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♪♪♪
The winner of the Juno, Blue Rodeo.
Blue Rodeo!
♪ Never thought this could happen ♪
♪ But somehow... ♪
Blue Rodeo! Yeah!
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Blue Rodeo!
Here they are, Blue Rodeo, live, right here.
♪♪♪
♪ You got sick of the pattern ♪
♪ And I got lost in this song ♪
Let's get 'er now!
When I was in my 20s,
I loathed them, and now that I'm in my 40s,
I don't know what I would do without them.
♪♪♪
♪ Hey hey, I guess it hasn't hit me yet ♪
♪ Fell through this crack and I kinda lost my head ♪
♪ I stand transfixed before this streetlight ♪
♪ Watching the snowfall on this cold ♪
♪ December night ♪
♪♪♪
You've been beautiful, thank you very much.
Thank you all very much!
You've been amazing, thank you. Good night.
Two, three, four.
♪♪♪
♪ Strange and beautiful are the stars tonight ♪
♪ That dance around your head ♪
♪ In your eyes I see that perfect world ♪
♪ Hope that doesn't sound too weird ♪
♪♪♪
♪ I want all the world to know ♪
♪ That your love's all I need ♪
♪ All that I need ♪
♪ And if we're lost ♪
♪ Then we are lost together ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Yeah, and if we're lost ♪
♪ Then we are lost together ♪
♪♪♪
Okay, ready to go?
Yeah.
Greg Keelor tribute video, take one.
Well, our first actual meeting was a bit of a confrontation.
We were both jocks, and we met on a football field
where I was a defensive end and he was a quarterback.
He was throwing the ball and I was on his blindside,
and just as he was about to let go, I creamed him.
Everybody liked to see the quarterback get it.
Yeah.
A friend of ours died in a car accident, David Soper.
At that age, 16, 17,
you had a total loss of how to react,
and how to be with each other.
And we were sitting in Jim's mother's house,
and there was a beautiful parlour piano in there,
and Jim sat down at the piano and he wrote a song
for David Soper.
And we're all just, like, dumbfounded.
And I had never heard Jim sing before.
I didn't know that he was musical at all.
It was just like such a shock.
And the same voice that he sang that day with
is the same voice he sings every day with.
He had that voice from the moment he started singing.
It's just an incredible instrument
that he was born with.
I kept all my musical stuff very private.
Because it was very embarrassing at that age.
I can tell you that, you know,
we kind of dabbled in music a little bit
because we were around music all the time.
But when I finished university in the spring of '78,
you very kindly came to pick me up,
put all this stuff in, and we're driving back.
And I was saying to you that I was going
to devote a year to music.
And you said, "Why don't we get a band?"
And I said yes.
And we've honestly had a band together
ever since that moment.
♪ You never please me, you try to tease me ♪
♪ I know you're always there ♪
♪ I do ♪
♪ Love you ♪
♪ I do ♪
♪♪♪
Forty years, you know what I mean, in a nutshell.
Well, that's sort of impossible.
That's why we're making a documentary.
But a nutshell, two guys meet in high school,
they discover a shared musical intent and vibration
and started writing songs that took us traveling
around North America.
Greg and I are living in New York,
and we would meet other Torontonians in New York,
and they'd come back, people would come back and forth,
talk about, "I met Jim and Greg down there.
They got a band, they're playing CBGB's."
"CBGB's. Oh my God."
The Demics had that song, "I Want to go to New York City,
they tell me it's the place to be."
♪ I wanna go to New York City ♪
♪ 'Cause they tell me it's the place to be ♪
♪ Ah, I wanna go to New York City ♪
♪ I just know that it's the place for me, yeah ♪
It's a time in music when bands
did a lot of different genres.
So we would play ska, we played a little reggae,
we played pop, and we've been in this band,
Fly to France.
♪ She sees the world through rose-coloured glasses ♪
♪♪♪
And we were tired of doing that.
It didn't, wasn't that natural for us.
We were seeing in New York
a kind of a neo-country movement,
where a lot of rock musicians were playing country music,
but very differently.
We finally came back to Toronto in '84
and started Blue Rodeo.
We were shocked at what was happening on Queen Street,
and it was all because of Handsome Ned.
When Handsome Ned arrived on the scene,
he brought that kind of revved up country music.
♪ And tongue tied Jill ♪
♪ Move over, Miss Ellen, Run-around Sue ♪
♪♪♪
He had reinvented himself as a cowboy,
and he was doing this high, lonesome music,
and he's created a neo-country roots scene,
and everybody starts coming out
and forming bands that, that are doing that,
either rockabilly bands or country bands.
'Cause when we had left in '81,
it was dead.
And we come back to a scene that's,
that's already happening, the Horseshoe,
the Rivoli, the Cameron.
So it was not the old country crowd.
This was a much younger, hipper crowd.
It was a time when college students were experiencing
for the first time Canadian bands that they liked
and that were a reflection of their own lives.
When we came back from New York,
we knew what kind of band we wanted to be.
They said they had a name, Blue Rodeo,
and they'd been playing in New York,
and that they thought I might work.
And I said, you know, "You guys seem kind of serious."
And I said, "I got a kid now,"
and I was, already had like 10 or 12 years as a postman.
I said, "I don't really think I'm gonna to be
what you guys need because you probably want
to go on the road and all that sort of stuff."
So they said, "Oh Cleave, just do it as long as you want.
You know, you're not the only drummer in the world.
You know, we'll find somebody when you can't do it anymore."
I said, "Great. That sounds fantastic."
We put an ad in Now Magazine.
"If you dropped acid twenty times,
you lost two or three years to booze and looking good,
and you can still keep time, call Jim or Greg."
And then Bazil answers that ad,
calls my house, gets my wife,
who doesn't want to take, even take a message.
"So just call back, he'll come back another time,"
just, and Bazil says, "Please, just take my number."
And they phoned me, said, "Are you Bazil from the Sharks?"
I said, "Yeah."
Says, "Hey, Cleave's our drummer,
we're the guys from the Hi-Fi's.
Can you rehearse tomorrow?"
And as soon as we got with Cleave and Bazil,
we knew we were good.
I think we'd only rehearsed twice, but we were a band.
It's not country, it's not this, it's not that.
It's just a collection of the individuals in the band.
You know, and what we've listened to over the years,
and that sort of thing.
Do you think a lot of people are getting into this country music
because of fashion?
I'll answer that one!
Okay.
I think it's very honest music,
and it's very rock and roll.
And I think that people are really interested
in rock and roll again.
And it's a very good way for original bands
to get their thing across.
They can talk about whatever they want,
whatever issues they want to talk about,
and it's packaged in a very easy to digest form,
which is kind of country rock-ish.
People are digging that again.
I just thought they'd be good guys to work with,
that they were funny and interesting,
and kind of different than most people.
They had a quality that was captivating.
Then one day, we were leaving rehearsal
and Greg said, "Do you guys like keyboards?"
I think I was like, "Well, what do we want
a keyboard player for?"
And the next day, we showed up,
and Bobby was all set up.
I'm on my way to the first rehearsal,
I remember thinking, I'm assuming I can do this
and it'll work, but they also might find me way too weird,
like the way, the stuff that I do, pianistically,
and that I've been doing at music school.
Like, it's just dawned on me that like,
oh, this actually might be a train wreck.
But from as soon as we started in the rehearsal space,
it was, it was awesome.
And Bobby had the most beat up old Ace Tone organ
from the '60s.
