Cowboy Junkies: The Addiction Continues

BY DAVID DeROCCO

When looking for an apt measure of the swiftness in which time passes, you might want to consider this fact: The Cowboy Junkies are into their fourth decade of making music together. The band that personified Canadian music industry cool in the late 80s/early 90s – to the point their singer was named one of People Magazine’s 50 most beautiful people in the world – is now over 30 years deep into their amazing recording career.

It seems like yesterday that this unique musical collective – Margo Timmins (vocalist), Michael Timmins (songwriter/guitarist), Peter Timmins (drummer) and Alan Anton (bassist) – was riding high on a wave of critical acclaim and cult-like adoration inspired by their breakthrough second album, The Trinity Session (recorded for just $200 at Toronto's Trinity Church using only one mic). That 1987 release, which featured Margo’s achingly beautiful vocal delivery of The Velvet Underground classic  “Sweet Jane,” transformed the band from Queen Street favs to international stars almost overnight. Since then The Cowboy Junkies have continued to record new music and tour, hooking fans with their addictive blend of alternative country/blues/folk rock.

With the band rolling into the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre October 27th, guitarist Michael Timmins sat down with GoBeWeekly.com to talk about Chinese translations, American record execs and the lasting legacy of the band’s Juno Award winning music.     

GOBE: When you first formed the band back in ’85, what was the goal? What were your early expectations or objectives for starting this band?

MICHAEL: At that age and in this biz, you don’t initially have a long term plan. It was really just to form a band, to do some shows and make an album and then go form there. We’ve always approached it an album at a time, and every time we go to make a new album take a step forward and make a progression and make sure the album’s good. Then go and play some shows and keep on going from that.

GOBE: What was the first song you mastered as a young guitar player?

MICHAEL: Well I’m not sure I mastered it but I had a Neil Young song book and I looked at it and the easiest song chords I understood were to “Helpless.” And they didn’t change throughout the whole song so I think that was the one.

GOBE: What do you remember most about those early gigs playing clubs like the Rivoli and Beverly along Toronto’s Queen Street strip?

MICHAEL: They were great days especially looking back on them you know, because you were part of a growing community. It felt small but it was really vibrant and exciting with lots of musicians finding their feet, finding their sound. It was just such a great time. Queen Street wasn’t what it is today, it was kind of go-to place for musicians and for artists. It was cheap to live down there. Lots of people hung out together. We didn’t know it at the time but it was part of a growing movement, a scene, lots of bands went on to do great stuff and sell lots of records and do their own things. At that time it was very exciting. The problem is you don’t necessarily know that. I look back on it now and I go, god, we were just so lucky to be part of that. We had a lot of fun.

GOBE: The Bare Naked Ladies almost got banned in Toronto due to controversy over their name; in your travels across the world, has the band ever encountered an overzealous administrator with an aversion to the word junkies?

MICHAEL: We started the band, we picked the name because we thought it was something people would remember. It was odd, it was different. We wanted something that stood out so we went with it. Then a few years later after we released (The Trinity Session) we were pushed by a lot of major labels, all American major labels. And this was right in the middle of the whole Bush #1 administration, coming out right after Reagan and all that stuff. The war on drugs was the big hot topic. Every single American  representative who came to see us said, ‘we want to sign you but you have to change your name. it’ll cause such great problems in the States, we’ll never be able to get you on radio.’ We just stuck to our guns and said, ‘maybe from your perspective but you’re crazy.’  The first move we’re going to make is not to get rid of the identity we’ve created for the last five years. That would be a terrible way to start. And they said we’d never get on national TV and of course a year later we were on national TV; you’ll never get across the border and of course we were crossing the border all the time. You’ll never get on the radio, and we got songs on radio. So there was a lot of thinking against (the name) but we held our ground. The only time where it ever came to play was not too long ago, five or six years ago. We played China. They’ve got a pretty serious censor board. We had to provide all our lyrics. And our promoter was pretty westernized. He was Chinese but he understood western culture and he thought ‘well, Cowboy Junkies doesn’t translate well, and if I try to explain what junkies mean I’m going to get lost.’ So he referred to us as Cowboy Fan. So as far as the Chinese go, they saw their first gig with Cowboy Fan.

GOBE: In a high tech world, The Cowboy Junkies have often been minimalists; recording with one mic, recording albums like Early 21st  Century Blues in five days. What has been the attraction to that style of recording; did it just suit the band, or was it a conscious attempt to simply capture something more visceral and experimental?

MICHAEL: I think it’s a combination. It definitely suits the band. We feel our strength is the way we play together, the four of us, the way we react together. We have enough experience now where we can do that in a studio situation, where we’re tracking to each other as opposed to playing live off the floor. But we always find that the time you get the best sound and dynamics is when we’re actually doing as much recording live off the floor as possible. That doesn’t mean one microphone. We can do some post production on the music afterward. But just capturing that energy of musicians playing together has always been a big part of who we are and what we do. And really, even as an outside producer, I always try to push my people to do that as well. I always feel that there’s a core part of any recording that you can hear people playing together as opposed to it all being manipulated and perfected in the studio which you can do these days. It’s that energy of hearing people playing together. It just gives the record a more human quality and to me that’s part of making music, capturing that human element.

GOBE: In 2015 Cowboy Junkies received a Polaris prize for The Trinity Session, an album almost 30 years old now. What’s your perspective on that record in 2016 – is it a blessing, a curse, a snapshot of a band hitting its stride at a particular point in time?

