By Jim Barber
If you’re looking to get a little warm, a little heated, or even hot like a hemi engine on full rev, let off some steam, escape that 500 pounds of stress on your shoulders, immersing yourself into the midst of a blisteringly badass rock show by Canada’s own Big Sugar would probably do the trick.
The band, founded in the early 1990s by the brilliant multi-instrumentalist, guitar master, vocalist and songwriter Gordie Johnson, is currently on the road in the Great White North (aka Canada) touring in support of the 30th anniversary of their most beloved, acclaimed and successful album, Hemi-Vision.
For longtime fans, it’s been great to see the post-COVID iteration of the band, which has been stripped down to a tight, impenetrably impressive power trio, decked out in the most fashionable of finery, much like in their early days, when their shark suits, slicked back hair, fine footwear were the diametric opposite of the Grunge times during which Big Sugar rose to popularity.
There was a time, not long after Johnson reconstituted the band in 2010 where a Big Sugar show featured a melange of musicians sometimes numbering more than a dozen on stage at any given time. This would often include the sensational singer/songwriter Meredith Shaw, Safwan Javed and Shaun Verreault from Wide Mouth Mason, the reggae/rapper Friendlyness and more.
But these days, fans see a stripped down version, one that hearkens back to the early days of the band when it was a tight, incendiary three-piece. Once again a ‘power trio,,’ featuring the remarkable talents of bassist Anders Drerup and drummer Root Valach, Johnson said this version of the band is different in a number of ways from the earlier triumvirate structure, and why he’s chose this streamlined lineup.
“It’s saying more with less. It’s easy to be agile when there’s only three people. The architecture of the song, the bones of the song stay the same to any of our songs because people know them, and they want to recognize them when they’re played live. But to have any sort of freedom or leeway to improvise with three guys, the skeleton of the song stays the same, but the muscles move differently. I am able to make one tiny shift and there’s only two other guys who need to follow me, so we can shift and morph and go into other songs and segue from one idea to the next with a lot of freedom and a lot of dexterity. The real secret weapon of this three-piece band is our ability to sing as a unit,” Johnson said.
“When I had 12 or 15 people onstage, I would sing and then all these folks would sing, and it sort of sounded more like a fireman’s Christmas choir or something? It was a group sing, and I was out front. But now it’s more like a vocal trio, like the classic Jamaican vocal trios or that Motown kind of vocal group where everybody sings. So, it’s the fourth instrument that you can use as a layer and as a texture, which I was never able to do before. Even in my old trio days, I was the only singer. There was no backup singing in those days. But now the singing is certainly a more important part of the overall presentation. We’ll take older songs and retool them, revamp them so that we can utilize our strength as a vocal group. And this is not to discredit what I’ve referred to sort as the RPM [based on the Revolutions Per Minute album from 2011] version of Big Sugar in 2012, when we were a minimum of five people and more often than not eight to 12 people or more, that group was super agile too, to its credit.
“Back then, I was more looking to bands like James Brown had in the 1970s, where once you get the group cooking, anything can happen on top of it. The group was always consistent, but I had the freedom to stop playing because I had so many musicians. I could stop playing and dance, sing, preach, testify, whatever I wanted to do. And I had other people in the band who could also step up front and improvise. [Longtime bandmate and harmonica/woodwind virtuoso] Mr. Chill would play saxophone. Friendlyness would walk up and start toasting, so that was still a really agile band. That’s always been an essential thing of Big Sugar – no one could ever accuse us of playing to tracks because you’d have to have different tracks for every night. A lot of that stuff isn’t rehearsed: that was just the level of communication that we had. With a three-piece the communication is different. And I don’t stop playing ever. I definitely get to play more guitar. In the beginning years of Big Sugar, when it was a power trio, there was more responsibility on the guitar, which I’m really stoked about having now. I mean, it’s really a different way of playing than when you’re with 10 or 12 people. Once you’ve got harmonicas and saxophones and keyboard players, your playing becomes a lot more understated and integral part of the rhythm machine. When there’s only three guys, I can play all the guitar I want or don’t want at any given time. There’s a lot more freedom as a guitar player, which feels like a good time to do that.”
In terms of his bandmates, each one of them comes with their own unique backstory, training and musical experience. But it works. Anyone seeing Johnson, Drerup and Valach on a stage over the last couple of tours has experienced the almost preternatural psychic link between the three.
