STEPHEN FEARING of Blackie and the Rodeo Kings Interview

Jade Dempsey: Where are you guys right now?

Stephen Fearing: Oh, I’m in Toronto in Hyde Park, we’re all scattered today. It’s our day off. Last night we played in London, Ontario and tomorrow we’re playing Massey Hall. So I was just out walking with my wife in Hyde Park, cause the leaves are unbelievable. It’s just a gorgeous day.

For those that don’t know Blackie And The Rodeo Kings, where would you suggest they start?

I don’t know…the new one…Actually, If I were you I’d go back to the first one, just because you get the sense of where we come from. Or the double album, King of Love, is interesting because we didn’t realize something more was going to happen. We wen’t into The Bathouse, the Tragically Hip’s studio, in Kingston, and we recorded for a week, something like that, and we ended up with a double record. That was when everybody started to bring original material in. We realized this thing was going to do more, and become more, than any of us had thought about. The King of Love double album is where the band really became a band. The album Bark is really special in many ways and yeah…there’s eleven of them, so pick a winner.

You’ve been together 27 years now. How did you all meet? And did you expect to be here all these years later?

Well those two questions are entirely related because we met for a special reason, Colin Linden and I had been working together. I was actually opening show Bruce Cockburn. Colin was the band leader for the Nothing But A Burning Light tour. And I had a very strong impression that Colin was the kind of person that I needed to spend a lot of time with, musically. It’s hard to put it into words. He’s a workaholic, but he’s creatively…he just fires on all cylinders, and is just an amazing guy to be around. So I needed to come up with a good project, and I sent him an email, back in the days of dial up, and said “ you know, we should do a tribute album.” It was in an era, 27 years ago, when there was a lot of people doing tribute records. And the typical way of doing it was a record label would kind of coral twelve artists to do twelve songs, and then somebody would kinda master them, and put them all together. So I called Colin and said that we should do a tribute to Willie P. Bennett. Who’s kinda, in hindsight, very much our guiding spirit, but at the time he was kind of a common thread between Colin and I. Somebody we both admired, and somebody Colin had worked with for many, many years as a side man. I had ran into Colin two nights after that a John Hyatt gig, up at the Danforth. He said that he’d been thinking about it and that we should do it as a band, that we should form a band to do this, and that we need one more singer. Between Colin and I we weren’t going to cover the material enough. And he suggested Tom Wilson. And that’s how it happened. Colin, being Colin we were literally in the studio, I don’t know, like weeks later, if that. What was supposed to be a one off record ended up, to answer the second part of your question, it just became this thing. You know, all the cliches about chemistry and all that. It was a lot of things that came together in a lucky way, but it really was that at its heart, the three of us, seemingly disparate elements, Tom Wilson at the time was the lead singer of Junkhouse which is a Hamilton hard rock band, Colin Linden a blues prodigy, and me, the folk guy, so what did we have in common? Well apart from Willie P. Bennett, there were a number of things, and Willie’s music provided a template for us to coalesce around. Once we did that, we found a way in, and it’s been kinda limitless. So we can cover a lot of ground musically. And we like each other a lot, so that’s…honestly, we were supposed to be a one off, one record, there was never any thought it was going to be anything more than that. We weren’t even going to tour it. It just sort of took on its own life.

O Glory is your eleventh album, what was the biggest difference between recording this opposed to your first…besides a pandemic?

Okay, well that would be the major difference. Obviously, what’s happened in between is 27 years of touring on and off, and as you said, eleven records. That’s a lot of water under the bridge. We all lived in close proximity for the first record, and now Colin lives in Nashville, I live in Victoria, Tom’s still in Hamilton and the rhythm section’s in Toronto. So we’re pretty far apart. But because we’ve done all this playing and recording, and socializing, the fact that we were making a record in captivity, in our own little pods, sending files back and forth, which is a very common way to make records now. It meat that we were…we were able to anticipate what each other was going to do a where a thing might go, and so, it felt comfortable. Even after not seeing each other for two and a half years, ‘cause we hadn’t seen each other for the entire pandemic. It was possible because of that. The only other thing, and I wouldn’t say it’s major…well, I mean the first album was all Willie P. Bennett songs, and we’ve gone from that to everybody writing songs a contributing and writing songs together. We’ve gone from being a tribute band to an original band. It’s not even a side project anymore, like half my life is Blackie and the Rodeo Kings. 

One of the things that’s really changed is Tom Wilson’s story, to encapsulate, it’s really his story to tell, but…he found out in his late 50’s that he was adopted, which he always suspected, but more that that, he found out the has was Mohawk, that his father was Mohawk, and his mother Mohawk. So he grew up thinking he was white, and he found out, no, you’re Mohawk. So what a time to find that out, with our country going through this very painful and difficult discovery of exactly how bad it has been, and how the institutions have literally tried to wipe out the indigenous people of our country. The residential schools, the unmarked graves, all that stuff is coming to light. In the midst of all that, one of my closest friends discovers that he’s Mohawk. It makes perfect sense if you ever meet him, by the way. 

There’s a focus and a tone to this record, that has to do with all the other things I was talking about, the fact that we’ve been together so long, the fact the we made it in captivity, but Tom’s story for me really resonates on this record, and I think it’s the thread that really comes through in the choices of the other writers in the band, Colin and myself. There’s still a sense of aiming in that direction, wanting to amplify something in our collective past that has been swept up under the rug for a looooong time. You know, it’s time for our country to really look at these things, which we are, slowly, painfully, awkwardly. It’s one step forward and a half step back. That’s the thread I hear in this record, and there’s one song in particular called “Grand River” which Tom and Colin both beautifully wrote together, and it really encapsulates the land back sentiments, and that a lot of thievery has gone on, a lot of broken promises, and hollow treaties. There’s been a lot of skullduggery that’s gone on…not to make this song…it’s a simple song in many ways, but it touches on it in a very poignant way, and I think that’s the heart of this record.