I saw my friend Stan Rogers perform countless times over an
eight year period beginning in 1975 when we first met at the Mariposa Folk
Festival in Toronto. I saw him at concerts, club dates and festivals all over
Canada and the northeastern U.S. and some of those times were shows I produced
at the Golem, the Montreal folk club I ran in the 1970s and ‘80s. His first Golem
dates were in February 1976 and his final dates there were in December 1982.
Stan was scheduled to return to the Golem in September 1983
but his life, along with 22 others, was tragically cut short on June 2 that
year in an Air Canada airplane fire at the Cincinnati airport.
I remember how thrilled and proud Stan was when his son
Nathan was born in 1979 and, as I noted in my review of Nathan Rogers’ album,
The Gauntlet, I know how proud Stan would have been to see the man and the
artist Nathan has turned out to be.
I mentioned how often I’d seen Stan perform because Nathan,
who is now the age Stan was when he was killed, was in Ottawa at Centrepointe
Theatre this past Saturday, November 17, performing a concert in tribute to his
father, and before the show I was kind of worried about how Nathan would
approach both the material and the larger-than-life legend about his father
that developed in the years and now decades following his death.
I needn’t have worried. Nathan, who physically resembles his
father (although he’s much thinner), approached the concert and the material
with a relaxed sense of humour and arrangements that both respected Stan’s
own from 30 and more years ago and brought in his own contemporary musical
approach. Nathan, for example, played many of the songs at a somewhat brisker
clip than Stan did. And although Nathan’s voice is somewhat higher and thinner
than Stan’s was, the genetic similarities in the timbre is unmistakable.
Most of the set list was devoted to Stan’s better-known
songs. As Nathan noted, there are certain songs that you just have to do in a
Stan Rogers tribute concert. Among the de rigueur numbers were such classics as
the inspirational “Mary Ellen Carter,” which remains my favourite Stan Rogers
song, “Northwest Passage,” and “Barrett’s Privateers,” which certainly garnered
the most audience participation of the evening.
Among the other highlights were “Lies,” “The Field Behind
the Plow,” “Tiny Fish for Japan” “Make and Break Harbour,” “The Jeannie C,” “Free
in the Harbour” and “Canol Road,” which he prefaced with a story of a bar brawl
Stan had in Jasper, Alberta, circa 1978. I remember Stan telling the story back
in the day – but Nathan had a great epilogue centred on his own visit to the
same bar 30-odd years later.
While I mentioned that Nathan’s arrangements remained
essentially faithful to Stan’s, the two best moments for me came when he
departed wholly from Stan’s approach. Nathan took “Northwest Passage,” which
Stan performed a cappella, and added a band arrangement based on his guitar
playing, to end the formal concert. And then, in what was surely an inevitable
encore, he sang “The Flowers of Bermuda,” which Stan used to play in an
exciting, fast, band arrangement, as a beautiful, slow a cappella ballad.
While most of the concert was devoted to Stan’s marvelous
original material, there were also a couple of covers – Archie Fisher’s beautiful
“Dark Eyed Molly” and Royston Wood’s comical “Woodbridge Dog Disaster” – drawn
from Stan’s repertoire.
With the exception of “The Flowers of Bermuda,” which Nathan
performed solo, he received excellent back-up throughout from guitarist JD
Edwards, fiddler Andrew Bryan and Ottawa bassist Stuart Watkins.
The audience – most of whom, like me, were old enough to
remember seeing Stan play these songs back in the day – loved the concert and
the standing ovation was well-deserved.
--Mike Regenstreif
