GARY CAIN BAND GOES FOR THE UNEXPECTED WITH FIRST RECORDING,
Guitarist determined to follow a musical path that’s less trodden
KITCHENER — Gary Cain is about as unpredictable a musician as has ever rocked on a stage in Waterloo Region.
Even the name of his soon to be released debut album, “Twang-a-delic Blues-ophunk” illustrates his sense of humour and determination to follow a musical path less trodden.
“I do things that are not expected, getting away from the predictable,” Cain said, by way of understatement. “I’ve seen a lot of players that don’t make mistakes but they’re not taking any chances. “I want to take chances.” On Saturday, May 13, Cain and his band will perform music from the new album at Cork Hall in Kitchener and it’s bound to be an evening of surprises.
“Twang-a-delic Blues-o-phunk” is a bit of this, a dash of that and whole lot of fast and furious finger work not to mention some serious drumming by Donnie MacDougall and bass playing by Tom Nagy.
“I didn’t make it sound like anything specifically,” said Cain, who by day runs a video production company in Kitchener. “There are a lot of influences.”
Cain’s discovery of guitar music came when he was a newly minted teenager and a guitar his mother had purchased on a vacation was just sitting in the rec room, taunting him.
“No one in my family played guitar,” said Cain, who also played piano a bit but wasn’t as inspired by the linear nature of the keyboard.
A guitar in his hands, producing sounds he found exciting, that was the instrument for him and he would regularly spend up to 13 hours a day playing AC/DC on this acoustic, nylon stringed classical guitar.
“I really got obsessed,” Cain said, on how he would play a record, “rewind and play, rewind and play” absorbing every note of the song which he would then copy.
“I was really into rock,” he said. “Then I heard Stevie Ray Vaughan and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
On a family vacation, his parents gave Cain some spending money which he immediately used to purchase a Vaughan recording on a cassette tape.
“I wouldn’t leave the car, I just kept listening
to it,” he said, admitting his family was pretty sick of the recording by the end of that car ride.
Through Vaughan he learned about other great blues artists such as Albert King, known as one of the kings of the blues, and Danny Gatton, a musician often called the world’s greatest unknown guitarist.
Suddenly, he was thinking less about rock and more about blues. It would be years later before he would marry the two, add a few other influences and come up with the Twang-a-delic Blues-o-phunk. But the road to his self-directed music career would be a long and at times difficult.
While performing in Dubai at a time when he was making a living as a professional musician, Cain suffered a throat injury and had to take several months off.
It was this time away from the stage that gave Cain pause, time to reflect on what he wanted to do with his music and it turned out, he wanted the music to be motivated by passion not a paycheque. So he has a regular job and only plays the music that inspires him.
Last year Cain placed fourth in Lee Ritenour’s Unsigned Blues Guitarist Six String Theory competition, in the blues guitar category and uses a new technology made by Fractal Audio and he is one of the company’s official artists.
Music continues to inspire him. It’s like meditation, a way to enter a state of mind where everything else falls away.
“I just turn off my brain and let life flow,” he said.