I asked my parents for a guitar when I was ten cause I wanted to be like Roy Rogers.
The first song I learned was Gordon Lightfoot's "That's What You Get For Loving
Me". I love the idea of this little kid singing all these love gone wrong songs.
I started writing songs because it was easier than trying to learn other people's.
When I became a teenager I got into singer/songwriters like Dylan, Jackson Brown
and Kris Kristofferson, as well as the British Invasion through the Beatles and
the Stones.
I met Greg [Keelor] in high school and we became friends. We didn't play music at
the time. It was not until years later, after university, when most of our friends
were getting jobs, that we decided to start a band. It was a good time for new bands.
Punk had made music simple, so you didn't really have to play well to be in a band.
So, right from the start, we wrote our own songs and within six months we had our
first single out. It was downhill from there; had to be didn't it?
In 1981 we moved to New York City, as much for the adventure as for the music. We
put an ad in The Voice and put together a new band, Fly To France, a truly stupid
name. In Fly, we played all kinds of music: ska, reggae, punk, rock, etc. We did
all the same futile stuff every band does. We had a manager who made a series of
dumb decisions and then disappeared, chased futile leads with promo people and sent
out endless packages.
Finally, Greg and I decided we would just sit and record a bunch of songs from beginning
to end. We got a New Zealand band, The Drongoes, to help us and we recorded a demo
with Try, Floating, Outskirts and Rose Coloured Glasses. We moved back to Toronto
in the mid-eighties and sent the tape around the to all the record companies. Bob
Roper, the A&R guy at Warner Music Canada [where Blue Rodeo later signed], passed
and told us they were looking for harder music.
There was this lost highway, countrified thing happening in Toronto, spearheaded
by Handsome Ned and his honky tonk hardwood floor radio show. All the punks and
new wavers had learned to play their instruments, were into hollow-body guitars
and had new bands.
We came back from New York in the summer of 1984 and started to think about putting
a band together. We already had the name, Blue Rodeo, when we bumped into Cleave
Anderson who was out celebrating the birth of his son Tristan. We asked Cleave if
he wanted to be in a band, just casually, and do local gigs. Ultimately Cleave said
yes, brought in his friend Bazil (who had also coincidentally answered our NOW Magazine
ad) and we were a band.
Noteable Entertainment & Events is a Vancouver based
booking agency, party rental, entertainment services and
event production company. If you are interested in booking Jim Cuddy please
contact us.