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Starting a band with international goals in mind seems even more risky than usual in thee tight times.
“If one considered the realities involved, you wouldn’t even be a musician at all,” opines Blue Northern leader Jimmy Wilson on the phone from Vancouver’s Mushroom Studios.
Producer-writer-rhythm guitarist Bill Cowsill agrees, and as a member of his family band in the Sixties (Hair, Indian Lake) he knows something about the subject. “It always remains the same. You just go out there, try and be persistent and do your job. Our job is to make records, and we do the best we can.”
Blue Northern performs their first soft-seat Edmonton headline concert with Ray Materick next Thursday at the Jubilee.
The present lineup has been working together for three years. Americans Cowsill and Wilson met in Edmonton by chance six years ago and gradually drifter into Blue Northern (now including Ray O’Toole, Leroy Stephens, Brady Gustafson) as Cowsill puts it, “by osmosis,” after some years of “wandering and pondering.”
Working west coast bars, the band released an EP for Vancouver independent Quintessence in 1980 that spawned a couple of singles.
Last August, a self-titled debut album was released by PolyGram, a work that contained two pop singles (O’Toole’s You’re Not The Same Girl, 100 per cent) and a remarkable traditional country single, Cowsill’s Vagabond.
If the album didn’t attain the gold status hoped for, Wilson was reasonably happy with the response. “It was a turntable hit, the problem was that the records just weren’t in the stores when it mattered.”
Owing to the band’s early western swing beginnings, Blue Northern is regarded by many as a country rock band. A brief perusal of the album offers a basically pop unit with a variety of influences, often featuring tight, full-bodied vocal harmonies. Wilson thinks that the diversity of the four songwriters in the group is cause for celebration, not pigeonholing consternation. “With a difference in ethnic roots, the idea is to establish an integrated sound rather than cultivate an empty image.”
A second album is almost half-finished, but both Cowsill and Wilson are bullish on the project. “If you accept that the first album was two-dimensional, this one is going to be a hologram.”
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