- Margo Timmins
They say you never forget your first, and it’s true. I bought my first CD player at Goldsmith’s in 1992 and went to some record store in the Mall of Memphis and bought two CDs: Small Change, a Tom Waits classic, and Black Eyed Man by The Cowboy Junkies which was hot off the presses. A recent break-in had seriously depleted my music collection so for months these discs and a handful of cassette tapes were all I had to listen to. And I never got tired of them.
The Cowboy Junkies made a name for themselves in 1988 with The Trinity Session, a fantastic collection of songs recorded at Ontario’s Church of the Holy Trinity. It’s still widely considered to be the band’s most important recording, and “Sweet Jane“, a quaalude-country take on one of the Velvet Underground’s definitive songs—is probably still the group’s best known cut. But for my money, it’s all about Black Eyed Man and I hope to hear many of those songs when the group plays a free concert at The Levitt Shell on Saturday, June 12.
