BOOKS

THE day after Cowboy Junkies fashioned 1988’s alt.country motherlode at a church in their native Toronto, bandleader Mike Timmins struggled to believe how perfectly they had captured their moment. He kept playing the tape end to end – to his sister, singer Margo Timmins, and then to his mother, before killing some of the party mood by playing it repeatedly on a boombox at bassist Alan Anton’s engagement bash. “We couldn’t take it off!” he recalls in Dave Bowler’s voluminous biography. “They were saying, ‘Do you think we could change the tape?’ after the fourth time.”