Rockinhammer

Nelly makes the scene

The success or failure of the 2007 Juno Awards show rests pretty much entirely in the hands of its host, Nelly Furtado.
So it only makes sense for the host broadcaster to parade their star in front of the media for the obligatory pre-Juno news conference.
 These things can backfire though. At last year’s news conference, Pamela Anderson managed to confirm her dumb blond image by calling Cold Play and The Black Eyed Peas her favourite Canadian bands (a friend at the side of the stage pointed out to her that they weren’t Canadian).
Things were different Saturday morning at the plush Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon when Nelly came out to meet the press. Dressed in an elegant high-waisted black dress and silver pumps, Nelly radiated class and she answered the softball questions sent her way with honesty and considered opinion.
“Who do you want to win at the Junos?” was the first one tossed toward the Victoria native.
“I’d like to see (Blue Rodeo’s) Jim Cuddy take one home,” she replied. “Or k-os. I’m also a big fan of Malajube, that group from Montreal.”
About hosting: “I have to admit it’s been really stressful, but a good kind of stressful. I put a lot of thought and energy into it. It’s really important to me ... It’s really different from performing. I think performing will be the most relaxing part of the evening for me ... I’m serious about it being a fun night for everyone.  That’s about the only thing I’m serious about.”
About the Canadian music scene: “I’ve now live in Toronto and I don’t take this artistic community for granted for one second ... There is a real artistic community in this country and I feel it more than ever when I attend the Junos. This is my fourth time attending.”
About stardom: “It’s a lot less glamorous than what you dream about of when you’re (a teenager) singing in your bedroom.”
About Saskatoon: “It’s such a cliché, but I really feel like I’m in the heartland of Canada. It’s really grounding ... (pause) ... and I feel it in my soul.”
About false rumours of her having an affair with basketball star Steve Nash (whose name is contained in the lyrics of her hit single Promiscuous): “I was really proud to include Steve in my song. I’m a proud hometown girl and Steve is from Victoria too.”
Eventually the tough question had to be asked. How did she feel about CTV’s double flip flop this week on the timing of the Junos, first knocking them out of prime time to a 10 p.m. start and then reversing the decision back to 7 p.m. Nelly explained that she wasn’t part of the decision. It wasn’t hers to make. She was, however, impressed by the anger it provoked across the country.
“I think it is great that people were so passionate about it,” she said.
At this moment John Brunton, executive producer of the Juno TV broadcast, stood up to defend CTV and lashing out at media types who criticized the initial time change as unpatriotic. Brunton noted that the last thing CTV wanted to do was run the Junos up against the hugely popular CBS reality show, The Amazing Race.
“All that anybody wanted to do was maximize the numbers of Canadians watching Canadian music. I think this controversy has been ridiculous.”
Sure, John. But nothing boosts ratings like a good jolt of controversy.

