Bluesman’s memoir focuses on life before music fame

He was born Colin Munn in Regina in 1964, but he’s best known by the name given to him onstage by his late friend Stevie Ray Vaughan in Ann Arbor, Mich., 20-plus years later — Colin James.

After 21 albums and eight Juno awards, James has penned a memoir chronicling the years leading up to his breakthrough 1988 debut album — he launches Playing the Changes: A Musician’s Memoir Thursday at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location, where he’ll be joined in conversation by Free Press editor Paul Samyn.

James started writing down stories from his formative years around six years ago. It wasn’t as easy a task as penning one of his many hits, such as Voodoo Thing, Five Long Years or Just Came Back. “I’m a relatively private person, so the idea of spilling my guts about stuff … I had mixed thoughts,” he says.

But once he put his mind to writing Playing the Changes, he found it to be an enjoyable experience. “Sometimes on a flight, I’d just open up my laptop and I would just go. And next thing you know, four hours have gone by, and I’m not ready to get off the plane, because I’m so lost in the writing.”

Rather than cover his time as a major player on the Canadian music scene of the 1980s, ’90s and beyond, James and his publishers decided to keep the focus on his early years.

Born to Quaker parents who were involved in the local folk/bluegrass scene, once James (then Colin Munn; James is his middle name) caught the music bug after fiddling with his older brother’s guitar, it wasn’t long before he was joining jams.

After a long bus trip through the United States with his mother, which included a stop in New Orleans, James returned to Regina and joined a folk band, before dabbling in punk, bluegrass and other genres.

But it was the blues that captured his imagination, and after exhausting the local jams (while not yet of legal age to be in bars), he began looking beyond Regina — and was lured to Winnipeg by young love and by previous visits to the Winnipeg Folk Festival with his parents.

“Winnipeg was kind of magic for me… I lived on Arlington and Westminster, around the corner from Prairie Sky Books.”

“It was pivotal,” James says of his year-and-a-half in the city, where he fronted the blues-rock band Hoodoo Men.

“I really needed to get a fresh look on things. Winnipeg was kind of magic for me… I lived on Arlington and Westminster, around the corner from Prairie Sky Books and (the long-defunct) Miss Lipton’s down the road.”

During his time here, James — who has lived in Vancouver for the last 40 years — connected with many local music staples.

“Big Dave McLean would let me sit in, Hound Dog would let me sit in — that was huge for me. Gordie Kidder brought me over to his house in Winnipeg and played me a lot of the songs that ended up on my first Little Big Band record… I had a really great time, saw some great music, and got a gig at the Winnipeg Folk Festival (in 1981, as the Hoodoo Men), which was really validating.”

While putting in the work and honing one’s chops are key for any chance of success — in music or otherwise — there can certainly be a right place/time element that works in one’s favour.

James recognizes that getting the call to open for the likes of John Lee Hooker and George Thorogood encompasses a little from both columns.

“It’s about taking those opportunities when they come and always going for it — because you never know what’s coming around the corner,” he says.

Never was that more true than in 1984 when, with a day’s notice, James was asked to open for blues guitar legend Stevie Ray Vaughan at a pair of shows in Saskatchewan. With bandmates unable to commit on such short notice, James rustled up some players and banged out a quick rehearsal hours before the first gig.

It was a success, and the two became good friends, with James joining the Pride and Joy singer as an opener on a subsequent U.S. tour — where Vaughan (who died in a helicopter crash in 1990) christened him Colin James.

From there, James signed a record deal with A&M and began working on his debut, which would be released in 1988 — where his memoir essentially stops.

Opting to end at the beginning of his career, as it were, proved challenging — it meant James had to avoid getting too much into the nuts and bolts of what came after that record. Could there be a followup book in James’s future?

“We definitely left room — it was slightly frustrating not being able to reference some things that happened after 1988,” he says.

James hopes aspiring musicians who read Playing the Changes find bits of his story that will prove useful. “Someone said to me once, don’t play music because you want to, play music because you need to, and that’s always held some weight for me,” he says.

“Going through some of the stuff to get where you want to isn’t for everyone, but if you’re truly dedicated and nothing else will do, then you’ve just got to kind of stick it out. It’s not always gonna be great.

“But you’ve got to be there for when opportunity knocks. And that’s kind of an overriding theme in the book — that you’ve got to keep your feet moving, keep the wheels greased and never get too comfortable. It’s great to be comfortable, but you’ve got to get out of that comfort zone.”

ben.sigurdson@winnipegfreepress.com