Beyond the blues

Blue Rodeo’s Greg Keelor and Jim Cuddy reverberate back into balance with Tremolo

by Peter Blackstock

It’s a predictable ending for Tremolo, a seven-minute song titled “Frog’s Lullaby” that slowly, quietly fades-to-black the hour-long musical excursion that preceded it. Such conclusions have been a trademark of most Blue Rodeo records, so you almost come to expect such a denouement, letting you go gentle into that good night.

Twenty seconds later, an alarm clock sledgehammers you wide awake again. The drums come a-thundering, the guitars come a-wailing, and Greg Keelor is singing with all the strength in his lungs, “Let’s go kick over tombstones/In the graveyard of my heart.” Indeed, “Graveyard,” all 2 minutes, 26 seconds of it, is the single most rockin’ song this band has ever committed to tape.

It’s a grand liberation, a shaking loose of some shackles that perhaps had begun to bind a little too tightly in recent years. The premier roots-rock band in Canada for the past decade — and with a seven-record catalog that rivals most any American roots band during that stretch as well — Blue Rodeo had become immersed in a bit of a moody funk during the mid-’90s. And while the results of that spell were sometimes magical, another side of the band seemed to be getting lost in the transition. That their last three albums ended with eight-to-nine-minute dirges was symbolic of that.

“I think that there was a sort of moment of self-consciousness,” co-leader Jim Cuddy said of the band’s realization that their records’ conclusions had begun to follow a certain path. “I don’t know how we ever established that pattern on our records that we would go out on a quiet note.…So we said, Well, we’ve at least got to acknowledge that we know we do this, and that it’s not the only way to end a record. So we thought, well, why don’t we just let ‘Frog’s Lullaby’ end, as if it were a typical Blue Rodeo record. And then there’s this time lapse where you think, ‘Yeah, they always end their records like that.’ And you step up to go push the stop button on the CD player, and, all of a sudden, ‘Wraaaaaaaah!’”

The contrast of soft-and-loud extremes serves as an ironic but fitting conclusion to Tremolo, which overall is the most balanced album Blue Rodeo has made to date. Generally, Blue Rodeo’s catalog has followed a musical and emotional rollercoaster, with albums dominated by bright, catchy songs inevitably followed by deep, dark, long, soul-searching explorations. On Tremolo, those defining aspects have been merged on a single album more effectively than had seemed possible in the past.

From the haunting acoustic sway of the opening “Moon & Tree”, to the first single “It Could Happen To You” (a semi-political tune cleverly disguised as a simple pop ditty), to the more rockin’ moments of “No Miracle, No Dazzle” and “Fallen From Grace”, to the beautifully enchanting melodies of “Shed My Skin” and “Dragging On”, Tremolo is loaded with songs that could easily fill the airwaves of any Americana or AAA radio station. Meanwhile, the band’s more contemplative material fits in more seamlessly than ever before. “Beautiful Blue” and “Brother Andre’s Heart”, though clearly mood pieces, work as pop songs too, reeling you further into the record rather than casting things out in a different direction.

“I think that we were in a more balanced mode in all aspects — instrumentally, in terms of the personalities of the band, and in terms of the songs that we had,” Cuddy says. “We weren’t desirous to just live in one mode all the time. And we tried to put the record together in such a way that it would flow and work together, the pieces would interlock, the songs would work with each other.”

The new record also finds the band on yet another label in the U.S. While Warner Canada has been a solid and steady home for Blue Rodeo in their home country ever since their 1987 debut Outskirts went double-platinum (in Canada, that’s 200,000 copies sold), the group has been bounced around in the States, largely as various major-label imprints have mutated into others. The band began on Atlantic, then shifted to East/West, then shuttled to Discovery, and now has landed on Sire, which took over control of Discovery a few months ago.

Ironically, they may have finally found a U.S. label that suits them. The newly reborn Sire is stressing similarly styled roots-oriented acts, having recently signed Jolene and Tim Carroll while carrying Parlor James over from Discovery, and subsequently courting a label deal with Watermelon Records in an effort to claim acts such as Don Walser.

