They finished moving the town of Lynn Lake — "located at the end of the northern highway P.R. 391, approximately 1058 km from Winnipeg," says the official blurb, "high on the Northern Shield, surrounded by lakes, trees and unspoiled wilderness" — from its original site 200 miles away and deeper into northern Manitoba nickel country, mere days before Tom Cochrane became its eighth official newborn citizen in 1953.
That men with heavy machinery could spend years hauling a whole town so far — to enable its small number to earn a living in richer mines — still amazes the award-winning Canadian songwriter and singer. It was epic stuff, proof of both the stoic power of human will and of the impermanence of the mighty cargo we accumulate, the objects we appropriate and call home.
And though he was long gone from Canada’s remote north by the time he was seized in his early teens by the notion that music could, if he worked hard and purposefully, support him for the better part of his life, and though the nickel’s gone now, and the government’s spending millions sealing abandoned mines to ensure the safety of gold-panning tourists who now provide the bulk of the town’s revenue, Lynn Lake is the source of Cochrane’s independence, the place where his first vivid tales took shape, where he got the idea that life could be big. Epic stuff.
" I’ve always thought of myself as a Canadian, a western Canadian I suppose, although I feel all of Canada is my home," he says. "Maybe that’s my mother’s influence. She would never let me forget where we came from. I married a Winnipeg woman, though we met in Vancouver, and Kathy has that same dry sense of humour, the toughness and open friendliness I associate with people from out there."
Out there, where his father, Tuck, cut an impressive figure as a professional bush pilot flying a Beaver float plane for mining companies, is where Tom Cochrane first caught wind of notions that were bubbling in the early 1960s to the surface of the Canadian artistic and collective consciousness, ideas and images in the songs and poetry of his lifelong, unwitting mentors Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, about a vast space that both provided room for calm reflection and inspired fearful awe. Many of those ideas sustain him still.
" There was something about the remoteness of that life that created extraordinary individuals," he says. "My father was one of them, almost larger than life. When he was struck down by Parkinson’s Disease, around the same time as it hit Muhammad Ali, I was drawn to the similarities between the two men. I admire them both a great deal. One is an international cultural icon, the other a huge influence in my own life, and they were common men driven by circumstance into courageous and difficult work. And now they’re both struggling, each a hero in his own way, with this terrible and debilitating disease."
Ali — whose defiant moral and religious objections to the Vietnam War, and his virulent outrage over the denial of civil rights to black Americans, made him a pariah in his own country in the 1960s and cost him everything he had fought and worked so hard to win, including the world heavyweight boxing title — is the inspiration for Cochrane’s most recent song, "Just Like Ali."
Just Like Ali
This is a spiritual song. I call it atmospheric blues. It’s about inspiration - how our heroes inspire us then we pass that on - like a torch and nothing can really defeat the spirit, not even Parkinson’s. I dedicate this song to my Dad - my Dad and Ali.
It was not in the wilderness but in the city — more accurately, a huge suburban spread on the western fringe of Toronto, where Tuck Cochrane had moved his family after landing work as a jet pilot — that Tom found his voice."I had a reporter’s eye and I love telling stories, and I was on my way to being a journalist," he says. "My parents definitely did not encourage my pursuit of a life in music. But I remember thinking back then that I could combine journalism and song in the narrative style of the folk singers I admired."
At school, a lifelong friend recalls, it was clear Cochrane, many of whose songs celebrate the renegade spirit and the independence of the determined outsider, was heading away from the fold. "He didn’t finish Grade 13, though he went on to study music for a year at Humber College. He was a powerful guy even then. He stood out. He did things his own way, and was quite a rebel. He was thrown out of school a couple of times, basically for flouting the rules. But he was a good student, good at English, and passionate about everything that interested him, particularly poetry and literature. He was always reading, quoting bits and pieces."
"For whatever reasons, he was always anxious to move people. He likes to provoke a reaction. He’ll go to any lengths to achieve that. There’s a lot of anger in him. I know some of the reasons, but not most. I think there’s a lots of the Scot in him, too … that’s his family background: Scottish, Icelandic and South African. He’s true to those roots. He takes no quarter, no prisoners. And he doesn’t tolerate fools or slackers. He doesn’t give much of himself away, except in his music. And he has always worked incredibly hard, often against impossible odds, and almost always contrary to other people’s advice and opinions."
