>>PREVIEW
C’MON and TRICKY WOO
Thursday, September 22
Broken City
Every once in awhile, a musician roams the country with barely enough coin to keep a tour van on the road, but with enough skill and stamina to make a connection with those who need it most. Their only sense of reliability comes from a bag of blistering songs they use to remind people – who simply need the loving nudge of a cranked amplifier – why they are alive.
One such person is C’mon’s "Sir" Ian Blurton – if ever there was rock ’n’ roll royalty in Canada, Blurton would be at the head. Comparatively, Andrew Dickson and his bandmates in Montreal’s incendiary Tricky Woo are still young, but even after a hiatus, their music could blow the majority of rock bands off any stage. It's no surprise that the two bands run in the same pack.
During his youth, Blurton received the best accidental grooming that any extraordinary artist-in-training could hope to receive. In the late '70s, an 11-year-old Blurton was enrolled at Toronto's liberal arts school, SEED, which sent him on a summer field trip to England to experience punk first-hand. Soon, he was drumming along to Brian Eno albums and then, as a teenager, learning the guitar. For his 14th birthday, one of his older sisters gave him a copy of The Stooges’s Raw Power. In Grade 10, he took a year-long sound studies course on John Cage at the Ontario College of Art.
"That was just mind-blowing," says Blurton with a laugh, over the phone while on a break from C’mon’s gruelling tour schedule. "The teacher I had was incredible. He let me sit in the classes for free. Everyone else was paying and they were all 19 or 20 and I was this little kid doing it for free. We studied things like the language of insects – it was pretty esoteric, like how in a lot of ways insects act like computers. They have just a yes or a no answer which is very much like a computer being zeros and ones.
"So he’d just crank up a recording of 30,000 bees really loud and we’d all lay on the floor in the dark and listen to it. It was pretty mind-blowing. There’s actually a couple of alternative schools in Toronto that are like that. I don’t know if they are necessarily as crazy as (SEED) was. It was pretty liberal. I had a lot of problems in school and pretty much everyone at that school had a lot of problems, so it was good to be surrounded by freaks."
After his education, Blurton continued to surround himself with more eccentrics as a main contributor to the Toronto scene and the Can rock canon. There were projects like the psych Slightly Damaged and the wildebeest of A Neon Rome, but neither would be as fiercely worshipped as Change of Heart, which sent people into mourning after their breakup in 1998. It was as if Blurton had died. Many repented for not knowing what they had until it vanished.
Despite the wear and tear of life as a passionate musician, Blurton thrilled fans and returned with Blurtonia, Bionic and, finally, the combustible rock trio C’mon. Featuring bassist and girlfriend Katie Lynn Campbell (formerly of Nashville Pussy, Famous Monsters and, uh, New Orleans) and Randy Curnew on drums, he says that C’mon is everything Change of Heart wasn’t. He doesn’t over-think the process. Their albums, including their new strutter, In the Heat of the Moment, are made in the same tradition as his favourite records from Black Flag and Black Sabbath – fast.
Blurton continues to make rock history with his performances, but so has Montreal’s Tricky Woo. They came on to the radar with one of the most fierce and memorable releases of the late ’90s, Sometimes I Cry. Tricky Woo’s performances could make any idiot with a disposable camera look like a freaking genius photographer. The dual attack of vocalist-guitarist Andrew Dickson and guitarist Adrian Popovich is stunning – there’s no question that they give all they have at every opportunity.
Following tradition, their highly anticipated fifth record, First Blush, is an unabashed make out session with rock ’n’ roll through the ages. It’s bands like Tricky Woo that continue to breathe new life into rock ’n’ roll and inspire the young ones to pick up a guitar and perpetuate the genre.
"I owe all my inspiration for rock ’n’ roll to my cousin Kenneth who took me to see Slade," confesses Dickson. "He used to work at a record store and would play for me and my brother all this extremely wicked shit that obviously we wouldn’t have picked up by ourselves. I owe it all to that guy.
"(Rock ’n’ roll is) such a healing music," says the man who has Judas Priest, Bad Brains and the Black Keys on heavy rotation in his stereo. "It never goes away and the right people get into it really early and they keep it going. It just keeps on coming ’round because it’s just so fuckin’ good."
Considering the unfaltering aptitude of Blurton, Dickson and their cohorts, the end of an era is thankfully nowhere in sight – especially not with these unwitting heroes fanning the flame inside anyone yearning for an unforgettable visceral experience. |
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