A Man of Many Parts: Singer, songwriter, guitarist, producer — Gordie Johnson does it all and does it well

By Karen Bliss

(Photo: Michael Maxxis)

Gordie Johnson has more songs earning money on the radio that he’s co-written with other artists than he has with Big Sugar — and that’s saying something. The blues-reggae-rock band released 18 singles over 13 years, including top-charting hits “Diggin’ a Hole” and “If I Had My Way.”

Johnson, a singer, masterful guitarist and equally successful producer for such artists as The Trews, Joel Plaskett, Gov’t Mule, Taj Mahal, Nashville Pussy and The Respectables, launched a new Delta-metal band, Grady, out of his adopted home base of Austin, Texas, but continues to come home to Canada to tour and work with others. “I’m looking forward to some un-busyness, but I don’t know when to expect it,” Johnson says.

He recently resurrected Big Sugar and has just completed a new album, Revolution Per Minute. He has also joined Wide Mouth Mason as bassist and is co-writing and producing the new album. The two bands plan to be on tour by the summer.

On top of all that, he’s produced and co-written with newcomers Tim Chaisson, a P.E.I. pop singer; Meredith Shaw, a Toronto pop singer; Shane Murphy, a Montreal soul singer; Matthew Miller, a Six Nations metal artist; Chris Kirby, a Newfoundland blues artist; and Jungle Rockers, a garage rock band from Austin.

“I don’t become a co-writer with every artist I’ve worked with as a producer. It’s not a given,” Johnson says. “Like Warren Haynes in Gov’t Mule. I’ve done the last three records, but Warren will come to me with song ideas and I work as producer and arranger of the song. He bounces ideas off of me. Joel Plaskett is the same thing. As a fully formed songwriter, I don’t co-write with Joel. I say, ‘That’s a good one’ or ‘You’ve done better things than that.’

“Other artists will come to me if they don’t have a clear vision of what they’re trying to say, then I’ll come in and work on trying to get there. It’s my job to be the first pair of ears to hear it and go, ‘I know you know what you mean, but no one else is gonna know what you mean. Let’s try and clarify it.’”

Johnson has his own tricks to get the best from a songwriter, usually involving reverse psychology. “I used one of my favourite tactics last night,” he says with a laugh, “with a guy whose songs I absolutely adore, Shane Murphy. I was listening to the lyrics go down and I thought, ‘This could be a lot better.’ What I like to do with great songwriters — I’ve done this with Joel too — is suggest a lyric that I know is really horrible and then they look at me with horror and disgust and start scribbling away. ‘No, no, I got something better’ — and it’s always better.”

He will also be completely honest, though, and not worry about bruising the artist’s fragile ego. “I’ve looked my artists right in the eye or I’ll look at their guitar while they’re playing and go, ‘What the hell are you doing? That makes no sense,’ or I’ll go, ‘That’s horrible,’” he admits. “The response is usually laughter, but there isn’t a songwriter out there who has the level of confidence to sit there and be completely open-minded to any criticism or suggestion. Every songwriter is pretty precious about their ideas and there’s always that hard swallow with letting some of that go.”

So who does Johnson rely on to tell him what sucks? “The best songwriting partners I have are The Trews,” Johnson says. They have written many songs together, including The Trews’ recent charity single, “Highway of Heroes,” with proceeds going to the Canadian Hero Fund.

“The MacDonald brothers [Colin and John-Angus] and I will sit in a room with the express purpose of writing songs,” Johnson says. “We pull out the notebooks and we’ll sing the worst stuff to each other. It’s like if you’re in a nudist colony. After a while, you don’t care what anybody looks like — we’re all naked, we’ve got nothing to hide here. Everyone’s got two of those and one of those and here we go.

“That’s really invigorating, because Colin will sit in front of me and say a line and then he’ll change it and say another one that’s horrible. ‘No that one’s worse.’ ‘Okay, it’s a bit better.’ ‘What if you change this?’ ‘That’s better.’ It just gets better and you keep perfecting one word at a time.

“None of us is afraid to throw out bad ideas because you gotta get your bad songs out of your system too. Better they come out now, in front of friends, instead of in front of an audience.”

Johnson has also put a lot of songwriters together. Shaw, for instance, now has co-writes on the new Big Sugar album and will soon start writing with Colin from the Trews.

“One of my writers from the Big Sugar days, Patrick Ballantyne, he co-wrote half of the Big Sugar catalogue. I put him and Meredith together. They came up with some amazing stuff and she consequently has some co-writes on the new Big Sugar. And I put Tim Chaisson together with Joel Plaskett and they wrote songs together and came to me with it and then I wrote with them.

“Sometimes, their tastes in music aren’t identical, and I think in some way that’s better, because then you get interesting cross-pollination.”

FYI
Publisher: n/a
Selected discography: with Big Sugar: Big Sugar (1992), El Seven Nite Club (1993), Five Hundred Pounds (1993), Hemi-Vision (1996), Heated (1998), Brothers and Sisters, Are You Ready? (2001), Hit & Run (double CD, studio and live; 2003). With Grady: Y.U. So Shady (2001), A Cup of Cold Poison (2007), Good As Dead (2009),
Calling All My Demons (live double DVD/CD; 2010)
SOCAN member since 1990
Visit www.bigsugar.com and www.shadygrady.net

Karen bliss is a toronto-based music journalist who currently writes for Billboard, www.rollingstone.com, msn, AOL, Elle Canada, www.jam.canoe.ca, www.samaritanmag.com and more.

Uploaded Spring 2011

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Send them to Rick MacMillan, Words & Music Corporate Editor, at wordsandmusic@socan.ca.

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