Band has a soft spot for bootleggers

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This article was published 30/06/2011 (5534 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

RYAN MCEATHRON is only a few degrees of separation away from one of the world’s most notorious gangsters.

McEathron’s great-grandfather, Carl Kennedy, was a rum runner in Ontario in the 1920s, smuggling alcohol across the Detroit River during America’s failed 13-year experiment with prohibition. He sold the booze to the city’s Purple Gang, a violent criminal organization who would distribute it throughout their city and to Chicago mobster Al Capone.

“Al Capone ran a large, large area, but the Purple Gang was notorious and that’s where his boundary stopped. They weren’t the smartest gangsters, but they were mean,” says McEathron, 29, who shares singing, songwriting and guitar duties with his cousin Dave McEathron in Toronto roots-rock quintet, the Warped 45s.

Kennedy’s story fascinated McEathron to the point where he wrote a song about the rise and fall of his great-grandfather, Grampa Carl, which serves as one of the highlights of the band’s new album, Matador Sunset. “Growing up in a family of musicians and storytellers, there was always this sense of mystery surrounding my great grandfather. I was inquisitive and was always pushing for information, but there were some people not too happy to talk about other people’s devious pasts,” he says with a laugh.

His late grandmother — Kennedy’s daughter — finally opened up to him and told him what she remembered, even giving him some books about the time period and pointing out pictures of gangsters she recalled seeing with her dad when she was a child.

McEathron can’t say with certainty how many of her memories were reliable, but with some collaboration from other family members, he put together a portrait of a gambling man who loved to take chances, but was forced out of the business after a bad deal.

“I think that’s the beauty of storytelling: the foggy in-between,” he says.

Foggy or not, the Warped 45s have been telling all sorts of stories — real and fictional — since 2007 when McEathron moved back to Canada from a teaching stint in Australia and hooked up with his cousin and some old friends — percussionist Hamal Finn Roye, bassist Alex Needleman and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Hewitt — and put the band together.

They released their debut, 10 Day Poem for Saskatchewan, in 2009 and earned a $10,000 fan choice award at North by Northeast the same year. They used the money to buy a van and head west.

“Everyone thinks we’re from Saskatchewan because of that album, but we have to admit: when we were making the record we hadn’t even been there. It was based on a poem we loved from a friend. We have been there a lot since then, though, and we love playing there,” McEathron says.

The band also has a soft spot for Manitoba where it has a dedicated fanbase. Over the next four days they will be playing at three different venues in the province, beginning tonight — Thursday — with a show at the Times Change(d) (admission is $10); Friday and Saturday at Dauphin’s Countryfest; and back in Winnipeg Sunday for an afternoon house concert and barbecue at the StuDome (information available at twangtrust.ca).

“The last time we played at Times there was some dancing going on, so it would be nice if that would happen again,” McEathron says.