Cochrane got his first taste of rock ‘n’ roll playing in local bands — among them the St. Thomas Blues Band (every Toronto guitar player’s first licks are informed by rhythm ‘n’ blues, the nation’s musical bedrock), a couple of outfits inspired by the headier essays of post-British Invasion pioneers such as Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, and Harvest, which mimicked the rootsy country-folk rock of The Band, Canadian cultural icons in the 1970s, and The Byrds — and copping his and every other hopeful songwriter’s hero, Bob Dylan. "He was an enormous influence on me," Cochrane says. "I was writing poetry at 13 or 14, which was kind of dangerous where I went to school. It was an activity you couldn’t admit to, like playing golf. My first song, 'Why Can’t We Be Free?', was a protest piece I owe to Dylan. I wrote it when I was 13, and that was when I first saw the possibility of a life in music."
He threw himself into that dream, writing furiously, building a repertoire, soaking up all the music he could. He gleaned little in his year of formal training — "the music program at Humber was in its infancy, it was chaos," he says — other than that he’d likely never be a good piano player.
" But I do remember sitting on a piano bench with Duke Ellington a couple of years before he died, watching his left hand work. Around that time I learned that music that communicates has more to do with feel, passion, tension and honesty than with craft and form. Ellington was so much more than a great musical technician and composer. He regaled us with stories about his life and travels and music. He wrote stories through his music, and that’s what impressed me."
"People in the music business often place too high a value on credentials and chops. It’s not about the technical shit. It’s about the soul."
Armed with the confidence that knowledge gave him, Cochrane at 17 and 18 found himself working the same coffee-house and concert club stages in and around Toronto’s then artistic Mecca, Yorkville, as many of his musical heroes, including Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Murray McLauchlan and Jackson Browne. He released his debut album, a largely acoustic, rootsy effort, Hang On To Your Resistance, in 1974 on the independent Toronto label, Daffodil, with school chum and longtime musical colleague Deane Cameron — who would later head Capitol Records/EMI Music Canada — on drums. He scored a Top 20 hit with ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy (Faith Healer)’, a blistering — and timely, given the rise and fall a few years later of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker — diatribe against the hypocrisy of evangelists who use religion to create their own financial empires.
But by 1975, after Cochrane had toured the country opening for waning American folk-pop star Jose Feliciano, musical times had changed. Troubadours were becoming passé, and Cochrane found himself adrift in the new musical landscape, driving cabs and hauling paint cans in Toronto, crewing on fishing boats in the Caribbean to survive, washing dishes and flogging his songs in Los Angeles to no avail, and losing heart.
" I was bouncing off the walls in L.A.," he says. "It’s not a great place to be when you’re broke. I was trying to please everyone, just to get a break. I thought I’d lost it."
It was at this low point in what seemed like a shattered career that he returned to Toronto, seeking spiritual nourishment, and stumbled one night late in 1978 on Red Rider.
" A friend took me to the El Mocambo to see this band, and right away something clicked," he remembers. "They had all the right parts, a really tight rhythm section (bassist Jeff Jones and drummer Rob Baker), great keyboards (Peter Boynton) and this incredible pedal steel player, Ken Greer, who used the instrument in a very unconventional way, not the way country players use it. There was a cinematic quality to his work, a lot of moodiness and resonance. And he’s a great keyboards player as well, properly trained in a very musical family, with solid classical roots and good improvisational chops, like a jazz player."
" They played material by bands I loved — Little Feat, Steely Dan — and they were looking for a singer and original songs. It was almost too good to believe.I auditioned, and got the gig, though in the early stages everyone was pulling in different directions." Cochrane knew he was onto something at last. With Red Rider, he would be able fill out the epic songscapes he had only imagined till now. And he was hungry for some kind of approbation in the marketplace.
Commercial accomplishments don’t impress him, he says, but he knows just how many awards he has earned and for what, the top chart positions of his best-selling records, and the number of hours of airplay a particular song achieved in a particular region. It wasn’t long before Red Rider made its mark, both as one of Toronto’s "must-see" bands, and, under Capitol’s wing, as a recording act, with a pair of albums, Don’t Fight It (1980) and As Far As Siam (1981) that both went gold in Canada, and yielded an astonishing number of hits for a novice act, including ‘White Hot’, ‘Avenue A’, ‘Don’t Fight It’, ‘Cowboys In Hong Kong’ and the classic ‘Lunatic Fringe’, a powerful indictment of random violence that was both prophetic and prescient, and, like so much of Cochrane’s work, draws inspiration from literature, the news, and the lives of unusual characters.
