Taking it from the top After decades with the touring version of the Guess Who, multi-instrumentalist flips the record with the A-Sides By: David Sanderson Posted: 3:00 AM CST Saturday, Nov. 9, 2024 Last Modified: 9:58 AM CST Saturday, Nov. 9, 2024 Updates

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This article was published 09/11/2024 (336 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For nearly 30 years — save for a four-year stretch in the early 2000s — Leonard (Lewsh) Shaw handled keyboards, saxophone and flute for the touring version of the Guess Who.

But after former Guess Who frontman Burton Cummings, who for years had been labelling the outfit a “clone band,” successfully filed a legal motion in April prohibiting any public performance of songs he had written or co-written for the Guess Who, the writing was on the wall for the ensemble and, along with it, Shaw’s main livelihood.

“The band was on a definite ascent, doing as many as 90 dates a year in the States, plus we had just released an album of new material — Plein D’Amour — for which we’d recorded seven videos,” Shaw says, seated in a St. Boniface coffee shop, where he is nursing an espresso macchiato. “Burton did what he felt he had to do but yeah, it was definitely a jolt, after devoting so much of myself to that project for 30-odd years.”

Shaw, whom some have called Winnipeg’s Leon Russell (the legendary American musician and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member), owing to his talents as a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, arranger and music director, didn’t stay idle for long. On Sunday, the spry-looking, 71-year-old will be on stage at the Metropolitan Entertainment Centre, along with a who’s who of city musicians billed as the A-Sides, for an evening of classic rock in support of the St. Amant Centre.

It will be the third time the group, which includes Bill Wallace, ex- of the Guess Who, Kilowatt and Crowcuss, Gord Osland (Mood Jga Jga, Graham Shaw and the Sincere Serenaders) and Laurie Mackenzie (Laurie Mackenzie and the Bandits, the Fuse), performs together. Shaw says attendees should definitely pack a pair of dancing shoes.

“We’ll be doing three sets and will be making room for everything from Fleetwood Mac to the Doors to Dylan,” he says, sporting a denim jacket over a black, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band T-shirt. “The promoter is calling the event the ‘Ultimate Tribute,’ but I don’t know about that. It’s more a bunch of loose musicians who’ve been doing this for a long time, up there having a blast.”

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Shaw runs a hand through a mane of shoulder-length, sand-coloured hair and grins, referring to himself as a “big oops.”

His father and mother were in their mid-40s and parents of a 20-year-old daughter when his mom visited her physician in 1953, convinced she was suffering from a stomach tumour. Uh, that’s not a tumour, the doc informed her, congratulating her on her impending bundle of joy.

“When I showed up, at first the neighbours were whispering that I was my sister’s kid, and that my parents must be covering up for her having a child out of wedlock,” says Shaw, who grew up on Smithfield Avenue in West Kildonan, and still resides in that neck of the woods. “The nice part of it was that my parents were quite settled by the time I came along. My dad was a very successful optician and we never had to worry about having enough food on the table, that was for sure.”

In addition to his professional career, Shaw’s dad belonged to the 20-piece St. James Symphony orchestra. He taught his son to play saxophone and clarinet at an early age, in addition to signing him up for piano lessons. And sure, his father’s taste in music may have leaned more towards the classics, but when Feb. 9, 1964, rolled around, he was as excited as his 11-year-old son, Shaw recalls.

“He was also a bit of a technology freak and ahead of the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, he’d worked it so he could record the audio from the TV onto his mono reel-to-reel tape recorder. He knew they were going to be a big deal.”

Shaw, who acquired the nickname Lewsh in grade school (his full initials are L.E.W.S.), was first alto for his junior high school band when he was recruited by a band teacher at West Kildonan Collegiate. West K was competing with other high school bands in the city for a trip to Montreal to perform at the site of Expo ’67, as part of the 1968 Man and His World exhibition. The school was successful in its bid, and Shaw credits the three weeks he spent on the road that summer for helping him make up his mind that music was what he wanted to do with his life.

He didn’t have to wait long to get started on that journey. He was still in high school in 1970 when he joined Mojo and the Nighthawks, one of Winnipeg’s first blues bands. The Nighthawks relocated to Toronto in 1972, a year after Shaw, who had also been sitting in with Junior Barnes and the Cadillacs, graduated from West Kildonan Collegiate.

