COWBOY JUNKIES
Some of the most bewitching music of the ’80s was made by Canuck siren Margo Timmins and band. Read how it came together: “It was an out-ofbody experience!”
With roots in post-punk and improv, this band of Toronto siblings were refining a hushed blues aesthetic on the independent margins. Then, on Friday, November 27, 1987, they entered their hometown’s Church Of The Holy Trinity to record their second album. Sustaining dream-moods of country, the Velvets and Elvis, its hushed, mantric devotionals reverberated into the wider world. “A lot of things came together on that record,” they say. “We had a taste of being big.”
Margo Timmins: I think the stillness and the beauty of the church added to how well we played that day.
Mike Timmins: Peter [Moore, producer] felt that the Church of the Holy Trinity would make a great place for us to record. It had a nice reverb to it, it wasn’t overwhelming and, having done some strings and jazz things there, he thought it would be worth trying a rock band in there. Nothing to lose, no money involved, we rented the church, got some musicians in on spec. No huge investment, so if it didn’t work we’d go someplace else. And we were almost expecting that. But it worked.
Alan Anton: It took a long time to set up in there. I remember saying to Mike at about two o’clock, “If it doesn’t start happening in the next hour, let’s can it.” We knew exactly what it should sound like but it just wasn’t happening. We’d run through something, record it, listen back, then Peter would move the microphone or us again and then, finally, he got it and we heard him say, “OK, that’s it!” It was a huge difference.
Mike: Not a ton of people came through, it’s not like a huge tourist attraction, but some did, we had a few takes ruined, but it was kinda funny. When we were recording Sweet Jane, I think the version that made it to the record, a young couple walked in at the far end of the church. We heard the door opening, but we just kept on playing because it felt like a good take. They sat down for a while and listened, then after a few songs, they left. No big deal… about 10 years later, I was having some work done on my house and one of the dry-wallers there said, “You know, when you were recording Trinity Session, I was there with my girlfriend listening.” It was the weirdest thing.
Margo: I don’t think it was guts to put [a cappella song Mining For Gold] on first. I think it was just ignorance is bliss. My whole life has been that way – somebody invites me to go walking up to Mount Everest, and I’m “Sure, I’ll do that,” without thinking, and you end up camping on a snow strip! I started doing a cappellas in our early shows because we didn’t have guitar techs, so it took Mike forever to retune between songs. There’d be these long gaps and, in those days, there was no way I was going to look at the audience, let alone talk to them, so to fill the gap I’d sing until he’d finished. So when we were doing Trinity Session, I thought those were a part of what we were doing.
Peter Moore: It doesn’t sound like an a cappella, does it? We were in an old church, built in the 1840s or whatever… you really get to hear the church too, that natural reverb and decay – it has an ethereal quality to it.
“WE USED TO GET LETTERS FROM PEOPLE TRYING TO GET OFF COCAINE, THANKING US.”
Peter Moore, producer
Mike: We were going to do to Blue Moon the same kind of thing that we did to the covers on [1986 debut album] Whites Off Earth Now!! The three of us worked on the music in the rehearsal space without Margo. We discovered that lopey groove that it ended up with, then Margo came in and started to sing those words – she didn’t actually know what we were working on! But it worked straight away and so we segued into Blue Moon from there and it was a nice combination.
AA: We were very much into that repetition thing, which was a very Velvet Underground kind of idea, then bands like The Fall got into that, too. That song had a great groove, so stay with it.
Mike: Blue Moon was that Tin Pan Alley side, we had to do something from Hank Williams, from Patsy Cline, then we added Sweet Jane to that, which gave it a different edge. Lou Reed is one of the great American songwriters, too, [and] The Velvet Underground were just such a cool band, everything rock’n’roll should be about… we figured it had been covered so many times and so badly by so many people that we should do it right. Of all the covers, it’s probably the straightest, because we went back to the live version on 1969.
PM: Fortunately, [on Blue Moon] she’s not belting it out, she sings softly, quiet. And she was singing through a speaker, softly into the mike, so she didn’t need to force anything. She was standing off to one side, with the speaker in the centre. I worked it so the microphone distance to the speaker was exactly the same distance she was, so she was mixing her own vocals by leaning in, backing off, and she heard it from the monitor. What she was hearing was what the mike was hearing.
Mike: We released The Trinity Session like we released Whites Off Earth Now!!, just as a little independent record [on Latent Records in early ’88]. When it came out, I was working as a courier in Toronto. While I was driving around, I listened to this great university radio station all the time.
We sent copies out to them and, as I was driving around one day, this DJ, who was my favourite, he said, “I got this record today, and I gotta tell you, folks – if you only have money for one record this year, buy this one.” And he put our record on… it just grew. These little wildfires would take off.
Peter Timmins: Graham Henderson saw a show we played and he called us at the Crawford house where we were all living, and said, “I don’t usually do this but I saw you play. I’m a lawyer, I’d like to work with you.” And he started shopping the tape around the labels for us. A lot of people were interested at that point but they came with demands, like they wanted us to change the name of the band, so we didn’t want to deal with those kind of labels. Some of them wanted all the focus to be on Margo, for Margo to shorten her skirt. There was a buzz about us, so the companies were interested because they thought they had to be; I don’t think they really got it. Then we met Jim Powers, the A&R guy from BMG.
