When Margo Timmins strolled up to the microphone in her low-cut black cocktail dress, wrapped in a scarlet shawl, with a rusty shock of hair draped over one eye a la Veronica Lake, even if you’d never seen Cowboy Junkies before, there was no mistaking her star power at the Villa Montalvo’s Garden Theatre in the summer of ’09. Timmins and two of her brothers, Michael on guitar and Peter on drums, along with bassist Alan Anton, have been doing the slow boil as Cowboy Junkies since 1985. As its name implies, the Toronto-based quartet specializes in quiet, ultra-slow tunes that might sound comforting to strung-out cowpokes hunkered down around a campfire after a long day rounding up stray dogies. Cowboy Junkies will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with Margo.
Alan Anton: I was listening to NPR the other day, where some dude was bongtificating about life in New Orleans—the vibe, the music, the romantic crumminess of it all—and after a pause, he summated: “It’s like very beautiful love made to a really dirty hooker.” That impressed me as being even better than the Vegas “what happens here stays here” thing, and I wondered what indecent city slogan might work for Toronto. My starting point was the squalid cleanliness and the grinding wealth that has defined this city since the hippies left Yorkville back in ’67. The big banks and insurance companies headquartered here after Quebec left Canada (ideologically anyway) in ’76, and Toronto quickly became the big money town, as monumentized in the CN Tower. Developers came and built a condo wall on the waterfront, and the lake left our daily consciousness. In their quest for wealth and World-Class City-ness, the deciders ignored what visitors really want: culture and street life. Ask someone who has visited and they’ll say, “Oh, it was really clean.” You’ll look in vain for the charming sleaziness of New Orleans or the all-you-can-succumb-to temptation package of Las Vegas. So I think we should go the other way with our city slogan. Welcome To Toronto: If You Experience An Erection Lasting More Than Four Hours, You Should Leave.
Video after the jump.
