corb lund band roughest neck around

CORB LUND
THE LONG VIEW
From criticizing sour gas to prophesying serpents,
Corb Lund ain’t your ordinary country star.
By SHANNON PHILLIPS
T
THERE MUST BE A RULE THAT YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED
to ask executives at a commercial country music awards show
to think about the oil companies in their stock portfolios. Corb
Lund broke that rule.
Last year, among the rhinestone cowboys and heavily
marketed “crossover” artists at the Canadian Country Music
Awards (CCMAs), Corb Lund and the Hurtin’ Albertans,
recipients of the Best Roots Artist award for the seventh year in
a row, busted out “This Is My Prairie” for their live performance,
a song about Alberta ranchers who see their land ruined by oil
and gas companies. “Prairie” opens with Lund’s voice floating
above accordion, and describes sick kids, dead calves and oil
companies gunning for a pipeline on ranchland that’s already
been wasted by drilling and mining. Once the banjo and guitar
enter in the second verse, we’re reminded that nobody blames
the guys driving truck for the mess, but take a good look at the
stock that you own… This is my prairie, this is my home.
Lund could’ve chosen any of his more genteel songs
from his sixth album, Losin’ Lately Gambler: “Long Gone to
Saskatchewan” has a more radio-friendly twang; “Chinook
Wind” is a more polite evocation of life in rural Alberta. Lund
has any number of songs that could be classified as straightahead country tunes, especially on Gambler, his first album to
get full US distribution. But he didn’t. He chose one that put
the Alberta government and Big Oil squarely in his crosshairs.
In Longview for three sold-out live shows at the community
hall, Lund is having breakfast at noon with me at Heidi’s Food
& Saloon, where the portions are positively Texan and the
coffee’s not even terrible. Lund half-nods when I ask him if
anyone shifted uncomfortably in their seats when he and the
Hurtin’ Albertans (Brady Valgardson on drums, Kurt Ciesla on
bass and Grant Siemens on guitar) did “This Is My Prairie” at
the CCMAs. But he says that wasn’t the intention. “I thought it
would stand out—not only for its subject matter,” he says. “Just
the type of song it is. It’s different.”
In what I come to learn is characteristic, Lund is even-handed
in his appraisal of Alberta’s politics and environment. Things are
this, but they’re also that. It’s not equivocation or weasel-words.
It’s a full reckoning of the situation. “The oil and gas industry is
reflective of the duality of the province,” he says. “I mean, I drive
a truck too, so who am I to say? We’re all hypocrites. But [what]
it comes down to: not only in Alberta, but all over the western
world, governments are in the pockets of corporations.”
The rhyming couplets of “This Is My Prairie” state what
is usually considered—in the rural landscapes Corb writes
about, where conservatives (federal, provincial, personal)
reign unquestioned—political heresy. “Prairie” lays it out in
plain speak: you can’t necessarily blame the riggers or the truck
A L B E R TA V I E W S O C T O B E R 2 0 1 1 43
Top: Lund (l) with his punk band, the Smalls (circa 1990s).
Bottom: With the Hurtin’ Albertans. Different music, same Corb.
drivers, but you can blame the government and companies that
trample the environment and collude to deny people control
over their land. Bear in mind, though, that Lund is also the guy
who penned “Roughest Neck Around,” the anthemic tribute to
Alberta’s oil patch workers.
In short, he has a clear-eyed understanding of what makes
Alberta tick. The world’s largest oil companies, people’s need
to make a living, the government never saying “no” to corporations—all compete for supremacy in our collective understanding of where we live, and all bubble underneath Lund’s music. “I
might be pissing off half my audience when I write these songs,”
he admits. His brother works in the oil patch, he tells me, as do
a handful of friends. But Lund says it’s his job. “That’s the role of
the artist, isn’t it? To say what’s [unsaid] in the room?”
LONGVIEW SEEMS A FITTING PLACE TO MEET WITH
Lund—picturesque and true to his songs, which are often
preoccupied with cowboys, horses, rodeos and other rural
themes. Longview is the home of Ian Tyson and backdrop for
Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. It’s like driving in the Alberta flag,
farmland giving way to foothills and rocky ranges, rolling hills
dotted with red barns and well-appointed farmhouses.
