Likwid turns 5 and Bob's your uncle!

After years of paying his dues, Blue
Rodeo's Egan feels quite at home now

If you were to trace one of those intricate music family trees for Bob Egan, its roots, branches and sheer number of players involved would rival Liverpool rock, old-school punk or pretty much anything short of the blues, where playing in as many bands as possible is the main name of the game.

As an in-demand slide guitar and pedal steel player in the increasingly self-conscious Americana movement, Egan has been around. He is a man of steel rivalled, perhaps, only by Eric Heywood of Son Volt.

In his 40s and playing New City Likwid Lounge's fifth anniversary party tomorrow, Egan's skills have been sought and paid for, in order, by Freakwater, Wilco, Oh Susanna, the Tragically Hip, Billy Bragg and, finally, Blue Rodeo, for whom he moved to Toronto in a flash of magic powder. He now calls the band home. Once in Canada, the good-natured Egan turned up on records by Vancouver's Radiogram and our own media-saturated Old Reliable.

Just home from a week-long tour of England and Paris with Richard Buckner, now he's on the phone talking about it for our benefit. Given these are local angles, let's start there.

"Above all, it's an honour, it's a blessing to be asked to show. Twenty years ago I looked at what I could want as a music career, and I always liked the sidemen, David Lindley (Jackson Browne sidekick), Ry Cooder, the guys that weren't out front leading the band.

"The fact is I wanted to play with Old Reliable and Radiogram. One of the things I realize is with my ... position, and my age is that one of the greatest things you can do is help out bands that are starting out. Just walking home five minutes ago, some guy pulls up to me and asks where the Blue Rodeo office is, then he's like, 'You're Bob Egan! Can I drop off a demo?'"

The path to being a mainstay in Blue Rodeo is a long tale of flukes, pain and pawning off equipment, enough to fill up a National Geographic feature. Egan lilly-padded around the swamps of northern Minnesota, Chicago, Mississippi and, finally, Toronto, moving his home base to follow the dream of music sometimes better dubbed 'night terror.'

"I had this fantasy maybe 20 years ago if I ever got a song on the radio that I would pull over and ask the first waitress I saw to marry me. When I moved up to Toronto from Mississippi, they sent a big moving truck down. When I got to the border the guy comes out, asks what I'm doing, who I am, and says, 'Whattaya got in that truck?'

" 'Oh, just 80 vintage guitars and 50 vintage amps, you want to take a look?' I ask. 'Naw,' he says, 'just say hi to Greg Keelor for me.' Then, first song I hear as I'm driving up was Bobcaygeon by the Hip, I'd never heard it before but my playing was on it. 'I love this country!' I decided."

He never married the waitress.

Fresh from a haircut by Ron Sexsmith's barber, "cuz he lives in the neighbourhood and I'm a big fan of his hair," Egan likes to play the frontman when the tide's right. "It's really a lot of fun, right up my alley. I'm touring because I have the time. We've been in the studio finishing the new (Blue Rodeo) record, they're taking a break from touring, and my record's officially released on the 28th. This is a second record - you get more credibility, who knows why. My last solo was toured in the backwaters of Mississippi where being a former member of Wilco didn't attract much attention. So I paid some dues, dude.

"But I've got the best of both worlds now. I don't think there's a better place for me in this country."

However he means country - genre or geographic - Egan's dead on. A pedal steel guitar in Canada with tenure, singing on the side alone, he may have finally found a place to stay for a while and put down some more roots.