“It’s sort of three generations of Big Sugar here, because you’ve got a guy who’s in his 20s [Drerup] a guy who’s 40 and a guy who’s 60 [Johnson]. So, it’s like a family. It’s almost like a family band in that regard, which is interesting because you’ve got three generations of guys who look at the same music from a different historical perspective. Anders, our bass player; I know Anders from here in Austin. Believe it or not, I first saw him on The Voice. I don’t remember what season he was a contestant [2020], but he was on Team Nick Jonas, and my teenage daughter wanted to choose the TV show we were going to watch on a particular evening. She wanted to watch The Voice. I was like, ‘oh, anything but that, baby. Please don’t. Papa doesn’t want to watch some industry thing.’ But then this guy came on and he was really good. He’s playing a Les Paul and singing a reggae song. I was like, ‘who’s this guy? This is my dude. I’m gonna vote for him.’ Well, it turns out it was Anders Drerup,” he said.
“And it’s a peculiar last name. It’s sort of Germanic, sort of Austrian, Central European-sounding name. There’s not too many Drerups out there. And I noticed that name on the band’s Instagram. And I thought, ‘that’s got to be the same guy.’ And when I realized it was, I’m like, ‘oh good God almighty. It’s the guy who’s on The Voice. He’s a Big Sugar fan. Go figure.’ So, I just sent him a message and I said, ‘hey man, we’re voting for you over here at the Johnson house. Right on bro.’ And he freaked out because he said he’d listened to Big Sugar since he was a kid. His teenage years were all about Big Sugar. And he was a huge Grady fan [another one of Johnson’s varied musical projects]. He’d been to see Grady a dozen times, so it was really great to connect with him. And he [originally from Ottawa] lives here in Austin, so we spend a lot of time working on stuff together. Sometimes I’ll go play in his group. He tours around a little bit too, so I’ll just go play bass one night, or I’ll play keyboards for him, whatever he needs, you know. So that was perfect. Yes, it was serendipity.
“And Root Valach is from Winnipeg, my hometown. [Late, great former bandmate] Garry Lowe’s son mentioned him to me and said, ‘he’s a really good heavy metal drummer, but trust me, you’re going to love him.’ I mean, I like me some heavy metal, but Big Sugar is not really that. But I said I would check him out. I heard him place on FaceTime. Benny Lowe held up his phone and I got to watch Root and listen to him play a couple of songs from our Heated album. And I was like, ‘aw, hell yeah. Okay, I’ll take this guy.’ He’s a really intelligent musician. He plays other instruments, which helps when all three of the guys in the band are multi-instrumentalists. We all understand each other’s discipline. I’m a drummer as well. Root’s a bass player as well and we all sing. So, it gives everyone in the group a unique approach to the same thing. The three of us would never approach the same instruments in the same way, which makes things interesting. There’s always instruments being passed back and forth. And for the singing part, we do spend part of our pre-show warmup singing old Newfoundland songs and sea shanties, just to get out vocals going together, which is pretty cool.”
It could be argued that Hemi-Vision is Big Sugar’s seminal, signature album, as it contains some of the band’s biggest hits, many of which still get significant airplay on terrestrial radio and garner the most raucous responses from audiences when played live. The 30th anniversary tour in commemoration of the album comes on the heels of a lengthy tour in support of the 30th anniversary of the band’s first major label release, Five Hundred Pounds. In both instances, it was a chance to revisit the albums in the new/old three-piece format as a form of celebration but also a reminder of the impressive musical legacy Johnson and Big Sugar have compiled since the band’s formation in 1991.
“If you don’t curate your own legacy, no one’s going to do it for you. I mentioned Jimmy Page a minute ago. The only reason we all still talk about Led Zeppelin, and why you see 12 year olds wearing Led Zeppelin t-shirts that their mom got them from Wal-Mart is because Jimmy has been meticulous in curating their music. AC/DC is another band like that you know, and also Guns ‘N Roses, where you can get one of their shirts at Target. Those bands have worked hard to preserve and curate their legacy. But then there’s Grand Funk Railroad. No one talks about Grand Funk Railroad. They sold more concert tickets than Led Zeppelin in America the same year they were on tour, I think it was 1973 or whatever. But no one’s curated their legacy. They’re not less of a band. They don’t have fewer great songs and great records, and they weren’t less talented, certainly. But, you know, you have to water your own garden. You’ve got to keep your name, your music and that legacy in people’s minds,” Johnson said.
