Northern Exposure : Country-Rock’s Blue Rodeo Is Big in Native Canada, but Band Struggles for More Airplay in U.S.

Canadian songwriting partners Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor came together nearly 25 years ago--not on a stage but on a Toronto high-school football field. It was a meeting steeped in adolescent testosterone, with Keelor, a senior, playing defense against Cuddy as the junior-team quarterback.

“I hit him after the whistle, and we ended up having this fight,” Keelor recalled. “There’s something about that age where you have a fight and you become friends. So there’s always been this tension between us. But it’s a good thing.”

That friendship developed into the band Blue Rodeo, which over the past 10 years has recorded seven critically acclaimed albums, performed hundreds of live shows and become one of Canada’s highest-profile country-rock acts. In 1990 and ‘91, the group won back-to-back best-band Juno Awards, the Canadian Grammy.

On this side of the border, Blue Rodeo is lucky to fill a roadhouse, usually playing to a small cadre of fans at clubs such as the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, where the group plays Friday as part of a Southern California tour.

“That is a mystery,” said Keelor, speaking by phone from his farmhouse an hour east of Toronto. “You could say record companies never really invested in us. How do you get radio play without major promotion from a record company? And the company won’t invest until you get the airplay. MTV? We’re too old and unattractive for that. VH1? That’s still a pretty select group.”

That Americans haven’t caught on in force, from Keelor’s standpoint, isn’t necessarily bad.

“We’re like this regionally popular bar band,” he said. “It’s pleasant to be able to go down to America and play the dives. There’s something about those shows that’s really special, just that sort of end-of-the-road, nothing matters. And those walls really absorb sound well. I miss that up here.”

One reason for the difficulty latching onto a larger following is that the group is hard to pigeonhole--and market.

Blue Rodeo began in the post-punk era as an aggressive, acoustic-driven rock band with a penchant for full, rich harmonies. Its sound has evolved to the point where it is considered too hard for country radio, too soft for rock, too mature for a young audience and too challenging for the light-rock crowd.

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On the new album, “Tremolo,” the country sound is up front, beginning with the infectious love song “Moon & Tree,” which features Kim Deschamps’ pedal steel guitar work, through the roadhouse romp of “I Could Never Be That Man.” It also includes gentle ballads such as the plaintive “Falling Down Blue” and the concluding, Replacements-sounding churn, “Graveyard.”

To record the new album, Cuddy said the band, which also includes bassist Bazil Donovan, keyboardist James Gray and drummer Glenn Milchem, met in the studio to learn the new material, then tried to capture each song in as few takes as possible. That approach made the playing spontaneous, he said, and kept the sound fresh.

“It’s like telling a joke over and over again,” Cuddy said from his home in Toronto. “You just get it right the first few times by intuition.”

“Tremolo” also was much easier to record than its predecessor, “Nowhere to Here,” Cuddy said.

“That album came from a very hidden part of the psyche. It’s good to get it out. I appreciate it for that reason, because there was a lot of darkness. That part of the psyche is oppressive, and making that record was oppressive,” he said. “But music is a tonic to that.

“This album is more a reflection of happier people.”

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It comes at a time when the future for Blue Rodeo is uncertain.

After “Tremolo,” Keelor and Cuddy recorded solo albums. Keelor’s “Gone” was released in the spring; Cuddy’s untitled album is slated to come out in the summer, after the “Tremolo” tour.

“I don’t think we really want to define ourselves as part of a band for the rest of our lives,” Cuddy said. “There’s a lot of Blue Rodeo that’s really good, but there’s nothing about the Rolling Stones touring again that makes me think this is the way music should evolve. . . .

“I think we’re both trying to find a dignified way to evolve and to do other things in music and still try to maintain the vitality of Blue Rodeo,” Cuddy said. “It’s always fun to come home when you travel, but it’s not that fun to be home all the time.”

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As for that long-ago fight, Cuddy was a little embarrassed that Keelor even brought it up.

“Greg is now the total countrified aesthete, but underneath that--which is a very slender veneer--there is a big sports-hog bully,” Cuddy said. “He was a serious sports guy, a Junior A [hockey] goalie, the real deal. I, on the other hand, was just a dilettante, a skinny-assed little quarterback who didn’t even care about football.”

So, who won the fight?

“He rubbed my face in the dirt,” Cuddy said, laughing. “But he paid for it, because I’ve been his shadow for 24 years.”

* Blue Rodeo and Blue Mama play Friday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $15-$17. (714) 496-8930.