Blue Rodeo Week: T is for The Days in Between

Bluerodeo.com image from 2000 tour - photo credit to Jeni Bautista

I’ve decided that I’m going to do a full-on “Blue Rodeo Week” to help promote the band’s brief run of U.S. shows next week, including the show that I will be attending in Detroit.

Blue Rodeo Week is going to be kind of like Shark Week, although you’re really going to have to squint to find the similarities.

In our previous Blue Rodeo discussion, we left off with a brief snippet of a tale about my dream experience attending a series of BR shows in 1998 at Massey Hall.

A little over a year later, Blue Rodeo had a Cleveland show slated at the short-lived Diamondback Brewery. I grabbed the girlfriend and headed over to the Diamondback, aiming to convert my girl to Blue Rodeo fan status.

Unknown to me, Blue Rodeo had a new album The Days in Between that was about to be released. Expecting all of the sure winners like “Try,” “House of Dreams,” and “After The Rain,” the band instead previewed most of the new album with only a few choice older cuts. Many of the old reliable tracks that were always in the setlist, were out for this particular show. It’s hard to say what they played or didn’t play, since I hadn’t heard any of it prior to that night.

The Diamondback was probably a bit too small of a room for Blue Rodeo, and it was packed. My view of the band consisted of occasionally being able to see over the shoulders of the many people standing in front of us, and only then, I would see what kind of looked like the band.

As a result, it was kind of an underwhelming experience. Although on a historical note, the tour marked the debut of ex-Wilco guitarist Bob Egan, who joined Blue Rodeo in the multi-instrumentalist slot replacing Kim Deschamps. The girlfriend remained non-converted as a Blue Rodeo fan, and who knows if there was ever a shot? Blue Rodeo for whatever reason are one of those bands that people either get it, or they don’t.

Hence, the reason for Blue Rodeo Week! If I can convert one person to “fan” status, well then we’ve got a winner, Jack!

Back to The Days in Between: It’s hard to pick a favorite Blue Rodeo album, but I really do like this one a lot. Which is why it bummed me out a little bit to hear talk from fans during subsequent album releases and tours, that the album was not held in very high regard by the band. An excerpt from the bio for followup release Palace of Gold seems to confirm that, to a point with these words from BR singer/guitarist Jim Cuddy, talking about Palace of Gold in comparison to The Days in Between:

“Wherever we were with the last studio record, we were done with that,” Cuddy told Maclean’s Magazine earlier this summer. “We needed to attempt something we weren’t sure we could accomplish.”

Blue Rodeo do a great job of covering their vast catalog of releases, yet starting with the touring for Palace of Gold, it seems like this album has been often-neglected in the setlists, which is a shame. I finally got to see “Truscott,” one of my favorite tracks from the album performed live by Jim Cuddy at a 2007 solo Canadian date that my friend Kevin and I drove up to see. A rarity, and a great pick well worth driving to see, not to mention the fun we had getting a hotel room that night, since there was also a huge hockey convention in town.

Those Canadians like their hockey, in case you haven’t heard.

Here are a couple of my favorites from the album (including “Truscott.”) The band also did a live television broadcast spotlighting the new album at the time that they originally released The Days in Between. Youtube clips are below, and I’d love to get my hands on a DVD copy. Email me if you can help with that!

P.S. Quality isn’t the greatest on the Youtube clips, but if you’ve been fiending to see live performances of stuff from this era, here ya go!

Enjoy the tunes and video, and join me tomorrow for day two of “Blue Rodeo Week!”

Blue Rodeo – The Seeker
Blue Rodeo – Truscott