Twenty years ago, when Alex and I were dating, I’d bought tickets for us to go see Blue Rodeo, a band I knew that she liked – and I liked quite a lot, too – thinking it would be an excellent date night sort of thing.
That night, she got a migraine. Which, until that point, I didn’t really understand. I’d only ever had one friend who’d had migraines, and they only ever seemed like a bad headache – take a couple of Advil, boom, and let’s get on with life, okay?
I didn’t say that, of course. I mean, if I had, I wouldn’t likely have had a girlfriend (let alone a wife) much longer.
It would be many more years of understanding the depths of migraines before I really appreciated how much it hurt for her to miss the concert, amidst the physical pain and discomfort.
While Blue Rodeo didn’t break up – Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor, being the two most prominent members (only one other, bassist Bazil Donovan, has stayed the course from the start), kept busy with many different projects – they seemed to ebb and flow from the charts and popular radio, allowing one to believe that they had gone their separate ways. And probably why I hadn’t heard (or paid attention to) tours that came through Calgary.
Until earlier this year.
So twenty years after we first tried to see Blue Rodeo, Alex and I waltzed into the Grey Eagle Event hall for the show.
The opening band was The Frontiers, a local “folk rock” group consisting of an electric guitarist, a standup bassist, frontman and acoustic guitarist, fiddler, drummer … and a saxophonist. That caught me a bit, you don’t normally see a saxophone in folk music.
Good energy for the band, and they’d clearly had a lot of experience, but I can’t lie: after three songs, it kinda kept sounding the same (a ballad to change the pace would have been nice to slip in) and some idiot decided to overuse the lights, which genuinely made it difficult to see.
Jim, Greg, and the band came on at 9:00. With a minor bit of humour as they addressed a tuning issue with one the guitars, they slipped into 5 Days In May. The song first came out in ‘93 on the Five Days In July album. And I wept.
So, minor note here. Although some of Blue Rodeo’s biggest hits (5 Days In May, Lost Together, Hasn’t Hit Me Yet, all of which were played) came out after I left high school, pretty much anything Blue Rodeo reminds me of my friends from high school, as we often drove about town (usually back and forth from the Blockbuster in a vain attempt to find something that 11 teenagers would agree to watch), singing along to various mixtapes we threw together, which included Blue Rodeo’s Try, Til I Am Myself Again, and What Am I Doing Here (all of which were also played), with all of us trying to hit the high notes in Try.
Memories have a way of flooding back. Especially invented ones, as I have since “added” both 5 Days In May and Lost Together, even though it might have only been a couple of us who might have been together for that. Maybe.
The crowd in Grey Eagle loved it. Alex was decided on the younger side, with the average age definitely in the mid-to-high 50s.
One of the great things about concerts that I’ve really picked up over the last couple of years is enjoying songs I don’t know, might not have ever even heard before. And Blue Rodeo has a lot of songs I’ve not heard – they’ve released 16 studio albums, some of which came out in concert. I’d not heard Cynthia (apparently named for girl Jim and Greg had met when they were working the CP Hotels much earlier in their careers, and gone up to Pyramid Lake in Jasper), New Morning Sun, or Venus Rising. They even did a fantastic cover of a song I’d never heard of called The Railroad, a song they definitely need to release.
I should return to that point earlier about how there are three original members still in the band. The lineup’s changed, but it’s still fairly stable, and currently includes Jimmy Bowskill, a devilishly talented Canadian blues guitarist whom had previously been (and I had seen performing) with The Sheepdogs. He and Colin Cripps, another of Blue Rodeo’s front guitarists, would play off of each other in long, stellar combo-solos that I’ve been fortunate enough to see a few times in concerts, and those two definitely did not disappoint.
(Oh, and high props to Glenn Milchem on drums, whose grossly overtalented skills threatened to explode, and Michael Boguski, whose keyboards bordered on a religious experience.)
They had us on our feet roughly halfway through the concert as their acoustic intro to What Am I Doing Here led the audience to sing, unprompted, the whole first verse and chorus, before the rest of the band kicked in.
We stayed up right through It Hasn’t Hit Me Yet, which was their crescendo to the pre-encore. And we didn’t have to clap long before they came out to Try, which I realized much to my disappointment, I can no longer hit … but Jim certainly can.
They ended with Lost Together, which I thought might induce another waterworks. It was everything I had hoped it would be, and I left the complex with a wide smile into the light rain of the evening, the both of us remarking on how waiting 20 years was somehow completely worth it.