Jim Powers: I went up [to Toronto] and saw them playing at a small club – may have been Clinton’s, but I’m not positive. It was a small place with a bar in the front as you went in and then a corner in the back where bands would play. I’m not even sure they were on a riser! No lighting, nothing, I think Margo was turned away from the front of the stage for about 80 per cent of the show, just quietly singing, and it gave you a feeling like you were peering in on a very private world.
AA: We recorded it and just carried on doing our thing for about a year. We carried on like we had before, there wasn’t any sudden change. Then RCA put it out [it was re-released on November 15, 1988], and there was. The hype hit pretty fast; it was amazing. Within a couple of months, we were in Rolling Stone, the New York Times.
Margo: I was in People magazine. Gap ads. The ‘50 Most Beautiful People in the World’ – I liked that one the best! It suddenly struck me how big
this thing had got when I was on the stage ready to do Saturday Night Live. You think of all the people that had done the show and suddenly we’re there! Even though we did all that, the record didn’t really sell any more… if I were to choose, I’d rather have what we’ve had than being a huge pop act for five minutes. It gave us longevity. It gave us a chance to build a crowd.
We had a taste of being big, we could see how easily it happens, how easily it goes crazy. We had [album track] Misguided Angel pulled from a radio station in British Columbia because it supposedly had satanic references! How are you supposed to take that seriously? …Videos are fine if you’re selling something other than music. If you’re a sexy pop star and you want to show off your pierced belly button…
AA: There was one [later video] idea that might have turned out pretty interesting. Hunter S. Thompson had written a book called Songs Of The Doomed, and in the first few pages he mentions sitting around and listening to something off [1990 follow-up] The Caution Horses, then he mentions the band later on in there, too. He’s always been one of our favourite wackos, so we decided to call him up and see if we could maybe work on something together… his idea was we’d go to his ranch out in Colorado, get a camera crew, no script and “just go crazy, man!” …Eventually he got really pissed off for some reason. He sent us a fax, saying, “If you guys show up here, you’re going home in body bags!” What did we do to piss him off that much?
Mike: [When the group met Lou Reed after he called the Cowboy Junkies’ cover “The best and most authentic version [of Sweet Jane] that I’ve ever heard.”] [Lou] was real friendly. The first thing he said was, “Fire your manager, don’t trust your record company and don’t talk to journalists.” When we saw him doing a show in Paris, he held on the bridge in the song which we put back in and said, “I’d like to thank Cowboy Junkies for this.” That’s pretty cool.
PM: The coolest reaction was we used to get lots of letters from people in LA, trying to get off cocaine, thanking us for The Trinity Session! This was the late 1980s, early 1990s, so coke was now an evil drug. They were realising that if they needed to sell their house to pay for it, they might just have a problem! Things like, “I’ve been doing coke really heavy for four or five years and, if it hadn’t been for that record, I couldn’t have got off it.“
Margo: Music is a very spiritual thing. When it works, it’s like you had nothing to do with it, you were just there as it happened… the day we did The Trinity Session, during I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, I can remember hearing my voice floating up to the top of the church and back down again and thinking, “My God, that’s so beautiful.” Totally hearing it as if somebody else was singing, for the first time. It was nothing to do with me, it wasn’t, “Look at me, I can sing”, it was an out-of-body experience.
PM: I wanted this to be a movie, to be a stage play, to open, flow and end. You couldn’t break it up, change it round. It is what it is, complete. But there was no vision from God that this would change our world. All I knew was we’d made a great-sounding record that had achieved the goals we set for ourselves.
John Timmins: Trinity Session was fortunate in that it came at a time when music was so produced, so awful, so goddamned grotesque that something honest like that record was needed. The Junkies were the band doing that just at the moment that the window was open for a fleeting second. I don’t think there was any way to anticipate what would happen as a result of it.
PT: The buzz around Trinity just blew up the balloon. People come to see you because of that and then the balloon shrinks back to the people who really get it. We knew that would happen. That’s fine because that part of the audience only came to sit in the back and talk.
Jeff Bird: Later, people’s concentration on it did irritate them – more so in the past because they’ve gone beyond that now. I think you just have to accept that it was a defining record and be proud of it.
Mike: We were spoiled by Trinity. A lot of things all came together at one time on that record, and we probably didn’t realise until later just how rare that was.
JB: We found out that the church is considered to be on a huge power spot. There are three ley lines that converge there – two rivers converged there, too – and, long before the white people came, the natives held it as a really strong, sacred spot. Even when we went back there in 2006 to make [guest-assisted remake] Trinity Revisited, it still had something about it… as soon as we started to play that room kicked in, it became something special. I guess we picked the right spot.
Music Is The Drug: The Authorised Biography Of Cowboy Junkies by Dave Bowler is published by Omnibus Press on February 11.