Waterdown ArtsFest
GRAHAM ROCKINGHAM previews a bigger, better festival just one week away
He’s in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame as lead singer, guitarist and chief songwriter of the multiplatinum-selling group April Wine.
He collects fast cars and vintage guitars and has homes in both Halifax and Montreal.
But Goodwyn, now 70 years old, remembers times in his life that were more appropriate for singing the blues than rock and roll.
Goodwyn grew up dirt poor in a house in rural Nova Scotia that lacked plumbing.
To take a bath, he and his two brothers had to carry water in from a nearby lake, heat it up on the stove and pour it into a wash tub sitting on the kitchen floor.
Those early years are chronicled in the song “Ain’t Gonna Bath in the Kitchen Anymore” on his new solo album “Myles Goodwyn and Friends of the Blues.”
“Absolutely,” Goodwyn says when asked if the song is based on fact. “When I was about six or seven, we moved into a house that had no running water and the stove was wood-burning.”
The album, released earlier this year on the Waterdown-based label True North Records, represents Goodwyn’s first exploration of the blues.
Goodwyn says he’s no expert on blues music, but he has a lot of friends who are. He invited a few of them to help him out with the record, including piano player Kenny ‘Blues Boss’ Wayne and guitarists David Wilcox, Rick Derringer, Amos Garrett, Jack de Keyzer, Garett Mason and Frank Marino (of Mahogany Rush). As you can imagine, some of the guitar duels on the album are eye-popping.
Goodwyn will bring a five-piece blues band to the Waterdown ArtsFest, which takes place Friday, Aug. 18
and Saturday, Aug. 19, on stages in downtown Waterdown. Goodwyn’s band performs on the Dundas Street Stage at 4:40 p.m., sandwiched between two local Juno-winning blues performers — Harrison Kennedy (3 p.m.) and Rita Chiarelli (6:20 p.m.).
Goodwyn says he used the blues format as a songwriting tool.
“A lot of blues players don’t worry about the song too much, it’s just a vehicle to solo and sing,” he says. “For me it was just about trying to write song good songs, work on the lyrics and make sure you’re making sense of things.”
He points to a song called “Brand New Cardboard Belt,” which, like “Bath in the Kitchen,” uses pieces out of his own past to tell a story.
“There was a time when I was a young fellow with very little money before I got into the business,” he recalls.
“You could buy pants on discount and they’d come with a cardboard belt and if you forgot to take out the belt before you washed them, it would come out in pieces.
“While I was working on this album, I found a cardboard belt in a parking lot, just a buckle and about two inches of blue belt. It’s now hanging on my studio wall so I can remember when I wore these cheap belts, which you could rip in half with your hands.
“So I wrote the song (“Brand New Cardboard Belt”) about this fellow who is a wonderful guy who doesn’t have a lot, and doesn’t say a lot, but when he does it’s heartfelt.”
April Wine continues to tour across North America and remains Goodwyn’s main meal ticket, but in recent years his creative energies have found more personal outlets.
He has two more solo blues albums already in the works and has authored two books — one fiction and one non-fiction — in the past two years.
The first book is a memoir called “Just Between You and Me,” which deals with his both his early life and his four decades touring and recording with April Wine.
The second is a lighthearted novel called “Elvis and Tiger,” which takes place in 1997 and has Elvis Presley living incognito on the island of Antigua, longing to meet newly crowned Masters champion Tiger Woods.
“I have a kind of fertile imagination,” Goodwyn says about his fiction novel.
“It’s the light read. The first book is a little more serious.”