>>PREVIEW
JON-RAE AND THE RIVER
April 7 and April 8
HifI Club
It’s been almost 35 years since CCR split, and the Band played its last waltz back in 1976. A solid three decades have passed since rock hung up its roll and abandoned the bulk of the soul, gospel and country that made the music possible in the first place. There have been pockets of roll here and there since, brief rockabilly uprisings and rootsy flirtations, but all told, the music industry seems far more inclined to produce a new Creed than Creedence.
With his thick glasses and shaggy hair, Jon-Rae Fletcher looks far too unassuming to be the harbinger of a rock ’n’ roll revival. His conversation – peppered with apologies for the occasional "fucking contrived response"– certainly doesn’t scream revolution. In fact, very little of Fletcher’s offstage persona really meshes with the booze-soaked belter who sings soulful songs of sexual frustration and rock ’n’ roll salvation.
But when you see him onstage or hear him on record, it’s impossible to doubt Fletcher’s conviction. Along with his six-piece backing band The River, Fletcher’s rock revue has become the stuff of legends. The "drunken rock ’n’ roll soul band" even had one of its sets dubbed the best live show of 2005 by Toronto’s Now magazine. Clearly, the crowds are connecting with the roots of rock just as strongly as Fletcher has.
It hasn’t always been that way for him, though. Despite the fact that he is the son of a priest and used to sing hymnals with his father every Sunday, Fletcher never saw much use for gospel. The first records he bought were Tom Waits’s Closing Time and the Velvet Underground’s self-titled debut, and his first band was an angst-ridden Nirvana knock-off – hardly the domain of a classic rock aficionado. It was only after he moved past his adolescent anger that Fletcher started to reconnect with popular music’s past.
"I think it probably just came from listening to some AM radio station and hearing the songs again for the first time," he explains. "Being like, ‘oh yeah, this song’s actually pretty fucking good.’ I did work at a record store, too, and so I got into going back through earlier stuff, like the Grateful Dead, finding out about them, besides the psychedelic teddy-bear shit. And finding out that music was pretty cool 30 and 40 years ago."
Even with this new appreciation of old sounds, Fletcher still wasn’t expecting to stray too far from his alternative tastes. So it caught him off guard when the songs he wrote started sounding more like something off Workingman’s Dead than Nevermind.
"I do remember one of the first country songs I wrote," he says. "I was writing punk music at the time and then all of a sudden this country song came out. And the only way I could sing it was with a twang to my voice. So yeah, it was surprising. I was surprised."
Equally surprising is the fact that Fletcher’s managed to assemble a group of like-minded musicians twice now – first in Vancouver, where he put together the original version of the River, and then again in Toronto after he moved there to follow his then girlfriend, now his wife. If Fletcher had any qualms about dismantling his already acclaimed band and moving across the country, it doesn’t show.
"I was never worried about it," he says of putting together the second River. "I mean, the way it came together is probably the best way it could’ve. It just organically grew to what it is. And that sort of goes with the spirit of the music. it goes wherever it wants. It all happened through chance meetings. I didn’t go out looking for people."
Fletcher is completely comfortable with his new band now, and when he performs it’s tough to imagine him backed by anyone else. In fact, the only part of the rock star lifestyle that Fletcher doesn’t seem comfortable with is giving interviews. When asked about an interview in Exclaim! where he compared his performance style with being possessed by the Holy Ghost, Fletcher can only laugh.
"Oh my God, that was so embarrassing," he says. "It’s not the Holy Spirit. It’s like, if God was an adrenalin rush, then I guess I believe in God. I don’t know what I was saying." |
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