“I can’t take all the credit for it because it sort of snuck up on me – that first Hemi-Vision reissue that we did during COVID [for the record’s 25th anniversary]. No one was putting out new records. I mean, we tried to put out a new record [2020s Eternity Now] but then you couldn’t tour. Our label kind of tapped us on the shoulder and said, ‘hey, you know it’s been 25 years since Hemi-Vision?’ And I was, like, ‘get out! Wow, who knew?’ It’s not like I had a little reminder on my day planner. They wanted to reissue a lot of the records that we did in the 1990s that never came out on vinyl originally. So, that was a unique opportunity to re-release Hemi-Vision. And then Heated was also re-released. Luckily, COVID lifted, and we were able to go out on tour and celebrate Heated. But we never toured in support of the Hemi-Vision reissue because no one was touring. And, again, it sneaks up on you. Next thin you know, it’s 30 years since Hemi-Vision.
“With Five Hundred Pounds, we only did a rewind of that one because Jack White came knocking and said, ‘hey, I love Five Hundred Pounds. Can we put it out on vinyl?’ ‘Uh, yes, yes you can. By the way, can I call you Jack?’ So, he decided to put out Big Sugar records and sort of take us under his wing for two years. We did a show with him and hung out and talked guitars and talked music and stuff all the time. He’s turned into a really good pal and really gave an adrenaline boost to Big Sugar. So, we went out and toured Five Hundred Pounds. And to great effect. I mean, people really turned out in large numbers to hear us play the entire Five Hundred Pounds record. A lot of the songs had not been played since we put the album out in 1993. Some of the songs were never actually played live, so it was a great experience to dig that stuff up and have to reenvision it. That was a large part of going back to being a trio, being in that mindset. Now, in the interim, we’ve made a new record. It’s finished. It’s sitting on a hard drive here at my house. But you want to time those things nicely. You want to put it out when you can optimize opportunities to tour.”
It was another famous friend who encouraged Johnson, while Big Sugar was touring in support of the Five Hundred Pounds reissue, to play more songs from Hemi-Vision live.
“We were on tour this past summer, and we did a show with Gov’t Mule, who are some really good friends of ours. We did a show with them in Buffalo and before the show, Warren Haynes said, ‘Johnson, are you ever going to do any Hemi-Vision stuff?’ I was like, ‘yeah.’ He said, ‘when? Like tonight?’ So, we did only Hemi-Vision in the second set because Warren said so. And it was a gas, man. We loved doing it. Then there were other shows in the summer. We had played the Five Hundred Pounds set to them already earlier in the year or the year before, so we can’t just keep going out and doing the same thing. We decided to throw a couple of Hemi-Vision nights into the tour. Well, people were kind of bonkers for it. I did a little online post saying, ‘hey, who wants to come hear us play Hemi-Vision?’ and it blew up my phone for a week. Then my agent started calling me asking if I wanted to do a bunch of Hemi-Vision shows. The next thing I know, my calendar is full of Hemi-Vision dates, and they keep coming. They keep adding more. But by summertime, we won’t be doing Hemi-Vision shows anymore. We will be starting to look at playing new material. We’ll probably play some new material on this tour as well, just because it’s ready to go. It’s recorded. It’s mixed. It’s ready to start showing to people. So, we’ll also throw in a new song every night.”
Hemi-Vision unleashed songs such as ‘Diggin’ A Hole,’ ‘Gone for Good,’ and ‘If I Had My Way,’ into the firmament of Canadian rock music. The combination of Johnson’s love for gritty Detroit Blues, and the best of Jamaican reggae, which appeared from the band’s earliest recordings, made for a magical combination, one that was unheard of in the predominantly beige radio playlists of the time.
Looking back at the writing and recording process of the album, Johnson said he did have an inkling that something special was brewing, although even he did not expect the chart and commercial success, the acclaim and popularity and the imprint the songs and album would have on Canadian music history.
“We were not immune to it. It’s not like we’re off in some bat cave somewhere, just aloof writing this stuff. We don’t care what other people think, but when you hit on something, you know it. My main songwriting partner of that era was a fellow by the name of Patrick Ballantyne. There were definitely more than a few moments where we would be sitting at a dining room table, with a couple of acoustic guitars, pen and paper and just hit on something. And usually, it’s so good that it’s funny. We hit on the occasional thing and would just be laughing ourselves silly because we couldn’t believe we actually thought of it. A case in point is the song, ‘All Hell for a Basement,’” he said.
