1. CROSSROADS.......... Jim Crichton of SAGA by Mark E. Waterbury
Pivotal moments in musicians careers propelling them from obscurity to infamy
I'm sure there are a good many of you who are probably saying, "Yeah, Saga, I remember them. Whatever happened to them?" Of course, you remember the most popular times for this Canadian progressive rock outfit, especially in the early eighties when their album "Head or Tales" produced well-known hits like "On The Loose", "Wind Him Up" and "How Long". But as far as what has happened to them is concerned...nothing except fifteen albums, world tours and a continued popularity especially in Europe. You can definitely consider one aspect for that longevity: the talent of the players and the respect that musical connoisseurs have for them. That and diligent work after some early setbacks.
Jim Crichton first strapped on an "air guitar" after watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show (yes, another one!). He actually began to perform seriously by the age of fourteen. The seeds for Saga were sown in Jim's living room in 1977 where he had ten songs he had written and was ready to put a band together to perform them. Mike Sadler had been a vocalist in a previous band that Jim had been him, and he was the first person who Jim called upon. "I had written a bunch of lyrics and I begged him to come over and sing on my tapes so I could hear what the songs sounded like," Jim recalls. "He came over and sang on the tunes. Then he quit his job and never left the band. I don't think his wife was real pleased at the time because he had a really good job as a graphic artist, but he just sat at my place for the next three months writing more tunes. I wanted to make a heavy keyboard effort, and the attempt was to make something sound pretty unique." With Jim on bass and Mike on vocals, the band first added drummer Steve Negus, calling themselves Pockets. They later changed their name to Saga after recruiting guitarist Ian Crichton and keyboardist Jim Gilmour.
The first two albums, "Saga" and "Images At Twilight" were released on Polydor-Canada and did very little in sales. The first CD had also been released on Polydor U.S., and the president of that label thought it was a good time for an album release from a new band because the only other U.S. release that week was going to be a soundtrack album from a movie. "The movie ended up being "Saturday Night Fever", and I think we sold about five copies in the U.S.," Jim muses. "Our timing ended up being really bad."
Before performing in Montreal to support the second album, Jim went into a record store across from the venue to see if they had the new album and the store did not even know it had been released. "The head office for Polydor was literally across the street from this store so we were so bummed they had not even stocked the closest store to the home office that we started our own label called Maze Records. We hired two girls to man the phones and phone radio stations and we put out the third album "Silent Knight". It went gold in about six months just with two people working the label." During the tour for "Silent Knight", Saga went to Germany where they made two TV show appearances and did their first show in Puerto Rico. This helped the band gain momentum. Their continuous touring helped create enough momentum to give credibility to the 1983 release "Head Or Tales" which would go on to sell seven million copies. But as it happens with a number of bands after the onset of success, there was a shakeup when Jim Gilmour and Steve Negus left the band. The band would continue with the core of Jim, Ian and Mike adding guest musicians as they released two more albums in the eighties. The nineties would see a reunion of the original lineup and Saga would continue releasing albums in spite of a musical climate that was rather unfriendly to their particular sub-genre of rock. "We have just held to making a record every year and a half for the past twenty-four years. It's been almost non-stop. The hardest part was actually during the nineties when grunge became big, the band was starting to get a little old and people were starting to get a little bored with it. It was hard for us to keep it together, but everyone enjoyed doing it so we kept doing it."
Persistence has started to pay off for Saga, as their popularity has been experiencing a rebirth in the past few years, particularly in Europe. Their 1997 tour supporting "Pleasure And Pain" led to a live album release in 1998 of songs cultivated from shows in Germany, Austria and France. At the same time, progressive rock in general has been growing in popularity over the past few years, partly due to the emergence of newer bands as well as the continued touring and recording of the classic acts like Yes, ELP, King Crimson and, of course, Saga. "It was nice to see some of the younger bands doing this. It's not great if it is all old bands, so it's really cool to see that. I tell everybody that we're an alternative band because ninety percent of what's selling these days is sequenced or hip-hop, or like Britney Spears or Back Street Boys. It's good to see good productions out there but it's not a live thing, and the bands that actually get out there and do everything live it's like the alternative music." Saga's most recent release "House Of Cards" looks to take the band's rebirth up another notch as it is already making waves in Europe as well as their native Canada and other international destinations, such as Venezuela where they recently sold out a gig after not playing there in ten years. "Two albums ago, we just decided to forget what year it was, forget what is fashionable, just make Saga records and not try to reinvent the band or make overly produced keyboard records with good guitar on it. And the reaction in Europe and everywhere has been really great. In Europe, we played there so much it could be easily going down hill. I've seen that happen with a lot of bands where it's a few less people every year. But the last two tours have increased tremendously and they are moving us up to bigger venues. That's with no radio, no singles, no nothing. I think the people who got confused about four or five albums ago when we were trying to reinvent Saga have heard by word-of-mouth that the new albums sound very retro and a lot like the old albums from the writing standpoint."
Saga is also poised to bring their rebirth back to the U.S., but they plan on going about that in a different way - first by starting to re-release all of the Saga albums starting with the first one, with new packaging and enhanced CDs with videos and bonus tracks. "Much our popularity came from playing live. It's like with Rush - a lot of people came out to see if we could pull off our music live. In Europe, about twenty percent of the audience tend to be musicians or friends of musicians, and they are studying how we do it live. The live thing has definitely kept us going for over twenty years. We've had many offers to start doing showcase club tours in the States and we could literally get into a van or bus and stay out there for four months. But the band is not into doing it until we have some kind of real release and some kind of record company support here, or else we'll drive around and play to five hundred or so people a night for four or six months and nobody will really know we did it. With the re-releases, we will have some kind of real support and then we'll start playing some shows here." :->
