For some musicians, like C’mon co-founder Ian Blurton, the bloom never comes off the rose—particularly where playing in front of a live crowd is concerned. Blurton is the portrait of a Canadian rock lifer. Beginning in 1982 with Change Of Heart and then with Blurtonia, the singer/guitarist has played on virtually every stage in Canada—at least twice. But now, with C’mon, Blurton has rediscovered the joy that brought him to the stage in the first place: a band of friends that have fun together every night on stage—or jumping off of it. “We already went west in June, and after we got home I had to take about a week off because I was literally unable to walk,” says Blurton of the tour that also found C’mon playing at the inaugural Sled Island Festival. “Not for any other reason than I was jumping off of too many tables while we were on the road and other such nonsense that tends to happen when there is a little too much alcohol involved.”
“Overall, rock ‘n’ roll is never taxing to me though,” continues the singer from a tour stop in Cornerbrook, Newfoundland. “If anything, making records with other bands is more taxing than being in this band. This band is all about the pure joy of it—we don’t freak out on each other while we’re on the road and yell at each other or anything. We’re all really close—like if you fuck with one of us, you’re fucking with all four of us; we just have a lot of fun playing together. We get crazy on stage and get the audiences worked up, and we get some really good shows happening.
“The only downside is that maybe we drink too much [laughing].”
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? That fun comes across at full throttle on C’mon’s new LP, Bottled Lightning of An All Time High, as well. With the new album, the band has hammered all of the imperfections out of their sound and delivered a distilled experience of their established sound. More powerful and potent than In The Heat of the Moment with a “perpetually in the red” mix and production style that occasionally breaks up due to mics overloaded with volume, tracks like “Waste My Time,” “Psychotic Reaction” and “Status Quo” are tight and, while they still fly over the top in delivery, play like the best, heaviest moments Thin Lizzy, AC/DC and Nazareth ever screeched out of a garage. For fans of the band, these things will come as no shock at all but, for the uninitiated, the record will play like an epiphany as the band, with goofy, sarcastic grins and all, makes converts of listeners accustomed to the craven emo set one pair of ears at a time. Bottled Lightning isn’t brilliant and isn’t original by any stretch, but C’mon offers a fun, rubber-faced response to everybody else in pop at the moment who takes themselves and their feelings too seriously and puts others to shame by rocking harder every time. “It’s like the stupidest, most generic band thing to say, but people really do seem to think that it’s our best record so far and the response has been really positive,” says Blurton of the reactions the new songs have received live. “I’m not saying it’s a good record, it’s just our best [laughing].
“I think having a lineup change is always a defining moment where you have to either step up or put it to bed and I think that we really felt we had something to prove. Randy, our ex-drummer, was great and we loved him and all, but Dean [new C’mon recruit for the drummer’s seat Dean Dallas Bentley -ed] is now the third guy and I think if he left the band, it’d be really difficult for us to move on from this point.”
According to Blurton, while radio has been only tepidly helpful in getting the word out on Bottled Lightning and this album was released completely independently (the band was dropped from Maplemusic not long after the release of In The Heat Of The Moment), the band has not suffered any losses of exposure due, in part, to very carefully planned touring. On the band’s departure from Maple, the singer gets philosophical (and comical) saying simply, “Well, we were way better than any of the other bands on the label and they kept complaining about how—I’m kidding,” goofs the singer. “It just really wasn’t working out you know? We’re a hard rock band and they aren’t really a hard rock label. If we’d have been on Metal Blade it might’ve made more sense even though we’re not a metal band either. It’s very, very mellow Canadian stuff and we’re a half-American band to begin with so it felt a little weird.”
As well, Blurton is quick to point out that the band has never stood on his name as a producer in an attempt to use it as an additional draw when booking a tour. Boasting a resume of production credits that includes well over half of the bands in Southern Ontario might be one thing, but according to Blurton there’s little point in namedropping because there are so few of those bands that come even close to sounding like C’mon. “We don’t use that at all,” says the singer flatly as far as his own name versus that of his band is concerned. “It’s all about C’mon—I actually feel weird about it coming up in interviews because it has nothing to do with the band whatsoever. Even the bands that I work with, they’re not really close to what we do. There are a few, but I do feel that it’s two totally different things. It’s not like Dean comes down and hangs out in the studio or anything, so when we’re booking a tour it’s not a matter of ‘Dean and Ian were hanging out in the studio and…’ it’s just a matter of ‘C’mon is coming to town’ and people get excited about that and that’s what I care about. The tour routes that we travel, a lot of those bands don’t play these stages; we’re out in the middle of nowhere and a lot of bands don’t come here and I could hand the phone to 25 kids that have never seen a bigger band. They only see local bands.
“These kids in these crowds are thrilled to see us and that’s what makes it great for me; we are planning on getting out of Canada to tour—we’re working on an American record deal at the moment and there’s talk of a release in Australia too—but everybody in this band has been a member of some other band that has gotten out of Canada before and no disrespect to our home country, but we want to make this as big as we can with the same kind of excitement that we’re getting now.”
For more on C’mon, click here: www.thisiscmon.com
Download “Waste My Time” – [mp3]
Download “Unh” – [mp3]
