Status: Single
City: Saskatoon
State: Saskatchewan
Country: CA
Signup Date: 9/2/2004
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009
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| Tuesday, November 10, 2009 - Shaun | Happy release day, everyone.
Here's a run-down of what you can expect from the cd/dvd:
Indecision-We had been on the road in North America non-stop for years
promoting our first record and its indie predecessor. Now, faced with
an audience who knew nothing about us, we decided to introduce
ourselves with the newest song we had, (which has remained unreleased
up until now). You can really hear in this tune what a big part Stevie
Ray played in my musical diet in those years, and part of the decision
to play Indecision first was in tribute to his Montreux debut in 1982.
He’d walked out in front of the Montreux crowd, equally unknown, an
equally incongruous fit with the evening’s other performers, (SRV on a
night of acoustic blues, WMM sandwiched between an opera singer and an
Italian pop star), and while he won over a lot of the audience, he was
booed loudly throughout by some of them too. (Although, like Dylan’s
boo-rific Monterey pop performance, few would own up to being the
boo-ers in the crowd now.) We wanted to give our mission statement fast
and bold and show the crowd we weren’t scared, (even though we were
petrified). On the DVD you can feel our collective exhale when they
applaud loudly in response. I hear, as well, the influence of the
guitar solo on Prince’s Sexy MF, Robben Ford’s Handful of Blues record,
and Jack Semple’s bop-wise blues in my soloing on this track, all of
which were huge influences in me stepping outside of traditional note
choices to find my ‘voice’.
Tom Robinson- Our good friend Gordie Johnson’s band Big Sugar’s album
500 Pounds was in the tape deck of our tourmobile a lot back then. The
arrangement of his take on Al Green’s I’m A Ram was the blueprint for
this Harper Lee influenced riffer.
Oh Mother (1997)-DVD Only- Oh Mother is an original blues that was a
staple of our set list from 1994-1999. I remember writing the lyrics in
my head in the early nineties while stuck in a blizzard in the
mountains near the Columbia Icefields. The road had disappeared under
dunes of snow, one of which our van was lodged in. Between trips
outside into the thick static to make sure the tailpipe was clear, I
huddled under blankets and wrote lyrics to keep my mind off the cold.
The next morning we were towed out and the lyrics were ingrained in my
brain after singing them to myself, over and over. We brought Oh Mother
out of retirement during the 2001 AC/DC tour where its familiar form
gave the tough crowd something they recognized to latch onto, warming
them to us. It served the same purpose at both Montreux performances
too. Safwan and Earl had surprised me with tickets to see BB King on my
birthday a couple years before and we left his concert a completely
different band, aware of the power of dynamics in a way we never had
been before. Our ’97 take on it is some of the best of the band in that
era; tight yet loose, each of our playing supportive, yet explorative,
and showing the many hours we’d devoted to listening, learning and
playing as a group. For reasons of capacity it’s included only on the
DVD. That’s the band’s big brother Ross Damude’s strat I’m playing.
Catching a glimpse of him side-stage, beaming after the song as Jacko
came to hand my Gibson Nighthawk back to me felt almost as good as the
crowd’s reaction.
Castles Made Of Sand-CD only- Emboldened by the reaction to Oh Mother,
we veered off the agreed upon set list to take a chance. Our
psychedelic take on this Hendrix tune did probably drive a few
Montserrat Caballe fans into the foyer, but it cemented our
relationship with the rest of the crowd. I’ve always loved the
textured, chordal approach Hendrix took on songs like this and Little
Wing, and the sound of Axis: Bold As Love, the album Castles appears
on, was a huge influence on the next record we’d make, Where I Started.
Corn Rows-Another Hendrix influenced riff, Corn Rows is also the song
in our catalogue most in debt to the Black Crowes, and their huge
influence on the band in its early days. The first song I ever sang in
a band in public, in fact the first song I ever learned to sing all the
way through while playing guitar, was the Crowes’ She Talks To Angels.
They are like SRV in that they were a gateway drug to their influences
for younger musicians. (I’m sure Chris Robinson would like that analogy
as much as Stevie Ray would not.) I used to get really light-headed
every night after the scream in this song. I’d almost faint; start to
see stars. It became a cue to go into an almost out-of-body experience
state, where everything seemed surreal. I often did my most inspired
playing afterwards and felt like I was watching it happen rather than
doing it.
Midnight Rain-At this point in our career we were hearing Midnight
Rain, our first and then-current single, a lot. Thousands of times at a
video shoot, at every radio station where we did an interview, we
played it on every broadcast… We weren’t quite sick of it, but since it
wasn’t out in Europe we had considered giving ourselves a break from
playing it in the set. It was the most pop of all the songs we played,
and the crowd’s reaction to it made it feel new to me again.
Tell Me- The first of my falsetto forays. I’m a huge fan of Prince and
his use of every part of his voice. There are only so many things you
can do with the bottom/middle part of your range, y’know? It’s been
said about me in a derogatory sense that I sometimes sound like a girl
when I sing. I take it as a compliment, as a lot of my favorite singers
are women. Besides, singing while pushing one’s voice into forced
gravely lowness has been done to death for a while. For the record, I
hate the other kind of, “Big girls, they don’t cry-y-y” style of
falsetto singing… I love how Earl plays this bass line.
Sister Sally- Another tune influenced by his Purple Badness. We all
love Prince’s funky jams and his capital P Pop songs, but Sister Sally
was an attempt to have something like his ballads Purple Rain and The
Morning Papers to play in our set.