It was that real cheap organ sound.
And immediately it felt good.
♪♪♪
And it was just like, oh my God, like Bobby is a virtuoso.
I told Jim, I said, this guy is fantastic.
He was kind of considered the wild man
on keyboards.
He'd hang from the pipes of the Horseshoe
by his hands, and play with his feet,
and he used to hit that with drumsticks
and roll an orange up and down it to go, brrrr, you know?
Like all sorts of crazy stuff
that would get people's attention.
You know, a lot of reviews would talk about
the crazy guy on keyboards.
And Bobby projected the crazy genius vibe.
Like, he definitely, there was something going on there
that wasn't, he was getting different frequencies
than the rest of us, and that was kind of exciting for people.
But I came from a different place
of experimentation. What was really unique
was that I'm a guy playing that kind of music
that would, like, really kind of happen more in art galleries.
It was really quite a lot of fun to try and straddle
that space between melodicism and dissonance
in the context of being a pop band.
When Bobby joined and added keyboards,
that expanded to the sound that we had wanted to have.
And we had a couple more rehearsals,
and then we said, "Okay, we're ready to play."
And we did our first gig at the Rivoli on February 8th of '85.
Our first gig at the Rivoli was sold out,
and we were shocked because that had not happened to us before.
♪ You were never the same way twice ♪
♪ I'm falling in love ♪
So we're playing the Rivoli,
to a full house, and we played "Try."
No one had heard the song, I think, before.
They started applauding.
And I remember, the first time Jim hits
the falsetto part in "Try," the whole room levitated.
And I've actually never experienced that before.
The whole crowd just went, whoo!
There was an audible gasp in the audience.
♪♪♪
♪ Try ♪
♪ Oh baby, try ♪
♪ Oh, try ♪
We're very satisfied starting to build an audience
and not having anything to do with getting a record contract.
Nobody in those days thought we were ever going to get signed.
You know, you know, these people aren't interested in us,
they're interested in hard rock bands.
That was the Van Halen days, hard rock with hair bands,
that's what got signed.
We were really enjoying playing to full houses.
And the audiences kept, just kept getting bigger.
So we were filling in every club we played.
♪♪♪
We were now playing in bars
that were super jam packed.
Being a successful bar band felt pretty good.
And all of a sudden, we're making a living
from traveling around southern Ontario playing bars.
We all had other jobs, you know.
I had another job, and it was a really good balance.
The publicist up at Warner Brothers,
Joanne Keating, she was a huge fan of the band.
Bob Roper, we had already sent him a tape,
the A&R guy, and he had rejected the band,
saying that they were hiring different,
heavier types of music.
So we thought, okay, we don't have a chance.
But Joanne Keating, she kept on pressing,
and pressing and pressing.
Blue Rodeo got on my radar because it was placed
on my radar by Joanne Keating, my assistant at the time,
and she was active on the Queen Street scene.
And she came and told us about this amazing band,
Blue Rodeo, and that we had to go and see them.
And she'd say, "I'm going to The Horseshoe
to see Blue Rodeo.
They're the coolest thing on Queen Street."
So with Blue Rodeo, it was, they're amazing,
but, I don't know if this will get on the radio.
She kept badgering Bob all through that summer,
and I think he finally acquiesced with, "Well, okay."
Well, finally, by the time he got around to seeing us,
we were so popular, the place was packed
and he couldn't get in.
So he came to see us, and we had to sneak him
in the back door.
And miraculously, we got a deal.
And little did I know that I'd be playing with those guys
for the rest of my life.
♪ Night after night, yeah ♪
♪ I know I should leave but there's something ♪
♪ Yeah, yeah, day after day ♪
♪ After day, after day ♪
♪ And I don't know why ♪
Okay, we can go.
Go ahead, Bazil.
Such a maze
But we got the tempo for that.
Okay.
There we go.
One, two,
one, two, three, four.
♪ Don't tell me I'm wrong ♪
♪ Because I've been watching every move that you make ♪
♪ Hearts you steal, in your makeup and heels ♪
♪ Trouble for the men that you take ♪
♪ Every time you walk in the room ♪
♪ I couldn't ever be sure of a smile ♪
♪ You were never the same way twice ♪
♪ Falling in love, night after night ♪
♪ It's crazy, ooh ♪
Two things that I've always wanted to do in my life --
they happened both on January 8th, 1987.
Devon was born, and that was the first day
we were recording "Outskirts."
Going into RCA Studios on Merton with Terry Brown,
it was a little mind blowing, you know,
because it was a big time studio.
We were very ambitious,
and we wanted to make a big time record.
His credentials would not have been the kind of music
that we were trying to play.
But he was very enthusiastic,
and he knew what he wanted to do.
We wanted to make something that was us,
and different from what a lot of the music was.
Especially in those days,
it really was a hair metal landscape in the music scene.
There was nothing like us.
I was thrilled to be in a major studio,
recording a record.
To me, my dream had come true.
Terry did an amazing job of sculpting our sound,
to rein it in a bit, and make it more accessible
to a larger audience.
If we would have been on our own,
it would have been a little looser
and rambunctious, maybe.
The first time I saw them, I think, was at The Horseshoe.
The musicianship I thought was great.
Greg's earthiness and Jim's sweetness
worked so well together.
I thought they were very exciting and visceral.
But obviously that changes when you go into the studio.
So it was, it was a little more difficult than I imagined.
We were guided through the record by Terry.
Terry was very kindly authoritarian.
We did what he said, and that's the way we thought
records were made.
He got his way.
That is his record, and there's no arguing
with how successful it was.
Terry didn't really get the whole retro thing at the time.
Him and Greg, they didn't see eye to eye.
Greg had, like, rockabilly sensibilities.
He really loved the Dwight Yoakam record,
so he wanted things to go a little more country and twangy.
But, you know, those are amazing sounding records to me.
And I love '60s from England,
and '70s from California.
I like that sound.
And he kept saying that, you know,
"We're making a record in the '80s, right, Greg?"
Greg would say, "Yeah, but I want it to sound
like it's 1969."
Bobby had a style that was going to be difficult
to contain on record.
He was a consummate musician,
and into the avant garde,
but he knew how to have fun.
You know, he was a huge addition to the sound of the band.
We were cutting "Piranha Pool."
There was a little bit of an edge there between us.
Oh yeah, they locked horns.
Bobby just wanted to do his own thing.
At some point, he took a pair of drumsticks
and started crashing on this beautiful Steinway
at the studio, and I kind of lost my cool,
and let him have it.
I was shocked, I've never seen a piano treated that way.
Well, I, you know, people like me did things like that.
That insinuates taking drum sticks to a grand piano
like it's not really my style.
That could like, that could destroy things.
It might have seemed like an attack
to an English gentleman,
but yeah, Bobby would have just been improvising something.
When we were putting the record out to radio,
we put "Outskirts" out first.
♪♪♪
Warner put that record out,
but they didn't have a lot of hope for it.
I think in everybody's mind, "Try" was a slam dunk.
Where we didn't have confidence was the first single,
which was the title track from "Outskirts."
♪ Here on the outskirts of life ♪
♪♪♪
The "Outskirts," the single, was not picked up
by a single radio station in Canada.
So we were taken out for lunch --
no, it might even have been snacks --
by somebody who was actually part of the jazz department.
And told us that our record wasn't doing very well,
and we probably wouldn't be making another one.
And he basically told us, you know,
"You've sold 5,000 records,"
which we thought, whoa, that's fantastic.
