JUST SINGIN’ AND PICKIN’
Fans getting in on the fun as CanCon icons revisit hits of yesteryear
For 15 years, Ian Thomas and friends Murray McLauchlan, Cindy Church and Marc Jordan have played each other’s songs, kidded around, told stories and included audiences in the fun.
They call themselves Lunch At Allen’s, named for a favourite watering hole and restaurant of McLauchlan’s on the Danforth in Toronto, where the friends would meet.
McLauchlan put this group of influential Canadian musicians together, with Church, a country and folk artist and Juno nominee.
The players showcase their instrumental abilities and their harmonies on each other’s songs.
What started with eight dates grew into an annual set of tours that see the band perform about 50 times a year, pretty much across the country. They’ll be playing Centrepointe Theatre on Friday.
You may hear McLauchlan’s Farmer’s Song, Jordan’s Marina Del Rey, Thomas’s Painted Ladies, and many more hits that people grew up hearing on the radio, as well as new material.
“It’s like having lunch with us really, and that’s why the Lunch At Allen’s title,” Thomas said in a recent interview from his Dundas, Ont., home. “It’s four friends, pickin’ and grinnin’ and you folks get to sit in.”
Thomas said it was a privilege to
have grown up at a time when he could make albums, which then got radio play virtually the next day. Consequently, their music provided a soundtrack to many people’s lives.
“It was just a wonderful era to grow up in” as singer/songwriters, he said. “The music was a lot less invested in the vanity it is now. I am so glad I’m not a woman and expected to be sexy in all my videos.”
The music is a conduit of memories, the 68-year-old said.
“We remember who we were, who we thought we were, who we wanted to be. So it’s an interesting touchstone.”
And his thoughts on being 68? “Oh God. First of all, God it happened fast,” he said with a laugh of disbelief.
“When you’re young, you expect an audience. When you’re older, you come to realize how much of a privilege an audience is. And how, in some respects, how symbiotic the relationship is between songwriter and audience. There’s a need coming from both directions.”
He feels a greater sense of responsibility, he said, to remember the audience paid money to come out and be entertained, more so now than in the “vanity of youth.”
Thomas and his big brother, famous comedian Dave Thomas, speak on the phone two or three times a week. They’re in the habit of carrying on conversations in different accents, one time it may be a Scottish brogue, or as if they were Aussies.
But the contrast between his staid home life and the “culture shock” of life on the road was the basis of Thomas’s 1973 hit, Painted Ladies.
“I was raised the son of a philosophy professor, a former Baptist minister, and all of a sudden in my first band out of high school, I’m singing in bars and sharing dressing rooms with strippers.”
He doesn’t recall there being any alcohol in his parent’s home until he got engaged to be married, and his parents brought wine or drinks into the house.
“So on the one hand, there was a sort of pining for the comforts of home, and sort of a longing to be with people you loved. Because touring, it’s soul destroying .... ” he said.
“Unless, of course, you’re going on little holidays with your best friends. Which is what Lunch At Allen’s is.”