44 A L B E R TA V I E W S O C T O B E R 2 0 1 1
Today, Lund may be something of an icon to many
Albertans: the new Tyson, a young guy keeping the old cowboy
traditions alive and bringing our ranches, coulees and farms to
life in fairly mainstream country tunes. But there are lots of us
Albertans—small town or city kids who went to high school in
the ’90s—who knew Lund in a previous lifetime.
We watched him at gritty all-ages punk gigs in the early ’90s:
Lund was the guy playing bass at stage right, holding together
the low end of the screeching, Black Sabbath-style wall of sound
that was the underground and legendary band the Smalls. Part
speed-metal, part punk, part jazzy rock ’n’ roll, the Smalls were
sonically unclassifiable. All you knew at the end of the show was
that you had a few new bruises, ringing ears and quite possibly
the desire to start a riot. The Smalls had that ass-kicking effect.
When the Smalls called it quits in 2001, they had
accomplished more than most noisy rock bands, selling over
40,000 albums and thousands of T-shirts and hoodies—the
band’s swag was practically a uniform for skaters, freaks and
“alternative” kids all over Alberta. In the early ’90s, before
iTunes or downloading, kids like me passed around copied
cassette tapes, waiting to buy a better version when the Smalls
came to play the Elks Hall or the rec centre in our small town.
We were sure to do our shopping after the show, just in case
any stage diving should divest us of our purchases.
Corb Lund 1.0—with all the dirty vans, mosh pits and stickyfloored bars—seems a long way from a Longview diner. But
Lund doesn’t actually think so. “I’m not the first one to do
it… lots of people get older and boring, start playing country
music,” he jokes. “I don’t know what punk rock kids don’t like
Johnny Cash—and maybe more so [here] than kids in Toronto.
Practically everyone our age in Alberta grew up listening to
country music with their dad in the ’70s. It’s in our DNA.”
When Lund started playing solo country gigs in Edmonton
about 15 years ago, all us dutiful hipsters traipsed down to bars
such as the Black Dog—“he’s the guy from the Smalls, you
know, and his kind of country music is actually pretty cool”—
and left with an inkling of the possibilities brewing in Canada’s
nascent alternative country scene. Lund’s road to the CCMAs,
country music festivals and even the main stage at England’s
world-famous Glastonbury Festival was paved in part by
western Canada’s hipsters, who thought they’d give country a
shot and go to a Corb Lund solo show.
“On the face of it, it seems like a jarring transition,” he says.
“But it felt organic, pretty natural. Lots of kids who listened to
Iron Maiden listen to Willie and Waylon now, or newer bands
like Hayes Carll or Steve Earle, right?”
Lund even thinks the years of long hair and loud guitars made
him a better country musician. “My first ten years [were in] an
environment where uniqueness and your own sound is really
important. That forged my writing style. It’s almost 180 degrees
from regular country music, where you’re encouraged to be
homogeneous. I’m not judging; that’s just how it is. If I hadn’t
had those years in the Smalls, I wouldn’t be the same writer.”
Lund also thinks his first career prepared him for the life
of a musician in the age of downloading, file-sharing and
P H OTO S BY A A R O N W H I T F I E L D ( TO P ) A N D K E N C L A R K E ( B OT TO M )
FEATURE
CORB LUND
free music. “We used to give away our music. That was how
it was done.” He says that the Smalls built their career from
what Canadian punk pioneers SNFU were doing—selling
T-shirts, giving away tapes, playing small towns. “What the
music business geniuses are saying now is that it’s all about live
shows. Well, of course it is! It’s the way things have always been
done in indie bands, so I’m quite comfortable with it. I’m not
counting on anyone else… not the label, the press or anything.
My thing has always been to get in the van and play lots.”
C
CORB LUND WAS RAISED ON A FARM OUTSIDE scruffy
Taber, and he initially went to the University of Lethbridge, to
study general arts. But at 20 Lund moved to Edmonton to enter
Grant MacEwan’s jazz guitar program, then bounced back
and forth between MacEwan and anthropology studies at the
University of Alberta. The years at MacEwan were a musical
gift, he says, giving him more chords in his quiver and a deeper
understanding of contemporary music.
Though Lund’s parents hail from a Mormon background,
their son’s decision to study music didn’t relegate him to black
sheep status. He figures he did raise a few eyebrows in the early
years, however. “The long hair and the rock ’n’ roll probably did
freak them out a bit,” he says. “But at the same time I have to
hand it to them; they were always supportive.” Lund’s dad was
a veterinarian and a steer wrestler and worked on rodeos all
over the place, including Africa and Europe. His mother “has
always been unique,” and both parents have travelled a lot. He
says his parents are proud of his career, but his mother still
“really wishes I’d just finish my BA.”