He said, "If it doesn't pick up, we're going to drop you."
Whoa, okay. I mean, you know,
we didn't have any skin in the game, really.
♪ Of your life ♪
♪♪♪
So "Outskirts" was a dud.
You know, radio wouldn't touch it.
But the weird thing in all this was so was "Try."
"Try" was a dud.
And we couldn't believe it.
You know, I know around the building,
people were thinking if we can't get "Try" on the radio,
what can we get on the radio out of this band?
I mean, the record company by this point had no,
they thought this is over.
So we were having a lot of trouble.
It was sort of going down the tubes.
♪♪♪
So in the mid '80s,
MuchMusic was really finding its groove.
Like, it was a huge time for popular music, you know,
it was, it was Madonna, "Like a Virgin,"
it was Wham!
It was, you know, David Bowie and Mick Jagger,
"Dancing in the Streets."
Like big, huge productions, big hair, big budgets.
It was full on.
And like MuchMusic was remarkable at the beginning,
and I think it's under celebrated.
You know, you could actually go to MuchMusic
and hand them a cassette, and if they liked it,
it would end up on air.
The magic sauce in "Try" was a fellow
by the name of John Martin, who ran MuchMusic at the time.
Blue Rodeo did a video for "Try,"
and it wasn't added yet at MuchMusic.
But Dave Tollington took John Martin out for a beer.
John came back, looked at the video again,
and put it smack into heavy rotation on MuchMusic.
Now, this was unheard of at the time
because we had a music committee
who was going through hundreds of videos,
and suddenly "Try" is out there being played alongside,
you know, those huge acts like Phil Collins,
and Michael Jackson, and Whitney Houston.
♪ Oh, it's crazy ♪
John hated the video, but he loved the song.
It was his favourite song that summer.
And he knew that radio wasn't touching it,
that he was the lone guy in the entire country
hammering this thing, and he wanted to prove a point
that MuchMusic could sell records on their own.
It hit a critical mass, and we never looked back,
and neither did the band.
I mean, it just took off like a rocket.
♪ Oh, you got to try ♪
♪ Try ♪
In many ways, MuchMusic really had a very fundamental role
in Blue Rodeo's success.
I don't think that we really understood
how our lives were changing because of the success
of that single.
Because the song was so great,
didn't hurt that they heard that they had
a handsome lead singer.
And you know, Jim can still hit that note today.
"Try"
♪ Oh, baby, you try ♪
♪ Oh, try ♪
♪ Ooh ♪
♪♪♪
The many looks of Greg and Jim.
Oh, oh dear.
Oh boy.
Yeah.
I'm sure glad you're all here for this.
Yeah.
Couple of desperate dudes.
Jim Cuddy, this is your life.
What makes Blue Rodeo fascinating artistically
are these two very distinct voices.
Different style songwriters, different vocals,
different performance,
I mean, and yet really complementary.
And Jim and Greg have so much respect for each other
that it's really foundational.
They're very different, and yet they make a whole.
You could see that there was a real partnership there,
but they were a little sort of oil and water.
Maybe, you know, for Jim, who was at private school
and had a lot of sports friends, to have this interesting,
creative, alternative thinking guy
would have been interesting for him.
They're both practical and together,
they're really good.
And I think that's just really compelling.
I think Greg being out here, pushing some boundaries,
is exciting for Jim, and maybe for Greg,
having a little form that Jim has balances him out.
Because they talk to each other,
and really listen to each other,
and create something that is stronger
than the individual idea.
Their voices together create something beautiful.
Their harmonies are gorgeous,
like in a, in that special way,
and I think that solves a lot of arguments.
I know it's cliche, but they're like brothers.
They are, they had each other's back, that's for sure.
Since high school, they've been inseparable.
There's Tom Brady playing with us.
♪ And our love shines ♪
♪ Like a diamond mine ♪
For "Diamond Mine," we wanted to do something
completely different.
We did the studio with Terry Brown,
and that was all fancy,
but I think Jim and I have that sort of contrarian gene in us.
Even though we really appreciated what he did,
we just didn't want to do that again.
We didn't really like someone telling us what to do.
♪ You say the party's over ♪
♪ But like a drunken fool, I never know when to leave ♪
♪ It's just that in the eyes ♪
The choices we made for "Diamond Mine"
were a reaction to having made "Outskirts."
After the making of "Outskirts,"
we felt that wanted to show a little bit more
of our improvisational side,
and we had a lot of songs, and we wanted a bigger,
messier live record.
They found a, an abandoned movie theater
up on Donlands Avenue.
It was a construction site, and there was no heat.
It was freezing.
We parked the truck out back for a month
and cut the record up there.
And we would mostly set the band up on the floor,
no headphones, playing with monitors,
just the way they would at a rehearsal.
And it puts the onus on the band to play really well.
And, you know, they were playing 100 nights a year at that point,
they were a really tight band.
It was like the Beatles coming back from Hamburg or something.
It felt like a healthy process for us.
It felt very musical without the structure around us.
It felt liberating.
A lot of what people did like on "Diamond Mine"
was it gave Bobby a chance to spread his wings,
and to show that jazzy, avant garde side of the band.
I mean, that's like they really did feel
like sort of that seal of like, coolness.
And it was sort of like another improvisational game to me,
to kind of explore what I could do to surprise myself.
It would be a point of a lot of excitement for me to do that.
I think that album captured the essence of the band
better than some of the studio work they did
because they are such a strong live act.
♪ Let it shine ♪
♪ Like a diamond mine ♪
I love that record.
It was the only way we could have done it.
That wasn't my favorite record to make.
It was really cold in there,
and for the life of me at the time,
I couldn't understand why we were making a record
in a place that was freezing.
Like, couldn't we afford the heat?
But we did it long enough until it got so cold
that we decided okay, well, why don't we go
to New Orleans and finish this?
It was very free form.
I mean, I think every record has been a reaction
to something that happened before it.
We went out one day into the French Quarter.
Cleave said, "My time is up for my leave of absence.
I took the leave of absence from the post office for a year."
Our manager was down there, John Katon,
and he drove me back to the airport.
He gave me the sudden ultimatum, or he says, you know,
"Cleave, we're going to be on the road,
we're getting, you know, serious.
And you know, you're going to have to quit your postie job.
This is the second album, we're going to do lots of touring."
He said, "You don't have to tell me now."
He said, "I'll call you in a couple days."
And I went home. I didn't really have to think about it too much.
I just didn't want to be on the road all the time.
He says, "I've got a pension at the post office,
and I've got two kids, and I can't give up
a sure thing like that.
What about five years from now, when this is over,
then what do I do?"
You know, I often miss some of the...
some of the experiences I would have had,
but yeah, it wasn't a hard decision really,
for me to make, you know?
The damn guys didn't have to get so popular,
make it look shitty on me. But, uh...
Oh, I admired Cleave leaving.
I mean, it was a real cool story,
to the extent it was a story in Canada at the time,
that the drummer in this band is a mailman,
and they got a record deal,
and he's quitting because he doesn't want to leave his job
because he's got kids.
And that was heartbreaking because when you've got
something that's unique and neat,
you don't want to mess with it.
You know, they always say, like, you change one member,
it's not the same anymore.
The funny thing about Cleave
is when he finally retired from the post office,
he phoned me up and he said,
"I just retired. So, tell Glenn thanks."
For holding my place, but I'm, I'm coming back now.
For filling in for him.
For 20 years.
