LOW-KEY CHARITY I FEATURE
Blue Rodeo musician celebrates his own lucky breaks by donating guitars to others
Blue Rodeo’s Bob Egan gives young people the gift of music.
JEREMIAH NORDQUIST is learning to play guitar on an instrument given to him by Bob Egan, a member of Canada’s popular Blue Rodeo band. On this day, the entranceway at Lutherwood in Waterloo is quiet while the 15-year-old plays an improvised tune on a classical guitar he’d just received that day. As Egan looks on, Jeremiah plays, head down, eyes focused on the strings. He doesn’t blink when feedback from the sound system interrupts his song.
Afterward, Jeremiah says he started playing last summer, and “I’ve been practising ever since. I practise at home with my dad.” Jeremiah’s used guitar, donated by Egan after he and his staff at Bob’s Guitar Service in Kitchener made repairs to it, now goes most places Jeremiah goes.
“It’s a really good guitar,” he says. “The way he fixed it up was amazing. He must have polished it. It’s very rich.”
Jeremiah’s goal, he says, is to play “upbeat music that everybody moves to” and to become as good a musician as his father who has recorded a CD. “I want to make people smile.” Meanwhile, Alex Welshman, 14, was looking forward to learning how to play AC/DC’s Back in Black tune on his guitar. When he plays music, he says, “I feel like I’m on a different world with nothing bothering me, no worries, just me.”
Egan is clearly pleased that Jeremiah, Alex and other young people welcome the chance to learn to play an instrument that he believes can change a life.
“When I was your age, guitars saved my life,” Egan says to the group of teens and staff members at Lutherwood. They’d gathered to acknowledge his gift of 16 used guitars – all repaired and ready to rock with their new owners.
“When I was your age, I was a bundle full of mixed-up emotions and nothing made sense in my life, and I could sit with that guitar and, bam, the world made sense,” he says.
“It gave me a sense of identity because I wasn’t interested in all the things other kids were, like sports or cars. Music was my thing. I had something to be known for.”
Since opening Bob’s Guitar Service in Kitchener three years ago, Egan has been quietly giving away used guitars to local young people who need them.
When clients come through the door of his repair shop with guitars that need more work than they are worth, Egan asks if they’d consider donating them to teens. When they learn what he’s doing, other musicians drop by to give him a used guitar or two.
Egan and his staff repair the guitars on their own time, without pay, without hoopla, without a second thought. It’s just the right thing to do, Egan says.
“My parents taught me you give back and the generation I lived in said, ‘Yes, we’re all >>
>> responsible for each other.’ It’s kind of a ’60s thing but I believe that,” he says later in an interview at his shop located on the second floor of the Opus II building next to the Kitchener train station.
“The way I see it is life is hard enough and the least we can do is try to make it easier for somebody else.”
Music helps us all ride out our emotions, says Brian McBay, Lutherwood’s music therapist.
“Part of how I work is to teach them to use music . . . as a different coping strategy, as a better choice,” McBay says, adding Egan’s donation is “phenomenal.”
McBay heard from a mother recently whose daughter had received one of Egan’s guitars. After the girl left Lutherwood, she expressed interest in recording music. Her mother “recognized her talent. It strengthened their bond,” he says.
“We deal with tough things here,” says John Colangeli, Lutherwood’s chief executive officer. “Music is a language that gets through to kids when nothing else gets through.”
Donna Buchan, executive director of the Lutherwood Child and Family Foundation, recalls how she and McBay went to Bob’s Guitar Service to pick up a guitar Egan had repaired to give to a teenaged girl at Lutherwood. When they arrived, they found a whole row of guitars repaired and ready to go.
“He had put them all in cases,” she says. “He’s a good guy.
“He’s a rock star but he’s real and he’s got a big heart.”
Being a “good guy” helped Egan get the gig of his life with Blue Rodeo.
“I’m just an average guy, a little below average in a lot of things,” Egan told the teens at Lutherwood.
“I got the gig of my life because I get along with other people. They think I’m a good guy.”
Egan is a skilled, experienced musician. Growing up in the U.S. when the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Watergate and Vietnam were in the headlines, he would sit on the edge of his bed and work his way through a Beatles songbook. He’d search for Muddy Waters albums, which became a kind of pilgrimage in central Illinois.
His musical credits include touring Europe and America with a band called Freakwater and a “fantastic” two-year stint with American country rock band Wilco, which included appearances on David Letterman and Conan O’Brien shows.
He toured with Los Lobos and Sheryl Crow, recorded with Oh Susanna, played a gig in Norway, and recorded solo albums.
But it was his ability to get along, his easygoing nature, the help he’d given to other musicians that got him the job 15 years ago when Blue Rodeo came calling, he says.
“Everybody can play, that’s not in question,” he says. “It’s ‘do you want to spend an afternoon on a bass boat fishing with this guy?’ That’s the thing.
“Because in this world, you’re either in a studio in a small space or you’re on a tour
bus. So it’s ‘can you get along with the guy? Is he a good guy?’ That’s what that’s all about.” Blue Rodeo reached into Oxford, Miss., to find Egan at a time when Egan was really needing help himself. He’d moved there after Wilco decided it wanted a piano player instead of a steel guitar player. He was out of a job. He’d spent all his money on “guitars and the good life.” He’d made an album, “my masterpiece,” in Oxford, “and nobody cared.” “I turned one of the rooms of my house into a war room and I covered the walls in butcher block paper with Sharpies and I made my lists of clubs I’ve played in Europe, booking agents I know, magazines that might carry an article on me, musicians I know in Canada, musicians I know in America, and I worked that relentlessly to make something happen.” He met Bazil Donovan, bass player for Blue Rodeo, after Oh Susanna invited him to Toronto to play guitar on the band’s record. They became friends, and Donovan joined Egan on Egan’s solo tour in Norway.