Keelor and Cuddy began playing together in 1977 in a garage/Merseybeat-style band called the HiFis, and shortly thereafter moved to New York for a short tenure with a band called Fly To France. They moved back to Toronto and forming Blue Rodeo in 1981 with bassist Bazil Donovan, keyboardist Bob Wiseman and drummer Cleave Anderson. The group spent the first half of the decade honing its chops on Toronto’s active Queen Street music scene in clubs such as the Horseshoe Tavern and eventually signed a deal with Warner Canada.

Outskirts kicked off the band’s recording career on a punchy note, highlighted by upbeat pop numbers such as the title track and “Rose-Coloured Glasses”, both of which remain staples of the band’s live shows a decade later. On the other hand, six-to-seven-minute tunes such as the closing track “Floating” and the jazz-influenced “Piranha’s Pool” hinted that Blue Rodeo’s horizons were broader than the rootsy pop that was getting them played on the radio (in Canada, anyhow).

The follow-up, 1989’s Malcolm Burn-produced Diamond Mine, saw a full flowering of those envelope-pushing tendencies; rarely has a band grown so much between debut and sophomore albums. With 13 tracks clocking in at just a shade over an hour long, Diamond Mine wasn’t without its memorable little ditties (“Fall In Line” remains among the group’s most beautiful songs), but the prevailing mood is one of sonic exploration and self-examination, with brief, eerie instrumental interludes serving as segues between several songs and the epic title track clocking in at over eight minutes.

All of which made a statement about Blue Rodeo’s musical abilities and aspirations; on the other hand, it wasn’t exactly easy to digest. “Man, I tried, but I just couldn’t get through it!” producer Pete Anderson admitted to the band when they asked him what he thought about Diamond Mine shortly before he began working with them on the follow-up album, Casino. Anderson’s approach was to give the band a sharp about-face, and he succeeded brilliantly. The only Blue Rodeo album under 40 minutes long (and one of only two under 60 minutes), Casino is a 10-track minor masterpiece of roots-pop, a worthy counterpart to the BoDeans’ Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams or Marshall Crenshaw’s self-titled debut. “Til I Am Myself Again”, “What Am I Doing Here” and “Trust Yourself” would almost certainly be shoe-ins for a Blue Rodeo best-of collection.

As strong as it was, however, Casino didn’t necessarily mean Blue Rodeo had found what it was looking for in terms of artistic expression. “I think that when you’re doing music for a long time, you end up wanting to cover a lot of ground,” says Cuddy, who shares the singing, songwriting and guitar-playing duties in the band with Keelor. “It has seemed to be that whatever we’ve just done is not something that we end up repeating.”

Indeed, the yin-yang cycle continued on 1992’s Lost Together, which swung the pendulum back in the boundary-stretching direction with a running time of 65 minutes. On the other hand, the disc seemed to show signs of Blue Rodeo finding a common ground between its clear pop talents and more ambitious tendencies: The long songs were mostly in the range of five minutes rather than seven or eight, and their melodies drew more upon classic structures even while pushing those limits a bit. In addition, Lost Together marked the last album that featured keyboardist Bob Wiseman — the most jazz-oriented player of the bunch — and the introduction of a new member, former Cowboy Junkies sideman Kim Deschamps, on pedal steel and other string instruments. (Current drummer Glenn Milchem also made his debut on this disc; current keyboardist James Gray joined the band shortly after Lost Together was recorded.)

The ensuing Five Days In July, recorded in the summer of ’93 at Keelor’s farm about an hour outside Toronto, is a more laid-back, mostly acoustic affair, sounding (as its title implied) very much like a stretch of summertime days spent hanging out in the country. A couple of deeper, darker songs at the end of the disc, however, were recorded later at another site — with vocal contributions from Sarah McLachlan (who was not universally known at the time) — and those tracks give a clue as to where the band was headed on its next record.

Indeed, 1995’s Nowhere To Here plunged into more ethereal sonic moods and textures than anything the band had ever done before. Though it was also recorded at Keelor’s farm, there was none of the summer-breezy ease that had dominated Five Days In July. McLachlan guested again, this time on three songs. The crowning touch was the eight-minute closing track “Flaming Bed”, a deathly dirge Keelor says was inspired by waking up at his farm one night to discover the mattress he was sleeping on had caught fire. In a song-by-song quote sheet issued at the time of the album’s release, Keelor described the scene in flatly mystical terms: “I realized that the fire had awoken me because she wanted to consummate her relationship with me. But she knew that for our spirits to entwine it would kill my flesh, so she sacrificed herself, like a Shakespearean tragedy. To love me she would have to kill me, so she gave herself.”

