Friday, March 10, 2000
By Lynda MacGibbon
Times & Transcript, Moncton, NB
"You can call me Matt, you can call me Roy, a Cape Crusader, a good ol' boy......."
The simplicity of that line from Cape Crusader, one of the tracks on Matt Minglewood's latest CD, Drivin' Wheel, seems quietly appropriate. For all his accomplishments and accolades - 10 albums, more than 20 years of touring, an East Coast Music lifetime achievement award, a Canadian Country Music Songwriter of the Year prize, Juno and CMA nominations -- Matt Minglewood is about as unpretentious as musicians come.
Born in Moncton as Roy Batherson (while his Dad was working in the CN shops), he moved back to Cape Breton with his family when he was six).
As with many Cape Breton families, music was a way of life and Minglewood remembers summers spent at his grandfather's home in Port Hood. "I'd sit on his knee and he'd play the fiddle for me. I learned to play the fiddle when I was about six or seven years old .... they told me I was pretty good.
But, unlike today, fiddle playing wasn't cool then. "I use to get teased a lot. All my friends were going with the hockey gear and I was going to fiddling lessons. I gave it up for playing hockey."
He did, however, keep his fingers limber by taking piano lessons in elementary school. Although he eventually quit those lessons ( and picked up the guitar), they paid off for him later in life when he discovered an affinity for the organ. " I played the Hammond organ on my first four albums," he says. Hammonds are featured prominently on Drinin' Wheel, although they're played by Bill McCauley, not by Minglewood.
In his early 20's, Roy Batherson became Matt Minglewood. The name, he says, was "a joke that stuck." In his early days as a musician he jammed with Richard Boudreau (who became the well known Sam Moon) and other musicians who were, he recalls, "into fictitious band names." Although Batherson wasn't officially in a band at the time, they christened him Matt Minglewood. Later he and Boudreau would create Sam Moon, Matt Minglewood and the Universal Power Band
Not only the name stuck. The profession did too.
" I never got in this in the first place for stardom or for money," Minglewood says. " When I decided this was made for me by some other power -- the power of music made the choice for me."
There have been highs and lows in his three decade career -- deals with record companies, disgust with their failure to fully market his music; plenty of bookings in bars and clubs, and then a sacrifice of interest. His latest CD was independently produced.
He's weathered the lows and celebrated the highs
"For me, it's not hard because I love playing, I love what I do. It's in my blood and it's not a chore. I've seen friends of mine who have been in the business, had some success, things got really quiet and they quit. I never did quit."
He laughs when quizzed about what fans remember as "comeback tours." He wasn't making a comeback, he maintains. " I was just coming back to your town."
He's sampled life in Toronto, Vancouver and Alaska, but he returned to Cape Breton years ago, eventually settling down in wife Babs' home town of Glace Bay. There they raised a son and daughter.
"I had wanderlust, " he says, "people in the industry wanted me to go Toronto ...... and that may have helped my career more. I would have been more in the mainstream.
"But I always came back to here. There was no other place I was going to live."
Which makes him proud of the song, Cape Crusader. His advice for curing the economic and social ills of the island? " Separate," he chortles, then grows more serious. "Hopefully, there's a future, there's no one fix, but give people a little dignity, throw some jobs down here."
In the meantime, he still leaves on a regular basis, playing in bars and arenas and beer halls across the country. This summer he's heading to Holland and Belgium where he'll play a series of outdoor park concerts to anticipated crowds of 2,000 to 3,000 people.
Then he'll return home again, a 'good ol' boy' who, even at 53, still plays hockey three times a week with his buddies in Glace Bay.