That’s a Rhaps! Sixty years after catching the rock ‘n’ roll bug, Grant ‘Rhaps’ Boden releasing new album at 77 By: Alan Small Posted: 4:23 PM CDT Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023

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This article was published 23/08/2023 (822 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Grant Boden has never had a career in music despite buying a guitar from Neil Young, playing in a band that opened for the Monkees and having a say in whether Sun Records was a good investment.

The man they call Rhaps turns the page on yet another musical chapter this fall with a new group, Rhaps & the Purple Hat Band, and a new album he made with help from people he calls “Winnipeg’s Wrecking Crew.”

The 77-year-old’s jug-band journey and brushes with greatness go back six decades to the infancy of rock ’n’ roll in Winnipeg.

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Boden’s love of strange names for music groups goes back to his high school days at Silver Heights and Kelvin in the early 1960s. He was part of the Hydraulic Banana Peel Jug Band Stompers and then the Down to Earthenware Jug Band, which rode the early ’60s folkie fad of jug music, and played at school gyms and community clubs in Winnipeg.

“A lot of people in bands at the time, that was their planned destiny, to be in a band, to be successful. For us it was fun,” Boden says.

One of the band’s favourite spots was the Fourth Dimension, a club on Pembina Highway near the University of Manitoba. It was there where Young, who at the time was just another young Winnipeg rocker with a dream, suggested they needed a guitar to fill out their sound.

He just so happened to have one for sale. A 1956 Les Paul Junior. Sunburst.

“He idolized Randy Bachman’s beautiful Gretsch guitar and sound, so he had to sell his first electric guitar, so he sold it to me,” Boden says. “It was $150, which was a lot of money back then, but it was a good deal.

“It came with 10 half-hour lessons, although I only got four. But I’m in no rush.”

The guitar had… features.

“So when I played it, every so often you’d get these shocks off of it. It had an electric short in it. So I was always anticipating getting this shock,” Boden recalls. “Many, many years later, I found this story on Neil talking about this guitar and he used to get shocks off it and he threw it against the wall.

“He never told me he knew about the electric shocks.”

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The musical world received a shock when Bob Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and the jolts could be felt as far away as Winnipeg.

Purists in Boden’s jug band didn’t want any part of rock ’n’ roll, he says, while others such as Boden noticed audiences zone out when they played on the same bill as an act on the rise — the Deverons — with a wild young piano player named Burton Cummings.

So Boden became part of a new group, the Electric Jug and Blues Band, joining Blair Wheaton, Ray Lovell, Dennis Faraci, Don (Stork) Macgillivray — the future Winnipeg journalist — and Bruce Decker, who split his time with the Deverons. They caught on to the funkier, more danceable trend.

There was a catch. They already had a guitarist. They needed a bass player and a drummer. So what would become a cherished collectible six decades later was swapped for a Gretsch drum kit and monthly payments to make up the difference.

“That’s the old musician’s story. Every time you trade up, you have to sell what you have,” he says.

“I’m a so-so drummer, but I’m a singing drummer. That beats out a flashy drummer.”

By 1967, band members were attending university, with Boden studying architecture and playing gigs on the weekend for fun, even if the band was rising in stature, at least in Winnipeg.

So much so that when the Monkees played a show at Winnipeg Arena on April 1, 1967 — no fooling — the opening act was the Electric Jug & Blues Band.

“I’m a so-so drummer, but I’m a singing drummer. That beats out a flashy drummer.”–Grant Boden

“That was our 15 minutes of fame, opening for the Monkees,” Boden says with a chuckle.

The band was back in the spotlight later in the year as part of Manitoba’s presentation at Expo 67 in Montreal.

“The same night in Montreal, Wilson Pickett was doing a concert there,” Boden remembers. “Here we come, these Prairie guys, playing this funky music. It was a struggle, but it was an experience.

“We kind of got a sense of being a big-time band but we were just doing it while we were at university.”

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Boden left the music behind for a career in landscape architecture — he had a firm in Vancouver before moving to Scottsdale, Ariz., in the early 1990s, where he worked directly with homeowners in a city on the rise.

