Sit Down, Servant!!

When you have music in your DNA, a little adversity won't keep it down. Such it is with Gordie Johnson. Having surgery for carpal tunnel is just a good reason to test your resourcefulness.

Test passed.




01 In My Time of Dying
02 If You Think Your God Is Dead
03 Wrapped Up, Tangled Up In Jesus
04 This May Be The Last Time
05 Motherless Children
06 Old Landlady Blue
07 Blackbird Bakey Pie Blues
08 Between Heaven and Dripping Springs
09 Tired All The Time
10 Don't Miss Me When I'm Gone


http://www.sitdownservant.com/?page_id=123

Gordie Johnson is living proof that you can’t keep a good rockin’ man down.
On the heels of a potentially career-altering medical ailment, instead of wallowing in self-pity, frustration and recrimination, the frontman for Canadian alt-rock legends Big Sugar, the cowboy metal Texas concoction known as Grady, bass player for Wide Mouth Mason and producer extraordinaire decided to bear down and create some new sounds.
The result is Sit Down, Servant!!, which fuses Johnson’s lifelong love for Gospel music, with his affinity for reggae stylings.
The project, which also features Big Sugar drummer Stephane Beaudin as Johnson’s accompanist, is currently touring Canada and will appear at the Mansion in Kingston on Friday.
And longtime Johnson fans will notice the versatile shredder playing a lot of lap steel and utilizing some simpler chording structures with his left hand.
That’s because he’s basically rehabbing his left hand as he recovers from surgery to repair damage that had occurred over the past couple of decades, resulting in a debilitating bout of carpal tunnel syndrome.
So, as any good musician, he is using music as a form of physiotherapy.
“I had surgery on my hand, right at the beginning of the year. Carpal tunnel caught up with me after 10 years of working around it. It finally got to the point where, man, I really couldn’t play any more. After the last Big Sugar tour, I couldn’t play at all. I couldn’t do anything with my hand. So I figured I would try and get that surgery done, so I could save it, which I did,” he told Kingston This Week from a tour stop in Saskatchewan.
“I got the surgery done, and had a couple of months of just sitting around and looking at my bandaged up hand, wondering if I was going to play again.
“My hand just didn’t work at all, and I told the doctor, ‘Just put a metal hook on there. I will play like a mother … with a metal hook. I don’t care. I am going to play a guitar no matter what. You can’t get bogged down by it. I am going to make a sound one way or another.”
The impetus to “play again” came in the form of an offer to tour Canada with blues-rock icon George Thorogood.
He told his booking agent to book the shows, but the agent wondered how and what form Johnson would be able to conduct his musical business.
“I said there must be something I can play. I decided I could go back to playing the stuff I have been playing all my life. With that music, there’s no pressure to sound exactly like the record or like what people remember from your videos 10, 15 years ago,” Johnson said, explaining that the agent needed a name to give Thorogood’s people.
“I said, ‘Um, it’s going to be called Sit Down, Servant!!’ I happened to be listening to that song by The Staples Singers on iTunes, so I was looking at the screen while I was on the phone with my agent, and thought it was a good one. I looked it up to see who owns the domain name online, and no one owned it, so I registered it while we were on the phone. So I said, ‘Yeah, that’s the name of the band.’”
But then the agent asked for music. Johnson said he did, but to give him to the end of the day.
“I went into the studio with my assistant and we just cut two tracks together and by the end of the day I had them mixed. We got the gig based on that. But more than that it got my mind off my troubles and my inability to play and got me focussed on doing something, and hopefully getting my hand back in shape so I can go and do Big Sugar again,” he said.
“So, yeah, I am playing guitar. I am playing it lying down on my lap like a lap steel for part of the night, and a lot of the songs are spirituals and traditionals and blues songs, and even the originals are based on traditional music. So doing it is someplace that is really natural and easy for my hand because I have been doing them for so long.
“It’s my left hand, my chording hand, that’s the problem. So I will play with a slide. I am playing open tuning and the lap steel a little. It’s made me able to play and it’s going to get me back playing every night, so that I get my mobility back and my hand back.”
Someone without Johnson’s positive attitude and emotional resiliency might have packed it in and felt sorry for themselves.
That’s never been part of Gordie Johnson’s makeup.
“It could be easy to get kind of depressed and sit at home and not do anything because it hurts and it’s uncomfortable and you’re not doing what you think you could be doing. So rather than succumb to that, I said ‘No, I’ve got something I need to work on here, and get a record made.’ And we only took two days to make the record [called I Was Just Trying to Help].”
Besides singing and playing guitar, Johnson manipulates bass pedals with his feet, to give the sound more ‘bottom end.’ And I Was Just Trying to Help also incorporates Johnson’s inimitable reggae-dub vibe, making the traditional songs sound ‘Big Sugar-ish.’
“I didn’t want to just sit there with a banjo on my knee and make an acoustic folk record. That’s not what I set out to do. If I am going to do something like this, it has to be unique and I have to put my own stamp on it, and the fact that it’s electric and really subsonic and has lots of dub echoes on it, makes it not strictly a traditional approach to that kind of music,” he said.
“The Staples Singers, Mahalia Jackson, Muddy Waters, Blind Willie Johnson: those people are giants and they already did that thing. I can never hope to do it that way. I can do what I do. And there’s nothing less appealing to me than copying somebody copying somebody. I love the intention of the music, and I have always loved the message of that music. It’s something that I relate to.”
Johnson spent much of his formative youth living in Windsor, Ontario, meaning the sounds of Detroit radio wafted easily across the border and into the ears of an impressionable young Johnson.
“My dad was a choir leader at church, but I was so tired on Sunday morning in church because I had stayed up all night. I remember before I was in high school, I was out until three in the morning playing. I would sneak back in the house, and I just lived with my radio on. And at that time, in the 1970s, starting at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m, you’d start to hear Gospel programs on the radio from Detroit. Every other night you’d hear blues or soul or R&B, but Sundays you’d start hearing Gospel,” he said.
“So I would lay awake all night listening to the sermons and the choirs and it blew my mind. It was my first memory of grabbing a guitar and sitting in front of the radio and trying to copy what the preacher was singing because he would sort of sing a line and the congregation would say ‘Amen.’ So that was my first introduction into that sort of tonality and applying it to a guitar. So by the time I heard blues music, it was really familiar. Musical instruments are meant to emulate those vocalisms, so my approach to musical instruments came from that time, and it’s a very vocal approach, where everything needs to mimic human speech and human sound.”
As for the messages behind the music, Johnson said he isn’t a churchgoer.
“I don’t belong to anybody’s club. I have always been of the opinion that you shouldn’t blame the failings of Christianity on Jesus. He was just trying to help. Which is where the title of the record comes from. Christianity has caused a lot of turmoil in the world but don’t blame Jesus, he was jus trying to help.”
With limited marketing, Johnson said he is shocked at how well fans are accepting the Sit Down, Servant!! sounds.
“We cannot keep the CDs on the merchandise table. We go and shake hands after the show and it’s kind of pandemonium. It’s unprecedented. The response has been great.”
But don’t think for a moment that Johnson is done being a rock god.
Wide Mouth Mason has plans to tour Canada in September, and Big Sugar is also going to cross the continent in the fall. And there are also some Grady shows in the works.
“This hand thing has put me behind my own personal schedule a little bit, but I have to get well to the point where I can play with all those guys again,” he said.