Mary Mary ’97 DVD Only- Extra points go to Safwan for addressing the
crowd in French, something that I as the lone descendant of the Gauls
in the band wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull off. It’s apparent in his
grin while doing so, and in the little glimpses we caught of each other
while playing, that we were ending the best and most important set we’d
ever done up to that point in our lives.
Mary Mary '97 Dvd Only-A lot of our shows around this time ended with a
big ol' jam on this shuffle from our first album, which would morph
into whatever songs we were feeling like at the time before returning
to climax on Mary Mary Our time constraints kept us from jamming too
much in '97, something we'd remedy when we were asked to make a repeat
appearance a couple years later...
Why-Our second trip to Montreux was under very different
circumstances than the first, (see our journal entry Montreux Musings).
We were in the middle of a cross-Canada tour and our quick trip to
Switzerland between dates would have us in the air more than on the
ground for 50 or so hours. We were really jet-lagged and disoriented,
but looking forward to a great set. The Jimmy Rogers Tribute which I’d
played in before our set had gone way over its time, as almost every
guitarist in the festival tried to one-up each other in honour of the
great singer/player, best known for his seminal work in Muddy Water’s
1950’s band. People were starting to leave by the time it was over,
well past 1 am. As we related in Montreux Musings, (essentially the
liner notes of the release), festival founder Claude Nobs invited the
bulk of the crowd onstage for our performance, making the setting very
reminiscent of the original Jazzfest venue in which the crowd
surrounded the stage. Our tour manager came backstage looking like he’d
seen a ghost and sat us down to tell us that we’d been set up in
reverse, with Earl on stage left and me on stage right. Doesn’t sound
like a big deal, but it’s kind of like a driver being in one of the
biggest races of their lives and being asked at the last minute to
drive a British car on the other side of the road. As well, my pedals
had all been fried by a power surge, leaving me with only a borrowed
distortion pedal to plug into my borrowed amp. This accounts for the
dirtier than normal tone on our first song, Why. We took the stage, and
through the woozy gauze of jetlag and sleep deprivation we dug deep to
make our second performance feel as good as our first. Gone was the
hesitation of the first year; we were a slightly older and more
seasoned group, opening with our current North American single and
possessed with a “really? Late start, blown pedals, funky set-up,
jetlag, what else you got?” attitude, we set about using that energy to
power through the fatigue. The hairy tone matched our fuzzy heads very
well.
Oh Mother ’99- We poured the rest of our anxiety over the situation
into the slow blues we’d performed the first year. Another couple years
on the road had pushed our extremes further out, making the quiet parts
even quieter and the louds louder. My singing and playing is more
experimental, less afraid to make a mistake, ready to walk the netless
high wire on account of the years of high pressure gigs we’d been doing
since our first Montreux performance.
Companion- I wasn’t joking in the scatting/playing part of Oh Mother.
(You’ll hear it). I would’ve been much sadder about the pedal board
explosion if we hadn’t been invited to spend some time with the man
who’d become my songwriting hero in the years since we first met him
after our ’97 performance, when he’d said very nice things about us and
invited me to play with him. I bought almost every record Van Morrison
ever did after that and listened to Astral Weeks non-stop for months
before we started writing Where I Started. His influence is all over
Companion. When I first heard the melody in my head it was in his
voice. We were honoured to hang with him again before and after our ’99
show. Every time I’ve had any brandy ever since, I’m transported to
that room in Stravinsky hall where I had an audience with a giant.
Hours after our performance, when we emerged bleary eyed into the
rising sun, exhausted from jamming for a few more hours on another
stage before catching our flight back to Canada, we heard the staff
quietly discussing the best way to get a living legend to go smoke
cigars and drink brandy elsewhere so they could sleep. There are some
beats that are just ‘Saf’ beats. My Old Self is one, and this is
another. I can’t think of another drummer who’d even imagine the rhythm
this way, let alone play it for the whole song. It’s my favourite of
his signature beats.
This Mourning- Saf puts a hurting on his rented cow-patterned drums on this one. Likewise, Earl on his own Dingwall bass.
Mary Mary ’99 Cd Only- I wish my tone wasn’t so fuzzy on this, but
sometimes it’s good to have to wrestle with a sound a bit to bend it to
your will. We inserted a bit of Don Nix’s Goin’ Down into this, which
we knew mostly from Freddie King’s version. Like Oh Mother, (the other
song included in both its ’97 and ’99 incarnations here), Mary Mary
shows the progression of the band. It’s rawer, funkier, more on edge.
In the songs that followed this in the set, the crowd stands up and
starts dancing. Wish we could show that to you, but...
Obviously, Mary Mary ’99 was filmed, as was Castles Made Of Sand, a
fiery version of All Along The Watchtower, Claude sitting in with us on
BB King’s Why I Sing The Blues, the late, great Jeff Healey and his
band sitting in, and a few other cool things… We ran into some
logistical obstacles while producing this project. Not only does cd and
dvd capacity become a factor, but so do legalities. Even with a
resident lawyer in the band, negotiating sync rights to include some of
these songs would dwarf the budget for the entire project many times
over. Some of them may be included on other live compilations in the
future, (along with the ubiquitous Superstition), as this will not be
the last live document of the band. We’ve got a few more things up our
sleeves…
As a document of who and what we were during the time of our first
couple albums and how we developed between them, I couldn’t be more
proud of Live! Montreux, Switzerland. We hope you enjoy it.
Go to the Fan Network Message Board to add your comments for Wide Mouth Mason!
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2:36 AM
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