margo timmins“This song I’d like to dedicate to the young girl in Utah, and her family.” Margo Timmins - “This Street, That Man, This Life”, Petaluma, CA, 2002
Simple words spoken quietly by singer Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies deep into the band’s set on the final night of a grueling five night run up the California coast. The young girl in Utah was Elizabeth Smart and the song, written a decade earlier, tells a story hauntingly too familiar to anybody who read the newspaper that spring. The real life story ended happily but really, how happy can such a story end? Somewhere between the polar tips of sadness and happiness is a place swathed in a mixture of the two colors. This place is called life. Few bands write and perform in this place as consistently as Cowboy Junkies.
As the influence of MTV started to fade from my life in the late 80’s, one of the last bands to register on my musical radar was Cowboy Junkies. I picked up the seminal Trinity Session as high school began and set it aside for a few years. Rock and roll might have been ready for the revolutionary lo-fi recording of Trinity but I was still taking the Duran Duran pins off my Member’s Only jacket. A few years later, our paths would cross again on television.
In anticipation of the follow-up release Caution Horses, VH-1 aired a short special on Cowboy Junkies (seriously, this happened, I have a copy) and the video for the first single, “Sun Comes Up, It’s Tuesday Morning.” With my musical tastes having moved from Thompson Twins to Eric Clapton and the early delta blues artists, the time was right for me to revisit Cowboy Junkies. Twenty years later, I still haven’t left.
Two things everybody seems to know about the band is that they recorded a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” and they’re depressing. Both of these facts are slivers of truth with far more depth than most listeners will ever notice. As a band, singer Margo Timmins with brothers Michael (guitar/songwriter) and Pete (drums) and Alan Anton (bass), they are constantly challenging the listener by adapting a diverse range of songs from The Cure to Townes Van Zandt. Sheryl Crow singing “Sweet Child Of Mine” is a cover, and a terrible example of one. Cowboy Junkies exploring an acoustically bare, first person reading of Bruce Springsteen’s “You’re Missing” works on a different artistic plane.
Yes, the stories found in Cowboy Junkies songs are dark but happy endings are relatively subjective in life, something that Hollywood and Miley Cyrus would prefer you forget. Many of the early narratives that Michael passed to Margo were filled with the Southern Gothic traditions of writers like Flannery O’Connor. As years pass and the realities of family life creep into the business of being a band, the tone of the writing and the pace of the music often flows through the speakers like the words of a Richard Ford novel float across the page. Happiness and sadness twist together to form a frail tempest of hope that refuses to stop living.
The endurance of Cowboy Junkies both artistically and commercially lies in the honesty of the band. There are few bands more open with their fans, both in person and in cyberspace. Everything from rough, first take recordings to hand written lyrics are available for the listener to explore through the band’s website. Singer Margo Timmins still comes out after every show to talk and take countless pictures with fans. On stage, the sonic clouds of dark mystery swirl from the amps without disengaging the audience. Cowboy Junkies are a shared experience.
Before the show in Petaluma that night in 2002, the band invited in five or six fans to watch a tired sound check. One fan had his wife and daughter with him, something he had mentioned to Margo the night before when he requested a song that had impacted their family in a meaningful way. Remembering this and despite not having played the song in years, the band dedicated it to the daughter and played it for the family, unrehearsed, in an empty concert hall. Watching the moment unfold, I realized that the most important moments in life are the small, all too fleeting times when life comes into focus. The moments when sadness and happiness both make sense and have equal importance to our souls. It is these moments that come alive in Cowboy Junkies.
find out more about cowboy junkies @ cowboyjunkies.com
read more from jason @ essential junk
photo by bill ivester
submit you own story about your favorite band or artsit to bivester@gmail.com
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