As Blue Rodeo’s bestselling album celebrates 30 years, Jim Cuddy recalls how it was made on Greg Keelor’s farm and what it meant.
by Nick Krewen
Special to the Star
Hard to believe that the classic Blue Rodeo album Five Days In July has accumulated three decades of memories.
Recorded in 1993 on band co-founder Greg Keelor’s Clarington farm, the effort ended up becoming the group’s all-time bestseller, moving 600,000 copies and yielding a multitude of hits: “5 Days In May”; “Hasn’t Hit Me Yet”; “Cynthia”; “Bad Timing”; “Head Over Heels” and the Rodney Crowell-penned “Til I Gain Control Again.”
The band is celebrating the album’s 30th anniversary with limited edition coloured vinyl and a two-set show that includes performing the album in its entirety, although that won’t be the case for their annual Budweiser Stage concert Saturday.
But speaking down the line earlier this week from a Grande Prairie, Alta., tour stop, Jim Cuddy — Blue Rodeo’s other co-founder — hinted there’s something in the wind for later.
“I can’t tell you why (we’re not playing it), but I think you can imagine,” he said. “We’ll save playing the record for another time.”
Looking back, the group — which included bass player Bazil Donovan, drummer Glenn Milchem, keyboardist James Gray and pedal steel guitarist Kim Deschamps at the time — was coming off a particularly brutal tour to support its fourth album Lost Together, and was looking to record an acoustic disc.
“The Lost Together tour took us to Australia three times,” Cuddy recalled. “It was a really loud tour and very exhausting.
“We had all these demos — an album’s worth of acoustic songs — and we thought, just for our own self-preservation, we should do an acoustic record and just have it be a sideline, not a major release.”
Cuddy also conceded that the Lost Together tour arrived at the tail end of six years of incessant touring; the 12-time Juno winners and eventual Canadian Music Hall of Fame members were looking to get back to some sort of normalcy.
“At that point, we were touring so much and we were missing our lives,” he said.
After informing their record company of their plans, the quintet set up shop at Keelor’s farm and made it a very casual affair: friends were invited to drop by; people camped out in tents on Keelor’s expansive property; the band set up shop in the singer and guitarist’s living room; Mimi’s Restaurant proprietor Mimi Braidberg cooked up a storm in the kitchen and Doug McClement’s LiveWire Remote Recorders provided a mobile truck to capture all the magic.
But Cuddy admitted the members of Blue Rodeo didn’t realize how magical the sessions were at first.
“We thought it was very nice, but we had no idea that it would be as important to us as it ended up being.”
Another pleasant surprise was that despite all the commotion of visitors milling about the farm, the sessions were never disrupted.
“We set up in Greg’s living room,” Cuddy recalled. “The kitchen is open, off the living room, and then there’s a set of sliding doors that goes out to his pool and his yard, and there are people that are coming in and out of that all the time.
“There were a couple of dogs there; Mimi, in the kitchen, making food … we were recording in the midst of all that and we never lost a take.”
The rural location and mobile recording also allowed for changes of scenery.
“Greg said, ‘Let’s go record this down by the pond where we can hear the frogs’ and we’d pick up mics and go down and do it,” Cuddy said. “It was just this beautiful atmosphere. I think that incorporating our lives into this recording — having the Skydiggers and having different people there, Andrew Cash came, and people stayed for the day or for the night or for whatever — we felt more comfortable. It just went flawlessly.”
One of the album’s guests had just put the finishing touches on her breakthrough album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, when she arrived at the farm for a few days.
“I guess Greg knew Sarah McLachlan through (producer) Pierre Marchand and I think we played with her in Newfoundland,” Cuddy said. “Greg … asked her to come and just sing with us. And her presence was beautiful: she is truly one of the most naturally gifted musical people that I’ve ever met.
“She played some piano later with Greg on ‘Dark Angel’ and played a little bit on ‘Know Where You Go,’ but she just added vocals and she was there for a few days. I think when we picked her up at the airport she had her bag stolen or something. It didn’t start out well. But she was just happy to be there and was a comfortable person to be around.”
Reflecting back, Cuddy said Five Days In July unknowingly marked a new chapter in the band’s career.
“I think that we became a heritage band at that point, that was going to last for a longer time. But I don’t think at the time we understood why that was happening. The record Casino is where we probably had our most radio success: ‘Til I Am Myself Again’ was on every possible radio station and that’s one of our weaker selling records.
“But Five Days is a whole different thing. I think it brought in different people to our audience. It was a confirmation of us as a roots band, as opposed to just a country rock band or even a rock band, which we never really were.”
That roots band is on the cusp of celebrating its 40th anniversary, and Cuddy acknowledged that Blue Rodeo has appeared in just about every Canadian city, town, nook and cranny along the way.
“We certainly made it our plan to not restrict ourselves in any way of playing places, as long as there was an appropriate place to play,” he said. “We got lots and lots of offers from different places and that’s certainly been part of the fun over the years: going to Tuktoyaktuk and to Churchill and to St. John’s. Every place is interesting and slightly different.”
Just last weekend, the band was in British Columbia, performing at the Salmon Arm Roots and Blues Festival, about 90 minutes away from the devastating fires raging at Adams Lake and Kelowna, B.C.
The band almost didn’t take the stage.
“The air quality was absolutely horrible,” Cuddy said. “There was smoke everywhere. And in Salmon Arm, there was a light sprinkling of ash in the air at all times. There was a power failure and they cancelled the other acts: I think La Vent du Nord was onstage when the power went down, so they continued a cappella and acoustically.
“The power came back on and it seemed like, in our own little way, playing would be a good idea … It was weird to have ash falling all over the place. When I sat down at my piano, there was just a chalky surface all over it. But again, other than the environment, it was OK. We felt like we were doing a good thing and people appreciated it, so it made everything else seem like a minor inconvenience. It wasn’t difficult.
“Then they cancelled the rest of the festival the next day.”
Due to the evacuations from B.C. and the Northwest Territories, Blue Rodeo found it difficult to depart.
“Roads were closed. Airports were closed,” Cuddy said. “We took another alternate route through Grande Prairie and, by the time we got through the mountains and into Alberta, the air just cleared up. So here we are in Grande Prairie. It’s totally clear and you wouldn’t even know there was all this devastation further west.”
During the 18-hour bus ride to Grande Prairie, there was an incident that reminded Cuddy of the staying power of the band, which currently includes himself, Keelor, Donovan, Milchem, guitarists Colin Cripps and Jimmy Bowskill, and keyboardist Mike Boguski.
“We’re all sitting around the front lounge of the bus and joking, and Greg said, ‘This is it. We actually died in the fire and this is purgatory; we’re on this bus forever,’” Cuddy chuckled. “And it occurred to me that we’re so many years into this and we’ve done this so many times that it’s not easy to do the travel, but that there’s a certain level of good humour in this band and sharing this pretty bizarre experience.
“And that’s a big reason why we can keep going. I don’t think there’s anything we would retire to: this is what we would do in retirement, is to play music. It’s our living and it’s our life blood … Things are good in the band and we’re definitely talking about doing another record.”
In fact, the only lament that Cuddy has about Blue Rodeo is that they didn’t start sooner.
“I reflect on those things and I always get mad at 54-40 because they started so young that we’ll never be the longest enduring band in Canada. They’ll always be ahead of us.
“So that’s my regret.”