Lunatic Fringe
"Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it." "I’m paraphrasing but it goes something like that. A series of events inspired this song. I was going out with a Jewish girl at the time and I was disturbed by anti-Semitic bombings in Paris, by the lunacy of revisionist historians, by various neo-Nazi groups gaining strength in Canada, and by a book I had read about Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who, like Schindler, helped thousands of Jews escape Europe during WWII. My manager at the time told me that there was no place for lyrics like these in this disposable pop world, and I was almost ready to cave in and accept this as a given. But the night we recorded the demo of ‘Fringe’, Fraser Hill, the engineer, told me over the studio monitor system that John Lennon was dead … Man, that hit me hard — as it did so many people. Lennon had always spoken his mind, always tried to write the truth, always went about his work with integrity. And I thought, for better or worse, I would try to use his example as the touchstone for my own writing. The irony is that ‘Lunatic Fringe’ went on to become one of my most successful and enduring songs, still is."
White Hot
Who would have thought that a song based on the life of a turn-of-the- century impressionist poet (Arthur Rimbaud) and his exploits in Africa could be a hit, especially in the indie pop, payola-ridden early 1980s? "I guess it proves that naiveté is one of the mothers of invention ... I wrote most of the lyric in a dusty corner of Guelph University’s Porter Hall library after reading Henry Miller’s White Heat/Time of The Assassins, an essay on Rimbaud. Kenny came up with the mystical piano intro after I played him the song at his place in north Toronto. I would travel to Somalia during the crisis there some 15 years later with World Vision. This was a country in which Rimbaud had sold guns, and unfortunately that legacy still remains."
Avenue ‘A’
"Shediac, New Brunswick, summer 79. We had a dirty old step van and a rental car, an Omni I think. The band house was a fly-infested shit hole with plastic bags for windows. After the show on a Thursday night, a bunch of us took the Omni down to the ocean and drove out on the beach to watch the sunrise. We left the car for a while and when we came back, all you could see of the Omni was the antenna sticking up above the water. The tide had come in! I wrote the song about a girl down there who had a plan to go to New York and study at Julliard, the music school."
On the road for the last half of 1981, opening for international acts such as The Kinks, Beach Boys, J Geils Band, Jefferson Starship, The Marshall Tucker Band and Journey, Cochrane got his first real taste of the big time, playing huge concert venues and empowered by the mighty roar of thousands every night. It was a pivotal period in which the polite poet’s aesthetic was peeled off like skin, and the raunchy common-man rock ‘n’ roller emerged, the scaffold climber, the grandstander with big, brave gestures, and that blistering, passionate voice.
" It’s a bigger wheel, it’s more fun," he says. "I’ve played thousands of clubs, but I’d much rather be in an arena. I enjoy the intimacy of acoustic performances, and I still do a few songs with just me and Kenny on acoustic instruments. It’s where I come from. And I’ve always thought Red Rider’s optimum venue is a 2000-3000 soft-seater, like (Toronto’s) Massey Hall, places where the power off the stage doesn’t overwhelm the musical interplay or the content of the songs. But, I like to rock out. I can’t deny that."
It was a time when Cochrane, with Greer as his musical facilitator and arranger, took dramatic control of Red Rider’s direction. The third album, Neruda, named after the Chilean diplomat and Nobel Prize-winning socialist poet and historian, Pablo Neruda (1904-73), was Red Rider’s masterpiece. More, it was a record like no other of its time, a work of great distinction, power, imagination and lyrical beauty, imbued with rich and unusual melodies and a dynamic harmonic substructure, compelling rhythms, substantial and thought provoking imagery and a continuing narrative theme (forward movement and escape), and an epic, cinematic sweep that British producer/engineer David Tickle (Split Enz, U2, Prince, Peter Gabriel, Jackson Browne) helped achieve by "stripping away superfluous frequencies, and giving the music spectacular clarity and plenty of room to breathe," Cochrane says.
Neruda, released in 1983, garnered reams of critical praise all over the world and yielded the now signature hits ‘Light In The Tunnel /Human Race’, ‘Power’, ‘Can’t Turn Back’ and ‘Napoleon Sheds His Skin’.
It remains one of the classics of adult rock, a timeless piece that represents the best work of a band with a vision and heart, operating in full collaborative mode, firing on all its emotional cylinders. And its standard bearer, ‘Human Race’ — a song exhorting valiant resilience against overwhelming odds, delivered with a convincing, world-weary, committed honesty — it was Cochrane’s memories of his years in the musical wilderness that inspired the lyric and his performance — is as moving and celebratory now as the day it was released.
