BLUE RODEO: FIVE DAYS IN JULY 20 YEARS IN OCTOBER!

Hosted and curated by CBC's Alan Neal

In Person Music

Thursday

Oct , 2013

7:00pm

Eastern

Knox Presbyterian Church

120 Lisgar Street (at Elgin) • Ottawa

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BLUE RODEO: FIVE DAYS IN JULY 20 YEARS IN OCTOBER!

I think this record captures, on 24 track, what I've always enjoyed best about our blaster rehearsal tapes, with the songs and playing remaining fresh and spontaneous.

Greg Keelor

DOORS TO THE CHURCH OPEN AT 6 PM AND THE BAR WILL BE UP AND RUNNING.

DOORS TO THE VENUE OPEN AT 6:30 PM AND THERE IS NO FOOD OR BEVERAGE ALLOWED.

Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor are coming to the Writers Festival!

Yes, believe it or not, it was 20 years ago this month –on October 26th, 1993– that the boys in Blue Rodeo launched Five Days In July.

The influential album (certified six times platinum now!) featured hits like 5 Days In May, Hasn’t Hit Me Yet and Bad Timing – not to mention fan favourites like Dark Angel, Head Over Heels and more.

Well, Alan Neal of ALL IN A DAY wanted to celebrate those 20 years of Five Days, so he’s put together a special show that does just that: with JIM CUDDY and GREG KEELOR in the house!

Jim and Greg will join Alan on stage to talk about the influences of the album, dissect the songs, and reflect on what inspired them 20 years ago to create the sound.

Who was that couple who met in a hurricane?

How transfixed can you be by a streetlight, anyway?

Ever wondered what hotel they sing about in English Bay?

So many questions, and Jim and Greg will be there to answer them and perform tunes from the album, along with a few very special guests.

It’s a night of conversation, music, and a few surprises from the CBC vaults!

And maybe, just maybe, you'll get a preview of the new Blue Rodeo album IN OUR NATURE.

SEATING IS LIMITED.

PLUS: CBC’s ALL IN A DAY (3-6 p.m. weekdays on 91.5) will be giving away tickets as well. Tune in for details on how to win!

The Authors

Greg Keelor

A few years after graduation Jim [Cuddy] and I started a band called the Hi Fi’s, which was in that new wave amphetamine punk school. I listened to a lot of British Invasion stuff and then, a lot of bands that came out in ‘76 and ‘77. After starting that band, we went down to New York, lived there for a while, came back and started Blue Rodeo. We needed some players and thought of Cleave Anderson, our first drummer, as he was in a lot of our favourite bands at the time. He asked his friend Bazil [Donovan] to join. Bobby [Wiseman] was the younger brother of a friend of ours and we just ended up jamming with him a few times. His influences were quite different, as he was more into the improv school of music and jazz, and he brought a whole new musical avenue to what we were doing. It was very exciting at the time. We picked the name Blue Rodeo just to underline the country a little bit. I liked a lot of that San Franciscan music of the late '60s, country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver, all those dreamy countrified landscapes. In the early days we were part of the punk school, so everything was really loud and aggressive. Even though our records didn't sound like that, we were always playing maxed-out and fast. I was a little more berserk back then. Now, the way we play music is consciously different. It's a little more connected. We were still unruly on stage sometimes, but, as musicians, we were a lot more disciplined. When I was writing songs for [Nowhere To Hide] I had been living on my farm for an extended period of time, by myself, without much contact with people. Everything had equal life to me out there. It was a very pleasant state of mind to be in. I'd be sitting in this room with this fireplace, and I'd be singing songs to it all the time like it was listening to me, and we sort of fell in love in a way. And then, one night, I woke up and my whole bed was covered in flames. There were tongues of fire everywhere, my mattress was burning and I was consumed in this fire. I realized that the fire had woken me because she wanted to consummate her relationship with me, but she knew that if our spirits were to entwine it would kill my flesh, so she sacrificed herself. To love me she would have to kill me, so she gave herself. That's where the song "Flaming Bed" came from. -Greg Keelor

Jim Cuddy

I asked my parents for a guitar when I was 10 ‘cause I wanted to be like Roy Rogers. The first song I learned was Gordon Lightfoot's "That's What You Get For Loving Me". I love the idea of this little kid singing all these love gone wrong songs. I started writing songs because it was easier than trying to learn other people's. When I became a teenager I got into singer/songwriters like Dylan, Jackson Brown and Kris Kristofferson, as well as the British Invasion through the Beatles and the Stones. I met Greg [Keelor] in high school and we became friends. We didn't play music at the time. It was not until years later, after university, when most of our friends were getting jobs that we decided to start a band. It was a good time for new bands. Punk had made music simple, so you didn't really have to play well to be in a band. So, right from the start, we wrote our own songs and within six months we had our first single out. It was downhill from there; had to be didn’t it? In 1981 we moved to New York City, as much for the adventure as for the music. We put an ad in The Voice and put together a new band, Fly To France, a truly stupid name. In Fly, we played all kinds of music: Ska, reggae, punk, rock, etc. We did all the same futile stuff every band does. We had a manager who made a series of dumb decisions and then disappeared, chased futile leads with promo people and sent out endless packages. Finally, Greg and I decided we would just sit and record a bunch of songs from beginning to end. We got a New Zealand band, The Drongoes, to help us and we recorded a demo with "Try", "Floating", "Outskirts" and "Rose Coloured Glasses". We moved back to Toronto in the mid-eighties and sent the tape around to all the record companies. Bob Roper, the A&R guy at Warner Music Canada [where Blue Rodeo later signed], passed and told us they were looking for harder music. There was this lost highway, countrified thing happening in Toronto, spearheaded by Handsome Ned and his honky-tonk hardwood floor radio show. All the punks and new wavers had learned to play their instruments, were into hollow-body guitars and had new bands. We came back from New York in the summer of 1984 and started to think about putting a band together. We already had the name, Blue Rodeo, when we bumped into Cleave Anderson who was out celebrating the birth of his son Tristan. We asked Cleave if he wanted to be in a band, just casually, and do local gigs. Ultimately Cleave said yes, brought in his friend Bazil (who had also coincidentally answered our NOW Magazine ad) and we were a band. -Jim Cuddy