We got our first major American tour after he left the band,
where we went out for a long period of time.
Now the focus was on making our mark internationally,
as opposed to making our mark only in Canada.
♪♪♪
♪ You can live in the house ♪
♪ And I will find a little place ♪
♪ Around the corner ♪
♪ Oh-oh ♪
♪ Trouble comes from the strangest quarters ♪
♪ It snuck up on us now ♪
♪ Without a warning ♪
♪ Oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh ♪
♪♪♪
The songwriting is one of the great inspirations
of my life,
and when the God of songwriting shines its light upon me,
I'm just in the happiest place that I could imagine being.
It is one of the most pleasant, calming things I do in my life.
Songs are like little miracles, you know,
the way they fall into place.
I know everybody writes songs in their own way.
You know, from my experience of working together,
Jim's songs generally come in quite formed.
Lyrics, done. Melodies, chords, everything is there.
He's much more constructed when he comes in.
Greg comes in a lot of times with very sort of raw ideas.
So the process can be a little bit more unknown.
There's a lot more potential for, you know,
kind of going around, and around, and around
to figure out where he feels he wants the song to go.
You know, and I don't know if Barry Manilow
would agree with me, but they feel like they come
from somewhere else,
and you got to get your antenna up,
and just sort of let the songs come through you.
They've charted their life through songwriting,
and they bring their audience along
through those passages.
And they've all dealt with broken hearts,
death, birth.
The process of songwriting is sitting with a guitar
like I've been doing since I was ten years old,
and playing til I find something interesting,
and then that suggests a song.
Songwriters have an aptitude to marry melody and story,
and I'm not sure if everyone can describe where it comes from.
You know, writing a song is like unwrapping a present,
and that's a sort of sweet metaphor for the joy
and the surprise that comes with songs.
It's the, it's the fuel for a band.
Jim and I realized that to keep the band going,
you got to have songs.
There's a couple of clunkers in there.
They're still your children.
I remember seeing the interaction,
the relationship between Jim and Greg.
There was some weird friction there, like brothers.
But I think a lot of times, out of friction
comes that creative spark.
I think that there is a subtle competition between us,
the same way that many brothers
have the sort of emotional entanglements.
I think Jim competes more than I do.
It came naturally to me, and it was a little harder for him.
That's a joke. I was putting that in to bug him.
I don't think we compete as songwriters,
but we push each other.
You know, if Greg has a particularly fertile time,
and he's writing a whole bunch of songs,
I think, oh my God, I better get going.
They used to write together, but they write separately now.
And then they come in, and the band will play around
what they've written and complete the song.
Jim's going to hate me for this.
I once told him this as a joke.
I mean, here's a guy who was quarterback
on the football team,
married the beautiful wife,
and I said, "You, you have no right to write sad songs."
He didn't laugh.
I don't think Paul McCartney would have been
Paul McCartney without John Lennon, and vice versa.
It took the two of them to be the Beatles.
But together there was a magic
that was bigger than the two of them.
♪♪♪
Yeah, I've often asked myself that.
Why do you ask that question?
Well, I think it's, I asked him to ask that question.
I want to know.
I have no idea why that is, but we were heavily,
Lennon/McCartney influenced. And I think if --
But that's alphabetical.
Keelor/Cuddy's not.
You bullied me in it, just admit it.
And even though you do point out that, rightly,
that it's alphabetic, the personalities of Lennon
suited me more, and McCartney him, right?
Where I'm a little more loose, and not as focused and,
but can write some okay stuff,
Jim is more of a music machine,
and in the same way that McCartney shows in that,
in the "Get Back," he's a bit of the engine to the band.
You know, and they all sort of tag along.
But it never bothered me one way or another.
And, you know, early on we decided
it'd be just easier if we tagged everything
with the same ownership.
And that's a Beatle hangover, too.
Yeah, but don't you think Keelor/Cuddy sounds better?
Like, I think that's why, I mean,
it never bothered me one way or another,
but Cuddy/Keelor doesn't sound right.
Yeah, Cuddy/Keelor sounds like farm equipment.
♪♪♪
After "Diamond Mine" was sprawling and, you know,
like a suitcase with clothes hanging out of the side
when you close it,
we wanted to have a more concise record.
Well, "Casino" was a concerted effort
to try and break the band in the States.
I hate to use the term "clean it up,"
but maybe the songs were a little shorter,
there weren't as many excursions into Bob Wiseman land.
We went down to Hollywood to Studio B,
and Capital Studios, and Frank and Dino,
and the Beach Boys, it was just fantastic.
Pete Anderson was our producer,
and he has had hit records with Dwight Yoakam,
and he planned on having a few with us.
Pete's approach was different because he didn't want
to waste his time on stuff that he didn't think
was going to get on the radio.
The challenge to me is, whoever I work with,
is let's make an aggressive record
that we can get on the radio without losing the band,
without losing their identity.
Pete was not a fan of the improvisational side
of Bobby Weisman, and really tried to contain it.
Pete Anderson did not go for Bobby's weird outside,
as he called it.
Bobby played in a style that, just, Pete just didn't get.
And he called it, "the wacky stuff."
He says to us, "What you need is,
you just need a keyboard player,"
and then get Bobby to just put the wacky stuff on.
It was really, it was really traumatic for me.
So by that point, that record,
I wasn't really present.
So although we made, I think, a good record,
I think it was also a bit crushing.
You watch the video for "Till I am Myself,"
Bobby is definitely somewhere else,
because Bobby is absolutely without expression.
He just...
♪ 'Til I am myself ♪
♪ 'Til I am myself again ♪
♪♪♪
"Casino," there are songs on that record
that are such popular songs in our catalog,
and yet it was not a successful record for us at that time.
To have a real hit in America,
when you're already a legend in your home country,
means that a lot of things have to align.
It's timing, its chemistry, its money.
It's the eve of the release of the brand new
Blue Rodeo record. This is a record called "Casino,"
which is why a lot of people
are going to be gambling tonight.
And then there's probably a little, tiny other gamble
that's going on as to whether or not this is the record
that's going to launch Blue Rodeo in the United States.
Was produced by Pete Anderson.
It's a lot more, shall we say, radio accessible.
A leaned down, stripped down version
of what we love best about Blue Rodeo,
which is great melodies, and killer harmonies.
♪♪♪
♪ I want to know where my confidence went ♪
♪ One day it all disappeared ♪
♪ And I'm lying in a hotel room miles away ♪
♪ Voices next door in my ear ♪
We're on tour down in America,
we get the call we're doing The Tonight Show.
Now what, up until that point, Jim and I had alternated,
and he'd sing a song on TV, I'd sing a song on TV.
The record company wanted us to do "After the Rain,"
but it was my turn.
So I had a little hissy.
Greg has this idea that in order to have the guitar
up where we want it, I have to play really loud.
He does that in soundcheck,
and we're in separate dressing rooms,
and I get a call from our management saying,
"The Tonight Show has called me and said,
'You need to tell the guitar player
to turn his guitar down."
I played so loud at soundcheck
that they took me out of the mix.
They just turned me off.
♪ Oh, one day ♪
♪ When you discover ♪
There's a certain point where you realize
you cannot influence your partner's behavior.
But yeah, it was, it was so much fun.
Even though I was having a hissy.
I like having a hissy at The Tonight Show.
♪♪♪
One of the great tools in the Blue Rodeo tool kit
was the constant touring.
