IN CONCERT
What: David Gogo
Where: The Robber Boot Club, 1605 Store St. (below Swan’s Brewpub)
When: Friday, Nov. 30, 8 p.m.
Tickets: $20 at showpass.com
Nanaimo bluesman David Gogo always makes records with a distinct direction. If he’s in an acoustic state of mind, he strips his sound bare. When he’s in the mood to rock out, he plugs in and amps up.
Until the recently released 17 Vultures, the two sides of his personality never officially shared a home on one of his recordings.
But something clearly changed in the leadup to the 15th album of his decorated career, since 17 Vultures bounces happily between the loud and the laidback.
The result is a recording that crosses formats from dirge rock to Delta blues.
“I always kept my songs separate, but I realized I needed to give my audience more credit,” Gogo said.
“If The Beatles can put Mother Nature’s Son and Helter Skelter on the same record, why can’t I do it? It gives your ears something different.”
Gogo has become a road warrior in recent years, but the making of 17 Vultures required the most focused studio stretch of his career.
It was the longest time he has ever spent writing for a new record, and though only nine songs made the final cut, he spent weeks editing each long before he entered the studio.
“I went back to the demo versions over and over again and was super critical,” Gogo said of the record, which features Odds drummer Pat Steward on drums and Ben Dwyer (son of Qualicum Beach jazz legend Phil Dwyer) on bass.
“There was a lot of trimming the fat. And that’s why the record, if I can say so myself, sounds as good as it does. There’s not a lot of bells and whistles. It’s all killer and no filler.
“When I got in the studio, I really knew what I wanted. It was a much longer process than I’ve ever done, but that gave me a lot of time to make sure I was happy with everything.”
After years in the music industry, Gogo, a six-time Juno Award nominee and three-time Maple Blues Award winner, has learned the importance of careful planning.
The former Capitol Records recording artist, who now records for Victoria’s Cordova Bay Records, has seen and done it all during a professional career that began when he was in his teens and has included relationships with everyone from Stevie Ray Vaughan to Johnny Winter.
“I really had to think about this one,” said Gogo, 49.
“It’s a tough business these days. You can’t just be spitting out records — you’ve got to make sure they are going to be really good and are going to do something, or people are going to stop wanting to pay for you to make them.”
He knew one song on 17 Vultures would immediately resonate with B.C. audiences: Tomcat Prowl, a 1980s hit by Vancouver’s Doug and the Slugs. It was an unlikely choice, in many ways, but Gogo prides himself on finding grit in the unlikeliest of places.
Doug and the Slugs keyboardist Simon Kendall, who played on the synthesizer-heavy 1988 original, plays Hammond organ on Gogo’s rollicking version, one of the album’s many surprises.
“I always end up hearing the blues in things,” Gogo said. “When we did Michael Jackson’s The Way You Make Me Feel [for 2011’s Soul Bender], it was made into a blues shuffle. The same thing with Doug and the Slugs’ Tomcat Prowl. If you look beyond the dated sound, it’s essentially a greasy blues song.”
His annual summer gig in Tahsis, which comes with a fishing trip, gave Gogo plenty of fodder. It was during the fishing trip that he began writing lyrics for the record.
On the journey home, the idea for the album’s stark artwork also came to him. “It’s so desolate up there, with their black sand beaches,” Gogo said.
“I started writing down lyrics and they were fairly dark. Days later, when I was heading home, something caught my eye and it was all these turkey vultures on a tree.”
Gogo instinctively took a picture of the birds.
When he got home, he was surprised to count 17 vultures in what became a somewhat ominous photo.
That snap gave Gogo the artwork for his new album, its title and the title track — the heaviest song of Gogo’s career.
“Lyrically, I was thinking Nick Cave, Mark Lanegan, a little darker. But that’s the neat thing about the album. We go from something that heavy to a total acoustic track.”
