Cowboy Junkies / Margo Timmins – Massey Hall (Toronto, ON)
Not many of us can claim to have had our lives change in a solitary day as substantially as Cowboy Junkies did some twenty years ago, when they assembled around a single microphone inside Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity. The resulting album, The Trinity Session, launched the careers of siblings Michael, Margo and Peter Timmins and their friend Alan Anton, and arguably helped spark the post-punk insurgency in country music.
As bountiful as The Trinity Session has been to the Junkies, it has provided a tricky heritage. The record has loomed over the group’s subsequent career like the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with similar symbolic ambiguity. Should they embrace its somber cadences and left-field commercial triumph? Or should they shuck off expectations and restlessly reevaluate their sound? The Junkies have chosen the latter, but their reputation still rests heavily on the former. Take a glance at most mainstream coverage the group gets, and words like “mopey” and “dirge” tend to be in there, even though the group long ago moved on from that sound.
Given how they battled to crawl out from under that legacy, one can imagine there was ambivalence about how to celebrate the record’s twentieth anniversary. What resulted was the recent Trinity Revisited CD and DVD project, with the Junkies returning to the church, this time accompanied by cameras, surround-sound mixing, and friends Ryan Adams, Natalie Merchant, Vic Chesnutt and longtime sideman Jeff Bird. The group successfully walks the wire between taking justified pride in past accomplishments and demonstrating how far they’ve come from those early days.
To ballyhoo the release of Trinity Revisited, the Junkies scheduled a single performance at Toronto’s storied Massey Hall. Adams had been scheduled as a special guest for the show but was an eleventh-hour cancellation. That’s a shame, more for Adams than the Junkies, because the DVD — particularly the behind-the-scenes section — gives a glimpse of Adams as ardent fan; his willingness to immerse himself in enthusiasm for someone else’s music exposes a refreshingly humble side. The absence of a marquee guest, however, signaled that the Junkies would sink, swim or tread water this night on their own merits.
The Trinity Session was performed in its original running order, but certainly not with any undue reverence for the original recording’s dynamics. Margo Timmins delivered, a cappella, the traditional “Mining For Gold” with such hushed grace that it seemed the audience was too entranced to applaud at the song’s conclusion. The spell broke a few bars into “Misguided Angel”, one of the record’s handful of original compositions and an early hit single. The original four-piece lineup, augmented by Bird’s mandolin, harmonica, fiddle and percussion, plus Jaro Czerwinec’s accordion, dug into the song and extracted richer melody and a deeper groove, an achievement repeated throughout the night.
On record, the Junkies’ original “I Don’t Get It” and the gospel number “Working On A Building” sounded forlorn and bereft. Here and now, they sound, well, winningly pissed off. Margo’s voice has in the intervening years discovered a broader emotional palette that found a nice counterpoint in Bird’s stinging harmonica. Michael Timmins’ guitar these days brims with assertiveness that was hard to detect on the original recording.
But it’s the rhythmic support of drummer Peter Timmins and bassist Alan Anton that constitutes the group’s secret weapon. To see the Cowboy Junkies in 2008 and watch this pair propel the ensemble — not with numbing volume or lead-footed tempo, but with precision and depth — is to render quite laughable the critical cliches of somnambulance that have dogged the band. “Postcard Blues” was conveyed by Margo with a scorching carnality, and “200 More Miles” became a vivid portrayal of the loneliness of life on the road. This ought to be a song every road-weary band breaks out at closing time.
By contrast, “To Love Is To Bury”, performed with Czerwinec’s accordion, Bird’s violin and Michael’s acoustic guitar behind Margo’s voice, demonstrated that few groups are so fearless in tearing a song down to its naked rudiments. The Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane”, swinging harder and served up with what for this group constitutes swagger, provided a predictable but satisfying climax to the night.
Regret came only in the choice of encores. Nothing particularly wrong with their cover of Neil Young’s “Powderfinger”, the propulsive “My Little Basquiat” (from their fine most recent record At The End Of Paths Taken), and the two early singles “‘Cause Cheap Is How I Feel” and “Sun Comes Up, It’s Tuesday Morning”. But here would have been a great opportunity to showcase how much distance the group truly has put between themselves and that storied day two decades ago when they recorded The Trinity Session. A run at, say, the quasi-psychedelic “Lay It Down”, or the needling aggression of “I Saw Your Shoes”, or the roiling melodrama of “Bread And Wine” would have closed this chapter in the Cowboy Junkies’ story with an exclamation mark.