Little Old Ladies and Bison Balls

There’s something about the music of Shout Out Out Out Out that doesn’t quite mix with a quilting bee.
 Maybe it’s the all-enveloping dance beat created by the two drummers and two bass players. Maybe it’s the synthetic, robot-like vocals. Or maybe it’s just the decibel level.
But there they were Friday night, pounding out the techno beat from a makeshift stage in the middle of a turn-of-the-century pioneer village while seven little old ladies (LOLs) worked their stitches into a traditional quilt.
They (the LOLs, not the band) were all members of the Women’s Auxiliary of Saskatoon’s Western Development Museum, location of the 2007 Juno welcoming reception.
“It’s not quite so bad, I just turned down my hearing aid,” one of the LOLs, said when asked how they liked the music blaring from a speaker less than ten feet from their quilting stall.
One of the major themes of this year’s Juno Awards could be called ‘Saskatoon, come spend your tourist dollars here.’ Local organizers are offering the media bus tours of the city,eager to show off the beauty of the prairies during a spring melt. They promise the tour won’t take long. We believe them. Nonetheless, there are few takers.
The media, along with a few hundred VIPS and industry insiders, are too busy slurping up the seemingly endless supply of free wine, beer and liquor provided by a phalanx of politely dressed waiters and waitresses. There’s also a fine selection of prairie delicacies offered as canapés — miniature cabbage rolls, an assortment of berries, venison ragout and ground bison balls.
Besides the quilters, the Western Development Museum has its own blacksmith, barber and red-serge Mountie.
“I’m waiting for the hanging,” laughs singer/actor Jim Byrnes (the wheelchair guy from the Wise Guy and Highlander TV series) between sips of Chilean white.
The blacksmith is banging out a red hot chain link. The sound of hammer-on-anvil mixes well with the music of Shout Out Out Out Out. Over at the quilting bee, the LOLs are selling charity raffle tickets at a brisk clip (the prize is one of their quilts).
After a couple of hours, the speeches are over and the free bar is shut down. Buses are idling in the muddy parking to escort the Juno revelers to the hotels of their choice. An evening of Junofest clubbing is about to begin.

Rocky, the Dude, hits Junotown

SASKATOON, Thursday, March 29 — When I arrived back at the hotel Thursday night (or was it Friday morning?) after a couple of hours of two-stepping with Trooper, George Canyon and 4,000 crazed Saskatoonians at a cow palace called Prairieland, I was greeted by the bored expressions of four uniformed security guards camped out in the lobby of the Ramada.
“Oh, are you guys here because of the Junos?” I asked, truly puzzled about why the Saskatoon Ramada needed extra security.
“No, we’re here because it’s Thursday,” came the answer. “We’re here every Thursday, Saturday’s too. It’s because of the Longbranch.”
The security guard pointed past the elevators to an unadorned rear entrance. “Through the door, outside and to your left, sir.”
I’d only been in town three hours and had already heard of the Longbranch. My cabbie from the airport had warned me about it. He mentioned something about not being happy to learn his daughter had been there. Hmmm.
I eagerly followed the guard’s directions into the chilly night air and tagged myself onto the end of a lineup that was protruding from the Longbranch’s entrance. Cowboy hats, pointy shoes, muscular men and slender girls.
“So what’s the big deal with this place tonight?” I ask the gigglers ahead of me.
“It’s Thursday, dude,” the miss in the long-legged denims replied. The giggles subsided. She looked me up and down as if I’d just gotten off the boat (it was a jet plane, but who cares about the details).
“Oh, sorry,” she added in a brief moment of sobriety. “I shouldn’t have called you ‘dude.’” Apparently it’s impolite to call real dudes ‘dude’ in Saskatoon.
Inside there were about 500 people jam packed in a bar licensed to serve 300. Well-formed women in straw hats looking for men with pickup trucks — one-tons are preferred over half-tons, I was told.
Cover charge was $2. No live music. Just lots of new country and classic rock coming from the DJs. I recognized some hotel staff getting hammered in an area towards the back. One of the chambermaids was celebrating her 40th. Brightly covered pre-packaged shooters were being served by the tray.
Canadian Idol judge Zack Werner, in town as part of the CTV Juno machine, was there, looking cool in black leather and jeans (I bet nobody called him ‘dude’). He signed a few autographs before allowing himself to be dragged into the centre of the dance throng by two or three young lovelies. Zack shuffled through Sweet Home Alabama while the girls did the bump-and-grind. He had a big smile on his face. Nothing ‘pitchy’ about this scene.
Sarah, however, seemed to be the Longbranch’s prime attraction. Everybody seemed to know her name. Dressed in the obligatory Stetson and a white sleeveless top, Sarah stood a few feet from the entrance on a riser above a giant cast iron bathtub filled with ice and bottled Pilsener (the beer of choice on the Prairies). With no regard to her frozen forearms, Sarah pulled the  long necks out of the tub and delivered up change at a furious rate. Sarah was undoubtedly the most popular bar tender in town. On Thursdays, it turns out, the Pils go for only $2.75. (Nobody could tell me how much they cost on Fridays.) This, of course, explained the Thursday night lineup. It also explained the security guards.
It seemed I had lucked out on hotels. Despite the view (dominated by the silos of the Robin Hood flour factory), the Ramada is obviously the place where all the truly beautiful people hang out.
————————————————————
It was a very different scene a couple of hours earlier at the Praireland where Premier Lorne Calvert, a former preacher, joined the stars of Corner Gas (Lacey and Const. Karen) in hosting the “Sasktel Get-In-Tune Party at the Park Juno Cabaret.” The Prairieland, a Saskatoon institution founded in 1884 by the Temperance Colony Pioneer Society, is a series of glorified barns which play host to the city’s annual agricultural exhibition. It was the spot local organizers chose to kick off the week’s official Juno festivities with a musical bash that included George Canyon and Trooper. These two acts would normally seem an odd match. But here it all made sense. Canyon fans and Trooperheads were all part of the same cosmic circus. The scene was similar to the Longbranch, except the crowd was older, younger and less deserving of the tight jeans. The Prairieland also lacked Sarah and the long necks. Instead there was an army of bartenders lined up behind a long series of tables at the back dispensing cans of Kokanee and Keith’s in exchange for beer tickets. They avoided finger blisters by using spoons to pop the cans open. Several long folding tables were roped off at the centre of the hall as a “VIP area” with seating for about 100 people. They were virtually empty.  George Canyon understood the crowd well. He played a medley of Johnny Cash songs. There wasn’t a lot of bumping and grinding, but the kids sure knew how to two-step. I took Trooper’s advice, opting not to stay for ‘a long time’ and went looking for ‘a good time.’

