As a great example of how humble beginnings in a garage can expand exponentially outside said structure, Cowboy Junkies have signed on as headliners for the 37th annual Canmore Folk Musical Festival.
In rounding out the headliner offering, Grammy award-winning country artist and Texan Rodney Crowell gets the nod.
Crowell will close the annual event on Sunday, Aug. 4, while the Junkies will wrap up the night on Aug. 3. Friday closers will be either Calgary’s Michael Bernard Fitzgerald or Toronto’s Strumbellas.
Cowboy Junkies began their journey in 1985 when Michael Timmins (guitar), Peter Timmins (drums) and bassist Alan Anton, one of Michael’s oldest friends, began jamming in a garage.
Timmins and Anton had tried their luck with a couple of other bands, Hunger Project and Germinal, and had recently returned to Toronto after several years in New York and London. The next step was to find a singer.
“I never wanted to be a musician,” sister Margo Timmins said. “But one day Mike asked me to sing. I said yes, but only if I didn’t have to do it in front of the other guys. So I sang with Mike for a couple of days and then he asked, ‘Um, do you think it’d be OK if we brought the other guys in now?’ I said, ‘Well, OK. I guess so, I mean, if we have to.’ ”
The band released its debut, Whites Off Earth Now!! in 1986 on their own Latent Recordings label. The band toured the southern and southwestern U.S. in support of the record, soaking up the music of Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers along the way, which, in turn, inspired their second album, The Trinity Session, self-released in 1988.
Recorded with a single microphone in Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity in one 14-hour session – at a cost of $250 – The Trinity Session featured spare, lilting originals alongside Jennings, Williams and Patsy Cline covers, as well as a haunting version of the Velvet Underground classic “Sweet Jane.”
Most recently, the Junkies released The Wilderness (2012), Sing In My Meadow (2011), Renmin Park, Nomad Series, Volume 1 and Demons, Nomad Series, Volume 2 and Trinity Revisited (2008).
Looking into the band’s past, The Caution Horses (1990), Black Eyed Man (1992), Pale Sun, Crescent Moon (1993), Lay It Down (1996, which featured the Top 20 hit “A Common Disaster” and earned Cowboy Junkies a gold record), Miles From Our Home (1998), Open (2001) and One Soul Now (2004) – chronicle the band’s evolution, a process Michael describes as gradual and organic.
In 2005, Cowboy Junkies released Early 21st Century Blues, while At The End of Paths Taken (2007) was hailed as an album of “an alluring, gently haunting quality; inspired by reflections on family and world dynamics and mortality.”
Crowell, meanwhile, looked to the past in moving ahead with his career in 2010. He called up most of the band that had played with him on his 1988 commercial breakthrough album Diamonds & Dirt and got them together in a recording studio.
Crowell and his old friends laid down a lot of great music in a timeless rocking country vein, but before a full album’s worth of material was finished, other projects intervened. Crowell made the album Kin with his literary confidant, author Mary Karr, and a host of top roots and pop vocalists. Then came Old Yellow Moon with lifelong friend Emmylou Harris, which led to a triumphant tour and a Grammy win for Best Americana Album.
But eventually, the unfinished project beckoned and after the band regrouped it was all pulled together, Crowell called it Tarpaper Sky, an allusion to the rickety house with a bad roof in which he spent much of his Houston childhood.
Crowell is a multi-Grammy winner, a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the recipient of the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting from the Americana Music Association.
Crowell says the songs on Tarpaper Sky are mostly pastorals – pictures from an imaginary countryside that tell unadorned stories with straightforward language and energetic musicianship.
Crowell’s story was not unknown during the years he achieved fame as a country music radio star, but it took on a vivid, cinematic quality with the publication of his 2011 memoir Chinaberry Sidewalks. His father, volatile though he was, pulled Rodney into country music, taking him to seminal shows and recruiting him to his hillbilly band. Crowell began to write songs in college and moved to Nashville in 1972, where he was drawn to a bohemian community of future legends that included Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt.
Crowell has conceded he didn’t accept or handle well the fame that came with that radio success. But if his prickly and independent spirit alienated him from some parts of the radio industry, it led him back to the artist’s path.