“It was two different songs. I had something I’d been working on, and he had something he’d been working on. They were two completely different songs. And then we said, if I made this about this, and instead of that and it’s not about a girl, it’s about this – we just kept shaving off parts and changing perspectives on the thing until it locked. And man, that was when we knew there was something. I don’t know how long it took us to come up with our individual bits, but once we sat down and started really hashing it out, it cooked. I thought it was a song about a guy from Newfoundland who goes to work in the oil fields in northern Alberta. Patrick said, ‘no, it’s about a guy who’s regretting his divorce.’ I said, ‘trust me, the one’s about Newfoundland.’ And once we decided on that, we put it all together. But it took the longest time to actually get the nerve up to perform the song live. Still to this day, if it hits me on the wrong day, I get a little choked up, I get too choked up to sing it. Those things happen to you, and you realize if it affects you that deeply, it’s going to affect somebody else.”
Johnson then talked about another song that continues to have the same affect on him. He worked with good friends The Trews on crafting the hauntingly beautiful ode to fallen Canadian soldiers, ‘Highway of Heroes,’ which the band released as a single to help raise awareness and funds to help injured and repatriated soldiers.
“I have tried to perform ‘Highway of Heroes’ live many times, but never with any success. I wrote that one with the MacDonald brothers [Colin and John-Angus]. They told me a story about a girl [Capt. Nichola Goddard] they went to high school with from their hometown [Antigonish, Nova Scotia] who was in the military, and was killed in Afghanistan [in 2006]. We weren’t even in the same country at the time. It was a phone conversation where we just started talking about the song, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if we have this part that goes like this.’ And I had a melody and some chords that got things started. But after I hung up the phone, I headed out in the garage and I just bawled my eyes out for about 45 minutes,” he said.
“And the story just went onto a page and all I could think of was Colin singing this song. I sent the lyrics to Colin and said, ‘listen, I can’t sing this to you how it goes. You’re going to have to show me how it goes.’ And he sent a voicemail of himself singing it – he just sang it into my answering machine, just his voice, all by himself. And he was sobbing while singing. I could hear his voice quivering as he tried to get through it. I was like, ‘man, how are we going to do this? This is too much. This is some strong stuff.’ And the same thing happened when we got to the studio. We did it all on one afternoon, but it just hit all the right notes. They pushed all the right buttons for everybody when it was being recorded. Even the drum parts have the passion in it, you know what I mean? That’s not a song you can just phone in. And to this day, I don’t know how they sing it, but they sing it every night. I don’t know how Colin gets through it because I’ve tried. I almost never get through it without having to take a minute. I’ve actually stopped the song partway through in acoustic performances and went, ‘this is too raw guys. I can’t do it.’ With songs, when you hit it, when you really hit it, it plugs right into some part of you and ‘Highway of Heroes’ is probably the best – or worst – for that. ‘Diggin’ A Hole’ started as just some annoying thing we used to play in the dressing room with harmonica and banjo. It was just annoying as hell. We used to kill each other laughing playing this thing all the time thinking, ‘God, that’s so dumb.’ But then one time I was like ‘wait a minute. I think I can do something with this.’ It was this silly, simple thing. It’s a song that has two lines and a chorus, but that’s all it needed.”
Folks reading this who weren’t around at the time, this being the early-to-mid 1990s, might not understand just how different the Big Sugar sound and vibe was compared to many of their contemporaries here in Canada, and especially south of the border. This was the height of the so-called Grunge era, highlighted by the Seattle Sound as practiced by the likes of Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Alice in Chains. In the Great White North, Canada was blessed with the likes of I Mother Earth, Sloan, Econoline Crush, Our Lady Peace, Moist and Age of Electric – all excellent bands, with their own continuing legacy of excellence – but Big Sugar were outliers to the prevailing musical milieu.
While flannel, scraggly long hair and shoe gazing were the uniform of onstage gear, Johnson and his bandmates wore slick Armani suits and fine leather shoes. Their musical combination of sophisticated blues melding with the ragged, improvisational, elemental sounds of Jamaican reggae shouldn’t have worked in this environment. But it did.
