Stormy Monday at Albert’s Hall

Then came a chance to play at Toronto’s other blues shrine (you can tell a blues shrine from all the framed pictures of all the blues luminaries who have played there). And this time it will be on TV. Danny Marks has a show called “Stormy Monday” which airs on Rogers Cable. No one is paid (presumably Danny gets something) and the shows are recycled to death on the Toronto cable and then shipped out west where they provide more “exposure” for struggling blues artists. We did the rehearsal last Monday but I dropped in with a friend on the previous Monday to see the first taping (not knowing I’d be on the bill myself). We arrived just as they were about to start filming, and we were escorted by Danny Marks himself to a table at the front (I guess they didn’t want an empty table at the front). We were seated next to a local performer that I have seen play and so I leaned over to ask him if he knew who was on the bill. He said “Oh, this is an all-star jam so there’s Danny and me and, eh, some other people”. That was my introduction to “Steven C”. I never did get to see him play that night but the following week I saw him do a harp duet (blues harp with “real” harp), a lady called Joanna Jordan.

That first night, I saw a string of female performers who just kept trying to outdo themselves steaming up the camera lens. It was something to see, and prompted me to compliment the first singer, Linda Partington, on her subtle interpretation of “Love me like a Man”. All of these women were outdone on the latest show by Rita Chiarelli who was almost falling out of her halter top and a wild group from Finland called “The Balls” which featured a sequined female singer who had learned Elvis songs phonetically ("Biga Biga Biga Hunk Lova") and rubbed up against Danny during his solos. A true cultural exchange. I had brought by Stratocaster for the rehearsal (since one of the event’s sponsors is Fender Guitars) but at the last minute I decided to take my Epiphone. Big mistake. I broke a string on the first tune. I bet Fender had a curse on every guitar that wasn’t’ built by them.

My first blues jam in Toronto

Now that I’ve played a gig at the legendary Black Swan, I decide to drop in at the regular Saturday All-Star jam session. I have not gotten the feeling that Toronto musicians are very hospitable – it seems that no-one is really happy to see another musician that’s going to take up valuable space on stage. As my old blues buddy Butch Coulter joked in one of his tirades “Welcome to Toronto – Wipe that smile off your face”. Anyway, Lorraine puts in a good word for me and I am included in the lineup for the second set. When I knew we were about to go on, I had to make a short trip to the washroom and when I got back upstairs everyone was on stage. I went directly to the stage and was pointed in the direction of a vintage Fender Amp in the corner. I plugged it in but alas, no sound. I’m turning knobs and leaning over the back of the amp looking for a standby switch thinking “This is some kind of initiation. If you can’t find the standby switch on a twenty year old Fender amp, then you’re not allowed to play the blues. At least not in this town”. While I’m thinking about all this and trying to get some sound, I hear “Ah on-two-three-four” and the band is playing. I was near the PA mixer so I just found an empty strip, plugged into that and cranked it up. I watched the next guitar player who got up and I couldn’t hear him doing a thing, although his hands were moving. I guess he knew more about the etiquette of jamming – pretend everything is alright (even when it isn’t), look cool and never have eye contact with anyone on the stage.

A couple of weeks later I went by again, this time with no intention of playing, but just to meet someone. In the washroom, I ran into Gary Kendall, the organizer of the jams (and on of the leading blues bookers in town) and although he didn’t recognize me right away, as soon as he did place me, he invited me to sit in on the next set. This time I used the guitar that was there and that was fine. I played for quite a while, mostly laying low in the background but then one of the singers called “The Thrill is Gone” and they asked if I wanted the solo. I said sure, then as someone was counting it in, Gary turns to me and says “The solo’s at the top”. I had just enough time to figure out the key and managed to play an introductory solo without any goofs. Phew. I left the stage after a set with a guitarist who had an armload of effects pedals and played with the guitar behind his back. And to further amplify the myth of the greasy blues bar, my jacket was stolen from the table where I was sitting. Another initiation, I guess. The most positive aspect, though, was a terrific horn player called Sax Gordon who was in town with Luther “Guitar” Johnson and who put us on the guest list for the Sunday Night at the Bermuda Onion. There Lorraine and I got to hear a blues show that was as good as it gets. Machine-gun delivery with exceptional musicians, especially the piano player, Joe Crown. Luther played with Muddy Waters and Joe has capture and added the piano sound epitomized by Pine Top Perkins.

