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Rich Dodson had to sweet-talk his way into borrowing the famous banjo that was used on Sweet City Woman.
"On the way to the session I stopped at an old music store in Toronto, Long & McQuade," said Dodson, one of the original members of the Stampeders, whose signature song Sweet City Woman will be inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame during a ceremony and concert tomorrow night.
"I don't even know if I had the dough to rent it. I think my old buddy Bob Abbott just loaned it to me. But I made sure I took the Gibson, the most expensive one.
"So I ripped a lick off and brought it back that day. I think Bob sold it about 50 times after that, over and over. Every banjo he had up there was the banjo from Sweet City Woman."
The Stampeders -- Dodson, Ronnie King and Kim Berly -- are a tragically underrated Canadian commodity when you consider their string of hits in the 1970s. But at least the band will get some long-overdue time in the spotlight tomorrow.
The third annual Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame gala will be held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
The evening will include salutes to modern-era inductees Leonard Cohen and Gilles Vigneault, and Legacy Award recipients Anne Murray and Lucille Dumont.
Sweet City Woman, a Dodson composition, is one of the individual songs being inducted.
The Stampeders are scheduled to perform the tune with country act Doc Walker.
"I'm flabbergasted, really," Dodson said of the honour.
"To be included with people like Leonard Cohen, wow. And I'm just looking forward to a rockin' weekend with the guys."
Sweet City Woman was a smash hit in 1971, despite the fact the Stampeders' record label had reservations about releasing it.
"Carry Me was our first single and it was getting a lot of play, so then we went to do the album," said Dodson, who was born in Sudbury, spent his teenage years in Calgary, but was living in a basement apartment at Dufferin and King in Toronto when he wrote Carry Me, Sweet City Woman and many more of his best-known songs.
"When Sweet City Woman came up for a single release, the people at the label thought, 'A banjo? Not in a million years is any radio station going to play this thing.' So it met with resistance. But we felt really good about it and just said, 'This has to come out, that's the end of it.' The rest is history. It took off like a rocket."
CHUM-AM was the king of the top-40 charts back then, and the station actually sent people to Sam's and A&A -- the big record stores on Yonge St. at the time -- to check the bins and count the discs being sold.
"They thought we were buying them ourselves," Dodson recalled.
"Canadian records generally weren't doing diddly-squat and they couldn't believe the sales. They thought it was a scam."
No one will be checking for hanging chads on the ballots tomorrow. Sweet City Woman is in the club.
Dodson admitted that it seemed as if Sweet City Woman was a hit for about five years, since it fortuitously came along at about the same time Canadian-content legislation was enacted.
Those are the laws that require Canadian radio stations to play a minimum percentage of Canadian music.
So now, after thousands of performances, surely Dodson must be sick of Sweet City Woman, right?
"No, I still enjoy it," Dodson said.
"It seems to bring people so much joy, so I don't mind."