Human Race
"This song pretty much sums it up. No matter how many friends you have, or how much in love you may be — or somebody is with you — you’ll get knocked down in this world. The measure of your depth as an artist or an individual is how you deal with it. The more valid your work is, the more isolated you are … like Neruda."
Power (Strength In Numbers)
"We were playing the Park West in Chicago in 1981-82. I went out for a walk before sound check, looking for a pair of pants or something, and I came across a crowd staring up at the top of a small building. Some poor guy was on the ledge about to jump and, like a chorus of crickets starting up at night, the crowd began chanting 'Jump … Jump!' Man, I’ll never forget that. That’s where the line came from: 'People do some strange things when they’re all together they wouldn’t even dream of by themselves'"
Napoleon Sheds His Skin
"The song’s about being involved in circumstances beyond your control, when things are not what you thought they’d be, and you crave for simpler times."
Can’t Turn Back
"No matter how rough things get, you stay the course. We perform that now with a long vamp section with a bass solo, and from time to time go into a version of Bob Marley’s 'Get Up Stand Up'. I love that man and that song. Marley was like a Third World Dylan — Dylan and Desmond Tutu all wrapped in one."
"Neruda I consider Red Rider’s first real album," Cochrane says. "Unlike the first two, it was more than a collection of songs. It was put together as a concept piece, a soundscape with several dramatic acts and reflective pauses. I’m amazed we pulled it off. That was when Kenny’s abilities and mine really came together, made something greater than the sum of the parts. I used his life as a metaphor for the struggles of all artists. His writing has been a big inspiration to me. Cody, my first daughter, was born the day the album was released, and we gave her Neruda as a second middle name." The pressure to repeat the success of Neruda forced the band — Steve Sexton had replaced Peter Boynton on keyboards — back into the studio too soon, Cochrane says now, though the 1984 follow-up, Breaking Curfew, was far from a disappointment, little it contained made a lasting impression on either sales charts or radio. It was, as they say in the business, a transitional effort that intended to draw attention away from business and interpersonal matters that had begun eroding the band’s confidence.
" After that album and tour, we were at a low ebb," Cochrane says. "It was a terrible time. Our manager wasn’t consulting us, and we were left in the dark, living off $250 a week each, even though we were filling arenas, earning bid-ticket money. The band started fragmenting, and at the end of the tour, Kenny and I went our way, and the other guys went theirs."
Taking his own advice, Cochrane got back in the race, regrouping in Toronto with Greer and keyboards wiz John Webster, to work on material for what would become Tom Cochrane And Red Rider — this time with the songwriter’s face front and center, and with Cochrane taking full responsibility for the results. Augmented by veteran bassist Ken "Spider" Sinnaeve and drummer Graham Broad, the core trio in 1986 was able to recreate the sound and style of Red Rider with cunning accuracy, especially on the hits ‘Boy Inside The Man’ — a rollicking invocation of the spark of youth concealed beneath maturing features, made all the more memorable by the rousing banjo/mandolin guitar feel that drove the song — and ‘The Untouchable One’, Cochrane’s love song to Kathy, whom he cast, naturally, as an outlaw.
Boy Inside The Man
"This is my own ‘My Way’, and has become the Tom Cochrane and Red Rider signature song. We’ve tried this song everywhere else in the live set and we’ve learned that it just has to end the show. Leaving it out of a live show is like walking on stage without one arm. The song dissects the rites of passage I think most men go through from 17 to our 30s. I was so paranoid at 25 about dying and leaving nothing behind — no kids, no legacy, no real work or music of value. I became almost desperately ambitious. 'Boy' reflects back on all that. Later, with family and kids and a bit of success, my priorities changed. This song was recorded in Wales, and it was the best recording experience of our careers to that point, pure magic! I mean, till then the recording process had been like spending months at a time in the dentist’s chair. This was our declaration of independence from a very uncomfortable management deal and even though we were almost broke and destitute after parting company with Bruce Allen, we were happy and creatively alive again. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
And no man is an island. Without friends like Deane Cameron, who became President of EMI Music Canada, and Tim Trombley, who headed the A&R department at the time, we couldn’t have made it to the next level."
Convinced that the Red Rider magic was safe and back in action, and buoyed by a new, tough live band and a lengthy tour, Cochrane and Greer began working on a new set of songs for the band’s sixth album, ironically their last collaboration until late in 2002.