Things were going great, the Nighthawks were getting booked regularly, but when Steely Dan released its debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill in November 1972, Shaw, already a huge jazz-rock fusion fan, suddenly realized he had “a ton” to learn, if his intent was to ever be in the same stratosphere as the eclectic-sounding sextet.

In 1974, he enrolled in a two-year music course at Edmonton’s Grant MacEwan Music College, to improve his skill on sax and keys, but also to learn arrangement and production techniques. He remembers his goals were seemingly a tad different than the majority of his classmates.

“There were 50 kids in my first-year theory course and I swear, 45 of them were 18-year-old guitar players wanting to learn (Deep Purple’s) Smoke on the Water.”

While in Edmonton, Shaw caught on with a funk-blues unit called Captain Cosmos that covered the likes of Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind and Fire. That band relocated to Toronto when Shaw completed his studies, and was soon getting booked throughout Ontario and Quebec, for six-night runs.

“I was also in a group called Backstreet, which served as the pit band at Ontario Place during the summer months right through the ’80s,” he continues. “Promoters would bring in these legendary headliners — Paul Revere and the Raiders, Del Shannon, the Drifters… the list goes on and on — and we’d spend Monday afternoon rehearsing ahead of playing alongside them for four or five days, till the next act rolled into town. It was always a gas to look up and realize that’s Bo Diddley, for example, leading you through his hits.”

“As my friend Rudy Sarzo once said, instead of musicians we should call ourselves memory merchants, because we play a song and it emotionally transports people back to a specific time and place that’s almost always associated with good thoughts.”–Leonard Shaw

As mentioned off the top, Shaw was offered a spot in the Guess Who in 1991 by Jim Kale, the Guess Who’s bassist from 1965 to 1972, who had acquired the rights to the band name a few years after Cummings left in 1976 to pursue a solo career.

Shaw prefers not to get into the politics of the “whole mess,” but it is his understanding that Cummings, along with Randy Bachman, accepted the opportunity to lease the Guess Who name from Kale for an extensive reunion tour from 2000 to 2003. The name reverted to Kale, however, when Cummings and Bachman chose not to continue playing together in 2004.

In July, a few months after the Guess Who’s demise, Shaw was invited to lunch by Winnipeg businessman Marc Kipnes. Kipnes was planning to throw a 70th birthday party for himself, and he was hoping to enlist the services of guitarist Greg Leskiw, one of the founders of Mood Jga Jga, his favourite Winnipeg band from the ’70s.

Shaw was aware Leskiw hadn’t been performing publicly for health reasons, but he mentioned he could probably get a hold of Gord Osland, Mood Jga Jga’s drummer, who now lives in Penticton, B.C. He did just that and Osland suggested they add Wallace and Mackenzie.

The four of them, along with Kipnes’s brother-in-law Doug Andrew, a respected Vancouver musician who was flying in for the party, only had time for a single rehearsal ahead of the packed soirée, which was held at Kristina’s on Corydon. Everything must have clicked because an attendee whose own milestone birthday was a month away, approached them following the first set, to secure their services for his celebration, too.

“It’s funny because we didn’t even have a name for the band, that night,” says Shaw, whose 2013 album The Lewsh Project, comprised of 10 original tunes, is available on Apple Music, as is Living Room, a solo jazz effort he recorded in 1996. “Offstage we jokingly referred to ourselves as Once Was, as in ‘don’t you know who we once were?’”

Shaw, who became a grandfather for the first time this summer, isn’t sure what’s in store for the A-Sides going forward, but as he has done throughout his 50-plus year career, he’s OK taking things day by day.

“When I got into music in the first place, it wasn’t for the accolades or successes but rather for the opportunity to play,” says Shaw, who also jams with the Ministers of Cool, an R&B group founded by the late Greg Lowe, whenever he gets the chance. “As my friend Rudy Sarzo once said, instead of musicians we should call ourselves memory merchants, because we play a song and it emotionally transports people back to a specific time and place that’s almost always associated with good thoughts.

“That reminds me,” he says, removing his glasses to give the lenses a rub. “If I ever need another band name, I could do worse than Memory Merchants, don’t you think?”

For more information, go to leonardshaw.com

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca