The next morning, before I left for Stratford, Brent\u2019s mother, who I guessed was somewhere in her eighties, gave me a horseshoe for good luck. Excellent gift. Kind of object that already has a life before it becomes a symbol. I loved the smell of the horses and the farm, mixture of hay, earth and manure. I rehearsed with the band, was exactly what I hoped. Made me wonder whether I should record an album with these guys, perhaps right there on the farm. Has the makings of a suitably odd Canadian story: a former member of Blue Rodeo records in a Dorchester barn with a Blue Rodeo tribute band while carrying a lucky horseshoe supplied by the farmer\u2019s mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After rehearsal, I went off to work on email-tours-book-editing-business while the band practised their material. When they finished, they asked what I thought. How could I not have an opinion? They were playing songs I once played, songs I helped inhabit, songs belonging to a life so distant it seems to have happened to somebody with my name. Now, listening as an audience member to musicians recreating something I experienced from the inside. What struck me was the irony of the musicianship. The tribute band had learned the songs with a precision we never possessed. They knew where everything went. They studied the arrangements, polished the turns. Blue Rodeo, invented the songs and then spent years changing them, forgetting parts, discovering other parts and occasionally arriving at the ending by collective intuition. The originals had enjoyed the privilege of not having to sound like themselves. The tribute band did not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The next morning, before I left for Stratford, Brent\u2019s mother, who I guessed was somewhere in her eighties, gave me a horseshoe for good luck. Excellent gift. Kind of object […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-9757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9757\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}