By God, it’s 12:22 AM EDT on Thursday, October 2, 2025, and I’m holed up with a fifth of bourbon, staring into the electric abyss of Ottawa’s blues underbelly, where Drew Nelson—slide guitar shaman and unrepentant road warrior—carved his legend from the frozen guts of the Rideau Canal.
Drew Nelson’s life in music reads like a fever dream scribbled on the back of a bar napkin somewhere in Ottawa, Ontario, circa the late 1960s—a city of frozen streets, neon-lit taverns, and snow that gnaws at your bones like a hungry dog. Nearly fifty years deep into the blues, Nelson has survived the cold, the madness, and the endless echo of a guitar screaming in the dark.
At sixteen, while other kids chased disco or sports glory, Nelson stepped into the chaos of Ottawa’s music scene, wielding a slide guitar like a scalpel on raw nerves. Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Little Walter—they weren’t just influences, they were specters whispering in his ear as he honed his craft in smoky bars, sweating through nights that blurred into a single, endless jam session. His style was gritty, authentic, a storm of emotion over technique, a survival mechanism in a political city that demands blood for art.
By 1980, Nelson joined forces with blues harp banshee Back Alley John (real name John Wilson) and drummer Sandy “Bone” Smith to form the Back Alley John Revue. The band was a three-man hurricane, first wreaking havoc on the Byward Market streets, then storming the Chateau Lafayette tavern—Ottawa’s oldest, most sacred den of chaos. They never recorded a proper album, because albums are sterile, neat things. Their mission was immediate: blow the roof off every venue, crush mediocrity under a wave of Chicago-style electric blues, and mentor young stage-predators like a 16-year-old Sue Foley, a lightning rod of teenage fury who would later scorch the Canadian blues scene with her own brand of unrelenting intensity.
But by 1986, reality hit like a sledgehammer. Back Alley John’s health collapsed—lungs shot, body failing—he fled to Calgary, leaving the Revue to disintegrate in a haze of smoke and shattered amps. Nelson, however, refused to fall into the abyss. By 1989, he had assembled The Drew Nelson Band, a chameleon outfit revolving around his voice and guitar, ready to take on Canada and the United States like a lightning storm on wheels. Their old song, “Nothing to Show,” resurfaced on the 1991 Saturday Night Blues compilation, which won a Juno Award—a bolt of national recognition suddenly illuminating the darkness.
The 1990s were surreal, a kaleidoscope of legends and chaos. Nelson linked with Dutch Mason, producing Mason’s 1992 album You Can’t Have Everything and writing four originals—work that snagged a Juno nomination in 1994. Meanwhile, the band opened for, or backed, proverbial blues gods like B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Little Richard, Eric Burdon, Taj Mahal. These weren’t performances—they were trials by fire under looming, mythic shadows. Nelson’s music began crawling into television and film, surfacing in soundtracks for productions like Da Vinci’s Inquest, and the feature film Naked Frailties, ghostly and omnipresent.
Albums accumulated like battle scars: the self-titled debut (1989), The Honeymoon’s Over (1990), Mr. Nelson’s Neighborhood (1994) with “I’m in Love” and “It Feels So Right,” Just Because (2001), and Thirty Odd Years (2006), a retrospective documenting a life of road-worn electric chaos. By the early 2000s, the band was playing over 200 shows a year, a relentless barrage of sound and adrenaline, until Nelson, sensing mortality gnawing at his edges, stepped back to prioritize family, leaving the endless carnival behind—for a time.
Yet the blues are immortal, and Nelson might just be their semi-reluctant prophet. By 2009, the band reappeared in fits and bursts, culminating in 2014’s The Other Side, co-produced with Steve Marriner of MonkeyJunk. A tribute to Nelson’s late father, the record channels heartbreak, honesty, and redemption. Tracks like “Make It Right,” a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire,” and “Please Come Home,” co-written decades earlier with Back Alley John, hit like lightning in a bottle. Critics hailed it as a Canadian roots-and-blues classic: raw, soulful, and unapologetically real.
Now in his sixties, Nelson operates like a seasoned predator—selective, precise, still dangerous. In 2024, The Drew Nelson Band thundered through the Capital Fair Blues Revue in Ottawa, proving the fire hasn’t yet begun to dim. Updates now trickle in through his official website at DrewNelson.Ca, an X.com feed at @DrewNelsonBand, and on his public Facebook page at facebook.com/drewnelsonband, but the true evidence of things still lives in the venues, in the tremor of strings under a guitar player’s fingers.
Drew Nelson didn’t just play the blues; he outlasted them, reshaping them into something Canadian, something lethal, something eternal. In a country where winters bite and silence can kill, survival is a triumph. And in that survival, Nelson has achieved a kind of immortality: one note, one chord, one raw, bleeding truth at a time.
