Dan McKinnon,
In 1997, 13-year-old Dan McKinnon was watching “WCW Monday Night Nitro” — one of his fave pro-wrestling TV shows.
In one episode, pro-wrestling god, Hulk Hogan, walked in accompanied by a heavy guitar solo. It was Jimi Hendrix’s iconic axe burst “Voodoo Child.”
“I had no idea who Jimi Hendrix was. I mean, he was on “The Simpsons” but I could not name you a single song that he sang or played on,” admits the tattooed Toronto-based blues/rock guitarist.
This was back in the days of dial-up internet.
“I remember searching Yahoo for Hulk Hogan and NWO entrance music. It said Jimi Hendrix ‘Voodoo Child’ so, on my own, I learned that little opening riff,” says McKinnon who is originally from Winnipeg, but lived in Guelph till he was 18.
In Grade 5, McKinnon was listening to Guns N’ Roses and Lenny Kravitz, especially the song “Are You Gonna Go My Way.”
McKinnon begged his parents to sign him up for guitar lessons, so he was enrolled at Guelph’s Ontario Conservatory of Music.
“I was my acing my performance exams but I wasn’t really playing music that I was into at all. Then my parents moved me to a different teacher — a gentleman by the name of Adrian Raso,” says McKinnon.
Raso is a virtuoso guitarist/composer who has played across the country and around the world with his Django Reinhardt-style ensemble Fanfare Ciocarlia.
During a lesson, when Raso writing out something for McKinnon to play, the young student asked Raso he could play a little guitar riff.
“I started playing that part from Voodoo Child,” recalls McKinnon. “It was so far away from anything that Adrian and I had been working on,” he adds.
“The riff took him by surprise and he said, ‘Where did you learn that?’ I said, ‘I saw it on Hulk Hogan. It was his entrance music.’ Then Adrian gave me a copy of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Electric Ladyland’ to listen to. “After that, all I wanted to do was just play guitar!”
At 18, McKinnon left Guelph to study jazz at York University.
“It was the bluesy side of jazz that really appealed to me — musicians like Jimmy Smith, Kenny Burrell and Willis Jackson,” he says. “More people were into artists like Miles Davis,” McKinnon says.
“At York, I really started exploring blues — players like Albert King and Buddy Guy,” says McKinnon. “When I came out of school I realized that my real strength as a musician was playing blues guitar.”
McKinnon started playing the circuit, and meeting other players in the rock and blues music community while working hard on honing his craft.
In 2012, he released his self-titled debut EP, followed by 2013 full-length album “As Sharp as Possible” which garnered him a slew of great press and Canadian Blues Debut of the Year from The Blues Underground Network.
In 2017, McKinnon won the Toronto Blue’s Society Talent Search and the Amy Louie Grossman Music Scholarship.
He also released much-anticipated sophomore album “The Cleaner.”
It was “live off the floor with the exception of one overdub.”
“The Cleaner” is a glorious high-five to blues royalty melded with modern rock featuring McKinnon’s Hendrix-like vocal swagger front and centre from hot-licks opener “Storm” to hard-driving rockin’ blues finish “WOWOWOW.”
The Mississippi blues spirit resonates through McKinnon’s Albert-King inspired riffs on “17 Years.” The essence of Junior Kimbrough’s pounding riffs dominates blues rocker “All Mine.” “Walk The Aisle” is a superb thumbs up to today’s rock and blues-boys The White Stripes, Big Sugar and Grady.
“The overall theme that I wanted for the record was to have music that was really blues-based so that traditional blues fans would really take to it,” explains McKinnon, adding he wrote the record last summer, then fine-tuning it in the fall.
“Sonically it’s more in the modern garage rock vein,” he notes. “A lot of my fave blues music comes from albums in the late ’60s and ’70s, like Albert King’s “I’ll Play the Blues for you,” one of my faves. On that album, King is playing blues songs but the rhythms and the grooves are ’70s soul,”
“When I am playing my monthly residency (at Toronto’s) Poetry Jazz Café, I am primarily playing to an audience that is under 35. I figured out a way of conceptualizing my blues music, so if someone who is not familiar with blues music at all can still listen to it.”
“The Cleaner” also features Peter Eratoscene on bass (Jackie Richardson), and Michael Carbone on drums (The Lincolns, Joey Landreth) with McKinnon on his Suhr Classic Pro Stratocaster guitar.
Stratocaster is the operative word for the music of Jimi Hendrix. McKinnon says fellow Strat player rock/blues guitarist/ singer Dylan Wickens has been a huge help and encouragement to him over the past 10 years — “bar none.”
In addition to Wickens and McKinnon, The Hendrix show coming to Rhapsody Barrel Bar on Saturday — featuring audience favourites and “deep tracks” — includes Gary Cain and Mike McDonald on guitar, with Ryan Allen on bass, and Mike Ranja on drums.
McKinnon says “The Cleaner” — or “ultimate competitor” comes from personal trainer’s Tim Glover sports psychology book “Relentless.”
“Glover worked Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. A cleaner is someone who pushes himself further when everyone else has had enough because he is not intimidated by pressure. It’s a unique term,” says McKinnon, adding the album title is also about his love for old jazz/blues albums. “Bluenote always had things like ‘The Sidewinder’ and ‘The Cooker’ — nicknames of sorts. I thought ‘The Cleaner’ was a pretty cool album title.”