He liked to quote Duke Ellington: "If you've lost your heritage, you've lost everything."
If so, the music world lost a little bit of everything last week, with the death of Ray Condo, singer, sax player and keeper of North America's musical flame.
Mr. Condo led Montreal's Hardrock Goners beginning in 1983, and the Ricochets in Vancouver from 1994. New bandmate Ian Tiles found Mr. Condo's body last Thursday, in the Vancouver co-op apartment he occupied alone. The cause of the notorious hard liver's death was apparently a heart attack, a few weeks short of his 54th birthday.
In a sense, this is a death of a salesman, one of those half-glimpsed journeymen of the music business who work the territory overshadowed by chart hits and their towers of PR babble.
Though Mr. Condo released six or seven albums, from 1986's Crazy Date to 2000's High & Wild, they never made much money. Instead, almost any night for 20 years, you might have found this rodeo-suited rainmaker on any sawdust stage in the world -- sometimes before throngs at a European festival; more often, for beer money and bus fare in some down-at-heel dive.
Yet Mr. Condo was no Willy Loman; he ported no mundane household wares. He was more of a preacher, with a catechism handed down from the Grand Ole Opry and Sun Records -- his satchel full of the treasures of American music, from pre-Louis Armstrong to the birth of rock (but not thereafter).
Many retro acts build a single decade or style into shtick, like some tricked-up rootsy ride at Disneyland. By contrast, Mr. Condo ranged through 60 years of hillbilly boogie, jazz, western swing, country, and rhythm and blues, stirring them into new brews in the gallon jugs of his jitterbug personality and sometimes reckless humour.
"He made it present and made it now," says his long-time guitarist-friend Stephen Nikleva. "It never had a revival quality about it. I must have done 600 shows with him and there was never a boring one. He didn't do anything halfway."
Mr. Condo's repertoire, nearly all covers, ranged from Count Basie and Billie Holiday to Carl Perkins and Arthur Crudup, plus the more obscure likes of Larry Darnell, Glenn Barber and Lew Williams. He was the kind of music devotee influenced not just by "king of western swing" Bob Wills, but by Mr. Wills' near-forgotten younger brother, Billy Jack Wills, who pushed that postwar country-jazz hybrid within yelping distance of the innovations of bebop and the passion of hard rhythm and blues.
He had a historian's (and country boy's) respect for sources. But he also had the irreverence and immediacy of a former punk rocker and eternal showman. I picture his gangly form in mid-concert, in Stetson and skinny tie, leaning into a particularly ripe verse or chorus with a force that made him seem to be looming up in a fish-eye lens. His vitality was ticklishly hypnotic, and just a little dangerous.
As Village Voice critic Robert Christgau wrote of the Ricochets: "They take over . . . so completely that it's hard to tell whether the songs were this good to begin with, and beside the point to care."
With such commitment on stage and off, Mr. Condo was equally beloved by rock-critic intellectuals, sentimental American seniors, and kids from England to Japan who dress painstakingly in 1950s pony skirts, pompadours or motorcycle boots to go cut a rug. He once described his audience as from 18 to 68, taking in "goth kids, rednecks, hippies and rockabillies."
He called his band the Ricochets, he said, because they "bounced around." And none of them more than their leader.
Mr. Condo was born Ray Tremblay in Hull, Que., in 1950, to an "Ottawa Valley hillbilly" family of eight children. He grew up with the sounds of Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and -- closer to home -- Ronnie Hawkins. He got his first guitar at 11, and made an album at 16 with a British Invasion-imitation combo called the Peasants.
After high school, he bummed around the country, "doin' the Kerouac thing." By the mid-1970s, he'd made his way to Vancouver. Always interested in drawing and painting, he registered for art school at Emily Carr, but after a single term he was absorbed into the city's new punk scene, becoming bassist in a band called the Secret V's.
7