By DENIS ARMSTRONG, OTTAWA SUN
The Cooper Brothers with Colin Linden, Colleen Searson and John Steele
Where: Centrepointe Theatre
When: Saturday, 8 p.m., $39.75
The Dream Didn’t Die for The Cooper Brothers, they only gave up on it for a while.
More than 25 years after Ottawa’s The Cooper Brothers quit the music business, the boys — Dick, the 59-year-old songwriter and his brother, singer Brian —have recorded a new album, In From the Cold, and are launching it with a big reunion concert at Centrepointe Theatre.
Produced by Colin Linden and featuring Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy, the album is getting a lot of attention. But Dick is still being cautious, and taking this reunion thing one day at a time. The savvy songwriter has seen how fickle the Canadian music business can be because he’s been there before.
“You hope your music will open doors for you, but it’s hard after you’ve dropped out of sight for 20 years,” says Dick, chuckling a little to himself.
Thirty years ago, The Cooper Brothers was one of the most successful Canadian bands of the seventies. Signed to Capricorn Records in the States, their first two albums, The Cooper Brothers and Pitfalls of the Ballroom, sold well thanks to three monster singles — Show Some Emotion, I’ll Know Her When I See Her, and the million-selling, Billboard chart-topping The Dream Never Dies.
That song title would become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy when Capricorn went bankrupt two weeks after releasing the Coopers’ second album.
By then, the boys were seriously burnt-out and wondering why their luck went south.
So in 1983, they quit. Didn’t even think about it. Dick had a successful writing career with a movie screenplay, a novel and dozens of video games. It wasn’t until 2006, when their greatest hits album was released, that the boys performed a live gig at their favourite watering hole, The Prescott.
“I didn’t think that anyone except a couple of old-timers and bar regulars like us would be there, but when we got to the bar, the line to get in to the bar went down Preston St. and all the way around the corner,” Cooper says. “That’s when I got nervous because we only knew four songs. We got lots of help from the audience that night. They seemed to remember the songs better than us.”
Opening for James Taylor at Bluesfest in 2008 made them hungry to perform again. Dick began writing songs for the first time in nearly 25 years.
“It’s a mystery how I wrote 25 songs in one year,” he says. “When I showed them to Colin, he said we should record them right away.”
Linden wanted the production to sound simple.
“He didn’t want us to get in the way of good songs. He liked their rootsy sound, so we kept the recording simple, stripped down to the bare bones. We’re really happy with the results. It sounds really authentic.”
Their first single is That’s What Makes Us Great.
“We weren’t overnight successes the first time around. It didn’t end on our terms the first time around. It would be nice to have one more kick at the can.”
