Toronto is close enough to the United States that we are fortunate to get some of its great bands when tours find them dipping south and across the border.
It’s a city of almost 3 million people. It has good bands in all genres. While Rush, for good reason, may be the most well-known, the alternative country genre boasts my favorite band, The Sadies, along with Blue Rodeo, New Country Rehab and countless others.
New Country Rehab will debut in Durango on Saturday night at the Henry Strater Theatre. The quartet played last year’s Four Corners Folk Festival and it is swinging through Colorado with other shows in Dolores on Sunday and in Denver. Led by John Showman on fiddle and vocals, the band also features Anthony de Costa on guitar, Ben Whiteley on bass and Roman Tome on drums and backing vocals. Showman formed the band five years ago with an effort to stamp his mark on country music.
“I wanted to take a whole bunch of old country songs and renovate them, and make them more palatable for the modern ear. Not that they’re not palatable, but I thought it would be interesting to do that as a contrast with what’s happening with a lot in popular country music today,” Showman said last week from the East Coast. “A lot of stuff gets recycled, not always made different or not even made much more interesting. I wanted to take a different approach and find the real kind of roots of the sound, the lyrics and try to make modern-sounding music. I surrounded myself with players who I knew would get into that and add something to it.”
“Roots” sits right up there with the word “alternative” as a catch-all adjective for music that encompasses so much, yet they are useless and futile descriptions that hold artists to a sound. New Country Rehab is a band influenced by bluegrass, folk, country and rock. The “new” in New Country Rehab isn’t because the sound is reflective of the pop music in a cowboy hat cranking out of tourist traps by the hit makers of music city; the band’s sound is right at home for fans of Bill Monroe, Gatemouth Brown or Uncle Tupelo, an original sound influenced by greats in American music.
“There’s this instant need to classify music through sound. I think it’s hard for artists to play the kind of music they really want to play, and it’s easy to get sucked into ‘we have to sound like that, or we have to have this sound.’ It can become a real minefield of either things you want to try to do, or things you want to try to avoid,” Showman said. “I think we’re lucky in that we kind of had a sound right off the bat that was what it was. The repertoire had already been ordained, and we chose it and were working on it. After a while, people started calling us this or that, and it was fine. We didn’t really care that much, and we haven’t tried to change our sound at all.”
Liggett_b@fortlewis.edu. Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager.
Bryant’s Best
Saturday: Alternative country with New Country Rehab, 7:30 p.m. $10/$12 day of show. Henry Strater Theatre, 699 Main Ave., 375-7160.
Sunday: Post Taste of Durango Party with Durango Funk All-Stars and Sky Pilot, 2 p.m., no cover, Moe’s, 937 Main Ave., 259-9018.
