Todd Wolfe hasn’t been to Lethbridge since the early ’90s when he was playing in Sheryl Crow’s band, but he is looking forward to showing off his more psychedelic blues side when he stops by the Slice, Feb. 6, with bassist Justine Gardner and drummer Roger Voss.
 He will be coming to Lethbridge hot off a beautiful five day gig at Edmonton’s Blues on Whyte.
“No I won’t be singing any Sheryl Crow songs. I don’t think I can do them justice, though one time a guy  wanted to sit in with us and wanted to play one of them and I hadn’t played it since the early ’90s,” he said.

He met Sheryl Crow through mutual friends when she was singing in Michael Jackson’s band.
“ In 1987 she would come and visit us in New York where I’m from. We started writing. We did a five song demo, and by 1989, she was in Don Henley’s band, and she said ‘why don’t you come out to Los Angeles and do some writing,’” Wolfe related.
He ended up playing in her band along with former Textones member Carla Olson in the early ’90s as Crow’s career started taking off.

“ I played in her band for about five years. She’s a hard worker and she could be a task master. She liked things done her way,” he said.

“She was a hard worker and expected everyone else to  be the same. So it was a good learning experience,” he said,  on the road from Saskatoon, where he just finished a three day gig at Bud’s On Broadway in Saskatoon.
“It was pretty trippy. We had a combination of moshers and hippy dancers. I’d never seen that before,” he observed, calling them “hip moshers.”
 Their first show in Lethbridge will be a combination of blues classics and originals, with a lot of psychedelic jamming.
“We’ll let the crowd determine what we’ll do,” he said.


He may be playing one of several songs he cowrote with Crow called “California.”
“We’ll probably be playing that one. We’ve been playing it a lot lately,” he said
 Wolfe grew up steeped in the sounds of  the British blues invasion. Cats like Cream, Eric Clapton the Beatles and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band plus a plethora of blues kingpins like Hubert Sumlin, Howlin Wolf, Buddy Guy and BB King laid his musical foundation.
 He is pleased with how his trio is playing.

“Justine is a graduate of the Berklee School of Music. But what’s surprising is you’d expect five and six string basses and a lot of slapping, but she plays pretty traditionally on a four string P-Bass. It makes it easy for Roger and me to stretch out,” he said.
“Sometimes it’s tough to play in a trio and sometimes I think I’d like a keyboard. But they give you some space to be experimental,” he continued.

Tickets are seven dollars in advance or nine dollars at the door for the show which begins at 9 p.m., Feb. 6.