30 YEARS OF FIVE DAYS IN JULY
The scene is serene, the vibe groovy. Picture a microcosm of Max Yasgur’s dairy farm circa 1969, but instead, the year is 1993.
The setting: Greg Keelor’s new country home. Exhaustion from the road combined with tired minds leads to magical music. Aromas of Miriam “Mimi” Braidberg’s home-cooking — a restaurateur who owned a Toronto diner frequented by artists and musicians — wafts into the surrounding rooms from the kitchen, and dogs wander throughout the house. At night, a fire is made outside. In the stillness of the evening, only the sound of crickets is heard. Add a few good friends — and lots of pot — and the picture crystalizes of the bucolic summer days and nights when Five Days in July was born.
Blue Rodeo never imagined that an album meant to be a mere side project — initially an acoustically-inclined EP tentatively titled On the Farm — would mark a pivotal chapter in the band’s history, nor, that 30 years since these joyful music making days in rural Ontario, songs from this record like “Hasn’t Hit me Yet,” “Five Days in May,” and “Photograph” would still resonate with fans, be staples of the band’s set list, and make up the biggest selling record of their career.
Five Days in July was the band’s fifth album. It arrived just over a year after Lost Together — one of the most rock-oriented records the country-leaning Toronto roots group had released to date. Burnt out physically — and mentally — from endless touring, Blue Rodeo needed a break from the noise. Infatuations, break-ups, and an overall theme of love for Mother Nature permeate Five Days in July.
For the latest Record Rewind, Amplify met with Jim Cuddy and Keelor backstage at Budweiser Gardens in London, Ont. as part of their current tour “Celebrating 30 Years of Five Days In July.” Later that night, Blue Rodeo played Five Days in its entirety, followed by hits from their vast catalogue in the second set.
Keelor arrives late to the interview after finding a local Indian restaurant for lunch. Apparently the Luddite was not aware of the interview; Cuddy holds up his iPhone and jokes with his partner in song, saying, “Ever heard of one of these?” After a shared smile, the pair sits side by side on a leather couch and reminisces for the next 30-plus minutes about those blissful days on the farm.
“When we return from a tour we usually go our separate ways,” Keelor explains. “This time I had just moved to my farm and I was jazzed about bringing everybody out to see it.”
At Keelor’s rural retreat, a couple hours east of Toronto, the band, which included Jim Cuddy, Greg Keelor, Bazil Donovan, Glenn Milchem, James Gray, and Kim Deschamps, were joined by friends, family, and fellow musicians like Josh Findlayson, Andy Maize (the Skydiggers), Andrew Cash, and Anne Bourne. This added to the familial and stress-free environment. Immediately after playing demos of a batch of new songs Cuddy and Keelor had penned on the road, the band noticed these compositions were quieter. Milchem, the drummer who joined Blue Rodeo after playing with indie-rock group Change of Heart, liked his music loud, so he was initially nonplussed about using brushes for an entire record. But, after listening to the first rough cuts, he, too, realized that magic was unfolding at Keelor’s farm.
“Those sessions were so much fun … just hanging out all day at Greg’s, staying overnight, and making music in the country,” Milchem recalls. “The neighbors had a peacock that would come around and visit; it was so idyllic.
“And, we smoked tons of weed — except for Jim,” he adds. “This album expanded the dynamics of the band and it was a pivotal recording in a way I did not see at the time.”
With this agreed approach of an unplugged affair, engineer Doug McClement was called to bring his 24-track analog recording truck (Comfort Sound Mobile) to the farm and capture this newfound sound and dynamic. Comfort Sound already had a long history with the band, dating back to 1980 when the Hi-Fi’s (Cuddy and Keelor, pre-Blue Rodeo) recorded a single at its Dufferin St. studio. McClement had also recorded Donovan when he was with The Sharks and Milchem with Change of Heart.
On June 20, 1993, McClement pulled his mobile truck into Keelor’s driveway. Over the next six days and nights, the band recorded about 20 songs.
“We set up the whole band together in Greg’s living room and put up mic stands in a T formation, then draped packing blankets over them to create isolated areas for each musician,” McClement explains. “The band was adamant about using wedge monitors and not headphones since they were going for a more casual, rehearsal-style vibe for the album.
“I also remember taping small lavalier mics inside the vintage acoustic guitars that did not have built-in pickups, and hanging lavalier mics inside the old upright piano, then putting a sleeping bag over it as a sound baffle since it was only five feet from Glenn’s drums.”
McClement says Five Days is a career highlight. It was memorable for many reasons — one being the volume of reel-to-reels used.
“I went through 27 reels of two-inch tape,” he reveals. “That is the most I’ve ever used on a single session in my 45 years as a recording engineer.”
Another fun factoid the engineer shares is this: Keelor’s house did not have enough AC power to fire up his mobile truck, so they had to tie directly into the power box on the pole beside the house. “Fortunately no electrical inspectors came by during the sessions!” he laughs.
