A New Direction For Blue Rodeo

Backstage before the first of two packed houses at Calgary's Jubilee Auditorium, with more gray through the temples and wrinkles than you would expect of a heartthrob whose soaring falsetto elicits squeals of delight from the female members of the audience, Blue Rodeo's Jim Cuddy looks tired.

Dressed in a black leather jacket and worn jeans, with a cell phone that rings several times before we sit down, and then periodically throughout the interview, co-lead vocalist/guitarist Cuddy resembles not the energetic rock 'n' roller or occasional flirt he plays while onstage, nor the Canadian music legend (it's fair to say by now), as much as he does a guy with measured confidence, ready for yet another interview in another city he's played dozens of times.

"Pardon me," he says, reaching into his pocket for the ringing phone. "It's dinner time and it might be my family."

It's not, and Cuddy declines to answer, instead quickly engaging himself in a conversation on the latest chapter in the Blue Rodeo story, one that has the Toronto-based band going back beyond their beginning for their most recent musical move. After eight studio albums, a live double and the obligatory Greatest Hits collection, the band's ninth studio album, Palace of Gold, marks a fresh new direction.

Inspired in part by Cuddy's fascination with the history of the Memphis Stax label that served as home to such legends of Southern soul music as Sam & Dave, Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes, the band re-recorded the 1991 ballad "After the Rain" and included it and a cover of the Gibb brothers' "You Don't Know What It's Like" on 2001's Greatest Hits. In contrast to fuzz-tone electric ballads like "Side of the Road" and the kaleidoscopic rock of "Diamond Mine," both were nattily dressed up with horn and string sections and foreshadowed the group's newfound fixation on orchestrated sounds in rock 'n' roll. It's a clear departure for a band known less for its precision and more for its melding of melodic rock 'n' roll, Gram Parsons-style country-rock, and wild, voltage-dependent jams.

"The genesis of my interest in wanting to do this was reading the Rob Bowman book 'Soulsville U.S.A.' about the history of the Stax label," Cuddy said, clearly relishing the telling. "And I was smitten with the whole thing, not just the music aspect of it but the whole endeavor of following this music that you like and then buying a theatre and putting a record store in the front and just drawing from people that came into the store. I mean, with Stax, Booker T. [of Stax house band Booker T. & the MG's] came into the store for an audition. And I thought that we could apply this to ourselves. We're in a city that's a very fertile musical ground. They wouldn't have to be necessarily Canadian [artists] but that would have been the focus. But that was too much for everybody."

Instead, the rest of the band, which also includes co-lead vocalist/guitarist Greg Keelor, bassist Bazil Donovan, drummer Glenn Milchem, keyboardist James Gray and multi-instrumentalist Bob Egan, met Cuddy halfway. The band built a studio in downtown Toronto and, as the ongoing recording of Palace of Gold required outside musicians, Cuddy and Co. were able to draw, in true Stax fashion, from those in the immediate area.

"When we'd come to those points in the recording when we needed an arranger, instead of looking at Van Dyke Parks or Lee Hazelwood, we just said, 'Let's just see who is around here, and let's just keep trying to mine our own land,' and right down the line we found people we were totally happy with and could work with," Cuddy said.

Palace of Gold, like its supporting tour, weaves the four-piece Bushwack Horns (led by sax man and arranger Richard Underhill) into the wide-screen Blue Rodeo sound. The addition of horns to their live shows is epic in effect, allowing the band to add considerable musical punch and dramatics to standards like Keelor's hyper-romantic ballad "Lost Together" and the driven space-outs of "Girl in Green." The horns also lend intensity to the band's performance of songs like Cuddy's fiercest new rocker in ages, "Walk Like You Don't Mind" and Keelor's Burt Bacharach-influenced "What a Surprise."

Toronto-based Anne Lindsay arranges and plays with the Planet Soul Strings, who also appear on the record but are not on tour with the band. But considering where the band's interests currently lie, she may yet get her chance. According to Cuddy, the group is receiving such a valuable musical education — years after crafting some of the most powerful Canadian music yet put to record — it's safe to say there will be some sort of orchestrations and additional musicians on the next proper Blue Rodeo album.

"I think more and more [orchestrations] are where we are at as a band," he said. "The horns and strings inspire too many things for us to turn away from it. Of course, it's not something I decide but something the collective decides, and maybe everybody will decide to do a really stripped-down acoustic record next. But I would hope that what we'll do with the next album is move on with orchestrations, and of course that doesn't have to be soul. It could be full-orchestra orchestrations or just acoustic guitars and trumpets, or all kinds of duet possibilities.

"What we've learned from touring with the horns is a new range of instruments and what they can do," Cuddy said, leaning back in his chair. "We've had some shoegazing music in the past and we've had some long jams, but unlike [2000's concise, poppy] The Days in Between, we didn't want to distill the sound down on this record. The Days in Between was the end of something, the end of being a guitar band."

