THE JUNKIES’ JOURNEY
Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductees the Cowboy Junkies continue a 33-year adventure
Band honoured with Hall of Fame induction
It seems like typical Canadian modesty.
Upon hearing they would be one of four acts inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in Calgary this Sunday, members of the Cowboy Junkies immediately began forming a list of those they thought were more worthy.
“We said: ‘Us? Really? Are you sure you don’t want to give it to someone else?’” said bassist Alan Anton in an interview with Postmedia from the band’s studio in Toronto. “We had fun going through the list of inductees and trying to figure out who’s not in it but should be. The glaring omission is that Celine Dion is not in there. Which is bizarre.”
True, but that doesn’t mean the Cowboy Junkies don’t deserve the honour. Granted, for those of a certain age, it may be difficult to see the band as anything but the forever youthful and hip Queen Street ambassadors whose devastatingly quiet sound rocketed them to international prominence. This was the band that put Canada on the global musical map during the dry pre-grunge years when very few interesting Canadian acts were getting attention. This was the band that played Saturday Night Live and reintroduced a generation to the Velvet Underground’s Sweet Jane, a cover version that Lou Reed himself reportedly said improved on the original. This was the band whose bittersweet ballad, Misguided Angel, was actually banned by a witless general manager of a Kelowna, B.C. radio station for alleged “Satanism.” You can’t get cooler than that. How could they possibly be old enough to be hall of famers?
But it’s been 33 years since Anton and siblings Margo, Michael and Pete Timmins recorded the Junkies’ debut album of mostly blues covers, Whites Off the Earth Now!! It’s been 31 years since the band released its sophomore album, The Trinity Session, a folky alt-country classic recorded on the cheap at a Toronto church using a single microphone. That album would go on to become one of the most acclaimed of the 1980s and would eventually spark a bidding war between major labels. In a gushing review, Rolling Stone’s Anthony Decurtis said it was as “important as it is inspiring.” One Canadian critic nicely summed up the band’s unique sound by describing the Trinity Session as “a country music album for people who hate country, a blues album for people who are bored to tears by blues and an album of traditional folk music for hardcore kids.”
More than three decades later, Anton acknowledges the Cowboy Junkies’ improbable rise to fame in the U.S. and Europe during the late 1980s was not expected nor particularly planned.
“We thought what we did was pretty outside music, definitely indie,” says Anton, who will join his bandmates Sunday for a private ceremony at Calgary’s Studio Bell alongside fellow inductees Andy Kim, Chilliwack and the family of inductee Bobby Curtola. “So for it to be embraced by mainstream media and all, that was definitely a surprise. But we managed to get through it. There was a lot of fighting off of the entertainment forces that wanted us to do this or that, which we were not interested in. So we wasted a lot of energy doing that. But we did OK and got through it. The good thing was that it did expose the band to a big audience.”
Thirty years and 16 studio albums later, the band maintains a healthy following. The Junkies still tend to be a bigger concert draw in the U.S. and Europe than in its hometown. Nevertheless, when the band hit it big, it was touted as representing a maturing Canadian sound, emerging from Toronto’s Queen Street West scene alongside Blue Rodeo and the Pursuit of Happiness. Audiences around the world were captivated, particularly by the quiet, sultry and mournful vocals of Margo Timmins. So it may seem strange that her involvement started out rather haphazardly.
Anton and guitarist-songwriter Michael Timmins had known each other since they were six and were already music veterans, having relocated to Europe to play in bands. Their musical interests evolved throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, veering from classic rock to post-punk to jazz and blues. All of this can be detected in the blueprint of the Junkies’ singular sound. Upon returning to Toronto, the pair wanted something different than the punky strains they had previously offered. They also knew they wanted a female vocalist. Years earlier, the two had watched a very young Margo belting out what Anton remembers to be Gilbert & Sullivan tunes from the Pirates of Penzance, of all things, for a middle-school production in a church basement. Anton asked Michael if his sister could still sing. He said he would ask.
Anton remembers Margo as being a touch rusty and more than a little gun shy about the whole thing. Stranger still, perhaps, was the recruitment of younger brother Pete, who Anton says had never played drums before. Nevertheless, something clicked.
Entertainment lawyer Graham Henderson, who would later marry Margo, heard something special in the band’s demos. After the act released the Trinity Session independently and sold thousands of copies out of the back of the band’s van, Henderson began shopping it around to major labels. They signed to RCA/BMG.
Despite their dalliance with the mainstream, the act became known for sticking to its guns creatively and ignoring advice of label brass who were keen to send the Junkies back to the church for a Trinity Session sequel. The Caution Horses, the band’s followup, was recorded without any major label interference. While the band would briefly be signed to Geffen, they have released albums under their own label since 2001’s Open. It’s been a formula the band has followed ever since, right up to 2018’s All That Reckoning.
“We weren’t really thinking of audience, even at that point,” Anton says.
“I don’t think there’s been a time where we’ve bowed to any sort of outside ideas.”
There was a lot of fighting off of the entertainment forces that wanted us to do this or that, which we were not interested in.