine: "If you have dropped acid at least 20 times, lost two good years to drugs and another three to five to booze, play a bass or drums and can still manage to keep time like a metronome, call Blue Rodeo."
Enter Bazil Donovan. Now the story is told of how the bass player was sitting at home one day when one of his buddies said, "Hey Baz, you should call these guys," which is true and he did. But what isn't told is that he and Cleave were old band-mates and Cleave had already suggested he call those guys from The HiFis who were starting a new band. At the time, Bazil was playing in real country bands all over Ontario. When I first met him, there were five or six country bars on Queen Street West between Ossington and Roncesvalles, Parkdale country. Bazil was a veteran, he'd been around and he knew all the right chords.
In New York, Jim and I had often practised at our friend Howard Wiseman's apartment because he had a piano and he was such a great guy. He also had a house in Toronto on Major Street he shared with his brother Bob and he suggested that I take his room until I found a place of my own.
I was sitting in the living room one afternoon writing songs on my new J200, when down the stairs comes Bob Wiseman. We start talking and he says I should sing him a song. So he sits down at the piano and I start to sing Rose Coloured Glasses. Well, it just sorta blew my mind. He took me to places I'd never visited before in music and it was very exciting.
With the band together, I got a space in those warehouses on Sorauren Avenue just below Dundas Street -- 1,000 square feet for $350 a month. It seemed like heaven after New York, just sitting there listening to CBC Radio and the trains outside my window. We made a lot of great music in that space. The cover of our first record (a Robert Frank rip-off) was shot there as well.
Our first gig as Blue Rodeo was at the Rivoli on Feb. 7, 1985. On Feb. 14, we played the Rivoli again, opening for Ned at his Valentine's Day Party, for which Ned had hired a trick roper, a yodeler and a quick-gun artist. The next day, we loaded the gear into my Dad's car and drove to New York for a showcase that night we'd set up at CBGB, because an A&R type had called and said he'd like to see the band. Of course, the A&R guy never showed up.
And now, 20 years and a few thousand shows later, I can honestly say it has been a good ride. The white-line fever has served me well. And if I could offer but one small piece of advice, it would have to be that if you're feeling down and not too sure of yourself, just listen to Gord.
To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Blue Rodeo releases its first-ever DVD, directed by Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann, today. A Blue Reunion concert will be held tomorrow at Lee's Palace, 529 Bloor St. W. (http://www.bluerodeo.com). Tickets cost $20 and are available at the venue on the day of the show only. Representatives of the Daily Bread Food Bank will be on hand to accept donations.
© 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.