Paul Black tells me about first hearing Stevie Ray Vaughan play, and even now, decades later, he still lights up describing it. It was Expo 86, his cousin had a spare ticket because a friend bailed for a ski trip in Whistler, and a teenager from Thornhill who had never heard of the guy walked into a free concert that changed the entire direction of his life. “Just blew my mind,” he told me, “I had never seen anything like that.”
Growing up outside Terrace, BC, Paul’s house was a mix of his dad’s country records, his mom’s gospel music, and his older brothers’ rock albums. He got into heavy rock first, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, before a cousin’s cassette of Jimi Hendrix cracked something open. By the time he moved to Victoria in the mid-90s, better weather and a thriving blues scene sealed the deal.
His band Taxi landed a spot on the Rocktoria compilation and picked up an eight-out-of-ten review from Rolling Stone. Since then he’s built a catalogue that includes Blue Words, which somehow found rotation as far away as Denmark and Singapore, and Beautiful Sin, recorded with three different drummers.
Along the way, Paul had two separate tendon injuries in his left hand, he adapted his technique both times and kept playing, at one point performing in a cast angled just enough that he could still hold a pick. When I asked him about his cover of Brick House, the Commodores tune he turned into a rocking blues number at Bart’s Pub in Victoria, he laughed and admitted he didn’t even know all the lyrics the first night he played it. It stuck anyway, and it’s become one of the highlights of his live shows.
Paul’s advice for young musicians is the same thing that’s carried him this far: keep your hands on your strings, and just keep writing.
You can hear the whole conversation, and Paul’s cover of Brick House, on this week’s episode of The PULSE Community Podcast: https://bit.ly/S3EP02PulsePodcast
The PULSE Community website: ThePulseCommunity.ca.
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/