“It is still a mystery to me. We were sort of shunned back in the day, and I’m not pointing fingers at anybody. But there were big rock festivals in those days where all those bands played, and we never made the bill. Our bid was never accepted. We weren’t considered part of the scene for things like Edgefest. We did play one of those, and we were slated for the noon slot, and played for 30 minutes. We left the festival site by 1 p.m. because there was nothing I wanted to see. And look, I’m not dissing anyone; they’re my contemporaries. They’re all good people. I really love some of those guys. They’re all really good dudes. But we weren’t four lads who grew up and went to high school together and had dreams of being in a rock band and getting a record deal. Man, I was at home listening to Miles Davis. I was playing jazz gigs in Toronto and rockabilly gigs and playing at illegal after-hours reggae parties. I was on a different trajectory, as were all the dudes I played with. They were part of a different scene. Mr. Chill just played blues and folk music in Windsor, Ontario. He never moved to Toronto. Garry Lowe lived in Toronto for decades and didn’t know a single Led Zeppelin song when I first met. He said he had heard of ‘Stairway in Heaven,’ but didn’t even have the title right. All he knew about Jimi Hendrix was that he was a black guy. I played with the drummer Al Cross, who is the consummate studio drummer, a jazz guy. He could go be in the pit band for Cats one night and then do a jazz gig. They were incredible musicians. Those were my people. I was a musician first,” he said.
“We got a record deal by accident. And the fact that it happened at the time that it did was even more unexpected. I remember our first day going to the record company. All they wanted to do was talk to us about Nirvana. I thought it sounded like a combination of Dick Dale and heavy metal. What’s the big deal? We were told this was going to be the biggest thing in the world, but it didn’t inspire us to go down that path. Nirvana launched a thousand other rock and roll bands, but not us. We didn’t really care. I was into Sonny Rollins. If I wanted to get inspired I would listen to [reggae legends] Black Uhuru, like, I had other tastes in music and I wasn’t thinking about being a rock star. The fact that Big Sugar got on the radio with reggae songs that had blues harmonica in them is still something that I can’t figure out. The stuff that made up Big Sugar didn’t really fit with the time, which is fine. It’s kind of cool that something so outside the box got that kind of airplay, and that people still listen to it to this day.
“’Turn the Lights On,’ [from Heated] didn’t sound anything like what was on the radio when it came out. There’s a lot of stuff from that era that doesn’t age that well. It may be one thing you remember from high school, or you remember from your first year at university. That’s nostalgia. But if you’re talking about listening to songs that all kind of sound like they were done at the same recording studio, even the recording techniques had a sameness about it, because everybody wanted to sound like what was on the radio. It’s the same today. ‘Turn the Lights On’ still doesn’t sound like what’s on the radio, but it still gets played on radio. I guess what I’m saying is first and foremost, make it good – your own version of good. If it lives up to what you really like, well, there’s probably someone out there who also really likes it.”
From album to album, project to project, Johnson evolved as a player, a songwriter, singer and musician. After putting Big Sugar into mothballs in the early 2000s, he moved to Austin, began working more and more as a producer and engineer, and satiated his writing, recording and performing appetite with the raggedly awesome cowboy punk band, Grady. After hand surgery, he taught himself to play lap steel and wrote, recorded and toured with drummer Stephane Beaudin as Sit Down! Servant, before firing up the Big Sugar wagon again in 2010. Each and every new song draws on from the influences and experiences of his past, present and future, meaning there’s great anticipation from fans and admirers in seeing where the muse will take Johnson and his bandmates next.
“All the musicians that I looked up to did that, whether it was Miles Davis or The Beatles. I mean, look at what the Beatles did from one record to the next in less than a decade. It’s remarkable how much their sound changes, especially from 1966 forward. It’s like, what the heck! In four years, you go from Rubber Soul to Let it Be? That’s crazy. Same thing with Prince and even The Police. To me, man, that’s what you’re supposed to do if the music is your priority. If stardom is your priority, you have a whole other set of parameters. You’re trying to do what is popular now and hopefully you can get it out there while it’s still popular now, otherwise you’re just chasing your tail. And that’s fine,” he said.
“But it really burns people out too because you never feel appreciated unless you’re on the absolute top. I bet Taylor Swift still has some anxiety nightmares about her career at times. I think it’s important to just take a minute and appreciate when you do achieve something. If you were wondering why Big Sugar went away for a decade, it’s because of that. When Napster happened, the record company was scared to death because they were seeing the death of their industry. The pressure was so crazy. I remember sitting in a boardroom with 12 record execs talking about the new Big Sugar record and I was thinking, ‘why I am making this record by committee?’ These people didn’t want ‘Diggin’ A Hole’ when it came out, but it was a hit so now they want the next record to have a ‘Diggin’ A Hole’ on it, which it didn’t. And they didn’t want ‘Turn the Lights On,’ but then they had to have another record with a ‘Turn the Lights On,’ because it was a hit. They didn’t want ‘All Hell for A Basement.’ It never came out as a single, but it’s the one song we have to play every single night. Like, these guys didn’t know what they were talking about. They were sitting there talking about The Spice Girls and S Club 7 and bullshit like that. I said, ‘come on guys, that has nothing to do with us. You’re talking about Frito Lay products over there.’ So, we just left. I went to Texas and started Grady and just played punk rock blues for people wearing Wranglers and cowboy hats, who just did not care about anything else.”