Blue Rodeo formed in 1984, from the ashes of the band The HiFi's, itself formed in 1977 by high-school friends Keelor and Cuddy. A name change to Fly to France and a move to explore the club scene in New York City only reinforced the viability of the then-thriving Toronto music scene. The two moved back, joined with bassist Donovan, since-departed keyboard player Bob Wiseman and drummer Cleave Anderson, and christened themselves Blue Rodeo.

The band's first album, 1986's Outskirts, gathered significant acclaim in Canada behind the strength of its songwriting and musical diversity (Elvis Costello meets Buffalo Springfield meets one of the earliest paragons of the sound that would be eventually be labeled alt.country), and spawned the hit single "Try." Blue Rodeo's sophomore album, Diamond Mine, followed in 1989 and revealed a band with a breadth of abilities and interests, and one that would spend the 1990s filling bars, theatres and arenas across Canada, all the while battling the notorious ambivalence of the U.S. radio industry. Keelor and Cuddy's insistence upon each singing their own songs (when they weren't harmonizing) split the face of the band — never an enabler of radio play when dealing with an enterprise like rigidly-formatted commercial radio.

The band scored huge Canadian hits with the albums Lost Together in 1992 and Five Days in July in 1994 and, arguably, hit an artistic peak with 1995's atmospheric, electrified Nowhere to Here before stumbling with the unfocused Tremolo in 1997. That same year Keelor issued his dead-quiet solo debut, Gone, which was followed in 1998 by Cuddy's All in Time. The relationship between the two leads, never free of friction, gathered much media play, and the imminent breakup of Blue Rodeo claimed more than its share of newsprint, but whether or not their relationship was actually unraveling was never entirely clear. At a festival in the late 1990s, a Cuddy spoken intro was interrupted by Keelor squawking "Get on with it" from the back of the stage. It was hard to tell if he was joking or not.

"I don't think the tension was overstated," Cuddy said, with no obvious signs of being annoyed to hear the topic come up again. "Greg and I have had a tumultuous relationship since we've been high-school friends. A lot of it has to do with this kind of antagonism that was always part of our friendship that we always relieved with humor, and you put that in a working relationship and it becomes difficult.

"But we're not the trouble spots in the band anymore," Cuddy said with a grin, declining to be more specific. "Greg and I long ago figured out many, many mechanisms by which we can settle our problems."

Keelor and Cuddy's musical compatibility has never been in question. From the opening notes of "Heart Like Mine" the first cut on Blue Rodeo's debut album, Keelor and Cuddy harmonize and Cuddy's pure, clean tones meld naturally with Keelor's coarser textures. And while Cuddy subsequently cut a path as the pretty-voiced balladeer of the group and Keelor that of a wandering mystic, those limiting roles were never sufficient to contain their individual artistic arcs.

Keelor, once the rock 'n' roll pulse of the band ("He used to be the ultimate entertainer, bopping around the stage," Cuddy said) has moved from a very stylized, affected method of songwriting and performing to the point where the new ballad "Stage Door," with its lamentation of life on the road and plaintive plea for "steel string guitar and a little weed and someone to keep me company," is more representative of his current situation than almost anything from his past catalogue. Or so one might suspect.

Cuddy too has grown as an artist. His writing, once clearly a cut below Keelor's, has sharpened over time, to the point where he can distill the essence of a relationship, create mood and ground a song with indelible imagery so seamlessly it's easy to take it for granted. From 1997's "Falling Down Blue": "She lived outside of the city/ On days when I'd visit her there/ I'd watch her out dancing/ All lit by the moon/ Cold winds of time in her hair/ Then we'd go driving for hours/ Turn off the lights and just glide/ Moving like spirits along through the night/ Light through the trees as our guide."

"There was certainly a point in time," Cuddy said with a meticulousness that suggests much thought has gone into this topic in the past, "where I realized I did not want to be as opaque as I had been in my songwriting. I think that I had been satisfied with creating an impression with little bits of narrative that created some impression of a story, and I was tired of that, and I wondered if I couldn't do it, if I couldn't write a narrative song. That was sort of where '5 Days in May' came from."

Cuddy's dissatisfaction with his own approach back in the early 1990s directly mirrors the band's current restlessness. The thought of returning to the standard Blue Rodeo lineup with a much more aggressive guitar-and-organ attack leaves Cuddy cold ("I don't know if we could get it up for that right now"). And even if the crowd that leaves the Jubilee Auditorium this November eve is still coming to terms with the new Blue Rodeo, there is little doubt, judging by Cuddy thrashing about the stage, pumping his arm in time with the horn lines, and Keelor, dancing in place and matching every brass note with one from his Gibson electric, that the band is energized by this new direction and committed to following it all down the line. — Ryan DeGama [Monday, Dec. 23, 2002]