Crossing boundaries ... Miles, Moors, Vikings, rickshaws and wacky Strats from the desert

I often get asked ‘what are you listening to these days.’ I guess it comes with the turf of music editor. There’s never an easy answer. I’m pretty much all over the map. But I like artists willing to cross boundaries and taste the exotic while linking with the past. In the ‘97 Cavalier, I tend to listen to oldies since I’ve only got a tape deck and the FM antenna isn’t working.  I just finished two days of singing along with a personally compiled tape of R&B classics (I love crooning to One Mint Julep ... was the cause of it all) and replaced it with Sketches of Spain, Miles Davis’ ambitious blend of orchestral, Moorish and military horns. Davis was  was trashed by bebop fans in 1960 because Sketches of Spain failed to  swing. Too much mood music, they said, too much Rodrigo. So much for innovation, pushing the envelope, stepping out of the box. Agreed, it’s not the type of music you should play on the way to a minor hockey game. My nine-year-old son, Michael, hated it. He wanted to hear Good Lovin’ by The Rascals. I’m not going to knock his taste, but I prefer the Grateful Dead’s version.

In my wife’s van, I’ve stashed a copy of Eisenhower, the new CD by The Slip. This three-piece jam virtuoso band originates from Boston but have since moved to the Montreal area where they’ve forged alliances with Canada’s thriving indy rock scene (Broken Social Scene, The Dears, Metric, The Stars, etc.). I always considered The Slip a live band — on the basis of two spectacular shows at The Pepper Jack Cafe. This sort of music doesn’t usually translate well into the studio, but on Eisenhower, they’ve found the way, combining Lennonesque simplicity with multi-layered, grandiloquent stylings.  My wife — a Jann Arden fan —  even enjoys it, except of course, when they slip into those free-form jams ...  which is not too often, thankfully, on Eisenhower (Studio Plateau Records or theslip.com).