Speaking of Grady. The band, which started as more of a lark and a fun way to blow off some musical steam and try some new things, ended up releasing three delightfully raw, blindingly intense but grippingly entertaining studio albums between 2004 and 2009, and a live record in 2010.
“The music’s really good. The big thing about Grady is that it was sincere. That was how we felt at the time. We were just expressing ourselves with zero regard for career achievements or ticket sales or records or anything. We just did what we wanted. We were just part of this weird scene that had a moment, especially in Texas, where punk and blues and metal and all of these things just collided on the street. We were swept up in it. That’s what we were doing with all our homies, and then we’d share it with people all over the world in Europe and Canada and the U.S. It was super fun. But I would say that performing that music every night, psychologically, was not sustainable. It just about took my life. When I finally shook that off, man, it took a couple of years to recalibrate to become a kinder, gentler, more thoughtful Gordie Johnson again,” he said, adding that part of that slowing down came as a result of his hand injury and surgery.
“Of course, I didn’t really slow down did I? I started playing steel guitar and then went on the road with Sit Down! Servant. It didn’t slow me down so much as I just had to take a different approach to it. I just needed a fresh perspective. You have to change your mind about things first. I love what George Clinton once said, free your mind and your ass will follow. So, yeah, I had to free my mind from being bummed out that I couldn’t play great music. I couldn’t play Big Sugar. ‘Okay, stop bawling and get doing something else. Get your mind off it.’ I couldn’t play my guitar, and I couldn’t play steel guitar. But I couldn’t play lap steel guitar because I didn’t know how, not because my hand wouldn’t work. I realized all I’ve got to do is get my mind around playing the steel guitar and the bass pedals at the same time. It gave me a focus and it was a very restorative way of giving myself a new purpose and continue to evolve as a musician. By the time I picked up a six string guitar again, it was like, ‘oh, well, that’s fresh. That’s new. Oh, I like this.’ I came back at it with a renewed passion.
“It’s the same at every step, like getting Big Sugar back together and going out and playing. You have to have a reason to get up in the morning and keep doing it and feel good about it because, believe me man, Big Sugar is a big commitment. I’m away from home most of the year. This is a business that I have, and Mrs. Johnson and I are it. We’re a company that makes things happen, and nothing happens without the two of us putting our heads together. And a career in music was either going to go this way for us and if it didn’t we probably wouldn’t still be together. Because it’s hard to explain what goes through your mind when you’re out there on tour and you’re playing a rock show every night. It’s hard to talk about that over the phone to someone back home. It’s not fair to do it that way. But we thought, ‘hey, we can rethink this thing and do it together if we want to.’ We both had to change our minds first, but our asses followed and now they go down the road together. We’re able to do this all together, so there isn’t that pressure at home or on the road. With Mrs. J, I’m always at home, in a way.”
As stated above, new Big Sugar music is ‘in the can’ as the music industry folks say, waiting for the best time to be unleashed on the world. Johnson spoke about what influenced this next step in his and the band’s evolution.
“Little wonder, there’s a lot more social awareness in the music. The lyrics are coming from the heart. It’s sort of impossible to escape thinking about the state of humanity every minute of the day. So of course that comes out in the music. I have a pretty solid footing in that stuff because reggae music has been social commentary music for decades and decades. That’s certainly given me a viewpoint there and a skill set to interpret it. That has a lot to do with it,” he said.
“Musically, it’s all about the three piece, again. And like I said, the vocals are the fourth element to it all. I’m also playing a Fender Stratocaster on most of it, which is something I haven’t done on a lot of records.”
The Hemi-Vision 30th Anniversary Tour began Jan. 24 in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and spends the first half of February in Western Canada, before returning Feb. 20 for a show in Toronto, Feb. 21 in London and Feb. 22 in Waterloo. For more information, visit https://www.bigsugar.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at bigjim1428@hotmail.com.
