MUSIC MAN A WORKIN’ MAN
No slowing Steve Pineo down
He should be free and easy, taking it slow and, maybe, napping a lot.
But Calgary artist Steve Pineo has apparently chosen to celebrate his half-century birthday by making his life a whole lot busier.
“I guess I was trying to take my mind off that,” the veteran singersongwriter says of his 50th.
That momentous event actually occurred two weeks ago — he celebrated with a bash at Mikey’s Juke Joint — but the lead-up and what has followed have certainly not shown he’s ready for the old musician’s retirement home.
He started the year by preparing for the Memphis Blues Challenge, as he and his band earned the right to represent southern Alberta at the international competition held in the Tennessee music mecca in late January.
Then he had to prep and mount his extravagant Elvis tribute shows, which he took to small towns all around Alberta.
And then, to add to the workload, he decided that now would be the perfect time to do a special show with a horn section, something he’s done before but not in the past 10 years, since before the birth of his two children.
That, naturally, means a few rehearsals to brush up on things before he performs this Friday at the Ironwood, but Pineo says the show required a little more than just shaking off the dust.
“I probably made it a bit more work than it needed to be, but I just wanted to make sure (it was right),” he says, noting he had to rewrite the keyboard parts for someone sitting in for his regular bandmate, who couldn’t make the date Pineo had chosen. That also allowed him the time to “analyze” the other parts and presentation, adding a trombone to the mix, which, again, required rearrangements for everything.
“I spent a couple of days where I got up, worked, walked the kids to school, worked, made them supper, put them to bed, and then went back to work and went to bed at two o’clock in the morning — and that was the day, that was it, was all I did,” he says.
The show will be an evening of blues and R& B and feature newer tracks written for his regular Blue Mondays stint at Mikey’s, and Pineo’s trademark tunes such as Perfectly Good Friendship, Too Bad for Me and Canadian Man, made famous by Paul Brandt and which has had more lives than the man who wrote it ever imagined.
The original version he says “was pretty basic,” but after that: he’s rearranged it twice for the local ensemble Revv52, once as a jazz choir arrangement and another with a horn section; he’s had to tailor it for his own horn shows; and then there was Brandt’s first version, which the Calgary country star re-did when Canada’s Olympic men’s hockey team won gold in Salt Lake City.
“I just thought it was funny how that tune that I kind of wrote as a bit of a lark had this life of its own,” Pineo says.
As for his own life, that doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Before taking the Ironwood stage Friday night, he’d begun rehearsals for Revv52’s California-themed show, requiring him to learn the guitar solo for Hotel California.
Down the road, he has enough songs for a new album, and says he’s hoping to record another Christmas disc in the near future.
“Right now it’s just a matter of allocating the funds for that instead of trying to save up to put my kids through college,” he says and laughs.
“Actually I really ought to, but I haven’t wrapped my head around it. I mean this was a big enough project, actually making a CD might cause a nervous breakdown, I don’t know.” For his 60th birthday? “Yeah, maybe then,” he says.