At work, I’m a sucker for acoustic guitar pickers. Canada has produced so many brilliant ones, all of whom  seem to send me their latest releases. (It’s much appreciated.) I just got triple-Juno winner Bill Bourne’s latest, Boon Tang (Cordova Bay Records, billbourne.com). Bourne is a world renowned folk-singer from Alberta who’s been on the road for almost 20 years. He has a songwriter’s appeal (a la early Bruce Cockburn), but mixes it up on Boon Tang with some Icelandic and near-eastern influences. Bourne’s done this by teaming up with a 23-year-old singing prodigy from the Faroe Islands, a Nordic archipelago somewhere northwest of Scotland in between Iceland and Norway. Her name is Eivor Palsdottir and, despite the Viking roots, her voice mourns for the desert sands and places even farther afoot, perhaps even India. With Bourne’s eerie slide arrangements, she takes the listener to other-world places on songs like The Terror Time. Just to keep things down to earth Bourne also covers Gordon Lightfoot’s For Lovin’ Me  (with mixed results) and Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry (masterfully). (Bourne will appear at the Lighthouse Festival Theatre in Port Dover this Saturday — March 10 — at 8 p.m.)

Slide to Freedom is an even less traditional guitar exploration has been released by British Columbia dobro master, Doug Cox in collaboration with Salil Bhatt and his father Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, creator of a  the mohan veena, a multi-stringed guitar-sitar hybrid. Canadian blues fans were introduced to the mohan veena a few years ago by B.C. guitarist Harry Manx, who studied with Vishwa Mohan Bhatt for several years in India before using it to play blues standards like Spoonful. Cox goes a few steps farther than Manx, bringing the Bhatts to Edmonton for a recording session with stellar tabla player Ramkumar Mishra. Cox’s resonator guitars, both steel and wooden, blend perfectly with the more mysterious eastern  instruments. Traditional blues fans will enjoy their winding takes on Mississippi John Hurt (Pay Day) and Blind Willie Johnson (Soul of a Man), but they may find the long stretches of instrumental jams tedious (I don’t, but my colleague Gary Curtis does).

Blending east with west and north with south is not something that is purely a North American trend. The world music album of the year is likely to be Aman Iman, Water Is Life by  Tinariwen, a group of Touareg nomads from the Sahara Desert. A lot of myth-making stuff has already been written about this band — how they sling Stratocasters over their backs next to Khalishnikovs while roaming the desert on camel back,  oasis to oasis, in search of truth, justice and the Algerian way (The Spectator ran a full page about them in the Discover, Saturday, March 3). The truth is that these guys grew up listening to tapes by Led Zeppelin and, I dare say, The Grateful Dead. They have a fine appreciation for the bass and guitar lines of classic American psychedelic rock and mix it well with the joyous desert music of their own culture. The lyrics, of course are totally foreign, but the music is more than vaguely familiar. When I hear track three on Water Is Life — something called Matajdem Yinmixan — I hear the guitar sound of Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods. This is the music Jerry Garcia was searching for in 1978 when he took The Grateful Dead to the Great Pyramid in Egypt to play two ill-fated concerts in the middle of a sand storm. Tinariwen rocks. Give them a test drive when Water Is Life is released in Canada on March 27 (outside-music.ca or tinariwen.com).

I started out talking about jazz, so it’s only fair I end off that way with the Toronto band, Autorickshaw and the new CD, So The Journey Goes (autorickshaw.ca). This is a tremendously talented Toronto band that blends the North American funk with the sounds of India. It features the wonderful jazz vocals of Suba Sankaran, who was trained in south Indian classical music but has a voice that could easily fit in with the Manhattan Transfer as she demonstrates on the title track of So the Journey Goes. There’s plenty of stuff on this CD that may be a little too Bollywood for western ears and a little too jazzy for friends of Indian classical music. When it works — as it does on Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire — it does it in grand style. Thanks for crossing the boundaries.

Cheers, Graham.

Graham Rockingham
Music Editor
The Hamilton Spectator
44 Frid St., Hamilton, Ont.,
L8N 3G3
T: 905-526-3331
F: 905-521-8986