My first gig in Toronto

Finally, after all these months in Toronto, my first paying gig. And it’s at the Black Swan, a veritable shrine to the Blues in Toronto. How did I come to be in this place? I was just hanging out in the backroom office/studio in the rear of my wife’s T-Shirt shop/studio in Sutton, Quebec. One afternoon Linda came back with a client who had mentioned she was a singer in Toronto. I welcomed her in and even played her a tune I had just written. She asked for a tape of it and I made one on the spot. Her name was Dawn DuVall and she was just starting to play around Toronto with a group called Blue Willow. The song was called “Dump That Lump”. As it turns out, a few months later when I found myself living in Toronto (was that song prophetic or what?) and was invited to sit in with the band. We played around the beaches a few times and now we were stepping into the blues circuit.

The gig went fine, and in the process, I made the acquaintance of a couple of the heavy hitters on the Toronto Blues Scene. After we had finished the first set, I was changing a string and worrying about breaking more because every time I broke a string I had to switch over to my Strat and my little Cube amp was not loud enough. So when I saw this fellow rolling in a Fender Super Reverb amp I thought it was my prayers being answered. I had barely been introduced to Michael Pickett when I asked him if I could use the amp. I got a rather surly look that seemed to go on forever at which point I said “Hey forget it . . .” but I guess he felt sorry for me when he looked down at my little 20-watt Cube amp. “That’s not an amp,” he kept saying, pointing at it. He didn’t exactly laugh, but he did lighten up a bit. Finally he said I could use the amp (I didn’t realize until later that this was his harp amp and he sure didn’t want some heavy metal guitarist blasting through it). After the first tune of the set, he walked across the dance floor to the edge of the stage and signaled me to come closer. Then he said quietly in my ear: “First of all, take your beer of my amp.” Oooops! Then he told me where to put the amp when I was through and walked out. That was not my only encounter with a walking, talking Toronto blues legend during our gig at the Swan. At one point in the middle of the set, Donny Walsh, “Mr. Downchild” of the Downchild Blues Band walked right up on the stage, asked what key the song was in then sat in on a couple of more tunes (One of the was “Dump The Lump”). I actually didn’t think he’d remember very much about that evening except for the startling resemblance between pianist Lorraine Ingle and the late Jane Vasey, Donnie’s former keyboard player and significant other who died of leukemia a few years back.

The gig came of very well, considering we were playing a rather large room without the benefit of bass and drums. Anyway, the doorman said he liked it and I gather that means a lot.

Women's Blues Revue at The Diamond

Saw some great blues performers at the “Women’s Blues Revue” sponsored by the Toronto Blues Society. Arranged to meet Marilyn Churley and her husband Doug MacDonald. I hadn’t seen Marilyn since the days in St. Henri when her daughter Astra was just born. Now Astra was a teenager – and a very high-profile teenager as the subject of a documentary film called “Talk 16”. Marilyn was a newly elected NDP member of the legislature, soon to be Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs. The concert didn’t exactly get of to a raging start (and it should have considering it was such a late start – something about coordinating it so that Salome Bey could be filmed by CITY-TV). I never did see those TV cameras, though. It was Salome that really got it going. I should say the highlight of the evening was a young singer called Amanda Marshall who was terrific (I just heard she is no being managed by the Jeff Healey organization). Ellen McIllwaine, who never fails to knock out a crowd despite the worse case of techno-karma that I have ever run into in the Canadian music scene. I have never seen her do a gig where something didn’t blow up, break or go out of tune. Still, her pioneering efforts with sound processing devices should assure her a place in some future hall of fame. And this time everything went fine.