Garnet Rogers

Grande Prairie, Alberta Daily Herald-Tribune, April 2001
Garnet Rogers raises the collective consciousness
John Agnew
For Encore!

While 30,000 people converged on Quebec City to make their voices heard at the hemispheric trade talks, folk-music hero Garnet Rogers was doing his best to raise the collective consciousness at the Trumpeter Inn last Saturday night.
Anybody who was worried that the protest song had been asphyxiated in the relentless avalanche of Brittany Spears and Back Street Boys recordings should have been there.
Rogers has a formidable presence, his sturdy six-and-a-half foot frame looming over the audience, the ceiling hovering dangerously close to his head.
Producer Franz Kratschat, who couldn't find another available venue, installed Rogers in a hotel banquet room, which didn't offer the kind of space a guy like Rogers usually needs to maneuver, but it worked. With a half a dozen different guitars in reach, Rogers performed a mixture of wistful ballads, sarcastic commentaries and pointed narratives for an audience who, by and large, didn't need to be convinced.
Rogers set the tone for the evening by opening with a song about the plight of the homeless. With a baritone voice that is both rich and powerful, Rogers sings with authority. His skill as guitarist and the heft of his voice lend his convictions the moral authority that comes with talent. The world of fashion was also given some critical scrutiny and found lacking.
Mixed with songs of political and social comment were several melancholy ballads that give Rogers an opportunity to let loose the incomparable emotion range of his mighty voice, and when the sound system occasionally crackled, I found myself wondering if such a powerful instrument needed any amplification.
The evening was leavened by a couple of wonderfully funny and mordant songs. Where Did You Get That Dress? was a rocking, bluesy number about a fumbling seduction and What's Wrong With this Picture turned into a sarcastic rant about aging, the dubious power of positive thinking and finally, driving in Alberta.
Rogers opened the second set of the show with a couple of songs that put the banks on the grill over the uphill battle faced by farmers to keep their farms and make them work. The songs were greeted with cheers of recognition from an audience for whom family farm closures are a brutal fact of life.
Like a golfer selecting irons for each shot up the fairway, Rogers picked a different guitar frequently to give each song its own tone. He plays with a lovely full-bodied vigour that is a pleasure to listen to. While it is common to refer to a performer's voice as an additional instrument, Rogers' actually is. Here is a guy who can really sing, using a full vocal range infused with nuance and implication. To close the set, Rogers veered toward the experimental, playing a fugue-like song while accompanying himself on a guitar fed through some electronic wizardry. The result was a piece more reminiscent of Pink Floyd than Pete Seeger.
Who Could Have Known? featured an eerie echo and delay that gave Rogers' guitar the heft of a small orchestra and pushed the sound towards that that comes from a synthesizer. For most of the audience the song was a huge departure from the Garnet Rogers they expected, and although it didn't earn the scorn that Dylan received when he introduced electric guitars at a folk festival in Newport, R.I., Rogers certainly gave people something to talk about after the show. In his introduction, Rogers said that it was a new part of his performance repertoire, although he had written the piece about a year and a half ago. It takes courage to change course in a career, particularly one as successful and as well received as Rogers'. After all, the money's in playing the hits, of which Rogers has many. After a seven-year absence it was wonderful to have Garnet Rogers back in town, and it was a fitting close to another successful season from promoter Franz Kratschat. The city's music community is well served by such a steady stream of top-notch folk, roots and blues performers.