Cowboy Junkies – Cold grey light of dawn
Margo covers her eyes and ducks her head. Michael sets his jaw as if bracing for a punch. What they’re anticipating is the nine-line summary of the Cowboy Junkies’ career in Peter Doggett’s recent 562-page history of country-rock, Are You Ready For The Country. When it comes to posterity, it’s evident that the Junkies are braced for the worst.
“In singer Margo Timmins, [Cowboy Junkies] had a genuinely unsettling figurehead, her voice as barren and cold as the wastes of Northern Canada,” Doggett writes. On 1988’s The Trinity Session, he contends, Margo “seemed to be reporting from the scene of some vast desolation, as if the nightmares of the Confederate Army had been entombed in ice.”
It reads like a catalogue of the critical cliches that have dogged the band since The Trinity Session, through all the stylistic development and variation in the intervening years. Jeff Bird, the Junkies’ long-serving multi-instrumentalist, who accompanies Margo and Michael at their radio-show promotional chores, has sat in on countless interviews where the band’s mope-rock reputation has come up, and comes to this conclusion: Every artist is allowed just one story.
“And our story is Trinity Session, and it doesn’t matter what else we do or what else we play,” says Michael. “I mean, that was 13 years ago. There are aspects of Trinity Session we have brought forward with us, because that is our style. But unless people are willing to listen to the music now, what can you do about it?”
So The Trinity Session is the record that launched them around the world, but it has also become a monolith that has cast a shadow over much of what they have accomplished since. “We have had that attitude to battle against, but we wouldn’t be mentioned in that book without that record,” Michael says philosophically.
The Church Of The Holy Trinity is an urban house of worship that was spared in a ’70s-era urban renewal project in Toronto. It now sits regally, almost surreally, tucked in amid the future-shock architecture of the Yonge Street retail behemoth Eaton Centre. The building itself is 119 feet long with a 40-foot ceiling. For reasons best known to acoustic sages such as producer Moore, it’s an ideal recording space, and he had been using it for various projects around the time the Junkies were planning their sophomore release. When asked how he convinced the proprietors of Trinity to allow a group called the Cowboy Junkies to record in a church, Moore hems and haws and then confesses: “I lied.”
At 9 a.m. on November 27, 1987, Moore again arranged the group in an acoustically advantageous way around the trusty Calrec, and captured them running through their road-tested set inside the church. This time, alongside covers such as Rodgers & Hart’s “Blue Moon”, Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, and the Patsy Cline classic “Walking After Midnight”, they took another run at their distinctive arrangement of the Velvets’ “Sweet Jane”. They also squeezed in impressive originals from Michael’s burgeoning songbook — “200 More Miles” and “Postcard Blues” — a few memorable collaborations between Michael and Margo: “To Love Is To Bury”, “I Don’t Get It”, and “Misguided Angel”.
By 11:30 that night, they were done. Moore returned to Trinity a week later to record Margo a cappella chanting the traditional “Mining For Gold”. The ambient sound humming behind her voice was a last-minute inspiration: “I went down and turned on the furnace, which was all steampipes,” Moore recalls. “It sounded like guys with hammers hitting [rocks]…you hear that ‘woosh’ and the sound of miners chipping stone in the ground, coming from the rads.” The track became the record’s opener.
For eight months, The Trinity Session, swathed in a cover that echoed the Velvet Underground’s third album, was an indie release, but it fortified the group’s swelling popularity. “I understood when I first saw them that this was something cool,” says Moore. “This was a secret club. But I guess that is the quality that made it go so big. It was a secret that everybody knew all of a sudden.”
Major labels beckoned, but each came to the same conclusion: The Trinity Session was a good start, but the entire thing needed to be redone in a real studio. “Isn’t that phenomenal? It freaked us out,” says Michael. “It just showed us these people don’t know what they are talking about. The reason they were here [to sign the band] is because of this recording. So it made us wary of signing anything.”
Eventually, RCA in New York City committed to a straightforward release of The Trinity Session, untouched. Success, by everyone’s estimation, would be 80,000 sales. It went on to sell 1.5 million. MTV jumped on videos for “Sweet Jane” and “Misguided Angel”, and comely Margo was anointed babe-of-the-moment. For such an introverted, wary bunch, it made for a hell of an adjustment.
“I never felt it went to their heads, but my god it made them feel uncomfortable,” says Moore. “Margo wasn’t craving the limelight. She is a quiet, gentle soul. Which is why people find her endearing. I think it was extremely uncomfortable. Their defenses went up, and people thought they were being cold and standoffish. But they were protecting themselves.”
Says Michael of that time: “It is the album that allowed us to do everything that has come since. The opportunities that came out of The Trinity Session were amazing.”
As annoying as the critical cliches can be about the group’s sound, The Trinity Session is also justifiably a source of pride. While they downplay its definition of their current sound, Michael is also quick to rally to the record and curious about the fact that it’s not better represented in the pantheon of modern music, particularly in the alt-country world.
“I mean, it is a seminal record,” he says. “It belongs in a list of benchmarks. That was the year of Guns N’ Roses and Ratt and Poison, but it managed to turn a lot of heads.”