BLUES VETERAN UNCLE WIGGLY STILL BURNING IT UP ON STAGE
Members of Hot Shoes Blues Band keep the creative fires burning, writes Roger Levesque.
Along with that whimsical name, Uncle Wiggly’s Hot Shoes Blues Band is a living testament to western Canadian blues history. When the Victoria sextet rolls into Blues On Whyte on Wednesday, you can catch solid musicmaking, still happening with some stops and starts, nearly 40 years after their founding.
The enduring figures in the band are singer Hank Leonhardt, a.k.a. Uncle Wiggly, and guitarist Mark Comerford. A recent chat with Leonhardt yielded his recipe for entertainment.
“What makes this band work, and the other bands I’ve been lucky enough to be part of, is the fact that they were all real bands, not just pickup musicians that worked together for a week or two. I still know everyone on board and there’s real chemistry. We have a lot of fun and it shows onstage.”
No small statement considering Leonhardt’s 69 years, including 50 years in performance, which began in the Edmonton area. Uncle Wiggly’s HSBB has been the most enduring part of that, with frequent reunions since their initial run in 19781983, and a regrouping in recent years that has pushed the band into a late-blooming era of activity.
Raised in Stettler, Leonhardt was one of the many who grew up around the time that rhythm and blues and Chicago blues morphed into rock ’n’ roll. The singer joined his first band in high school at Edmonton’s Victoria Composite, and despite a sojourn to art college in Seattle and a successful parallel career in advertising arts, he’s been making music ever since.
Leonhardt’s professional start came in Edmonton in 1969 with several bands, the cabaret combo Sweet Salt, then New Coloured Rain, which toured all over Western Canada. He also fronted that pioneering blues-rock unit Hot Cottage from 1974 to 1978.
“Hot Cottage was where I really cut my teeth on the blues,” Leonhardt recalls. “The big thing that really changed it for me was that they were doing all-original material and I dug that after doing Top 40 covers for years. It was so cool to open up that process of songwriting and it stuck with me after I moved to the coast.”
The salty west-coast air lured him to Victoria in 1978 and Uncle Wiggly’s HSBB took shape. The 1970s and ’80s audiences for Hot Cottage in Edmonton and Uncle Wiggly’s in Victoria had a similar demographic, mostly college kids out for a good dance experience. Along the way he guesses that both bands educated a few fans to the blues.
“I hope so anyway. We were still learning at the time ourselves, picking up lessons from some of the great blues artists that we got to open for. Now most of our audiences tend to be middleaged, grey-haired, hard blues fans, and a lot of them know us from the early days.”
Tom Lavin of Powder Blues offered to record HSBB at his Blue Wave Studios in Vancouver. The resulting 1981 LP sold its first 5,000 copies in no time, bringing RCA Records to sign them, after which the re-release sold another 20,000 copies. The band was getting national airplay, opening for acts like Joe Cocker, Koko Taylor and Muddy Waters.
The band put out a second album before it all ended, midway through their national tour in 1983. Leonhardt stayed busy in other bands, criss-crossing the country before HSBB started having reunions in the 1990s.
Those dates eventually grew into small and larger tours. In 2013 the band recorded Still Burnin’ It Up, a raucous hornheavy set and their first release in three decades. Wiggly/Leonhardt and the HSBB were inducted into Victoria’s Blues Hall of Fame.
Today, Leonhardt says Hot Shoes Blues Band is “trying to keep it really simple, in the pocket.”
That flare for traditional blues, r’n’ b groove sand riffing horns makes the mostly original tracks on Still Burning It Up (2014) very tasty. Now they’re road-testing tunes for another studio session this fall.
“I think there’s still a traditional attitude. The roots are there. At the same time you can’t help but evolve and get a little more innovative in the writing.”
Guitarist Comerford remains part of the HSBB today, along with bassist Lonnie Glass, drummer Andy Graffiti, saxophonist Paul Wainwright, and for this Edmonton stint, Dennis Meneely (of Tacoy Ryde) on keys.