♪ Oh, if I had my way ♪
♪ I would never go back ♪
♪♪♪
♪ With my back to the wall, just let myself fall ♪
♪ Watch the daytimes turn black ♪
♪ But now and again I find ♪
♪ You cross my mind ♪
Unfortunately for me, that was sort of the beginning
of my really bad troubles.
So, that just ushers in a very bad phase for me.
♪ Oh, if I was a train ♪
♪ I would never slow down ♪
For us, we never really had breaks.
We would put a record out, and we would tour that record
for probably a year, year and a half.
Then we would start doing demos for our next record.
We didn't take long periods of time off.
♪ As I write one more letter to you ♪
♪ No, I can't change the things that I do ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa ♪
♪ One day, when you discover ♪
♪ Just why I ran ♪
♪ Ran away from you, lover ♪
♪ Well, I know I'm to blame ♪
♪ Feel so ashamed ♪
♪ Called out your name ♪
♪ Oh, after the rain ♪
♪♪♪
We were on the road all the time.
There was constant touring.
Like I remember one time doing a coast to coast run
in Canada, and it was over,
and we had one day off before we started
the American tour.
You know, we were up to about 250 shows a year
for a few years. It was too much.
Well, it took a toll on our emotional lives at home.
By the end of the "Casino" tour,
there's lots of people having trouble
with their relationships.
You know, I know that Jim had trouble,
Greg had changed partners as well.
We were gone a long time.
I had a girlfriend when I left for tour,
and by the time I came back,
she was dating her roommate.
By the time '90 rolls around,
we've been doing it for a long time.
That's the most turbulent part of my marriage.
We had two kids quite quickly,
my father passed away unexpectedly,
and Jim was gone and touring a lot.
And we really couldn't afford a babysitter at this point,
and I felt like I was going to implode.
And finally I just said, don't come home. I'm done.
♪♪♪
Rena and I are at the breaking point.
So I think that Rena actually did not want
to stay married to me.
We are not really talking, and I come home
to what I think is going to be our arrangement to split up.
♪ I walked you to the corner ♪
♪ Stood beside the bus ♪
♪ And the tears rolled on our faces ♪
♪ As the driver stared at us ♪
♪ Typical summer ♪
♪ That time of year when you go back to Toronto ♪
♪ And I stay here ♪
♪ I miss the way you wake up ♪
♪ And the way that you sigh ♪
♪ And I miss the way you turn your head away ♪
♪ When you cry ♪
♪ I don't think this time will fly ♪
♪ Here comes ♪
♪ Sad nights again ♪
♪ And here comes ♪
♪ Sad nights again ♪
♪♪♪
You know that song, so I wrote that song for Rena,
I wrote a lot, I've written a lot of songs for Rena.
She doesn't like the fact she takes the bus home.
She said, "I never took a bus home."
♪♪♪
♪ Summer girls, they sure are fun ♪
♪ Get so golden in the sun ♪
♪ That they could block out any other thought ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Dry your eyes and turn away ♪
♪ Because there's nothing we can't say ♪
♪ 'Cause we were never meant to talk a lot ♪
Blue Rodeo is beloved by Canadians,
and it's the connection with the audience
that, that is consistent wherever they play.
When "Outskirts" was released, we were seven years old.
We were, we were, we were kids,
and not yet in control of, like, what our musical,
you know, influences or experiences were going to be.
We were really relying obviously on our parents.
And I think, you know, it doesn't,
it didn't stand out to me then as much,
but the difference between Jim and Greg's voices.
And as I've gone back and revisited,
and sort of re-fallen in love with Blue Rodeo.
I hate to tell Jim this, but I'm, I'm a Greg.
I'm a Greg, voice person.
Damn!
I'm just being honest! I'm just being honest.
The music sounds -- if somebody said to me --
in fact, years ago my manager said, I said,
"I want you to hear this band,"
and she fell in love with Blue Rodeo.
And 'cause she was sort of a little country,
she was a little this, she's a little that,
she said, "Is that, is that Canada?"
And I said, "You know what? Yeah.
Whatever you're responding to is Canada."
When I think of Blue Rodeo,
the first thing that pops into my head is,
we started to be allowed to have co-ed parties
at our house when we were 12.
And we would like, listen to our parents' music
at these parties.
And I slow danced with my boyfriend, Bobby,
to like, "Five Days in May" and "Hasn't Hit Me Yet."
Like, I have like this memory.
And then the next year, he and I put on those songs
because he was like, "These are our songs."
Like, he'd remembered that we danced to them
the year before.
Like, it's so sweet on his side of things
that he had, like, he thought we had songs,
and it's cringe for me because I'm like, so gay.
So it was like, for me, it was like,
"Oh God, I got to dance with Bobby again!" you know?
I think just that openness, and that inclusiveness
that they showed me early on,
they're like that with everybody,
and there's not a lot of airs with either of them.
They're just good, solid guys.
The other day, I posted on social media
asking people what moves them about Blue Rodeo,
and it went viral.
Sarah Dundas wrote: "They came on our first date with us.
They were with us for our worst break ups.
They are a part of our lives."
This one is from Nola Simon:
"It's the emotion and the relatability of the songs,
along with tiny little Canadian details sprinkled in."
From David Andrew Rosenberg:
"Honesty, integrity, authenticity in every molecule
of this band. And that is why we love you."
The band. Not you, David.
♪ When summer's gone, ooh ♪
♪♪♪
It felt like we'd been on the road forever.
And we were playing in a suburb of Detroit,
and it was some sort of rib festival
because we did a lot of rib festivals in those days.
And it was of the most pathetic gigs we had ever played.
We were, there was this, we were on this side of a canal.
Oh, that's right.
And then on the other side were the rib fest people
who were, you know, barely knew we were there.
And so a few times big boats came down the canal,
and so they couldn't hear us, or see us,
for an extended period of time.
So it just seemed so useless.
And after a certain point of touring in America,
we were sick of it.
And the chorus came quickly that night to me
because it, just, well, if we're lost,
at least we're lost together.
Two, three, four.
♪♪♪
I remember Greg coming in with "Lost Together,"
coming on the bus saying, "I got this song,"
and he started singing the chorus.
And we were, we actually kind of made a joke of it.
And I remember making fun of him in the bus.
I don't know whether it was too tender,
or I can't remember why.
And he was definitely offended,
and I felt bad for doing it.
They thought it was too sentimental.
Because it was such a singsong type thing, you know?
But then when we rehearsed it, we realized,
no, no, this is actually a good song, you know,
because we, we heard him singing the chorus
over and over in the back lounge of the bus,
and we'd be kind of going, he's still Lost Together, is he?
♪ And if we're lost ♪
♪♪♪
♪ We are lost together ♪
♪♪♪
There was a couple of times when Greg's instincts
about music were just so right,
and the band and me were so wrong,
and I was so wrong about "Lost Together."
You have to just look back with embarrassment
at how off the mark you were.
♪♪♪
I was playing with Andrew Cash,
opening for Blue Rodeo in Guelph University,
and they were looking for a new drummer
before they recorded "Lost Together."
I was really into thrash metal at the time.
I played double kick drum pedals,
which sounds like the drummer from Megadeth.
First of all, I got a call from Andrew Cash saying,
"Glenn, I think your ship has come in."
And then I got a call from Jim Cuddy
asking if I'd be interested in coming in and auditioning.
When he came in, he was probably too muscular
for us at that point.
I don't think I was an obvious choice for Blue Rodeo.
I think the fact that I also had other possibilities
in my toolkit musically was of interest to them.
