In honor of Blue Rodeo’s U.S. jaunt happening next week, I’ve decided to celebrate with Blue Rodeo Week. We kicked things off yesterday with a look at the band’s The Days in Between album, and featured a couple of choice cuts, as well as some some cool live television performances promoting the album thanks to Youtube. And now, the action continues…

My Blue Rodeo obsession began innocently enough in 1990 with the release of Casino, the band’s 3rd album. “Til I Am Myself Again” was the first track (and really the only one) to receive significant U.S. radio airplay. WMMS was playing it, but I actually had heard the whole album first courtesy of a promo copy sitting in the stacks at a small record store that I was working at in high school.

Now you’ll be alone
When the sun comes up
With your tattered little dreams
And a broken cup
Then you’ll have to
Trust yourself
And don’t believe in anymore lies

“Trust Yourself” from Casino

As much as I listened to Casino back then, it’s probably the Blue Rodeo album that I listen to the least these days, although there are a stack of tracks from Casino that remain concert staples even now. “What Am I Doing Here” might seem like a weird opening track for a concert setlist, yet for me it always seemed to set the tone nicely for the great night of music that was ahead. The story behind the song is well-known to the average Blue Rodeo fan, and singer/guitarist Greg Keelor says of the track:

“That song is about an infamous gig we did at the Erie County Fair just outside Buffalo. We’d been on the road far too long, and we were playing on a dirt racetrack, last on the bill after seven high school groups in a battle of the bands contest. By then there was hardly anyone left – maybe 200 high school students who were more interested in drinking and throwing up than they were in watching us. I’d look around at the rest of the band and every one of them was just playing away, staring at the ferris wheel going around and around, and it sure seemed like a good metaphor for us; a circle going nowhere!”

Jim Cuddy, the “other” singer/guitarist in Blue Rodeo explains the goals that the band had when they went in to begin the recording process for Casino, and how they wound up working with producer Pete Anderson (Michelle Shocked, Dwight Yoakam, etc.)

“We wanted to make this record with somebody who really knew how to record guitars, and how to make a record that had the best qualities of the ’60s and ’70s. We listened to the records that we liked – Neil Young, the Beatles – and tried to pick out of them some kind of direction. There’s an enormous effect that these songs have on you from the very first second you hear them. The singing is so ‘in your face’, the guitars are really loud – these were the production values we were after. The next step was putting a wish list of producers together, and we came up with Pete.”

“On Diamond Mine, what we were going for was vibe, directed toward spaciousness and mood, and the playing was all subservient to that. But with Casino, we wanted to make a real pop record, condensed, distilled and intact.”

Winding down the touring cycle for Casino, the band did a live daytime radio broadcast for WMMS at the Empire Concert Club. While in Toronto for the Massey Hall shows in 1998, I happened to mention the gig to BR bass player Bazil Donovan, and quickly found out that he was the group’s unofficial historian. We had interesting conversations about a few gigs, and talked about the Cleveland show. He remembered that Cleveland show in great detail, telling me that they had been up late the night before, drove straight to Cleveland for the show, and played the gig on very little sleep. And as Donovan remembered, “we sounded pretty good, I think.”

What do you want me to do
I’ve thrown away everything for you
I’ve wasted my dreams
Each day it seems
I’m losing my way back to you

“After The Rain” from Casino

The Empire show sounds better than good to me, but let your ears be the judge. One of many WMMS broadcasts from the Empire that I taped off the radio at the time, I later got a hold of a better copy, which is the copy that I’m sharing here with you today. The show features about half of Casino, and rounds out with a nice selection of tracks from the band’s previous albums Diamond Mine and Outskirts. The Empire show also features original keyboard player Bob Wiseman who contributed many out-of-this-world moments to the early BR albums that seemed to visit entirely different planets when reproduced in the live setting. Wiseman’s keyboard solo on the title track for Diamond Mine is unquestionably one of his most memorable contributions as a member of Blue Rodeo, and is the set-closing track for the band’s Empire set.

I think the early years for Blue Rodeo were an interesting time period for the band – Cuddy and Keelor share the vocals, harmonizing on the verses/choruses for many of the tracks. In later albums, the songs became more easily identified as a “Cuddy” track or a “Keelor” track, in comparison to the material on albums like Casino, which had more of a unified spirit running throughout. This Empire show is a nice snapshot of the band’s sound, which would remain relatively intact through Lost Together, the 1992 followup to Casino. A dramatic shift followed with Five Days in July in 1993 as the band began to evolve into the overall sound they retain today.

But we’ll talk about Five Days in July on another day – for now, enjoy this memento from one April afternoon spent with Blue Rodeo in Cleveland.

Blue Rodeo
4/3/91
Empire Concert Club
Cleveland, OH

broadcast on WMMS

Joker’s Wild
5 A.M. (A Love Song)
Til I Am Myself Again
Piranha Pool
What Am I Doing Here
Now and Forever
Time
Rose-Coloured Glasses
Trust Yourself
After The Rain
Heart Like Mine
Diamond Mine

Relevant Links:

Blue Rodeo official site

Purchase Casino from Amazon – CD or MP3