Skies clear just in time for magic Blue Rodeo show at jazz fest
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The skies cleared just in time for Blue Rodeo.
Of course, they did. It's the magic of the Montreal International Jazz Festival, but it's also the magical ties that bind this Toronto band to their fans ici. The forecast all week insisted there was a 90- to 100-per-cent chance of rain at 9:30 on Friday night, but the folks at MétéoMédia clearly haven't been listening to the Five Days in July album often enough. There was no way the big free outdoor Blue Rodeo show at the jazz fest was going to be rained out.
And the fans knew it. The crowd stretched all the way back to Ste-Catherine St. and anyone who stayed home because of the forecast will be kicking themselves when their friends tell them how inspirational this soirée was.
By the time Jim Cuddy got to belt out Try, the very first Blue Rodeo hit, as the encore and sitting at the keyboard, there was no getting away from the fact this was one of the great Blue Rodeo shows here.
I mean not that there have been any Blue Rodeo shows much less than life-affirming. I was there Friday night with my daughter Devan reminiscing about the epic Blue Rodeo shows we'd seen at Théâtre St. Denis and Place des Arts. Friday, they ended with Lost Together and if you weren't choking up just a little bit, then you just don't love this thing called rock'n'roll.
You could see Cuddy and fellow lead singer Greg Keelor were just loving this as much as the audience.
'Merci beaucoup,' Cuddy said, near the end. 'Nous adorons Montréal.'
Later, Cuddy said: 'We'd like to thank the rain for taking a little break for us and mainly we'd like to thank you for coming out in spite of the weather.'
Highlights included an incredibly intense take on Diamond Mine with Keelor rocking his vocal hard, a brilliant Trust Yourself with thousands singing along, and the anthems Til I Am Myself Again and Hasn't Hit Me Yet, which were just as great as you might imagine.
I bumped into promoter Rubin Fogel, who was talking about how the first show they did in Montreal was at Club Soda in January 1988, back when they were hardly known here. A year later, that was no longer the case.
Close to 40 years on, many of those same fans are still at the rendezvous.
One of those was Anita Stephenson. She and her two sisters came from Guelph just to see Blue Rodeo. She's a huge fan and spent the entire drive here playing Blue Rodeo tracks and singing along to them, which kind of drove her two sisters, Janet and Susan, a little crazy.
Anita's seen them 15 times.
'They're Canadian and they're part of our culture,' Stephenson said. 'They brought this Canadiana. They weren't forced to go touring in the U.S. I think the songs are great, the people are great, it's a mix of country and rock, but it's not true country. Some songs are more romantic, some are straight-up anthems. I just like it all.'
Her sister Janet said they're not nearly as fanatical as Antia, 'but we support our baby sister.'
And they're also making a 'girls' weekend' of it, hanging out at the jazz festival for two days.
'Look at the smile on our face,' Janet said.
'I feel like a little kid,' Anita said.
Patrick Beaudet has been a Blue Rodeo fan since 1989, the year he first saw them at the Spectrum.
'I fell in love the first night I saw them,' Beaudet said.
Friday night was his 12 th Blue Rodeo show and a forecast predicting heavy rainfall wasn't going to keep him away.
'I'm a fan fini, good weather, bad weather, I was going to be at this show,' Beaudet said. 'I can easily cry listening to Blue Rodeo. It hits me viscerally, inside me, profoundly. It's the lyrics, the harmonies. I like Oasis, Pulp, British rock, but I love the Canadian roots of Blue Rodeo.'
Stéphane Fortin is also a hardcore fan and has been for over 30 years.
'I love the melodies,' Fortin said. 'And music is all about emotion.'
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