blinker the star come from Pembroke, Ontario, the first city in North America to install streetlights and the home of the world-famous Eddy Match Factory, from whence hails almoast every pack of matches on the continent. Pembroke is 100 miles north of Ottawa, almost in Quebec, so if you don't know your Canadian Geography you better start boning up. Jordon Zadorozny, who does the vast majority of Blinker's writing and singing and playing, says lots of his songs are about Pembroke, and the odd surplus of "absolutely cerfiably crazy people there".
For instance, "Bicycle Freedom" on Blinker's new album A BOURGEOIS KITTEN, is based on the Kruzcyinski Brothers, Ronnie and Jimmy, a pair of bike-riding middle-aged "extreme paranoid shizophrenics with no grasp on reality." They always call Jordon "Sir".
At first, blinker the star was just Jordon, who was born in 1973 and is now 22 years old. But lately, drummer Colin Wylie and bassist Pete Frolander have become Blinkers too. Before Frolander, there was Peder Jacobson; before those guys there were a couple other guys who helped out on Blinker's aptly and widely hailed debut CD "BLINKER THE STAR" (released in Canada in summer of 1994 on Vibra Cobra Records by a guy who became their manager then later still stopped being their manager; then released on Treat & Release Records in the States in fall of 1995).
Before the first album, there was allegedly also an early 1994 cassette called Satin Doombox, of which only three of four copies are known to exist. "We had a big release party," Jordon Remembers.
Jordon says the words "blinker the star" don't mean anything, except that before Blinker he was in a band called Tinker. Before that, he was in a band called King Louis Katz, named for a Dr. Suess story; coincidentally enough Blinker also have a song entitled "Bourgeois Kitten" and "Kween Kat," and Jordon owns a 10-year-old longhair named Maggie. (But he hates dogs, dispite having another song named "My Dog.") Before King Louis Katz, he played a big-band music in high school until a "young liberal teacher" started letting him compose classical scores based on old Black Sabbath numbers.
He was also in a group that entered a local Kiwanis Club contest with a jazzed up version of "Interstellar Overdrive" by Pink Floyd, not to mention a swing band with a bunch of British guys who worked Homer Simpson-style in the local nuclear power plant and were really proud of it.
Entralled with pop music's melodies but not its overproduction, Jordon started recording Blinker's first album when he was just 17 years old. It was done completely on the cheap, to the extent that the opening track, "J-Bird (Part Two)," wound up with an unusual percussion-jam ending when Jordon recorded it over an un-erased old tape, accidently leaving the ending of an old song there as if he meant it to be there in the first place.
The disc was a crude hodgepodge of everything from country to grunge, complete with oddball echo effects from a "crappy little Roland amplifier." There was even a track called "Nary Aloha," identified by many critics as a Hawaiian slack-key hula because of its title even though Jordon was mainly just trying to rip off the solo album from "Abbey Road."
Jordon's ancestry is Ukrainian, but his parents were the famous Canadian bluegrass fiddlers who went by the names Pete Dawson and Carol Kennedy, recording numerous albums together for London Records in the late '60s and playing frequently on a televised jamboree based out of the Wheeling, West Virginia.
They owned a music store where they sold instruments, and wherein Jordon pretty much grew up. When he was 12, he got a four track recorder, and a friend "had a big fantasy that a couple of our teachers were in Nazareth" (referring to the kickass '70s A&M rock band rather than the city where Jesus Christ learned carpentry).
"We'd superimpose all their names on the Nazareth albums," Jordon explains, "and we imagined they owned this big castle in Renfrew, Ontario where they celebrated "The Festival of Bugger." We even came up with sayings about "there was a faulty bugger"." Which sayings sometimes got little Jordon into trouble.
He wrote songs -- whole "albums," in fact -- about these fantasies. But when he turned 15, the music store burnt down. So he moved an eight track recorder into his mom's basement, where she now sold pianos and where he'd previously primarily played floor hockey. The plaster walls made for great acoustics, so Jordon recorded Blinker's debut CD down there, weeding out for it the "most- outstanding" of the 100-or-so songs he'd composed on eight-track. One of which concerned gunning down hippos at the zoo. "But the new album is the record I've always really wanted to make," Jordon says.
It's got a cleaner more technocratically swoopy star-blinking sound he attributes to "studio-geek" producer (and big Cars fan) Ken Andrews of the band Failurel keybord guy Chris Pittman from the Replicants lends a hand too. Though not especially fluent in French ("only what I learned in school," Jordon admits), Blinker the star now reside in Montreal, where they sometimes see nubile disco queen Mitsou (the Madonna of Canada) shimmying down the street, and where they once came upon "the house Voivod built" while looking for a rehearsal space.
Yet since their new collection was recorded in the States with an American producer, the new CD may well run afoul on content quotas stipulating that a certain percent of music programmed by Canadian radio stations must be made in Canada. That's just a cross of Blinker, like their countryman and labelmate Bryan Adams, will have to bear.
The Album's oldest song is "Earman," which Jordon still refers to as "the one that sounds lik the Cure." "Kween Kat", by contrast has bluesish slide guitars that are supposed to remind you of Led Zepplin III.
Some of the more bizarre noises on the record, Jordon boasts, are mistakes that accidently emerged from studio speakers or special effects pedals when nobody was paying attention; when suchsounds didn't seem merely "stupid and goofy," the Blinker boys left them in. blinker the star's previous CD (according to its sleeve was "for personal use only, not for entertainment purposes," but even though their recording process has turned notably more professional (or at least less cellar-bound), Jordon allows that the new disc is perfectly okay for entertainment.
So put the damn thing on already -- Entertain yourself 'till the hippos come home!!
