IN CONCERT
What: Steve Marriner and David Gogo
Where: Hermann’s Jazz Club, 753 View St.Tickets: $25 from hermannsjazz.com
When: Thursday, Oct. 7, 7 p.m. (doors at 5:30)
Note: Gogo and Marriner also perform Friday, Oct. 8, in Nanaimo at the Queen’s Hotel and Sunday, Oct. 10, at the Duncan Showroom
Nanaimo bluesman David Gogo went from a relatively busy September to an outta-site October, one that will see him play 11 shows in 16 days.
Those are pre-pandemic numbers for Gogo, who has been a touring machine for the better part of three decades. He’s happy to be back at it, playing shows across Western Canada this month, and is hoping the forward momentum continues. “It’s almost like having a job again. I’m going to have to go back to Jazzercise and get in shape,” Gogo said with a laugh.
“But things could change at any time. You never know.”
His upcoming run consists of co-headlining dates with Toronto’s Steve Marriner, the Monkeyjunk frontman. The two friends had initially planned to make a record together in 2019, around the time the pandemic arrived.
That release was eventually scrapped, though Marriner produced and appears on several songs from Gogo’s new album, Silver Cup.
Gogo said he wrote the majority of the album during down time brought about by the pandemic. “It’s not what I do, I’m a travelling musician. I was going to have my best year ever, so the big thing for me was to stay focused, and stay creative.”
He also started a podcast (Soul Bender), and begrudgingly cleaned up the music room in his house which, to his surprise, was full of interesting items he had all but forgotten about. “I’d always come off the road and have a suitcase full of stuff, and would just throw it in a box and put it in a corner. I was finding stuff, like a poster from when I played at Harpo’s with Bo Diddley, or Steve Ray Vaughan’s phone number and address on a piece of paper. I started framing all that stuff, which had been in boxes for 20 years.”
Gogo gravitated toward another pandemic-friendly activity: playing his guitars. “When you’re on the road, you can’t play what I call the ‘wall guitars,’ which sit at home on a wall.”
One of those, a wood-bodied National Trojan guitar, from 1935, is what spurred Gogo to record Bob Dylan’s It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry for Silver Cup. He also gathered inspiration from his record collection, especially country-blues recordings by Tommy Johnson, Canned Heat and Barbecue Bob.
“I was listening to a ton of music, all the time. Because I was always at home.”
The tour comes at an opportune time for both parties, as Marriner’s new album, Hope Dies, arrived July 2. Gogo, a six-time Juno Award nominee (Marriner is a two-time Juno winner), said he wants to work as hard and long as he can in the coming weeks, for fear of another shutdown.
He has a plan if everything goes south once more, however.
“The only good thing about the beginning of the pandemic was during that first summer. I went down almost every day to our family’s river spot in Nanaimo with a cheap guitar. There’s worse places a guy could be.”
mdevlin@timescolonist.com