Victory Day contained not a hint of the disintegration, a year or so later, of the long and productive relationship between the Red Rider principals. It was a strong and assertive record that contained several of Cochrane’s finest songs, including ‘Big League’, the sad, allegorical tale of a hockey jock who lived on dreams of a heroic future and died before he ever really got into the game; ‘Good Man Feeling Bad’, a proud and flawed dreamer’s plea for patience and forgiveness; and the title track, about the conflict between lovers over what makes life meaningful — its small moments or the big pay-off.
The narrative theme of the album — essentially a running debate spawned by our hero’s relentless pursuit of the golden fleece, a sort of odyssey, and one of Cochrane’s obsessions— was as complex and sophisticated as rock ‘n’ roll gets, and viscerally satisfying as well. While it lacked the lyrical fluidity and gracefulness of Neruda, it provided ample proof of Cochrane’s belief that raunch and intellect aren’t mutually exclusive concepts in popular music. "It captured the feeling of the wandering boy, the Homeric part of the psyche of the last half of the 20th century," he says. "There was something lonely in it, a sense of isolation, but also of jubilation and purpose."
Big League
"The song is based on a true story. I met a man in an arena when we were on tour just before sound check, a nice soft spoken guy, who told me that his son had aspirations to play pro hockey and had a scholarship, or had been close to one in the States. He asked me if we were going to play ‘Boy Inside The Man’ that night and said that his son had been a big fan. I asked him if his son would be there, not realizing the man had been using the past tense. That was when he told me his son had died in a car accident that past summer... I felt for that guy, his story hit me hard. Some songs are hard labour, but the best songs are born ... I carried that story with me for quite some time. Ken and I rented a house to write and pre-produce Victory Day. With the exception of the music equipment, we kept it bare and empty, not even a phone — nothing, like a Buddhist retreat or a monastery. In the upstairs room I simply kept a mat, tape recorder and guitar, that’s all. Ken was producing the Tragically Hip at the time, so sometimes he wouldn’t show up till late in the evening. I’d go into that room in the afternoon for an hour or so and meditate … and sometimes I’d fall asleep in the silence. One day I woke up, picked up the guitar, turned on the tape recorder and played and sang ‘Big League’ in one pass. One pass, and there it was ... born. I’m as proud of that song as anything I’ve ever written. It’s Canadiana, and even though it rocks, it’s written in a true Canadian folk narrative style. But most importantly, I hope it cuts to the heart of life, love, loss and family ... I think it says something about the hopes and dreams we put into our kids’ heads, and the transience and preciousness of life. This song’s origins are culturally specific, but the story taps into something universal, into ideas and feelings that resonate through every culture."
Though two more albums would appear under the name — Over 60 Minutes With Red Rider, a compilation released in 1987 of the best of the band’s previous four albums; and Tom Cochrane And Red Rider: The Symphony Sessions, a 1989 "best of" band collaboration with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra — Red Rider came to an end in that house in Toronto’s northern suburbs in the days and months following the Victory Day tour.
Like most endings, it came quietly, not with a great deal of anguish and pain, but as Cochrane continued working on material for the next album, he felt more and more the loner. Greer was earning a reputation as a producer and valued session musician, and seemed to have less time to work on his longtime partner’s songs. "I was teaching myself how to use recording equipment, how to engineer my own work, how to build up my own soundscapes. I wasn’t the musical innocent I’d been when I joined Red Rider. We wanted to explore different things. It was clear we were heading in different directions. It was counterproductive to keep working together at that point." Greer took to the road with Gowan, then with his own band, and Cochrane spent a year traveling to Mozambique, Ethiopia and Somalia as part of a World Vision effort to raise media consciousness about the ravages of famine in the region and the need for massive relief, and honing his musical chops and engineering skills at his home studio in Oakville, west of Toronto. Gradually, with John Webster’s help and prompting, a new style started emerging, an edgier, rhythm ‘n’ blues version of Tom Cochrane.
Ironically, that material gave Cochrane his biggest hit. Mad Mad World, (tracked appropriately in Memphis with producer Joe Hardy) with its infectious, hypnotic, hard-driving anthem, ‘Life Is A Highway’ — the most often played single on North American radio in 1991 and a song that, like the best in pop history, captured perfectly the timbre of its time — and the desperate cry for passion to ease a troubled heart, ‘Sinking Like A Sunset’ — written by Webster’s partner, Vancouver singer-songwriter Annette Ducharme — sold more than 2 million copies in North America. And it took Tom Cochrane — without Red Rider — to the heart of the rock ‘n’ roll pantheon, and loaded him with music business and artistic awards as it roared its way around the world for the next three years. It was all the vindication Cochrane needed.
