Big Sugar will ‘leave it all on the stage’

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This article was published 24/02/2024 (669 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Musician Gordie Johnson says he speaks with his guitars, and if the nominations and awards he has received are an indication, he does it very well.

Johnson, Winnipeg-born and now Texas-based, is the front man for Big Sugar, a roots, rock, reggae band he formed in 1988. It’s still among the top 25 best-selling Canadian bands in Canada.

Next Saturday, Johnson and “two of his best friend musicians” will hit the stage at Brandon’s Western Manitoba Centennial Auditorium for their “500 Pounds Theatre Tour,” named after their second album, “Five Hundred Pounds,” that was released in 1993.

“The first half of the show will be all the songs from the ‘Five Hundred Pounds’ record, then we take an intermission — I mean wardrobe change, set change, the whole deal. It’s a very theatrical show, it’s not like seeing us in the smoky bar,” Johnson said during a live video chat with the Sun on Tuesday from his home in Texas.

“This is a very different kind of Big Sugar show that you haven’t seen us do before. And then in our second set, we dig through the rest of our catalogue and we play the hits, but also some deep cuts never played on tour.”

While Johnson won’t say how many guitars he owns, he said he uses “five or six to get a Big Sugar show done,” and continued listing how he has guitars stashed in different places in North America.

“All the red and sunburst ones are in the west, all the black and white ones are in the east, so I’ve got guitars hidden around. And then I have some from a band called Grady, and a group called Snakes of Central Texas, which is psychedelic blues, and I usually play a Fender for that. Turns out I’ve got quite a few guitars,” Johnson said as he laughed.

Big Sugar fans are “pretty guitar-savvy people,” he added, and some even know the guitars by name.

“I’ll show you something,” Johnson said as he held up a guitar. “I happen to have this, the ‘Ride Like Hell’ guitar. It’s a 1960s Gibson 335, and of course I’ve owned it since back in the day. It’s one of the guitars I’ve owned the longest.

“And I will bring it out to play ‘Ride Like Hell.’ It should have life breathed into it, to keep it happy. And if you look at the videos from that time and the instruments used on the record, I’ll be bringing those, too.”

The song “Ride Like Hell” was the first track on the “Five Hundred Pounds” album, and Johnson will tell you that when it was released, it was not a “big seller,” compared to Big Sugar’s other singles, “Diggin’ A Hole,” “Turn the Lights On,” “If I Had My Way,” and “All Hell For A Basement.”

Last month, multi-Grammy-award-winner Jack White — formerly of the band The White Stripes — stated that the “Five Hundred Pounds” album was “the best blues-based record to ever come out of Canada,” and that it inspired his approach to writing songs and playing guitar. White also played the single “Ride Like Hell” during a concert in Toronto in April 2022.

And now, the band can’t “go anywhere” without people shouting out “Ride Like Hell” as a request.

“It’s just so visceral,” Johnson said. “It just sounds like a moment of some dude’s burning the tires right off the wheels. Like we ran the car off into the ditch and back up onto the road and the cops couldn’t catch us. It’s got that kind of about-to-go-off-the-rails immediacy to it.

“And you can’t play it halfway. Every night we play it, whether it’s the first or the last, we always play it like it’s the last song,” Johnson said.

Included in Johnson’s guitar inventory is his double-necks — one neck has 12 strings, the other has six strings.

“For the guitar players out there, and for my Big Sugar repertoire, I keep one double-neck — of my seven double-necks — in open G tuning for songs like ‘Diggin’ A Hole’ and ‘If I Had My Way.’

“The beauty of having that double guitar has more to do with the sonic texture, to be able to have that nice, big, clean, chimey 12-string for the clean bits. And then when you go to play the heavy chords and the solos, you drop it into the six-string. It’s a completely different sound, so it’s great,” Johnson said.

The first double-neck guitar Johnson ever had was a gift from Rush’s Alex Lifeson when the two met outside a recording studio in 1996.

Johnson said it took about a week to work up the nerve to play it. “It was like the sword in the stone or something. He had given me Excalibur and I went on to slay dragons with it,” Johnson said as he chuckled.

“I got brave enough to pick it up and played it on almost the entire ‘Hemi-Vision’ record. It’s the same guitar that’s in the ‘Diggin’ A Hole’ video.”

It was Lifeson’s kindness and the unassuming way he carried himself that have stayed with Johnson all this time, he said.

“Alex Lifeson didn’t need to be nice to me — he had zero to gain from that. And that’s so refreshing to be around, because so many people in this business become so full of themselves and their own lore and mythology. Just be nice to everybody,” Johnson said.

By the time Big Sugar’s tour lands in Brandon, they will have performed three shows — two in Alberta and one in Saskatchewan — and then there are 24 more shows booked until the end of August.

Johnson’s days of riding in a tour bus and burning the candle at both ends are over, he said.

“I plan to still be hitting it over the fence by the end of the last show. I don’t want to see anybody getting tired or worn out. I’m asking you to spend your hard-earned money on Big Sugar. I don’t plan to give you anything less than all of it, you know. I’m going to leave it all on the stage.”

» mmcdougall@brandonsun.com

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