You can hear those years of music school and the Smalls
in Lund’s early country albums, and even in his more recent
work if you listen carefully. There’s a driving, complicated riff
underlying many of his songs; nothing simple, twangy or honkytonk about tunes such as “Expectations and the Blues,” which,
with its rhythm and arrangement, could just as easily be rock
’n’ roll. The songs with more accessible subjects are also simpler
compositions—the predictable three-chord progressions in
“Time To Switch to Whiskey” or “Roughest Neck Around” are
the sort we’re used to hearing on commercial radio.
But with Lund, simple composition is a style choice rather
than a necessity borne of not knowing how to do anything else.
He’s not afraid to challenge his listeners or, it seems, his band
and himself. Even simpler songs such as “Five Dollar Bill” are
full of trickier chord progressions than one would ever hear in
commercial country singalongs. And the more complex the
subject, the richer the composition. “The Truth Comes Out,”
another of Lund’s environmentally themed songs, starts out in
an ominous D minor, setting the tone for a song about climate
change, loss of wildlife and rampant Alberta growth:
Connie says she’s never seen the cougars so bold
they’re comin in the yard and they’re stealin young colts
they drag em in the brush with the claws sunk in their nose
the weather’s been funny thirty years or so
the winters got warm, not as much snow
hear the big cats comin cuz there’s nowhere left to go
Lund also breaks from the commercial country mould in
shying away from whining about heartbreak. Spanish armadas,
cocaine addiction, Chilean dissidents and reflections on
apocalypse, Norse gods, triple-headed serpents, Ottomans and
Vikings populate Lund’s songs. “Love songs are just a default
for so many guys,” he says. “I write those songs if it’s real. You
can usually tell it’s a default—it betrays a lack of things to say.”
His subject is often an eclectic blend, but from the beginning
of his solo career, cowboys—and what they represent in our
provincial heritage, from settlers and stewards of the land to
booze, gambling and chewing tobacco—occupy much of the
lyrical space. This comes from his upbringing and his father’s
rodeoing, he says. “I’m rooted in this place—both sides of my
family go back 100 years in Alberta.”
Corb Lund’s tunes go over just as well
at the Longview community hall as
among the urban hippie/yuppie set.
Lund says he also likes to reach back into old western stories
because he’s a “nostalgia nut… I like old guitars, old clothes…
old cowboys. There’s so much rich history—not just here in
Alberta, everywhere—that people could write about. I don’t
know why more people don’t use it. It’s just sitting there.” Same
goes, he says, for the history of country music itself. “There’ve
been five or six subgenres of country music over the past 50
years, and dipping into them—putting a few more styles or
chords in your palette—that’s something I like to do.”
As the band continues to grow, Lund takes a philosophical
view of its relationship to the world of commercial country.
“I like to think of us as having our foot in the door—opening
it a little for people in our world [of independent music]. You
can look at it and go ‘Okay, most of those acts [on commercial
country radio] aren’t my kind of music,’ but a lot of rural people
don’t have a whole lot of choices. They watch CMT or listen to
country radio ’cause that’s the closest to what they like, right?
But when bands like mine get exposure, it shows there are
other things out there. Ironically, even though we’re outsiders
in that world, our stuff has more rural content and more things
people can relate to than most of the stuff on country radio.”
Lund knows that different songs of his resonate with different
audiences, and he’s proud of that. The band has grown beyond
Canada; they now play bars with 200–500 people throughout
the western US, especially in Montana, Colorado and Texas.
They play across the UK and even at rodeos in France. Their
A L B E R TA V I E W S O C T O B E R 2 0 1 1 45
Ian Tyson with Corb Lund at the Calgary Folk Music Festival.
success abroad matches what they were achieving at home five
or six years ago. Lund now plays hockey arenas and theatres in
Canada and headlines festival bills. “At first I wasn’t sure if the
cowboy/Alberta stuff would resonate anywhere but here,” he
says. “But Canadians pick up on different aspects. In Ontario
and out east I think they go for the music—the similarity to
Johnny Cash or Stompin’ Tom. In other places, it’s the rural
themes. And you know, Ontario is a big province. It isn’t just
Toronto. There are a lot of places where they’re just as hillbilly
as we are,” he jokes.
After producing his last three albums through Alberta’s Stony
Plain Records, Lund has been picked up by New West Records,
where his new labelmates are some of Americana music’s most
legendary names: Steve Earle, John Hiatt and Kris Kristofferson.
Lund thinks part of his success comes from the schizophrenic
nature of Alberta culture—at once redneck and conservative, but
with a heavy dose of what he calls “independent progressivity.”
“The West is just so roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done, you
know, and it’s so wide open you can start something and actually
succeed… it’s part of the culture. More so than the 400-yearold culture out east. We’re viewed as redneck cousins, and
that’s true to some extent; I certainly know those people. But
we also have a streak of independent thought, progressiveness,
ingenuity and innovation that isn’t recognized as much.”
I
I HADN’T PLANNED TO TALK POLITICS FOR OUR
interview—it almost felt unseemly in an unassuming foothills
diner, where Lund was reminded by no fewer than three
different people that “Ian was in… looking for you…” and
“Ian” later calls the restaurant to track him down. (Ian Tyson,
it seems, does not mess around with cellphones, and if the
Canadian country music legend wants to track you down, he
46 A L B E R TA V I E W S O C T O B E R 2 0 1 1
will.) But as the coffee kicked in, blowing out the cobwebs of
whatever was consumed the night before or preoccupied Lund
earlier today (“I’m having lady troubles” he told me about two
minutes after we met), it became pretty clear that Lund’s got a
big brain under that cowboy hat.
“There are just too many people,” he says. “I mean, a billion
Chinese and a billion Indians are aware of how we’ve been living
for the last 50 years, and why shouldn’t they want the same
things? They want to drive cars and have the good life. Slightly
less than half the time I think we’ll figure it out, and slightly
more than half the time I think we’re screwed as a species. That’s
kind of dark, but it’s where I’m at. You can’t discount human
ingenuity, though. It’s more a matter of will than ability.”
Lund thinks that governments—Alberta’s in particular—need
to consider life beyond oil. “Remember when Klein sent out that
questionnaire asking what we wanted the government to do with
our money? I wrote that we should spend every spare dollar on
developing ourselves as a new energy province so that when the
time comes—and it will, whether it’s five or 50 years from now,
when the world moves on and needs a new energy source—we
can be ready. It would behoove us to look to the future. If you take
away oil and gas, all we’re left with is tourism and agriculture.
We’re just lucky we sit on a bunch of old dinosaurs.”
That night, during the show at the hall, I look around at the
Smithbilts, Wranglers and belt buckles. I conclude that this has
to be the most straight-edge audience I’ve ever seen at a Corb
Lund show, recalling all the ironic cowboy shirts I’ve seen at past
gigs. In Longview, the opening riff of “Roughest Neck Around”
elicits more hoots ’n’ hollers than I recall at folk festivals,
and “Hard on Equipment”—a song about screwdrivers and
wrenches and trouble getting the floorboards to level—merits
giddy head-bobbing from the old guys, probably because they
all know somebody who, just like in the song, blames the
government for his crooked floors. The standby foot-stompers
that made Lund famous—“Five Dollar Bill,” “Horse Soldier”
and “Shine Up My Boots”—are well received. It occurs to me
that the Longview crowd might be astonished to learn that
these tunes go over just as well among the urban hippie/yuppie
set at the Edmonton Folk Festival.
The encore showcases Lund’s careful and deliberate crafting
of his live shows. “The Truth Comes Out” renders the audience
hushed and introspective, as almost everyone in the crowd
surely understands how you’ve now got to be careful out fly
fishin’, ’cause there’s “grizzly bears where there were no grizzly
bears before.” (The First Nations critique of western economic
growth—“white man builds a big fire, still cold”—may, however,
be lost on those who don’t study the album liner notes.)
But Lund would never let folks go home with that kind of
buzzkill. The finale is what Corb calls his “traditional spiritual”
song, and the crowd cheers, sings along and raises their Pilsner
cans. It’s no longer time for reverence of prairie history, cowboy
culture or pristine landscapes. It’s time to switch to whiskey.
Shannon Phillips is a Lethbridge-based journalist, researcher
and communications consultant for the Parkland Institute.
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CORB LUND