I remember doing "Rain Down on Me,"
and I thought, I guess this isn't a good song.
I should just, I should just dump it
because it wasn't working.
So, we asked Glenn if he would come and play with us,
and he changed everything.
The demos sounded great. We just righted the ship.
♪ Rain on me ♪
♪ Oh, rain down on me ♪
The song, "Rain Down on Me"
all of a sudden made sense to me
and, and we could go forth.
So I think that that was a testament
to how good Glenn is as a drummer.
We had to get him away from the double bass drum.
That just, that was not right for us.
Jim told me years later that he went to Greg and he said,
like, "What about this double kick thing, man?"
And, and Greg was like, "Just give him time,
just give him time," which was nice
because they could have just said, like,
"You gotta lose a double kick," and I would have lost it.
But it did eventually occur to me
that this is really on the wrong side of tasteful.
♪♪♪
♪ Didn't know what to bring you ♪
Yeah, when I started rehearsing with them,
it seemed like the band was in some disarray.
Jim and Greg seemed really intent and focused
on what they were doing.
And then there was Bobby Weisman on keyboards,
who was clearly unhappy with being in the band.
He just didn't really seem to want to be there anymore.
I think he'd had enough of, of Greg and I guiding the songs.
That's not the way he envisioned Blue Rodeo going.
I think I was trying to figure out how to leave
for more than a year.
Because even though it started beautiful,
and even though I loved those guys,
the relationships changed over time.
That kind of broke my heart.
But the relationships in the beginning
were really beautiful and really about friendship, you know?
Bobby was not someone who was necessarily cut out
to be a side man.
Bobby had gone from this guy who was like
this animated jumping bean on stage,
and then one day he stopped doing all of it.
People are coming in expecting to see
the wild man on keyboards,
and now the wild man's just sitting there
with a straight face.
I was surprised when he called me and said he was,
he was leaving.
And Jim was really awesome.
I mean, I remember really clearly that he just said,
"It was great making music with you."
And it's a very nice, it's a really nice thing
about Jim's personality.
In the video, was it a little homage to him
in the, in the solo section.
We built this little keyboard altar for him.
♪♪♪
♪ In the silence of this whispered night ♪
When Cleave left, it was tough.
And then when we got Glenn, you know,
you can't help but wonder, is this going to work?
I remember talking to Greg about how difficult
this was going to be because Bobby
was such a big feature in the band, especially live.
And he said, "Don't worry, we'll never go back.
We'll never go backwards."
♪♪♪
♪ And I want all the world to know ♪
♪♪♪
♪ That your love's all I need ♪
♪ All that I need ♪
♪ And if we're lost ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Then we are lost together ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Yeah, if we're lost ♪
♪♪♪
I loved it all. It was like, it was amazing.
I mean, those guys, they were like my brothers.
It was like an incredible experience.
I loved, I loved them, I loved everything about it.
♪♪♪
♪ Then we are lost together ♪
♪ Together, together ♪
♪♪♪
Thanks so much, Halifax! Always a pleasure.
Thank you all very much.
So beautiful to see your faces, thanks.
♪♪♪
We were playing Australia frequently.
That's a long way, it's a very exhausting travel.
And we were just burnt out.
Around that time, Jim came to me.
The band needed a break.
It's money, how do we exist,
and still be able to take a year or two off?
So I went to my boss, "We need a little bit more money
than usual for the next record.
In fact, what do you think of this?
We give, we give Blue Rodeo this signing bonus
for a new contract, and then when they're ready
to make the first record,
we'll give them another big chunk of money,
which is more money than we've ever given them.
And, and then the band's going to disappear for two years.
What do you think?"
Five Days started off as Jim coming to me in a rehearsal
and saying that he and Greg wanted to make
an acoustic EP, and I was like, "Okay, sure, let's do that,
and get that out of the way,
and then do a proper rock record," you know,
which was, that was my mentality at the time.
You know, in my mind, we were still post grunge Rodeo,
and I was still kind of hoping we were gonna go,
go in that direction, I think.
You know, on the way home from Australia,
I'm thinking I'm going to go home and relax for a bit.
Greg comes and sits beside me in the plane,
"We've got all this new material.
I think we should go and record it as soon as we get home."
He said, "In fact, we can do it at my farm.
We can get Doug McClement to bring his truck out."
Harkening back to enjoying the experience
of the "Diamond Mine" sessions so much,
where they were just kind of set up in a circle,
no headphones, and we'd just like to record
a whole bunch of tunes over the course of a week.
And since we've done all this traveling,
let's make it fun.
And we'll just do this side record.
Won't be a big deal.
I'd never been in a house where it was just,
like, full of instruments.
Like, he had all these guitars,
he had a couple of drum sets, he had amps everywhere.
We set up in his living room, and there's people all around,
there's Mimi, our favorite restaurateur is cooking for us.
People are in the pool, and we're just doing songs live
off the floor.
Everybody's changing their style a bit,
I'm learning how to play mandolin, harmonica.
We didn't really have traditional room dividers
that they'd have in the studio,
so we set up microphone stands in a t-bar setting
and hung sleeping bags and packing blankets over them.
On paper, a recording engineer would be horrified.
He would say, that album came out of that room?
You know, there were people camping,
people coming out for the day, or just an overnight.
And a lot of the Queen Street sort of people
would be hanging out.
We had Sarah McLachlan there,
and Anne Bourne on cello and backing vocals,
and, and the five of us.
I was invited in, and everybody was super warm
and inviting, and inclusive,
and that was kind of the first time I felt something like that
within a musical community.
So when I say it was influential,
it was incredible for me to feel part of something
bigger than myself for the first time.
And, I think that Blue Rodeo -- Greg and Jim in particular --
really showed me that that is how it is to be a musician
in the world.
Again, it's one of those moments where it's like,
is this a dream? Because it seems so ideal.
You know, I still kind of get emotional when I,
when I think about it.
Of all the experiences I had over 25 years in the business,
that's kind of at the top.
And I was sitting on the floor with Michael Hollett,
and the backyard is full of family and friends and dogs.
And then Greg yells out the screen door,
"Okay, everybody shut up. We're going to do a take."
And if you put headphones on, you can hear dogs barking,
you can hear birds, you can hear thunder and lightning
some nights.
Also, there's almost no overdubbing
on that record whatsoever.
That's five guys in a room playing songs.
It was live off the floor.
If somebody made a mistake three minutes in,
they'd start over again and do it again.
But it isn't cut and pasted together
the way records are being made now.
It was very much like documenting a live event.
And I think that we thought of it
as just a side project.
It wasn't until I heard the playback,
and these acoustic songs had a beautiful landscape,
and they were powerful because they were beautiful sounds
with space in them.
It was pretty apparent that "Five Days"
was going to be something different.
I think pretty much any musician who plays in a band
goes into the studio.
You're hoping to catch something,
and they caught something magical.
All of a sudden our palette had so many more paints on it,
so many more colors. So it changed us forever.
It was a complete work.
Kind of like Sergeant Pepper, you know,
if you put it on, you went from the track one
to the last track as a full piece of work.
And I guess the punch line was, it was,
in terms of Blue Rodeo's goals,
it was a complete and utter disaster
because it took off like the second rocket in their career.
And the the offers to tour were so big
that they couldn't take the two years off.
And they just went straight back at it.
So, failed mission. I'm sorry.
