Shannon is smooth as silk

By Dan Hilborn
Published July 13, 2005


There is a moment when most new listeners of Mem Shannon's down home New Orleans-style music pause and wonder - haven't I heard this guy before?

Shannon, a fixture on the American blues festival circuit for the past decade, is one of those true treasures of the genre. One moment, his deep baritone voice is as smooth as Barry White and the next it's as infectious and enthusiastic as Fats Domino. When his full range comes shining through in the same song, as it often does on his latest CD, I'm from Phunkville, you can expect a measure of blistering social commentary, too.

"I consider myself the common man," Shannon said during a telephone interview from Baxter, Iowa in the middle of yet another year-long traipse across the continent.

Shannon is truly a rare bird in the music industry. For most of his life, he drove a taxi to pay for his passion of playing in a variety of house bands in the lively nightclub scene of The Big Easy. Nowadays, he shares the driving duties with his band, appropriately named the Membership.

Since his 1995 debut release A Cab Driver's Blues, Shannon has averaged 200 performances a year, travelling from small clubs to some of the largest music festivals in the world, including the Montreal Jazz Fest and his hometown New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. On Aug. 13, he'll wind his way into Burnaby for the sixth annual Blues and Roots Festival.

"It's kind of hectic," Shannon said while his hotel room's microwave oven beeped in the background. "I spend a lot of money on gasoline, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my van gets me home."

But being on the road for most of the year is the lifestyle that Shannon loves. "I get more out of being in different places every night," he said. "It seems to make the music fresher than if you're playing at the same club every day and every night. Nine to five is not for everybody."

Currently on tour with his four-member band - Robert 'Rhock' Dabon on keyboards, Jeff Hebert on drums and Angelo Nocentelli on bass - Shannon's music and lyrics reflect the laid-back wisdom that comes from driving for most of his life.

"I guess I'm naturally observant," he says nonchalantly. "I'm always honing in on things that interest me, and hopefully other people."

His music will get your feet tapping and his lyrics will have your head nodding in agreement, like in Perfect World, probably the most quoted song on his latest release. "A perfect world, it just can't be. 'Cause in a perfect world there would be no you, there would be no me. In a perfect world - there would be no need."

Shannon is clearly comfortable playing the role of reluctant philosopher. "Some of my songs touch on political things, that can't be helped. ... I hate that," he said.

For example, his 2001 hit S.U.V., which was featured on the Car Talk - Born Not To Run CD produced by Ray and Tom Magliozzi, better known to Burnaby NOW readers as the syndicated columnists Click and Clack, begins with the lines: "Look out. There goes another one driving 60 miles per hour just to get to the stop sign. That's just stupid."

SUVs are one of Shannon's true pet peeves. "There are too many out there, and most of of those people are in their SUVs by themselves," he said. "They're in a big vehicle and not using it for what it was made for in the first place - which is going hunting or into the mountains or in snow. People use them to go to the corner store to buy a loaf of bread."

He expresses a similar style of disdain in The Reason, the opening song of his latest CD. "What's the reason? Why can't we all get along? What is the reason? Why did you make me write this song?"

Despite the fact that Shannon has been playing music since he first picked up a clarinet at the age of nine, he said the process of writing his own tunes does not come easy.

"I have to be inspired, or on deadline," he said. "I'm not one of those guys who gets up and writes a song every day. That's not the way I do it. Somebody has to say something, or I have to see something in the course of the day to inspire me to write.

"But if I had to be in a studio in so many weeks, my brain would start cranking something out - hopefully, something good," he chuckles.

In a few more weeks' time, Mem Shannon and the Membership will coax their aging van - it has 450,000 miles (725,000 km) on the odometer - across the border to play at the Burnaby Blues and Roots Festival. After that, he'll head out to the Salmon Arm Blues and Roots Festival, and then the Labatts' Blues Festival in Edmonton before heading home for a well-deserved break.