The band only did three takes of a song before moving on. If they were not happy with a song, they would return to it the following day. “It was almost the complete opposite to the way records were being made at the time,” McClement comments. “It was a real throwback to early sixties recording methods where the onus was on the band to deliver and on the recording crew to make sure the red light was on when the magic happened.”
That warmth and magic emanates from the 11 songs, and the final production definitely echoes early singer-songwriter records from the 1970s like Neil Young’s Harvest.
THE HIT SONG THAT WAS NEARLY LOST
Around the same time Blue Rodeo gathered at Keelor’s farm, the Skydiggers were recording an album in North York with Bob Ezrin and were looking for a couple extra songs.
“Andy [Maize] called me and asked if we had any extras to offer them,” Keelor recalls. “I went over to the studio and played them ‘Hasn’t Hit me Yet.’ There is a little finesse thing in the song I was not aware of when I was writing it … a key change … and the Skydiggers’ bassist could not figure it out, so they passed.”
It’s a good thing the Diggers did not scoop up this song. The second single from Five Days in July, “Hasn’t Hit Me Yet” peaked at No. 8 on the RPM charts and is frequently cited as one of the best Canadian songs of all-time. Audiences of Blue Rodeo shows over the past three decades have most likely sung the first few verses alone, waiting for Keelor to join in. According to Keelor, this tradition began one night at a show in Morin-Heights, Quebec.
“We had been playing the song for a while by that time and the night before that show I was at The Rivoli with The Sadies and The Good Brothers and I had gone to town!,” he recalls. “We were smoking joints, drinking whiskey, and just having a good pickin’ and grinnin’ evening.”
Awaking with a brutal hangover the next morning, Keelor drove to Morin-Heights and arrived with no voice. “I told the audience that they would have to help me out and they did, especially on ‘Hasn’t Hit Me Yet.’”
Cuddy adds: “He tried that in Italy another time and it didn’t work!”
A BROKEN HEART AT THE TOP OF ASPEN MOUNTAIN
Many of Keelor’s songs on Five Days in July describe a newfound love or a breakup. One of the most haunting is “Dark Angel.” The song was written about a woman from Colorado that Keelor fell for madly and deeply in the course of an afternoon. The only problem: this trust-fund girl had a boyfriend. Not that this usually stopped the songwriter, it just meant he had to work a little harder to win her over.
“She eventually broke up with the guy and we got together,” Keelor recalls. “But then she went home to Colorado and I found her sleeping with another guy camped out on Aspen Mountain!”
Keelor was so devastated that when he attempted to record “Dark Angel” he could not sing it properly. “I felt so broken that she was with another guy that I could not get in the head space where I was when I wrote the song,” he explains. “Then, one day, I walked into the studio where we were mixing the record and Sarah [McLachlan] was playing and singing it on the piano. I sat down beside her and our engineer John Whynot set up a couple of mics and we just sang it together; that was the take!”
For Cuddy, the mood for the Five Days sessions in that summer of 1993 were bubbly and relaxed. A lot of recording was done late at night by candlelight. Sometimes, dogs howled during those after-midnight sessions. All those feelings come through in the record’s vibe.
“It was so comfortable to just play music,” he says. “We did not feel like we were under any pressure to get things done. I’ll never forget listening to the album closer ‘Know Where You Go’ for the first time on playback. I sat on the steps of the mobile truck and was bowled over by how full and powerful it sounded despite it being just acoustic instruments.”
Recording in Keelor’s living room live-off-the-floor, versus a staid studio with a producer’s constant gaze through a control room window and a clock on the wall keeping tabs on the time, added up to a special recording that captures the essence of this quintessential Canadian band.
“Whenever I’m in a store, or in my car listening to the radio and ‘Bad Timing,’ ‘Hasn’t Hit Me Yet,’ or ‘Five Days in May’ comes over the speakers, I am immediately taken back to Greg’s candlelit farmhouse with the crickets in the background, a summer breeze blowing outside, the smell of the campfire, and the outstanding music that was made over those five days,” McClement concludes. “Somehow, all of those elements made it into the grooves on that album.”
RECORD FAST FACTS
Album: Five Days in July
Artist: Blue Rodeo
Band: Jim Cuddy, Greg Keelor, Bazil Donovan, Glenn Milchem, James Gray, Kim Deschamps
Released: October 26, 1993
Recorded: June and July 1993 at Greg Keelor’s farm, Clarington, Ont.
Producer: Blue Rodeo
Engineer: Doug McClement (Comfort Sound)
Mixed: John Whynot
Label: Warner (Canada); Discover (U.S.)
Sales: 600,000
Track Listing:
1. 5 Days in May
2. Hasn’t Hit Me Yet
3. Bad Timing
4. Cynthia
5. Photograph
6. What Is This Love (ft. Sarah McLachlan)
7. English Bay
8. Head Over Heels
9. ’Til I Gain Control Again
10. Dark Angel (ft. Sarah McLachlan)
11. Know Where You Go/Tell Me Your Dream (ft. Colin Linden and Sarah McLachlan)
