This 40-year-old Canadian has seen just about every side of the music business. He's played street corners in Saskatchewan and had a bunk on Stevie Ray Vaughan's tour bus. He's opened for the Rolling Stones and gone platinum with his Little Big Band. Having experienced the benefits and pitfalls of major label recording contracts, he's scaled it down for a brand new CD, Limelight, and apparently found his true calling.

It's a sunny Sunday morning in the town of Genk, Belgium. Colin James is sitting in the back garden of his hotel, drinking a double espresso, and shooting the breeze about the music industry. He's glad to be back in Europe after a long drought - record company policies, he says, have made it tough for him to sustain a career outside of Canada, where he is a bona fide star. But any disappointment has, for the moment, been tempered by the warm reception he received the night before from a festival crowd numbering in the thousands. At 40, and after stints on Virgin and Warner, James has elected to go indie. He's found the music he wants to play and, he believes, the right partners to market it around the world.

Before hitting the road for a show in Germany, James sat down with BluesWax to talk about his career and his upcoming CD, Limelight.

Vincent Abbate for BluesWax: Tell me about your hometown of Regina.

Colin James: It's kind of a nondescript little city in the middle of the prairies. You can see the outskirts from any building if you go up to the top. It's city, city, city - then it stops and it's wheat fields as far as the eye can see. Kind of redneck. Not the kind of place where you expect to discover the Blues.

BW: So how did it happen in your case?

CJ: My mom and dad were avid listeners. They seriously loved music. You could probably categorize them as beatniks. They loved Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, all the Folk magazines out of New York. They took me to see Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee when I was eight. At a pizza joint! I got to sit [a few feet from them] ... seeing Sonny really blew my mind. It had an impact. And I had older brothers, so I grew up with John Mayall, the early Fleetwood Mac records, as well as all the Blues stuff. It was kind of a natural progression. I saw lots of great people growing up. We used to go to Folk festivals in Winnipeg, the next city over, and see people like Johnny Shines and Roosevelt Sykes. So it was just in our blood. Something was bound to happen.

BW: Your parents took you along to those shows?

CJ: My mom had a lot to do with it. She really wanted me to hear all this stuff. I started playing when I was thirteen. I played mandolin, actually. I gave up the guitar for a while and started playing Celtic music of all things.

BW: You recorded a couple of things with the Chieftains later on, didn't you?

CJ: I'm on two records. It was awesome. CJ: came to a show I did in New York years ago with a penny whistle. He had heard I played penny whistle, which I don't tell anybody. [laughs] I really love that music. But when I was 16 I stopped. I left school pretty early. I left home when I was 16, hit the road and started a little Blues band. There were lots of years of being broke, playing subways and street corners, playing in front of stores for change.

BW: Did you move from Regina to Winnipeg?

CJ: To Winnipeg first. Then I ended up moving to Montreal, which I loved. But I was broke. Broke for years. It didn't start clicking in until I was about 20 or 21. Before that, I'd got gigs opening up for George Thorogood and John Lee Hooker when I was 16. Then Stevie Ray Vaughan came through when I was about 18 or 19. I got the job opening for him on a bunch of shows. We became chummy. He was real nice to me. He came through again and I got the job opening up for him again. That was [when] things started to speed up, because after we finished our last show, he bought me a plane ticket to Tucson. He said, "Come on down." Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne were all playing this festival. I was at the airport. I had no money and didn't have a credit card. I had five hundred bucks from selling my amp and the acoustic guitar I'd been given when I was 13 years old. Which I played last night, because I got it back!

BW: Was it in hock all these years?

CJ: No. I'd sold it to this critic in Vancouver. He sold it back to me at double the price, and then proceeded to trash my album. But they wouldn't let me over the border. I had to call Stevie's secretary and tell her. So I snuck in. My uncle drove me down to Seattle, where my grandpa lived. I stayed there and called [Stevie's people] again. He sprang for another ticket. This time he sent me down to Austin. He wasn't even there. He was on the road. I got to Austin, stayed at the Stars Motel, which is where they put everyone who played Antone's. Stayed there for a week and had a great time. But I was totally broke. Then I joined Stevie in Cleveland. I did about two weeks with his band.

BW: Did you perform with him?

CJ: He called me up for encores.

BW: So you were opening the shows then?

CJ: No. Nothing. The band was nice enough to give me a bunk on the bus and give me a room in the hotel.

BW: I guess he must have liked you.

CJ: We got along great. Our meetings early on were all about [things like] "that recording by Otis Rush" and he was so into talking about music and knew every tambourine player on a Howlin' Wolf session. He was a real musicologist. He loved the obscure Blues. So we hit it off on that level, because I knew the Ray Agee version of "Tin Pan Alley." I knew the version he got his version of the song from. When we first met, he came bustling in saying, "How the hell do you know that?" Then managers started calling me, we put a band together, and within a year I was signed to an American label.

BW: Around that time, you changed your name from Colin Munn to Colin James. What inspired you? Skip James? Elmore James?

CJ: James is my middle name. A newspaper wrote me up as "Colin Mudd" and I didn't like that. It was constantly being misspelled and mispronounced. On my website, there's a little thing called the Blues Room where you can hear Stevie announce me. I found a board tape from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1984, and Stevie goes, "Ladies and Gentlemen, from Vancouver via Austin, Texas ... Colin James." He asked me before I went onstage that night. "Do you want to be called Munn or James?" I'd been talking about changing my name. But that was really the start of my persona.

BW: And your records took off in Canada right from the get-go?

CJ: Oh, yeah! I guess my record was, at the time, the fastest-selling record in Canadian history. We hit 100,000 really fast; number one videos and all that stuff. We had some success in America. We opened up for Keith Richards on a ten-show tour. Steve Winwood, Little Feat, all kinds of touring. That [first] record, to me ... I think it's terrible now! But it's a learning experience. I got to work with the legendary Tom Dowd in Miami, then went to L.A. and finished the record with Danny Kortchmar. A typical story. I think my first record had five producers. All A-list producers. Tom Dowd didn't want me to play any Blues. He was virulently against it.

BW: Why?

CJ: He was trying to get me to listen to Eurythmics records. He wanted me to be modern. It was like pulling teeth to get a Blues song on the record. The second record was a much better experience. I went to Memphis and recorded with Joe Hardy, who's done a lot of ZZ Top. With that record, we came heartbreakingly close to breaking the States. We had a Number 2 Rock song on the radio. We tried to cross it over and it didn't fly. It was such a drag. It did well [in Europe.] We played Germany a fair amount back then and had an MTV video hit. This was 1991. We played Sweden a lot. We opened up for Robert Plant in England. I thought the record was pretty good. We got a nice, three-star review in Rolling Stone. I did Letterman. No complaints, but I wish it would have broken in the States better. That would have helped me.

BW: This is all heady stuff for a young man from Regina.

CJ: The first time I flew to New York I played five nights at the Radio City Music Hall! Opening up for Steve Winwood. I'll never forget the sound of my feet clicking across the stage, because the place was empty. Everyone was in the lobby waiting for Steve Winwood. Great experiences though, if I think back now. Awesome. The tour with Keith Richards was particularly cool. I never understood how good Keith Richards was until I did that tour with his band, the Expensive Winos.

To be continued...

Vincent Abbate is a contributing editor at BluesWax. Vincent may be contacted at blueswax@visnat.com.

Copyright Visionation, Ltd 2005. All Rights Reserved with limited rights offered to artist and their agents for publicity purposes only with proper citation to BluesWax, BluesWax.com, or www.blueswax.com.