Life Is A Highway
"I had a sketch of this song laying around for quite a few years, and after my first visit to Africa with World Vision, the world relief organization that I supported then and still support, I needed to write something that would pull me up, pull me out of that funk, make me feel good. I was exhausted mentally, physically and spiritually after that trip, and John Webster had been encouraging me to finish that sketch. I woke up one morning early, went out to my studio in the back shed and laid down the song and the lyric in about two hours. Again, the song was just born. I felt exhilarated, I felt good! And soon I guess it made a lot of other people feel pretty good too. The song had that effect. Songwriting is therapeutic, for the writer sometimes as much as for the listener ...
Yes and no. Sometimes you can get too much of a good thing. Cochrane admitted during the post-‘Highway’ period, when his marriage had started falling apart. He’d flown too high, and he was starting to burn up."
The release of Ashes To Diamonds, the limited edition, three-CD boxed set retrospective of Cochrane material, which takes its title from a song he wrote about a friend who was caught trying to smuggle a news videotape out of South Africa under Apartheid — it included several overlooked gems and some wonderful acoustic performances of his best known compositions, culled from CBC Radio’s live, in-studio concert program, Swingin’ On A Star, hosted by Murray McLauchlan — only spurred him on.
He refused to believe the best was behind him.
Ragged Ass Road, released in 1995, was a personal alarm, a wake-up call. It was a desperately raw and urgent album filled with pain and anger — most of that directed at himself. It was a strenuous effort to reach back to his past, to the boy inside the man, to the kid in the wilderness who used to live at the end of Ragged Ass Road and wonder at the great blue sky and listen for his father’s plane. It was also an album that dealt unapologetically, unsentimentally, with the nuts and bolts of love and the blistered nerve-ends of a passionate relationship that had somehow unraveled. It was bitter and spiteful at times, but overwhelmingly honest, a most convincing, unselfconscious howl.
I Wish You Well
"Four years of touring after Mad Mad World and the kind of chaos that rock ‘n’ roll success brings left my home life — or lack of it — in tatters. It was all a blur. Kathy and I separated for the better part of a year, and Ragged Ass Road and specifically the song ‘I Wish You Well’, addressed all of that … kind of like Lennon’s lost weekend period. A big part of why we’re here is to learn."
And he followed the lesson with Songs Of The Circling Spirit in 1997, a live acoustic album that presented a revitalized Cochrane — much more at ease with himself, reunited with Kathy and his daughters, Evan and Cody — confidently laying out all those big arena rock songs in their most naked form, and at one with audiences who had been listening intently to his yarns of travel and love and yearning for the better part of 20 years. He had come full circle. The next year, with Xray Sierra — named after the call letters of the small plane he had learned to fly, thereby fulfilling part of Tuck’s legacy — Cochrane took a step farther into new territory, combining narrative lyric forms and folk and blues elements — "Stonecutter’s Arms", "Willie Dixon Said" — with hip-hop rhythms and sampled loops. It was a brave experiment, but the experience gave him an opportunity to retrace his steps, bury a hatchet or two, and rekindle some old friendships.
Maturity brings wisdom, some degree of inner peace, humility, strength, balance. With Greer, Cochrane has found some of that. And with the reunited Red Rider — bassist Jeff Jones, John Webster on keyboards and drummer Randall Stoll— and Trapeze, this digitally remastered, reconfigured amalgam of the band’s best recorded music, live performances, and some new cuts — he sees only another horizon, renewed possibilities. The odyssey is far from finished. "It’s not time for a retrospective," he says. "It’s really another beginning. Red Rider is my signature band, the sound and style of the music in my head. There’s a hint here of the past and the future. This set of music and videos is a consolidation of our work, a reaffirmation. I feel comfortable with these guys. It’s a very unusual band, and it’s great to hear Kenny’s steel guitar again. Sometimes you have to go back to find yourself …"
Good Times (live recording)
"I always wanted to write a campfire song, and this as close as it gets. It’s somewhat autobiographical. I usually sing it acoustically live, and I love the live version we recorded with Kenny’s steel guitar.Man, it sounds like he’s dancing on the Milky Way … so cool. And the audience that night ... that’s what keeps you coming back. Listen to them sing! The energy they give out, that’s what it’s all about.I might write the songs but the audience breathes life into them!"