A far cry from the guy who on Casino’s “What Am I Doing Here” pondered, simply, “I stand in front of this Ferris wheel/And I wonder what am I doing here?” And if Pete Anderson thought Diamond Mine was a struggle to get through, he hadn’t heard nothin’ yet.

Then again, Keelor’s solo debut Gone, released on Warner Canada earlier this year, took the moodiness to an entirely different level. “If you had a hard time getting through Nowhere To Here, this may be a real challenge; it’s like watching spit go down a window,” Keelor cracks. “A lot of it’s just me and a nylon-string guitar.” It’s also an even more pronounced collaboration with McLachlan; she appears on six of the album’s 10 tracks, not just as a vocalist this time but also playing piano. Other non-Blue-Rodeo-like instrumentation on the disc includes cello and tabla.

“I’d been to India, and when I got back I just felt like doing something that was outside of the band, just for my own sanity,” Keelor explained. “I just showed up at a friend of mine’s place, and I didn’t really have any idea what sort of record I wanted to make; I just thought I would try it and see what happened.”

Cuddy has also recently completed a solo project, likely to be released sometime next year (and unlike Keelor’s album, Cuddy’s disc probably will be released in the U.S. as well, though the specifics haven’t been worked out yet). Cuddy describes it as “a little more countrified than Blue Rodeo, and a little more personal.”

Among the album’s guest contributors are Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett, who contribute vocals and banjo to a country tune called “I’ll Make Believe She’s You”. Cuddy explained that it was all sort of a happy accident, with Blue Rodeo bassist Bazil Donovan luring Tweedy and Bennett down to the studio one night after Wilco had played a promotional gig in Toronto. “Bazil phoned me from their gig and said, ‘I think I’ll ask Jeff and Jay to cut the country song with us.’ And I said, ‘OK, that’s fine,’ because I knew that it would never happen — getting somebody to record something while they’re in town doing a promo thing. But Baz is very persuasive, and sure enough, half an hour later, he calls back and says, ‘OK, we’ll be down in an hour.’ So we put a band together real quick, and they came down around midnight, and we just sat and played. It was really simple and easy; it was just a very pleasant musical moment. But it definitely is part of the heart of my record.”

Cuddy adds that the serendipitous session “was really good timing for me, because I had been very influenced by Being There [Wilco’s most recent record]. I had listened to it a lot, and I really had dug where it had gone, how it had brought in psychedelia, and different kinds of elements that I was really mesmerized by.”

Donovan’s role in arranging that rendezvous seems somewhat symbolic of his role in Blue Rodeo. Probably the most ardent country-rock fan in the band — he lists the Burrito Brothers’ Gilded Palace Of Sin among his five “desert island discs” on the band’s web page — he also has recently been moonlighting with another Toronto roots outfit called Crybaby. A July weekend in Toronto found him playing Saturday night at a cozy little hideaway called Ted’s Collision, bookended by Friday and Sunday gigs with Blue Rodeo in front of a few thousand people at Fort York, a historic site and outdoor park in downtown Toronto.

With the CN Tower, the world’s tallest building, looming over the proceedings just a mile or so away, and with a lineup featuring Canadian pals the Skydiggers, Oh Susanna and Great Big Sea as well as American guests Victoria Williams (on Friday) and Steve Earle (on Sunday), the Fort York gigs were an ideal hometown kickoff for Tremolo. As they crank out a couple hours of material from throughout their career, one is reminded just how many good songs this band has written, while the tightness of their performance testifies to all that they’ve been through together.

As they wind things down for the encore, Cuddy croons out “Falling Down Blue”, a tender ballad from the new album, seemingly content to let the crowd down easy at the end of the night.…Uh, not quite. It was all just a setup for that final punch, a glorious, thrashing release, Glenn Milchem literally tumbling through his drums as Keelor shouts out the final words of the night:

Let’s go kick over tombstones

In the graveyard of my heart.

No Depression co-editor Peter Blackstock likes quite a few Canadian bands but, sadly, has never heard Stompin’ Tom Connors.