True Blue humour

Even when Blue teamed up with another Montreal singer-songwriter, George Bowser, in 1978, their blend of folky rock music and comedy arrived when the disco craze made gigs for rock bands hard to find.

Yet their talent won out. Bowser and Blue have gone on to record 13 albums, as well as the soundtracks for the National Film Board of Canada animated film Scant Sanity and for the TV show Misguided Angels. They have co-written 18 theatrical shows, notably the Centaur Theatre box office blockbusters Blokes (1992), Schwartz’s: The Musical (2011) and Last Night at the Gayety (2016).

Early calling

Music has always been Blue’s calling: he performed folk music in coffee houses in the early 1960s before attending Sir George Williams University, one of Concordia’s founding institutions, in 1966.

At Sir George Williams, Blue discovered an unlikely performer. “Leonard Cohen was our poet-in-residence during my first year there,” recalls Blue.

“I had a friend who was an art student who used tons of mascara and knew I was in a band. She took me to a classroom in the English department area, where I saw Lenny sitting on a teacher’s desk playing a nylon string guitar and droning on and on. I looked into the rest of the room. It was full of girls following his every word and looking dreamy. It didn’t really do anything for me but I realize now I should have learned more from that scene than I did!”

Later, he leaned “more and more toward creative writing as I went through school,” Blue says.

“It was a hippy time and we were all very influenced by the arts. I got my BA in 1971 and then left school to make it big with another band called Mantis. We had one album out. It received very little airplay and after a series of very unpleasant gigs the band broke up.”

So Blue returned to Concordia. “I was rapidly moving from being interested mostly in content to becoming very interested in style,” he says. “I took an MA in English — creative writing — at night, stretching it out through the ’70s. It turned out to be a godsend because as long as I was still going to school I didn’t have to start paying my loan.

He adds, “And the government kept paying the interest. Because of all the rampant inflation in the 1970s by the time I got my MA and left university my capital amount had all but been eaten up by inflation!”

Blue pauses a moment, then adds, “I will always be grateful to Sir George Williams and Concordia universities for the opportunity to encounter and wrestle with new and stimulating ideas. As I look back now I see how that gave me the intellectual confidence to go out into the world and make statements of my own. One such statement was my MA thesis. It was a novel about Montreal entitled The Paris of America, which later became a Centaur musical by Bowser and Blue.”

Almost Blue

Rick Blue — whose real name is Richard Elger — got his stage name from a tap dancer named Mary Monday when they performed in Montreal bars in the mid-1970s. Together, Blue played ukulele and Monday tap-danced at Montreal’s notorious gay PJs nightclub on downtown Peel St., where legendary Montreal drag queen Armand Monroe — a.k.a. “La Monroe” — animated shows nightly.

“Armand in a dress with his hairy legs — he’s the reason I’m not gay!” Blue says with genuine affection.

“It was such a wild place! I made more money playing two 10-minute sets at PJs than I did playing a whole night with a band.”

Blue kept his stage name when he joined forces with George Bowser in October 1978. “Bowser and Blue sounds better than Bowser and Elger,” he says.

Bowser and Blue’s big break came in 1985 when they were the opening act on Katrina and the Waves’ North American tour. “They liked what we did,” says Blue. “By the time we got to Philadelphia, they had a number one song with ‘Walking on Sunshine.’”

Band members from both Katrina and the Waves and Supertramp then played on songs recorded for Bowser and Blue’s self-titled 1986 debut album.

Like Blue, Bowser — whose children Jeanne Bowser, BFA 03, and Adam Bowser, BA 10, are both Concordia graduates — has a great sense of humour. As he says, “Most of my life I have spent playing the guitar, drinking and working with Rick, and the rest of it I wasted!”

Bowser adds, “We have covered thousands of miles together in a truck, and now I’ve heard his life story and he’s heard mine, and there are times when I literally heard him or me say, ‘Did that happen to you or to me?’ We complement each other very well.”

Blue says that Bowser and Blue, despite their satirical stabs at politicians and other celebrities, have never really ticked anybody off, not even the Quebec separatists they skewered with their biting parodies.

“Our songs were a way to laugh at our problems, especially going into the 1995 Quebec referendum,” Blue recalls.

“It was tense in those times and people needed to laugh. But we never wanted to be only that. I like the francophone culture here. I married a francophone [in 1989]. I never wanted to be seen as anti-French. I’m not. And our humour was always good-natured,” he says.

 “We both raised families, so it has been our little business. We said, ‘Let’s have fun and make some money!’ And we did it in Montreal. It has been a great run.”

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