When he returned to Mississippi, Egan decided he couldn’t continue a musical career. “It was done. I couldn’t starve anymore.
“It was one of the darkest periods in my life.”
He sent out feelers to get back into the business world, a world he’d left behind, and he was getting ready for interviews with a home-improvement company and a university.
He had an undergraduate degree in criminal justice and a master’s degree in industrial organizational psychology. He’d worked in the corporate world as a management consultant.
He was about to put away his guitar picks when “I got the call from Blue Rodeo because they needed a steel player and Bazil said, ‘Man, I just spent a couple of weeks with this guy Bob Egan in Norway. He’s a good guy. We ought to give him a shot.’ That was 15 years ago.”
In that moment, “my life changed from being a broke, Mississippi solo artist to becoming a member of a successful, legendary Canadian institution,” Egan writes on Blue Rodeo’s website.
“I was literally saved by Blue Rodeo,” he says. “And Canada welcomed me with open arms. This country has been very, very good to me. And I realized that early on and said when I get the chance to pay the favour to Canada, I will.”
“How did I get here? Love, Luck and Hard Work! Oh, and a little more luck, eh?” he writes.
Raised as one of seven children in a mining town in Minnesota, Egan had been told music was a passion, not a profession.
“I was raised to believe that being a musician was not an honourable profession; that I should have a solid career.
“It was understood that you would go to college. It was also understood that there was no money for it.”
He financed his degrees by playing in >>
>> bar bands and fixing guitars.
Luck was with Egan when he met music legend Johnny Cash backstage at the Irving Plaza in New York.
At the time, Egan owned a successful guitar repair service – the first Bob’s Guitar Service – in Chicago and had played with Wilco a number of times.
Cash asked him if he was Wilco’s new steel guitar player.
“No,” Egan recalls saying. “I’m terrified. My parents raised me not to be a musician.”
Cash looked him in the eye and said: “Well it’s a hard road, but if your heart is in the right place, it’s a good life.’” It was an epiphany moment, Egan recalls. “I’m like, OK, this is a game changer. If this upstanding man of faith, iconic man of faith can make music, then so can I. Music is not inherently bad. I was able to throw off all the shackles of how my parents raised me that ‘No son of mine will be a musician.’ ”
He sold his guitar repair business in Chicago at age 38, joined Wilco and “got on a tour bus for the first time in my life.”
People “came out of the woodwork” to help Egan set up Bob’s Guitar Service in Kitchener three years ago.
He was renovating a house and touring with Blue Rodeo. As part of his plan to give back, he’d been a national goodwill ambassador for the Canadian Paraplegic Association.
He hadn’t had much time to get involved with this community.
But when he went looking for “bordello red” carpets, aged vintage wood, couches, chandeliers, cabinets, glass and fixtures – all necessary for “the vibe” of his welcoming shop, he found people eager to help.
The carpet owner traded the rugs for work on his vintage guitar collection. Local artists donated their artwork. “I have many arrangements like that with people in town. We trade services,” he says.
In 1990 in Chicago, when Egan opened his first Bob’s Guitar Service, it was all about survival, making a living, he says. This time, community service is an important goal.
A worn sign in the shop states the shop’s missions and goals – including “to become a community hub for the different guitar playing constituencies,” to “become a good civic neighbour;” and to “be happy.”
About 800 clients have come through his doors in the last three years. Each time, he asks for the guitar’s story.
“I’ve had somebody come in the day after their mother’s funeral with an old cheap battered guitar, saying I need to get this running.”
Besides repairing guitars to donate to young people at Lutherwood, group homes and elsewhere, Egan says he got involved with Music Works, a City of Kitchener initiative to support and invigorate the local music scene.
He developed innovative modern audio arts courses for Conestoga College, launched at the Kitchener Studio Project at Joseph and Gaukel Streets.
He’s committed to a community where he recently married, where he’s building a business and renovating a house, where he sees a daring future.
He says he’s impressed by Kitchener’s size, quality of life and passionate craftspeople.
“They’re not distracted by this big city-moving-rushing-to-get-ahead thing,” he says.
“I find so many people who are dug deeply into their craft whether it’s raising organic produce, the business of making the best venison sausage, the business of working in copper or precious metals.
“I see it as kind of an oasis from the hum and the drum and the distraction of the big city where you can actually focus and work.”
Finally, he says, pointing toward the train tracks outside his window, “there’s not another city in this country that’s moving this progressively forward to meet the future and that construction that you’re hearing right now is proof of that.”
He appreciates the foresight it takes to build light rail and support the technology hub. He’s happy, he says. It doesn’t hurt, Egan adds, laughing, that his mother came to accept his life as a musician. There were a couple of turning points, he says.
One was the photograph of her son on the front page of her local paper in central Illinois when Blue Rodeo was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2012.
Then, when the State of Illinois put up road signs on the highway stating people were entering and exiting the childhood home of Bob Egan, Blue Rodeo member, Hall of Famer, that clinched it, he says.
“She’s like ‘OK, that’s my boy. He made me proud.’ ”