Downchild still flying after four decades

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Aykroyd (far right) joins Walsh (third from left) and Downchild for some Canuck blues. ( HBO CANADA)

It's a term of dismissal and derision in the music industry if an artist is labeled a "one-hit wonder."

Donnie Walsh is much more than that. He's a one-genre wonder, in the sense that he pretty much single-handedly created Canada's version of the blues.

Walsh, known in music circles as Mr. Downchild, is the founder, creative engine and sole remaining original member of the innovative and ever-enduring Downchild Blues Band, which has for more than four decades set the standard for blues performance in this country.

His achievements and the legacy of the band are celebrated in the new homegrown documentary Flip, Flop and Fly: Forty Years of the Downchild Blues Band, which airs tonight at 7:25 on HBO Canada. The 90-minute special combines archival footage and photos, interviews with past and present band members, tributes from Downchild fans and performances from the band's 40th-anniversary concert last fall at Toronto's Massey Hall, and the result is a musical journey that's as uplifting as it is entertaining.

Narrator Dan Aykroyd, a longtime fan and friend of the Downchild bunch, describes Walsh as a guy who was destined to lead a band into (in these northern climes, anyway) uncharted territory. And Walsh himself says the path he chose was pretty much the only one that was ever available to him.

"Before I started playing blues, I was just, um, I guess you'd say ... screwing around," he says of his decision, after being transformed by hearing a Jimmy Reed double-album at his girlfriend's birthday party, to learn to play the blues and form his own band.

With younger brother Richard "Hock" Walsh as lead singer, the Downchild Blues Band started performing regularly at Grossman's Tavern in Toronto in 1969, at first for three pitchers of beer and a hot meal, and later for actual cash money. Before long, the band had an independent album release, Bootleg, in circulation; its success led to a record contract and a second album, Straight Up, which included the band's signature hit, Flip, Flop and Fly (along with a couple of Walsh compositions, I Have Everything I Need (Almost) and Shot Gun Blues, that were later covered on Aykroyd's Blues Brothers project Briefcase Full of Blues).

What followed, and what is covered in colourful detail in this documentary, is a four-decade blues odyssey filled with drama, romance, intrigue, interpersonal friction, personnel upheavals and, above anything else, an unwavering dedication to the genre.

During its 40-year existence, something between 80 and 100 different musicians have been part of Downchild; several have had more than one stint in the group (Hock Walsh was fired and rehired three different times before his death on New Year's Eve 1999).

"The remarkable thing -- and it says much to Donnie's vision of the band -- is that it always sounds like Downchild," says writer/publicist Richard Flohil. "If you hear the very first Downchild record, it's recognizably Downchild; if you hear the latest one, it's recognizably Downchild. And that's a totally different cast of characters -- only one (original) remains, and that's its leader."

The Downchild story has a couple of close-to-home connections, as well -- saxophone player Pat Carey, a band member since 1985, got his musical start playing jazz in Winnipeg, and classically trained pianist Jane Vasey, who joined Downchild in 1973 and had a huge impact on its sound, was also a Manitoba product (she died of leukemia in 1982 and, with the band's support, a piano-performance scholarship was established in her name at Brandon University).

In the end, though, Downchild was, is and always will be Walsh's show. And 40 years into it, he can pretty safely say that he isn't just "screwing around."

-- -- --

A grim tide: Documentary film at its most raw, real and terrifying is on display in the CBC/Passionate Eye feature Tsunami Caught on Camera, which airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBC News Network.

The hour-long compilation of first-person accounts of the tsunami that struck coastal communities from Thailand to Indonesia on Dec. 26, 2004, is as frightening and gut-wrenching as anything you'll see on TV.

The film employs no narrator or expert analysis -- just the home-video footage and tortured recollections of people who survived the tidal onslaught and are still living in its aftermath every day.

It's startling, from start to finish.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

TVPreview

Flip, Flop and Fly

-- Forty Years of the Downchild Blues Band

-- Narrated by Dan Aykroyd

-- HBO Canada

-- Saturday, 7:25 p.m.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 4, 2010 C7