♪ They met in a hurricane ♪
♪ Standing in the shelter ♪
♪ Out of the rain ♪
♪ She tucked a note into his hand ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Later on, they took his car ♪
♪ Drove on down where the beaches are ♪
♪ He wrote her name in the sand ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Never even let go of her hand ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Sometimes the world begins ♪
♪ To set you up on your feet again ♪
♪ And I know it wipes the tears from your eyes ♪
And the winner of the Juno goes to...
♪ And how will you ever know ♪
♪ The way that circumstances go? ♪
♪ Always gonna hit you by surprise ♪
♪♪♪
♪ But I know my past ♪
♪ You were there ♪
♪ Everything I've done ♪
♪ You are the one ♪
♪♪♪
With this record, so much happened,
and there was, there were so many possibilities.
When you get into making a record,
there's so many possibilities at a certain point
that it's very easy to lose sight of what you started out
trying to do.
And, and the dust is just sort of cleared for me now.
Yeah, I wanted to do something totally different.
I don't even know what, but I just wanted to try
to go in another direction.
Part of the painful thing was it was the mirror opposite.
It was the evil twin of "Five Days,"
done under the same circumstances.
We thought, oh, a winter version, this will be cool.
By the time we were doing "Nowhere to Here,"
we were indoors all the time.
And you know, we had a big bag of weed.
It's kind of a stoner record.
And partly because we were all really stoned,
except for Jim, who was, poor Jim,
who had his patience tested greatly.
He lived a different life than us.
We'd pull into a town, Jim would get up
and go for a jog in the morning.
You know, he's going to take care of himself,
he's going to exercise every morning,
and we're just taking it day by day on the road.
He expected us to be doing more at the farm.
I remember him saying, "What if you worked a day job?
Like you'd have to put in a solid eight hours, you know?"
I remember Glenn just saying,
"That's why I don't work a day job, that's why I do this."
And we were working at a tremendous rate,
we really were.
But we'd all go out and smoke a joint.
He'd go, "Can we take a music break now?"
Okay, Jim.
It was not the best environment for Jim.
There was a wood burning stove that was leaking smoke
all the time. So for me, just physically,
it was an incredibly difficult atmosphere to be in.
I mean, if you ever listen to the tapes of that record,
there's, you hear the song, and then it stops,
and then I go,
and I'm coughing like crazy.
I could not thrive in that setting.
Just around the time that the bed tracks were done,
I fell from the loft. And I was in rough shape.
That was when we found out Greg was diabetic.
He fell, cracked a rib, went to the doctor,
and they said, "You should be in a diabetic coma right now."
I'd probably been a diabetic for a large part of my life,
but I never got my blood test,
I didn't trust doctors at the time.
So poor Jim had to come out and do all his vocals
at my place while I'm upstairs in bed,
moaning in pain.
Yeah.
We made some of that record with him up in his bed,
and he'd all the sudden he'd bang on the floor
for us to be quiet.
And yeah, it was, it was so crazy dysfunctional
at that point.
And I could sense the frustration in Jim
where he was just like, "I can't do this anymore."
I'm an accomplishment oriented guy,
so I wanted to finish the record,
and I wanted to get my songs on there,
and I wanted to help Greg as much as I could,
but I didn't like the direction of the band.
Greg used to be the guy who always had incense burning,
always had candles burning. Lots of them!
One night at the farm, he had all these candles lit
and everything, and he fell asleep,
and they caught fire.
And he woke up and his bed was on fire.
That's how he woke up to a flaming bed.
So he wrote a song about it.
♪ Last night I woke up ♪
♪ In a flaming bed ♪
It's not a record that's fondly remembered by Jim,
that's for sure.
When you have two people leading a band creatively,
there are times when I feel like I'm doing the leading
and there's times when he's leading,
and so I think that, that was just one
where I was just along for the ride.
I think they were kind of pulling in different directions.
But I also think they had just reached a point
in their relationship where a reckoning was required.
I mean, I think that's the first time we had
very divergent ideas about how to make the record.
♪ And your eyes, they were in my mind ♪
♪ And I just want to hold on to you ♪
♪ Yeah, your eyes, they were in my mind ♪
♪ And I just wanna hold on to you ♪
♪♪♪
I think the first big crisis was when Greg left
to go do a solo record without sort of telling us
what he was doing, and there was no surety
that he was coming back.
"Gone" represents something for Jim
because all of a sudden his partner
was doing something on their own.
I thought he was gone.
I didn't think he was coming back, but I wasn't sure.
I didn't really talk to them too much about it
because I was sort of driven.
So he was quite comfortable being somewhat mysterious
and leaving Jim to guess, which I think Jim likes to know
where things are going,
so it might have been a little challenging for him.
That was less challenging in my mind
because it doesn't surprise me that artistic people
want to make art in a different way.
Greg needed to do something for Greg,
but it's always unsettling when someone starts
exploring something outside of the unit.
Well, I get the impression from that listening to music,
and doing some of the reading on you guys
that that there may have been some conflicts in style,
and, but it sounds like a lot of that
might have been relieved by having the chance to go solo,
where you could do exactly what you wanted to do,
and you could do exactly what you wanted to do.
And now you can come back to Blue Rodeo
and it's, you're happy to, to blend again.
Everything we've gotten out of music has been,
you know, like Siamese twins.
But certainly a band is like a family.
Yeah.
And you really, you spend every minute with your family.
You tell me what that's like.
And in hindsight, it was the best thing
that I think they could have done.
So, I think, I think "Nowhere to Here"
was a bit of a catalyst for that.
Has the band ever had an existential crisis?
Oh God, sure.
Oh that's, that's pretty... - You're looking at him.
There's been a few events in my life
that I thought I had hit the wall,
and like, I just couldn't do what I was doing anymore.
And when you hit those walls, it really feels like the end.
Greg developed tinnitus, and it is distracting
because you have this sound.
But also he developed some other hearing challenges,
which were painful.
The migraines were so bad.
I couldn't go anywhere without ear plugs in.
All those things I sort of loved to do was all taken away.
And it got to, I thought I was gonna do living room parties
for people, but they weren't allowed to applaud.
It would just...
I'd play a song, "Don't! It hurt my ears."
Greg was only doing a few songs per show.
He'd come out and do the shows acoustically.
Being on stage, the sound would, it would,
like, literally torture him.
He reached a point where he's like, "I can't do this anymore."
I thought that that part of my life was over.
How I viewed the band around that time
when Greg's hearing challenges became something
we had to deal with was more of a, okay,
what are we going to do?
How are we going to do this?
Number one, we have to rally around and support Greg,
and then what do we do to change things on stage
so that we can continue to play?
We tore everything off the stage,
and figured out how to put our amps and isocabs
off the stage. Glenn behind plexiglass,
Bazil on a vibrating pad so his volume can be low.
Just looked like a normal setup.
There's no sound on our stage.
You can, we could talk like this in the middle of a rock song
because everything's being channeled out to the board.
And of course, it allowed Greg to survive on stage.
It was a big adjustment for everybody.
The only one that has any sound on stage is Greg.
Greg has an amp because he can't wear headphones.
So it's a little bit ironic, but that's the way it works.
Greg was like, "I'm just going to switch exclusively
to acoustic, and I want someone else to,
to play electric guitar," and Colin was the obvious choice
because both Jim and Greg already kind of love Colin,
and he just, he just fit right in.
You know, we had this long relationship as friends,
and that combined with the work that we'd done together,
it was a comfortable situation.
So they asked if I wanted to come in and help out.
I said, "Of course," you know.
