ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON DEC. 22, 1989
By Steve Newton
Poor Colin James. Vancouver’s fave young blues-rocker had to travel all the way down to Tennessee to record the vocal and guitar parts for his next album–and he hasn’t even had time to go sightseeing!
“I haven’t had a chance to do anything,” said James, on the line from Memphis last week. “I went and put my hand in the Mississippi River, and went into Sun Studios, but that’s all I have had a chance to do. Every day has been just like a lot of work in the studio–hours and hours of relentless noise,” he laughs.
As well as the vocals and guitars–which will eventually be added to bed tracks recorded at Vancouver’s Little Mountain Sound–James is “sweetening things here and there” on his new album by having some unnamed guests come in. And while he’s keeping their identities secret for now, James does say that the Memphis Horns will be among those getting their licks in on a few tunes.
Although James had three producers contributing to his first album–Bob Rock, Tom Dowd, and Danny Kortchmar–this time out he’s going with one man, Joe Hardy, who worked on the Georgia Satellites‘ latest album, Steve Earle‘s Copperhead Road, and has also been in the studio with Texas boogie kings ZZ Top. So it’s safe to say that the next Colin James album will feature lots of the lovely “noise” that James alludes to.
“The record is rockin’ real hard,” he says. “It’s got more of a bluesy edge than our last record, for sure, but it’s also a little heavier on the rock end of it too. The band played so well, you know. Darrell Mayes is such a great drummer–he just kicked butt on the whole thing.
“And we’ve recorded more than enough songs,” he adds, “so it’s gonna be really hard to whittle down when it comes to it. ‘Cause we’re gonna finish them all, which is always dangerous because you get to love ’em and you don’t know what to throw away.”
Like his debut album of ’88, James’s second record will features a mix of his own compositions and tunes cowritten with other songwriters. He did some writing with Bill Carter, who cowrote Stevie Ray Vaughan‘s “Crossfire”, and Jerry Williams, who wrote “Givin’ It Up For Your Love” for Delbert McClinton, as well as two tunes on Bonnie Raitt’s last album and no less than five on Eric Clapton’s Journeyman.
Colin James fanatics who can’t wait till the release of his next album to see him tour can rejoice in the fact that they can shell out some bucks and see the 25-year-old guitar whiz at his gala New Year’s Eve show at the North Shore Studios. They just might get to hear some of his new material before anyone else on their block.
“We might sneak in a couple,” says James. “Some of the tunes we had a chance to go out live and do, and that’s why we’re putting them on the record. And other ones are pretty new and it’ll take a while for the band to sink their teeth into them. But we’re all itching to play.”
If anyone had told Colin James two years ago that he’d be headlining a gala, $125-a-head New Year’s gig on the last night of ’89–or better yet, playing the sold-out, five-night stand he did at the Commodore last November–he might not have believed them. But he’s quick to point out that his rise to fame has not been a terribly fast one.
“When I moved to Vancouver I was pretty broke,” says the Saskatchewan native, “and it took quite a while to get it going. It’s just such a lot of work when it gets down to it. I mean the touring, and how much time it takes to infiltrate a market. It takes a long time just to get out there so people know who you are.”
Some of the people who have come to know Colin James in the last little while are real rock ‘n’ roll heavyweights, like Keith Richards, who got James and his band to open for him when he toured to support his Talk is Cheap album. That valuable connection got James into an impromptu jam session backstage at the first of the Stones’ recent BC Place shows.
“The whole thing about that was just funny,” says James, “because I didn’t go there expecting to jam. But shows like that kinda give me the willies in the first place, so often I’ll just back off and not go, but I thought, ‘What the hell, I’ll go.’ And I was just sittin’ in the dressing room for a few seconds when it happened. It was just a goofy jam, but Keith was nice, ’cause he remembered me from the shows we did last year.”
Will Richards show up as one of the guests on James’s album? We’ll all have to wait until the record’s release, which is tentatively scheduled for April or May. And James only kids around when asked if he’s got a title for the LP in the can yet.
“You never know,” he says, “it might be called Colin James and the Colin James Band, featuring Colin James. Or maybe Colinization–I’m kinda pushing for that.”