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The Mecca burned down in the summer of 2002. Investigators ruled out natural and accidental causes. According to one arson investigator: “someone had a problem with the Mecca.”
Whoever torched the one-time truck stop on the TransCanada highway at the west edge of town was obviously not a music lover. Calgary hasn’t seen a funkier roadhouse since, and probably never will. It was, literally, a mecca for live roots music in southern Alberta, home for a brief few years to the “Calgary sound.”
Prior to the conflagration, the Mecca was the site of a three-night live recording session that has become the Woodstock of the local roots music scene. Everybody claims to have been there on June 27, 29 and 30, 2001, although the joint only held about 100 people. Definitely in attendance were Cowsill, Steve Pineo, Tim Leacock and Ross Watson (known as The Co-Dependents), who turned the place on its ear for a 16-song, Live Recording Event. Yet, despite the mythic status of that triple-night set, the boys were not at their best. “I’d filmed the Co-Dependents a month before and honestly, the performance was much better because there weren’t being recorded,” says Neil MacGonigill, a veteran Calgary impresario, music producer and one-time manager of artists such as Jann Arden, and k.d. lang who has footage from both concerts stashed away. In fact, he has a lot of the Calgary sound stashed away. MacGonigill is a one-man archive of some of the best events in Calgary roots music history, including an old cassette of Cowsill recorded t the Palliser Hotel on July 5, 1985, where Cowsill opened for lang. Backing up Cowsill on guitar was a 20-year-old kids named Colin Munn, better known today as Colin James. MacGonigill recently had that tape remastered and released it in 2004 as Billy Cowsill Live From the Crystal Ballroom.
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On a recent November night at Merlot, one of the few Calgary clubs that designs to book local roots acts, Cowsill sat listening to an acoustic set by Tom Phillips, Kit Johnson and bassist John Hyde. “He writes great tunes,” Cowsill said as Phillips played one of his many originals.
Any roots musician in Calgary would kill for such an endorsement from Cowsill, the monster singer whose legendary voice is rivalled only by his equally storied addictions. “Three vegetarians and a junkie,” is how Cowsill once described The Blue Shadows, a breathtaking Vancouver quartet marked by Everly Brothers-like harmonies by Cowsill and Jeffrey Hatcher, perhaps the only singer whose voice could be considered a perfect complement to Cowsill’s.
Recent years have not been kind to Cowsill, whose many health problems include an eight-hour back surgery in which one lung had to be collapsed. Doctors could not get it to re-inflate. That devastating ever didn’t stop the cast-iron Cowsill from recently recording an album that included Phillips, Williams and Jane Hawley doing Hank Williams covers and originals inspired by the iconic country music singer. (Its release on Ruby Moon records is on hold following the recent death of label founder Joel Shortt.)
This special night at Merlot, health issues didn’t stop “Billy One Lung,” as he calls himself, from accepting an invite from Phillips to sing a few tunes. He chose a Hank number and one of his own, Vagabond. He may not be the Cowsill of old, but he can still sing better with one lung than most can with two. “Hearts of gold and s… for brains, that’s what you get in this business,” Cowsill once said. So what does Calgary need in the way of brain manure? “We need more recording,” says Cowsill. “That’s what happened in Austin. Guys were just putting out albums and they just kept coming out and coming out. And we need some really serious country music. Calgary could also do with some kind of a sister to South by Southwest (the Austin music showcase and conference that spawned Toronto’s North by Northeast). We need a North by Northwest.”
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