The Hamilton Spectator
March 14, 2002
Glen Nott

A belly button, those long, flowing locks, two eyes, a nose and a mouth. Yes, Garnet Rogers and Britney Spears do have a few things in common, and there's really nothing more he can do about it without the work of a really sharp scalpel.

If pop diva Spears is the swallow in the business of making music, then Rogers is the other bird, the rare one. "Way back, my agent said to me 'I'm going to make you rich and famous.' I mean, rich would be nice, but fame?" Rogers says from his country home near Brantford. "Any kind of brush with celebrity I've had has been a massive annoyance."

Garnet Rogers, the singer, songwriter, master storyteller and favourer of Swedish motor cars, is a true mountain of a human being — beyond his bellowing delivery or towering frame.

Like his famous late brother, Stan, who died in an airplane fire in 1983, Rogers gets nary of whiff of consideration inside the music business.

Principle and purity has a way of deflecting such things. But, no matter.

"When we started in the early '70s, there was no industry at all," he says. "Gordon Lightfoot and Anne Murray were signed to American labels, and True North had two acts — Murray McLauchlan and Bruce Cockburn.

There really was no place for my brother or myself — no piece of the pie. So we baked our own."

There is a new album coming, titled Firefly, and soon Rogers will be snaking his way around North America, weaving another web to hold his large pockets of fans.

It's an endless road, really, and Rogers would have it no other way. He put a million kilometres on his last Volvo before it up and died, and now he's breaking in a newer, older model.

"I don't like those new ones," he said. There was a time Rogers was less mountain and more volcano, storing up anger and frustration and unfair dealings of life in a bubbling well of lava.

He's willing to talk about that.

"I've had a fair bit of loss in my adult life," he says, "and I was handling it in bad ways — alcohol, rage, anger." That wasn't the man, of course, it was the man's passion, and he found a way to harness that. Rogers can come across at times as aloof, almost stand offish, but he's actually just protecting his heart, which is enormous.

He's not really willing to talk about that, so we will.

Everywhere he goes, from little villages in Vermont to big halls off the Jersey turnpike, Rogers tries to give something back. The first line in his contract addresses the local food bank. At Christmas, he quietly goes out shopping for the local women's shelters.

He doesn't talk about this wonderful side; he does a quick self-efface instead.

"It's probably all just white, liberal guilt," Rogers says with a laugh. "I've been very fortunate.

"Food banks were supposed to be a Band-Aid solution, of course, and then the Band-Aid just kept getting bigger. The philosophy at work here is so simple: a performer comes into town, people buy tickets and CDs, and the performer then leaves town. So why not give something back?

"I just think that it's better to leave a mark on the world that's more than a used coffee cup," Rogers said. "These disasters on TV tend to knit us together, but I think we're sort of lacking in Community spirit and togetherness."

Oh, Rogers still gets peeved, all right. But it's usually his Volvo that absorbs the punishment.