The Burnaby NOW recently chatted with musician Shaun Verreault about his career and upcoming performance at this summer's Burnaby Blues and Roots Festival.
Q: How did you get your start in music?
A: Well, the band that most people would know me for is a band called Wide Mouth Mason, which I still play in. We put out a record called No Bad Days last year and we just came from promoting it at the South By Southwest music festival in Austin. . But after that . I started doing this thing in Vancouver a couple of years ago where I would invite musicians who had never played together before and had never played with me before on stage and I wouldn't rehearse them and I wouldn't have any idea what we were going to do, and then I'd just start playing and see how they would fall in. That's what this project (is) that I'm playing at the Burnaby Blues and Roots Festival, called SV and the Killer B's. It's a quartet with drums, bass, keyboard and me playing mostly slide guitar, and it's an opportunity to practise spontaneous creation and invention.
Q: How did you become a successful musician where so many others fall short of the 'rock star' goal?
A: I think the music industry is different now than when I was trying to get my foot in the door.
In a way there are more opportunities for you to do it whichever way you want, but there's less of a system to plug into to make all of those things happen, and maybe less money to go around and less opportunity in the traditional sense. We were grinding it out on the road for quite a few years as a young band, playing blues clubs and playing covers and learning our craft and playing in front of people who weren't our moms and our girlfriends and learning how to grab an audience and make them get it. Over time we began writing our own music and we started putting that into the set and really focused on it. . So people started to see us, and word got around that we were a good live band and we had songs that they thought could amount to something, and then we just kind of followed that trajectory.
Q: You've performed with some pretty big names. Who was the most interesting?
A: They were all interesting because they were all well beyond where we were as a band and as a machine when we played with them. Seeing the Stones or AC/DC up close was pretty mind-boggling and you pinch yourself, but it was also interesting to see what the crew and the machine around them would do to put a show on like that.
Any time you feel like, oh, man, we've been on the road for nine weeks and I'm exhausted, then you'd see Angus Young get carried off the stage every night by a couple people who'd throw a towel over him and carry him off, completely spent.
I'm thinking, he's been doing this forever and lives in a castle filled with money and still decides, "Everyone who came to see me play deserves to see me give everything I have," and it becomes this ritualistic thing of how much of myself can I burn off at this show?
I saw the same thing happen with Mick Jagger when he had this horrible flu and was ill and pasty and sweaty and went on stage and no one would have any idea.
And it wasn't like it was at Madison Square Gardens that night, either. It was one of the smallest shows of the tour and he still went out and performed as if it was one of the most important gigs of his life.
Those things were really inspiring to me, and to us as a band. Whether it's a small club somewhere or the SkyDome, you play as if your heroes are watching you, because maybe in some way, somehow, they are.
Q: How do you not let it get to your head and become the stereotypical rock star?
A: You measure yourself against your heroes, not against your peers, and then there's always work to be done.
This year, I'll have been playing guitar for 30 years, and I think in about the last seven to 10 years I've sort of found in the particular way that I play slide, kind of my own voice now, after doing it for that long.
So that's always humbling, and the music business has a way of humbling you, too. You have a single that does really well and you play with the Stones in the SkyDome and the next day you're playing in a half-filled small club .. The music business will start to chop you down if you start to feel too proud of yourself.
Q: Where would you be today if you weren't a musician?
A: Who knows? I probably wouldn't have travelled as much as I have. I wouldn't have seen as many things as I have. I would be less expressive as a human being. It's the cliché of in jail or dead, but really, I don't know. When you're growing up and you want to get attention, if you can't get good attention, you'll settle for the other kind.
I got enough good attention from being the guy who was a guitar player that I didn't have to go seek out a lot of other kinds of attention.
So, it is a cliché, but nights where I'd be using my energy to find some other way to feel a buzz, I'd be playing a show somewhere, or rehearsing with my band, or in my bedroom freaking out that I'd figured out the chords in Spanish Castle Magic.
Q: What can fans expect from your set here in August?
A: It's a real mix. It's definitely blues and R&B-based, but it also comes from a place of jazz and sort of the network of U.S. jam bands, you know, Government Mule and the Allman Brothers and Derek Trucks Band and that kind of stuff where it's very much improvised but also danceable and fun.
Just because we're making it up - and it's really rich musically to be a naval-gazing academic affair - you've got to be able to move to it and the whole idea of making things up together is to build peaks and valleys and excitement into it - waves that you get to ride that the audience gets to ride with you.