MICHAEL: It would be really silly for me to call it a curse you know; that was an album that again we made by ourselves really just as a group of musicians, and calling up friends, getting together and creating. So it’s truly a really honest document which just happened to capture the ear and imagination and heart of millions of people. And it still does. I guess when you create an album like that you’d be silly to call it a curse. There’s an element of albatross about it in that you’re always compared to it. It’s the standard with which you’re held to. In many ways we’ve made better records than that but not as important a record as that. That all comes down to definition and interpretation and perspective. We’ve made albums with better songs than that are on The Trinity Session. Margo’s sung better than that on other recordings. But there’s something very special about Trinity.  We captured something. We were just talking about capturing musicians playing together and I think that’s what that record did. That’s one of the reasons why it got so many people’s attention. It was such an honest sounding record. I look back on it and a lot of that  was circumstance. It was all we could afford to make a record. It’s how we heard our music. I’d be lying if I said we knew the record was going to be a classic album. We were just trying to capture our sound. It worked out on all kind of different levels.

GOBE: And in truth, the reverence for that album is probably less about the band, and more about the people who love it because it reminds them of a very specific period in their lives.

MICHAEL: That’s true. That’s a really important thing to remember and we do remember that. That might be the only record they associate with The Cowboy Junkies, but it might be an association that’s phenomenally strong depending on where that person was in their life at that time. We all have records like that, that we all fall in love with. Even if we hate every record that that band did after that we still have a love for that band because of that one record. I certainly have lots of bands like that. And that’s enough. For some people that’s enough. It’s amazing to be able to connect like that. For others it may have been a stepping stone to follow us our entire careers. We’ve been around long enough that we have lots of people who have come into our music through other records.  It was a very special moment, very special to our career and gave us lots of opportunities.

GOBE: With the band’s Nomad series of releases, you put out four albums in 18 months – that’s old school 70s-era recording output. Was that liberating in that you couldn’t obsess on things? Or did you find it challenging trying to deliver on that ambitious recording schedule.

MICHAEL: Again a combination of both. We realized we had to announce it and sort of let our fan base know what we were doing. We had to put a time period on it, otherwise the schedule would easily drift. We realized that up front so we put that time restriction on it. That posed a bit of a challenge. But it was liberating too you know, knowing that over these two years this is what we’re doing, this is what we’re focusing on. For me that meant I had to take time to write. I find now I do so much stuff outside of the band that in order to focus on writing I have to make this conscious effort to shut off everything else. But in that situation we had established a schedule that we had to stick to so it was liberating. I had no excuse. I had to go do it.

GOBE:  As a songwriter, do you find it easier to write when in an emotional positive mindset or when in a state of emotional chaos?

MICHAEL: There has to be a certain amount of positivity, because you have to believe in yourself if you have to write a song to bring to your band, to bring to your audience who have a certain expectation of your past work. You have to believe you can do it. It’s never easy and it’s never a given, so you have to have that. From an emotional point of view, if there are emotional things happening in one’s life, you can pull on those for inspiration. Again, it’s kind of a yin-yang thing. You need things to be happening in your life in order to write about them. (Laughing) If you’re too screwed up  the last thing you want to do is focus on writing songs.

GOBE:  All artists vary. I look at the Stones and how they wrote Some Girls, delivering that classic through the emotional chaos of their divorce and Keith's arrest. Some people write better when they’re happy, although you can be very happy going through a divorce.

MICHAEL: (Laughing) There you go, that’s so true!

GOBE:  From where to you derive the greatest joy at this stage in your career as guitarist for The Cowboy Junkies?

MICHAEL: Just playing live. I think at this point the band is so good live. We don’t tour as much as we used to. We do shorter tours and keep the playing a fresh experience each time rather that do these long six to eight week tours. We kind of go out now for four or five shows at a time and come home for five or six weeks then go back out again. That keeps things fresh, keeps you on your toes. The band is so experienced now, we have this nice inner flow to it. It’s a real pleasure. When we’re  in the middle of Trinity and those early records we were relatively new  musicians. I thought we were old experienced hands at that point but I look back now and realize how young we were. We were still learning. We’re still learning now as well but we have a lot more experience to pull from, different live situations to pull from. So there’s something real natural to our live show now I really enjoy.

GOBE: From a fan’s perspective, or someone who may have never seen the band perform before, what mindset should they come with when the band rolls into the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre.

MICHAEL: The way we approach it these days, and it’s hard because we’ve been around 30 years and have this huge repertoire, there’s people that all they want to hear is Trinity. There’s people who got into us later on. There’s people totally fresh to us. There’s people who’ve seen us a few times and want to hear something different. What we do is two sets of music every night. The first set we generally focus on what’s on our most recent studio work. For this show it will be the Notes Falling Slow collection, which is three records we did in early 2000s. That first set is 45 – 55 min long. Then we do a second set which is generally an hour, hour and a half long and that’s all catalogue. We go really deep into the catalogue, we ensure we touch on a lot of songs people will be familiar with. We try to spread it around so everyone hears something they’re familiar with and maybe they hear something new that will interest them in learning more about the band.

For tickets visit https://www.firstontariopac.ca/Online/. For more information on The Cowboy Junkies, visit  http://www.cowboyjunkies.com/.