Cowboy Junkies – Cold grey light of dawn
The languid tempos and whispery tone that would characterize their early work was as much a product of necessity as it was inspiration. Their tiny rehearsal space sat just a few yards behind their house, which was pressed cheek-by-jowl with their neighbors. During their very first jam, the police descended on the troupe; a neighbor complained about the noise.
“We realized we had to tone down,” says Michael. “One thing fed into the other: Margo began to realize that her singing voice was more effective quiet. We began to realize, if we can get down underneath Margo, the sound will be more effective. Pete picked up brushes — he was just learning to play drums at that point. Everything sort of came down. We learned to play with less volume.”
Their first gig as the Cowboy Junkies was in 1986 at the Rivoli, a restaurant on Toronto’s Queen Street bar strip with a small performance space in back. In those days, the group would lay down a rhythmic groove while Margo improvised vocal melodies and sang snatches of old blues songs. Often, the entire performance would consist of a single, ever-shifting jam. In the audience at that first show was Peter Moore, a recording enthusiast who had ambitions of becoming a producer.
“I was mesmerized by Margo,” Moore remembers. “The very first show, people weren’t paying attention to them, because they were playing so softly and quietly. Margo had her back to the audience a lot of the time; mind you, she was wearing a stunning dress and looked like this absolute angel. Nobody really got it.
“That changed very quickly.”
Some time after that first gig, Greg Keelor, of the Toronto band Blue Rodeo, threw a fortuitously-timed dinner party. Among the guests were Michael and Margo and Peter Moore. The Cowboy Junkies had talked with recording engineers about capturing the intimate sound of their rehearsal garage, but had been met with blank stares. Moore was a devotee of single-mic recording (and an enthusiastic concert bootlegger) who was looking for an act that was willing to experiment with his theories.
Moore’s own epiphany about making records came when he listened to Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms and compared it to a 1956 Billie Holiday session. “I was thinking, where the fuck did we go wrong? You could see Billie Holiday, see the sweat,” recalls Moore. He had done some recording with punk bands, but over the course of the dinner, he pitched Margo and Michael on recording them in their garage on a single microphone — an eggbeater-sized Calrec Ambisonic he had just paid $9,000 for and was expecting delivery on soon. “Their eyes were lighting up, and mine were lighting up, too,” says Moore.
On a hot, sticky June 26, 1986, Moore dragged his gear over to the Crawford Street house, arranged the group around his treasured Calrec, ran cables through the backyard, jerry-rigged a control room in the kitchen, and rolled tape. Aside from a panicked moment when someone sent Moore’s microphone crashing to the concrete, everything went smoothly.
Moore ran the recording signal through an F1 digital converter and stored the sound onto regular Betamax tapes, which he recently dug out of his archives and played back. Echoing through his studio monitors came the 15-year-old sound of the band feeling their way through take-after-take of Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Shining Moon”, a reimagining of Bruce Springsteen’s “State Trooper” — and a hesitant stab at the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” (something they’d set aside for another day).
The tracks break down, and the band members’ chatter sounds nervous. The music is haunted, at once ancient and reflective of an utterly contemporary numbness and desolation. And Moore is correct: If you close your eyes, you’re in the garage on that sweaty afternoon, as they forge their new sound.
“They were very aloof; I was ecstatic,” Moore says of the playback session. “This was new from the point of view of the style of music, the whole vibe that was happening. They had a very cool attitude to groove that was missing from music.”
They pressed up nine tracks as Whites Off Earth Now and issued it on their own Latent Recordings. Their introverted, hushed performances at the Rivoli before a faithful few became crowded with scenemakers eager to catch a piece of what was becoming the most-talked-about band in town. “Because we became the thing to go to, there would be this separation in the room,” says Margo. “There was this bubble that encased us and [the hardcore fans]. And then there were people at the back, at the bar, because it was the in-thing. I could totally blank them out.”
The group hit the road, playing to near-empty clubs in U.S. cities and returning home to find their local fame snowballing. Soon, the swelling crowd would force them out of the Rivoli — not to a bigger venue to accommodate the bigger audience, but to an off-the-beaten-track bar, where they hoped the hipsters would not follow.
“It was a good learning experience, to not let it shake you that the Pong machine or the cash register was louder than you. And there was this intensity, with all these people sitting around you,” Margo says. “And then we got to another level where we could ask them to turn all that [noisemaking] stuff off.” “Or not serve beer during the show,” adds Michael. “Just to piss them off.”
“As far as noticing who was listening, we really didn’t care,” says Margo. “We just wanted to play. I don’t think I paid attention to the audience and realized that people liked us until after The Trinity Session.”