Cliff Stevens has been playing guitar professionally for longer than he sometimes cares to admit, around 35 years to be vaguely precise. Like so many blues musicians before him, he spent much of his career displaying his significant talents in relative obscurity as a sideman with various travelling groups. Crowds ranged anywhere from 14,000 at the Montreal International Jazz Festival to 1,400 at the Medley Club in Montreal to 14 drunks in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

Like a moth to a flame, Stevens was drawn irresistibly to the genre. He recalls learning to play at 13 jamming for hours to slow blues in a coffee house in his home town of Montreal that was a hot bed for Canadian guitarists like Frank Marino of Mahogany Rush and being influenced by the foremost British and American blues rock guitarists of the day. “Clapton just jammed all night long and I was blown away,” Stevens says of a Cream concert that he attended in Montreal in 1968. “I then saw Johnny Winter in 1970 and memorized every lick I could.”

The non-stop grind of six-nights a week on the road mixed with alcohol and drugs took its toll. “I was burned out, disillusioned, I badly needed a break,” says Stevens who stepped away from music from 1982 to 1985 to drive taxi in Toronto.