During my longest stint in music retail, I worked in the E.T.C. room. E.T.C. (as in etcetera) was a room was tucked along the side of a massive music store (Musiplex) and housed what didn’t fit in the Rock/Pop/R + B room or the Classical/Jazz room (which had a separate entrance to keep the riff-raff and the hoity-toity from colliding).
E.T.C. had the leftovers - reggae, children’s, gospel, folk, soundtracks, easy listening, world, comedy, blues, new age and – gasp! – country. Quite the musical education for a punk purist. First Johnny Cash happened. When American Recording arrived it went on the store stereo every bloody day. The next Boxing Day, I purchased the Essential Johnny Cash box set (a shining light in a dim packaging
format) and began looking back. And what I saw (and heard) was the raw power of country music. Yes, sappy Nash-Trash (in its shifting forms) has infected country music for a donkey’s years but when that devious formula (3 Chords + Truth = Country) is followed the aural impact is devastating. (It helps the listener along if a long love affair has reached an explosive conclusion.)
It was in this mental and personal mix-up that I heard the Blue Shadows {Billy Cowsill (guitar, vocals) J.B. Johnson (drums) Jeffrey Hatcher (guitar, vocals) Elmar Spanier (bass) Barry Muir (bass)}.“Hank goes to the Cavern Club” was the Blue Shadows M.O. and they built a rock-country hybrid that stands up along a thousand other rural-urban fusionists. Uniting Winnipeg’s local legend Jeffrey Hatcher (who fronted power-pop band the Fuse in the late 70’s) and former sixties teen-pop idol Billy Cowsill of The Cowsills (the model for the Brady Bunch) in the early 90’s seemed a strange idea on paper but it played out like fevered dream version of pre-psychedelic rock n’ roll – Everlys, Orbison, Beatles, Buck et al. The harmonies soar, the guitars ring, the lyrics lament; everyone wins whether you’re a power-pop fan, a British Invasion fanatic, a lover of gut-bucket country or just damn broken-hearted. On the debut you can take in Coming on Strong which hits like the Buck Owens freight train sound, then sway along to the old-fashioned hurtin’ tunes like The Embers. The second ‘rocks harder’ as the sophomore cliché goes so you get to enjoy more driving tunes like the harmony-drenched kiss-off song, Born to be Riding Only Down.
So whatever your genre bias, wander into the E.T.C. room for a spell…
On The Floor of Heaven
Lucky to Me
0 comments:
Post a Comment