Vancouver's Powder Blues are still Doin' It Right
Four decades in, local music legends eager to be back onstage
If you're curious about the bad old days of Vancouver nightlife, ask Tom Lavin.
The singer/guitarist/ co-founder of Powder Blues started playing local bars in 1969 after moving from Chicago. The city was rife with nightclubs and burlesque joints like the New Delhi, Café Copenhagen and Shanghai Junk.
“I was enrolled at the Vancouver School of Art, which became Emily Carr, in the filmmaking program, and I was playing in all the local strip bars to support my school fees,” Lavin said. “There were like 50 clubs at the time. That's where the musicians really learned how to do it. One of my first jobs was playing six nights a week, six hours a night, 50 minutes on, 10 minutes off. You were onstage a minimum of 36 hours a week. You might live hand-to-mouth, but you could still live. And all you were doing was playing.”
In 1978, Lavin co-founded Powder Blues with his brother and six other players. The group's first album, Uncut, met with indifference from record labels but enthusiasm from music fans. After selling 30,000 copies at live shows, the band signed with RCA. When the label re-released the album, which was originally on the tiny Blue Wave Records imprint, it sold over 200,000 copies. The debut has some of Powder Blues' best-known songs, including Boppin' with the Blues, Hear that Guitar Ring, What've I Been Drinkin', and the immortal Doin' It Right.
Lavin's years on the live-music circuit brought him into contact with legends like Cheech and Chong and actor/director Dennis
Hopper. The Easy Rider actor was filming his movie Out of the Blue in Vancouver, and funding was running low. To qualify for government subsidies, a film was required to have a certain amount of Canadian content, so the producers began looking around for a qualified candidate to do the soundtrack. As Lavin recalls, Gino Vannelli was the first choice, but after viewing a rough cut of the film, the Montreal singer/songwriter decided that it wasn't for him.
Lavin got the call and, when asked if he had experience composing for film replied, “`Yeah, for sure.' Which was a total lie.” He got the gig, and immediately called a friend who was working for B-movie producer Roger Corman.
“I told him that I just signed to be a film composer and asked, `How do you do that?' Fortunately, he was a renaissance man and he gave me the rundown in five minutes. It made a lot of sense to me. And I've always believed in the Buddhist principle of beginner's mind. I went in with zero preconceptions and began working with Dennis on it.”
Following the success of Uncut, Powder Blues began touring outside of B.C. The group released three more studio albums and, in 1983, travelled to Europe and played the Montreux Jazz and North Sea festivals. In 1990, Powder Blues toured behind the Iron Curtain. Lavin kept a journal.
“I'd stay up till two, three, four in the morning and write. We were in Moscow and Vilnius and Lithuania. The Soviet Union was breaking up under Gorbachev. I was in the Kremlin, in Tbilisi in Georgia. I stayed in the huge summer resort of Josef Stalin. I thought, I'm meeting some really weird people at a really weird time and maybe it would be a good idea to try and capture it.”
Powder Blues' recording output slowed following the release of 1993's Let's Get Loose but the band kept playing live. Lavin is eager to get back onstage.
The lineup features longtime Powder Blues players Daryl Bennett, Tony Marryatt, Bill Runge, Michael Kalanj and Vinny Mai.
“We do a concert set. There are a lot of tunes that have been on the radio, and if you don't play them people feel like, `Hey, where are the hits?' But the way we approach blues is much like jazz. All the solos are improvised, and no one knows who I'm going to call for a solo and when. That's the art in it, the spontaneity.”
There were like 50 clubs at the time. That's where the musicians really learned how to do it. ” Tom Lavin, Power Blues founder