Blue Rodeo: Lost Together

The winner of the Juno, Blue Rodeo.

Blue Rodeo.

Blue Rodeo!

Blue Rodeo! Yeah!

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Blue Rodeo!

Here they are, Blue Rodeo, live, right here.

Let's get 'er now!

When I was in my 20s,

I loathed them, and now that I'm in my 40s,

I don't know what I would do without them.

You've been beautiful, thank you very much.

Thank you all very much!

You've been amazing, thank you. Good night.

Two, three, four.

Okay, ready to go?

Yeah.

Greg Keelor tribute video, take one.

Well, our first actual meeting was a bit of a confrontation.

We were both jocks, and we met on a football field

where I was a defensive end and he was a quarterback.

He was throwing the ball and I was on his blindside,

and just as he was about to let go, I creamed him.

Everybody liked to see the quarterback get it.

Yeah.

A friend of ours died in a car accident, David Soper.

At that age, 16, 17,

you had a total loss of how to react,

and how to be with each other.

And we were sitting in Jim's mother's house,

and there was a beautiful parlour piano in there,

and Jim sat down at the piano and he wrote a song

for David Soper.

And we're all just, like, dumbfounded.

And I had never heard Jim sing before.

I didn't know that he was musical at all.

It was just like such a shock.

And the same voice that he sang that day with

is the same voice he sings every day with.

He had that voice from the moment he started singing.

It's just an incredible instrument

that he was born with.

I kept all my musical stuff very private.

Because it was very embarrassing at that age.

I can tell you that, you know,

we kind of dabbled in music a little bit

because we were around music all the time.

But when I finished university in the spring of '78,

you very kindly came to pick me up,

put all this stuff in, and we're driving back.

And I was saying to you that I was going

to devote a year to music.

And you said, "Why don't we get a band?"

And I said yes.

And we've honestly had a band together

ever since that moment.

Forty years, you know what I mean, in a nutshell.

Well, that's sort of impossible.

That's why we're making a documentary.

But a nutshell, two guys meet in high school,

they discover a shared musical intent and vibration

and started writing songs that took us traveling

around North America.

Greg and I are living in New York,

and we would meet other Torontonians in New York,

and they'd come back, people would come back and forth,

talk about, "I met Jim and Greg down there.

They got a band, they're playing CBGB's."

"CBGB's. Oh my God."

The Demics had that song, "I Want to go to New York City,

they tell me it's the place to be."

It's a time in music when bands

did a lot of different genres.

So we would play ska, we played a little reggae,

we played pop, and we've been in this band,

Fly to France.

And we were tired of doing that.

It didn't, wasn't that natural for us.

We were seeing in New York

a kind of a neo-country movement,

where a lot of rock musicians were playing country music,

but very differently.

We finally came back to Toronto in '84

and started Blue Rodeo.

We were shocked at what was happening on Queen Street,

and it was all because of Handsome Ned.

When Handsome Ned arrived on the scene,

he brought that kind of revved up country music.

He had reinvented himself as a cowboy,

and he was doing this high, lonesome music,

and he's created a neo-country roots scene,

and everybody starts coming out

and forming bands that, that are doing that,

either rockabilly bands or country bands.

'Cause when we had left in '81,

it was dead.

And we come back to a scene that's,

that's already happening, the Horseshoe,

the Rivoli, the Cameron.

So it was not the old country crowd.

This was a much younger, hipper crowd.

It was a time when college students were experiencing

for the first time Canadian bands that they liked

and that were a reflection of their own lives.

When we came back from New York,

we knew what kind of band we wanted to be.

They said they had a name, Blue Rodeo,

and they'd been playing in New York,

and that they thought I might work.

And I said, you know, "You guys seem kind of serious."

And I said, "I got a kid now,"

and I was, already had like 10 or 12 years as a postman.

I said, "I don't really think I'm gonna to be

what you guys need because you probably want

to go on the road and all that sort of stuff."

So they said, "Oh Cleave, just do it as long as you want.

You know, you're not the only drummer in the world.

You know, we'll find somebody when you can't do it anymore."

I said, "Great. That sounds fantastic."

We put an ad in Now Magazine.

"If you dropped acid twenty times,

you lost two or three years to booze and looking good,

and you can still keep time, call Jim or Greg."

And then Bazil answers that ad,

calls my house, gets my wife,

who doesn't want to take, even take a message.

"So just call back, he'll come back another time,"

just, and Bazil says, "Please, just take my number."

And they phoned me, said, "Are you Bazil from the Sharks?"

I said, "Yeah."

Says, "Hey, Cleave's our drummer,

we're the guys from the Hi-Fi's.

Can you rehearse tomorrow?"

And as soon as we got with Cleave and Bazil,

we knew we were good.

I think we'd only rehearsed twice, but we were a band.

It's not country, it's not this, it's not that.

It's just a collection of the individuals in the band.

You know, and what we've listened to over the years,

and that sort of thing.

Do you think a lot of people are getting into this country music

because of fashion?

I'll answer that one!

Okay.

I think it's very honest music,

and it's very rock and roll.

And I think that people are really interested

in rock and roll again.

And it's a very good way for original bands

to get their thing across.

They can talk about whatever they want,

whatever issues they want to talk about,

and it's packaged in a very easy to digest form,

which is kind of country rock-ish.

People are digging that again.

I just thought they'd be good guys to work with,

that they were funny and interesting,

and kind of different than most people.

They had a quality that was captivating.

Then one day, we were leaving rehearsal

and Greg said, "Do you guys like keyboards?"

I think I was like, "Well, what do we want

a keyboard player for?"

And the next day, we showed up,

and Bobby was all set up.

I'm on my way to the first rehearsal,

I remember thinking, I'm assuming I can do this

and it'll work, but they also might find me way too weird,

like the way, the stuff that I do, pianistically,

and that I've been doing at music school.

Like, it's just dawned on me that like,

oh, this actually might be a train wreck.

But from as soon as we started in the rehearsal space,