Sea the driving force for Canadian Rockers

by Dan Craft at Pantagraph.com

Canadian pop-rockers Great Big Sea, playing the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts Friday night, were forged in the island isolation of their native Newfoundland.

Like the name says, Great Big Sea is of the sea -- literally and figuratively.

When the award-winning Canadian rockers roll into the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts at 7:30 p.m. Friday, they'll be bringing with them their native Newfoundland heritage, awash in brine, wind and surf.

"The far east of the Western world," is how they've described their far-flung island origins, where a person could walk for miles in utter isolation before meeting another islander.

The result of that stark upbringing makes for some lusty, soul-felt music, promises Alan Doyle, who handles what he calls the band's "stringy stuff: mandolins, guitars, bass, bouzouki, that kind of thing."

Band mates Bob Hallett and Sean McCann aren't as lucky: They have even more instruments to lug from concert stage to concert stage.

Says Doyle, "Bob's really crazy -- he plays something like 20 instruments," from fiddles to whistles to bagpipes and beyond.

Forged 15 years ago on the streets of St. John's, Newfoundland, Great Big Sea is one of Canada's premier rock bands, winners of 18 of the country's East Coast Music Awards.

In the past decade, incursions have been made stateside and beyond, originally via the interest of Sire Records' Seymour Stein (Madonna, Talking Heads, etc.). This weekend's BCPA show marks Great Big Sea's first-ever downstate Illinois concert, according to Doyle.

Even the rural stretches of the American Midwest seem like major population centers when compared to Great Big Sea's origins, he says.

"In Canada, which is so sparsely populated, it's not hard to earn national media attention," he says. "If you keep playing long enough, eventually they'll have to pay attention because they run out of options."

Stateside, Doyle continues, the situation is reversed: "In America, which is so much more densely populated, you have more options to perform, but you never earn national media attention simply because there are so many options."

Great Big Sea has managed to overcome that hurdle, however, earning a cult reputation through an eclectic sound that merges Newfoundland's 500-year-strong Irish, English and French history with everything from Bob Marley to Johnny Cash.

"We're lucky that we grew up in a place where we had music -- really good music --in our own back yard," says Doyle. "By the time I was a teen, there were a lot of bands in Newfoundland reinventing the Newfoundland folk music tradition."

Because of that upbringing, where old was being made new again, "the whole notion of taking a 200-year-old sea shanty and playing it like a band from California wasn't new to me -- there was already a history of reinterpreting our great music."

For example, he says, "my folks would have a party at home, and my uncle would be sitting in one corner singing a song by Elvis, while my grandfather was over in another singing a song he wrote back in the 1940s -- and they were all treated like good songs," Doyle recalls.

By the time the members of Great Big Sea crossed paths during the mid-'90s and began playing the rough-and-tumble bars of St. John's, the trio knew "we weren't the best musicians in town, we just wanted it more. We were driven by a bloody-minded need to succeed and we were rewarded for our bleeding," says Hallett.

That drive has continued to this day, with the band's origins forever at the forefront of their concerns.

"It would be impossible to do what we do if we were from anywhere else," says McCann. "Our songs come from the sea and the cliffs and the rocks and all the other natural beauties our country provides. Without her, we simply couldn't exist."

What: Great Big Sea

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday

Where: Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts, 600 N. East St., Bloomington

Tickets: $21.80 to $33

Box office number: (866) 686-9541