There used to be a label on LP records that warned "home taping is killing music.''
Around these parts, and by that I mean the thousands of square kilometres of Canada, Mother Nature is doing a much better job. Ask anyone who tries to tour the country nine months of the year. This latest round of woolly mammoth weather hasn't helped.
Claws loosening like those of a determined crow preparing to fly from his telephone pole on Edmonton's rock 'n' roll north side, Bobby Cameron has more than once been inspired to leave home because of the weather. When he was a younger man (his age is secret now), the award-winning guitarist proved why he wasn't an award-winning truck driver.
"I know the reason I left the Maritimes," he smiles. "I was driving up the driveway with my father's Jimmy. My buddy was going by in a car and I waved at him. I wasn't looking, so I drove the thing right through the side of the house." Ouch.
And this has what exactly to do with the weather? Well, you probably guessed it - things got pretty stormy between Cameron and his father after that. It blew him west in a hurry, to both Vancouver and Toronto over the years, always coming back to Edmonton.
Playing under the coloured gels at the Sidetrack Cafe tonight and tomorrow, the former MuchMusic Guitar Warz champion and darling of SOCAN and ARIA is anxious enough to hit the highway again.
"My goal right now is to get on to finishing another album, besides pushing my material down in America. I have a new publishing deal with a company out of New York, where like it or not all the action is."
His No. 1 guitarist is Stevie Ray Vaughan, but Cameron's sound isn't limited to the copycat wave that still hits the shores of local blues clubs weekly, worldwide. For someone as tremendously professional as Cameron appears on his two albums, as tight as any rock record out there, the man's had an uphill climb. I ask him, given that, why he's still here at all.
"I've asked myself that a lot," he laughs. He spent years chasing the big recording contract, hearing that this country needed neither another Colin James nor a Bryan Adams, the latter particularly unnerving. So don't blame Cameron for changing gears in another place where, because of the warm weather, they have something called population density, thereby increasing the chance that the right kind of ears might get tickled. "Most of the Cape Bretoners started out playing music in the womb, but not me. I was about 22. I've taken lots of trips to a lot of places. Edmonton is definitely my home, and I always haul myself back here spiritually. But independent music's gotten real stiff in the last four years and I have to act.
"I've contacted just about everyone up here. I talked to a guy who travelled Europe extensively. Canada's not the easiest place to crack. You really have to have at it. I want to take my focus off the BS in the industry. It's the same old thing, very few people in one big country. In the states, if you travelled the distance between Winnipeg and Vancouver you'd hit a dozen big cities." Cameron has nice things to say about Canada, of course.
"You can't beat the whole rawness and the energy. We really work hard at what we do, no one's afraid to go out there and swing a bat. Canadians are not afraid to put it on the line. Here I am, just anxious, writing like crazy. It's time, you know?"
Sure enough, stand outside the Sidetrack tonight, and you'll feel things have already started to warm up some.