He has created designs across North America, but his knowledge of rock ’n’ roll would bring him into contact with the ghosts of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Boden had also become part of a consultancy business that helped banks decide on loans, particularly for restaurants. Summer work at Minaki Lodge in northwestern Ontario gave him knowledge and connections for the side hustle.

It was unremarkable work until one day in 1988 when an accounting firm needed his musical expertise. Their client was Sun Records, the Memphis label where Elvis recorded his first songs.

“They wanted to go public on the stock exchange and nobody in these accounting firms had the musical knowledge that I had,” he says. “They quizzed me on music, but I know my stuff.”

He had to go to the Sun Records headquarters to assess the value of what they had. He encountered some priceless stuff.

“My job was to listen to the music and verify it did exist and they had safety copies of everything. There was all this incredible music in their vaults,” Boden says.

“The (studio) engineer is wearing white gloves and we’re taking out the original acetates of Jerry Lee Lewis’s Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, Great Balls of Fire, Johnny Cash songs and some old Elvis stuff there. Carl Perkins, you know Blue Suede Shoes? The stuff we’ve never heard, I listened to; he was 40 years ahead of his time.

“I would pay hundreds of dollars to do this, and they’re paying me.”

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The architecture life and consulting business are in the past at the Holmfield Art Farm, in tiny Holmfield, about 230 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg, where Boden’s life has come full circle.

It’s where Boden and painter and muralist Katharine Bruce, his partner, spend the summers.

“We raise art and music,” says Boden, who works in his “music shed.”

He’s left the blueprints behind and grabbed a guitar — not the old Neil Young one, sadly — to return to his old pastime, writing songs.

“What am I going to do, take up woodworking?” he says, laughing. “That involved saws and dangerous equipment. What’s safer? Songwriting.

“I’m going to take up songwriting. I won’t hurt myself, at least physically. So that’s what I’ve been doing, learning to write songs.”

Connections to his younger days led to Fred Turner, the bassist of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Bill Wallace of the Guess Who and Macgillivray, his old jug-band pal from the ’60s, all of whom guested on Boden’s 2014 album Somebody’s Gotta Do It!

He has released four more albums since then, including two in 2023: Campfire Songs, a compilation he produced of music he wrote with friends he made at the Rodney Crowell songwriting camp in Nashville, and After All These Years (Country Blues Revisited) by Rhaps & the Purple Hat Band, who are the cream of Winnipeg’s studio musicians: Murray Pulver, bassist Gilles Fournier and drummer Daniel Roy.

“Strange Reason, there’s definitely a sense of a void… The video and the song and all of this were something we’d never done before.”–Jolene Bailie

“These guys can do anything,” Boden says of the trio he compares to the Wrecking Crew, the famed group of Los Angeles studio musicians who played on hits by the Monkees, the Byrds and dozens of other hitmakers.

“When I’m working with Murray, I clumsily play the song, he makes his notes, and he goes to Gilles, and then Gilles will go, ‘I think if I put this bass line to it here,’” Boden says. “That’s the fun of it. That’s what the Wrecking Crew in L.A. did. They made the songs. Everyone thought it was the Monkees but it was the Wrecking Crew.”

There were no videos when the Electric Jug & Blues Band were around, but when Boden wanted to make one, he sought out more Winnipeg artists to guide the way.

In this case it was Jolene Bailie, Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers’ artistic director, and dancers Carol-Ann Bohrn and Warren McClelland to bring Boden’s ideas from the song Strange Reason to life; the video was filmed by Landon Lake at the Rachel Browne Theatre.

“I sort of let the song guide me. Strange Reason, there’s definitely a sense of a void,” Bailie says. “The video and the song and all of this were something we’d never done before.”

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After All These Years is likely just the beginning for Boden and his songwriting, who’s making music for fun in his 70s just as he did in his teens. He’s back to Crowell’s songwriting camp again this month.

“I’m back being 22. I’m like Buddy Holly, only I’m 50 years behind,” he says.

He says he’s had the knack of creating bits of songs, a skill that earned him his Rhaps nickname.

“Stork gave me that nickname, Rhaps,” he remembers about Macgillivray from their high school days.

“I always wore blue and I was coming up with little song bits, so he said, ‘You know, you’re like George Gershwin. Rhapsody in Blue. That’s what we’re gonna call you. Rhapsody.’ So it became Rhaps.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall