Press

Blues is a young man's music

Jeff Spevak
Staff music critic

(April 27, 2006) — David Gogo's memory of the circumstances surrounding his first encounter with Stevie Ray Vaughan is as sharp as if it happened yesterday.

David Gogo learned by watching Stevie Ray Vaughan that you didn't have be old to be a bluesman and that drugs just drag you down.

"Turkish steam bath," he says.

As sharp as his sense of humor. The rockin' Canadian plays today at Milestones, having packed most of his 37 years with a non-stop case of the blues. Vaughan seems to have been the deliveryman.

"When I was a kid, he was the only contemporary bluesman anywhere near my age," Gogo says. "I figured you had to be an old guy in order to be authentic. Then I heard Texas Flood."

"It re-opened the doors for Buddy Guy, Albert Collins," Gogo says of that epic 1983 album. "And it opened the doors for a kid like me." He started checking out Vaughan whenever he made it to western Canada. Gogo began dressing like Vaughan, with the floppy Vaughan-style hat. When Gogo turned up wearing a Vaughan tour T-shirt for a show in Victoria, British Columbia, Vaughan's manager spotted the skinny wannabe and invited him in for the sound check, then a backstage pass for the concert.

Single-mindedness such as that displayed by the young Gogo for blues is generally rivaled only by cranky hermits wiring up bombs in their wilderness shacks. "I went through a phase in my teens where I was an uber-blues guy," he admits. "I couldn't listen to anything else.

"My tastes have expanded since then."

Sure have. There's the evidence, right there on Gogo's new album, Skeleton Key. Amid songs by Collins, Otis Spann, Willie Dixon and his own stuff, he's covering Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus."

"We actually recorded that before Marilyn Manson decided to cover it, or Johnny Cash," Gogo says, noting that the album he included it on was never released in the United States. "It went from the bottom of the list just to make the album, to the first single. We had a pretty good hit with that. When I told the band I wanted to record it, they honestly thought I was joking at first. I always liked the song, I thought maybe there's some way we can blues it up."

Same with another gutsy choice: "Signed, Sealed, Delivered." As if Stevie Wonder couldn't get it right the first time.

"It always drives me nuts, when a band covers a song and they play it the same way as the original, except with a different lead singer," Gogo says.

"We wanted to make it a little different, cut the tempo in half, give it a gospely kind of feel."

The result sounds like something Wonder might do if he were going to cut the song again. It's diversity. Maybe. Whether he's listening to synth-pop dance giants or a pop-soul superstar, Gogo brings it back to the blues.

"I can't remember when I didn't have a guitar," he says. "Or a toy ukulele. I got into Elvis first, then the '60s bands; the Beatles, the Kinks. As my guitar playing started to develop, and I was grooving on Cream, Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, I realized a lot of this music I was hearing — my dad had a B.B. King album, a Taj Mahal record — it kinda sounds like that."

As a young man, Gogo was opening for guys like Johnny Winter, Buddy Guy and, especially, the late Albert Collins. "I was watching a DVD of one of his live shows," Gogo says. "It reminded me of why I do what I do. You don't get to see those guys anymore."

Vaughan's another one you can't see anymore. Growing up, idolizing Vaughan, Gogo's young eyes didn't deceive him. He saw what drugs were doing to Vaughan. "Oh yeah, I saw him at one point, it was really bad," he recalls. "Sure, it was great to see him clean up. The last time I saw him, he was so clear, so lucid, you could see it in his eyes. I thought, 'This guy has the same look in his eyes when I first met him. For a while, those eyelids were pretty heavy."

At that first Vaughan concert that opened the 15-year-old Gogo's eyes, it was a clear-eyed Vaughan opening, of all things, for Men at Work. We've already established that Gogo was blown away by the bluesman. And the Aussie pop band everyone else came to see?

"I listened to half a song of Men at Work," Gogo says. And then he left. "The next day at school, everybody asked, 'How was the Men at Work concert?' I said, 'Man, I didn't even watch them.' And everybody's thinking: 'That Gogo's weird.'"