And so he switched entirely to acoustic guitar,
and then I took all the electric guitar roles.
Colin's a great player.
And now we have Jimmy Bowskill too,
so like, we have an embarrassment of riches
in the guitar department.
♪♪♪
It was pretty natural, man.
I mean, they're just such a great bunch of dudes,
so it was good vibes right from the start.
♪♪♪
And then, but at the end of the tour,
we all found out that he was suffering again,
headaches again, and I kind of felt like,
well, we've kind of failed him.
Over the years, it just got worse, and worse, and worse.
The world that I had inhabited,
the life that I had lived,
I couldn't do it anymore.
Greg was anxious about injuring himself,
and he called Jim and said,
"You know, I can't do this anymore. It's too difficult."
♪♪♪
The phone call in 2016 to Jim, when I said I quit,
I was just sort of mildly hysterical,
and I was crying a lot.
I was just saying, "I can't do it anymore."
So we hung up and, and I thought that was it.
♪♪♪
I was at home, I called Rena from the kitchen.
I said, "Greg just quit."
There was always that undercurrent of possibility.
So when it happened, he was ashen.
Like, everything just dropped out of him.
I think, I mean, I was shocked,
but I was also, I was wounded.
I was wounded that he quit over the phone to me,
but I was also kind of tired of it.
I was, I was tired, tired of the drama.
You know, tired of all the fighting,
and then, and the uncertainty.
It was devastating. I mean, this is a, you know,
you're not just creative partners, they're friends.
You love your friend. This is like you're losing a lover.
If someone's quitting, it's hard not to feel rejected.
It was like everything had been pulled out
from underneath him.
He had worked so hard to make this happen,
he had really reinvested for it to happen.
And he was really devastated.
You've been here before a couple of times,
why is this one hitting you so hard?
There are many reasons for either one of them
to be sad about the partnership dissolving,
but I think at its heart, it was toughest for him
to be losing a friend that way.
Well, if your high school buddy,
that you have been literally through thick and thin,
through the wars, through everything together,
is telling you he doesn't want to play anymore,
it's pretty devastating.
You know, I thought, okay, well, if this is the way
it's going to be, all right.
I have a good solo career, and I'll just keep going,
and that'll be the way it is.
And because I'm okay with change, I'm like,
"That's great, that's fine.
You know, you got your own solo career.
That's what he wants. It's okay."
♪♪♪
Greg's such a consummate professional
that he said, "I will meet all of our existing obligations."
He agreed to stay through the summer shows.
And then one thing was added,
another thing was added, another thing's added.
But we get to Vancouver, and we're playing a show,
and Greg says to me, "We should make another record,"
and I'm like, "What?"
I didn't think we were a band anymore.
And so, whatever made Greg need to quit at one point
was no longer circumstance for him then,
so it seemed like we carried on.
I don't know that there was a definitive time
where we said, is this, are we still a band or are we not?
I think, like, too many bands break up not realizing
that like, hey, just give each other some space.
Go write a solo album, go, go meditate.
You know, you'd be surprised in six months
how people's perspectives can change.
♪♪♪
When I quit the band, I think everybody was a little,
"Oh my god," and that seemed like a setback.
I think Greg came back because he missed it.
He missed Blue Rodeo.
I think it was hard for him to think of a, a life
without that available to him.
I think he loves Jim; I think he loves what they do together.
You'd be giving up so much to give that up,
and I think he still loves to create with Jim.
It took a while to do the adjustment,
but once the adjustment was made,
the band has been playing fantastic.
The band has never been better.
♪ Just trying to remember ♪
♪ The better times ♪
♪ Back when you were ♪
♪ Wild ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Back when you were ♪
♪ Wild ♪
♪ Back when you were ♪
♪ Wild ♪
♪ Back when you were ♪
♪ Wild ♪
♪♪♪
♪ 'Til I am myself ♪
♪ 'Til I am myself again ♪
And here we go, we're going in.
Yeah!
Have fun!
Thanks!
Bye, Jim! Good luck!
Thank you, Stella!
Not that you need it!
Stella!
Jim!
Wish us luck.
Blue Rodeo's legacy is ongoing.
It's still being written.
This band is defying the odds in a lot of ways.
We're playing to more people,
we're playing larger venues.
They just leave it all on the stage every night.
And so audiences feel that if they stay connected
to that through joy and sorrow.
I think that they are one of the greatest groups
to ever come out of Canada. I love them.
So when I think about Blue Rodeo,
I think that in some ways they are really
Canada's band, right, because they're a little ragged,
they're very real and authentic.
They're definitely cheeky. They're just like us.
Blue Rodeo was a big chunk of that
for the Canadian industry to believe in itself.
And Blue Rodeo showed that other model,
which is, you know, just work your ass off in Canada
and you can have a great life as a musician.
We love them. Like they're a part of our family.
And in fact, our families have grown up with Blue Rodeo.
There is a real affection for this band.
Blue Rodeo is certainly the soundtrack to my life.
That sense of community, I think,
is not only what binds them to be collegial
with other Canadian artists,
but also with the fans themselves.
Canadian fans are very loyal to their bands.
They stay loyal and want them to do well.
You work hard for them, they repay that with their loyalty.
There's a lot of love in the band.
And when we're playing, you know,
the first couple of songs every night,
I feel this sort of wave of love,
and a large part of that energy is the reflection
of the audience.
The other thing that is really special for me
kind of happens at every show now.
I think there was a period in the band
where I kind of took it for granted.
You know, when we were touring a lot,
and it was it was kind of wearing
and, you know, we get on each other's nerves.
And Bazil and I would just walk off stage
and bitch for like an hour, you know?
You know, which is not something
I look back on proudly,
but I, you know, I just think it was something
we had to go through.
Blue Rodeo is the type of band that we can have tension
and that, but we get over it quickly
because at the end of the day,
we knew that there was all this love too, we were brothers.
But I don't think there's ever been a time
when I didn't want to be Greg Keelor's partner.
And I think that we had this kind of perfect partnership.
I don't imagine he feels the same about me,
but that's just the way I feel about him.
Jim is one of the great inspirations of my life.
He's just one of the inspirations
of why I picked up guitar.
Look at all that's happened to us.
When I think back on Greg and I starting this life together
and, and how many good things have happened to us,
that was our life.
I think even doing this, going over everything,
I realize how fortunate we've been.
As you get older and you start to appreciate
what a rare opportunity it is to make your living
playing in a band, I think that you, your gratitude,
you know, fuels your will to stay.
So now, after 32 years, when I play a show,
now I sort of just feel like, I can't believe this
is still happening.
Like, I can't believe how lucky we are,
I can't believe how lucky I am.
I can't believe that...
You know, there's still people up there,
singing along, you know?
And...
Obviously, I'm getting emotional talking about it now.
So, you know, I feel really grateful.
♪♪♪
♪ Strange and beautiful are the stars tonight ♪
♪ That dance around your head ♪
♪ And in your eyes, I see that perfect world ♪
♪ I hope that doesn't sound too weird ♪
♪ And I want all world to know ♪
♪ That your love is all I need ♪
♪ All that I need ♪
♪ And if we're lost ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Then we are lost together ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Yeah, and if we're lost ♪
♪♪♪
♪ Then we are lost together ♪
♪ Together, together ♪
♪♪♪
No, that was good, all good. Congratulations.
Okay, sweet. Thank you, Dale.
I think we said enough.
Jim's said enough.
Okay, we can cut that, please?