"It's hard to say exactly how I first got interested in playing blues," says Lepage. "I liked music ever since I was a little kid. I used to skip out of school a lot, and I remember in grade four I'd pretend to go to school but really I'd hide in the bushes, and then when mom and dad went to work I'd go back home and sing along with records. None of it was blues, of course. It was quite a mixture of other stuff. When I started in bands, I was just singing. I wasn't playing guitar. So I was at the mercy of guitar players who'd say, "let's do this one." I guess I went the average route through a peer kind of popular music.

I guess I just played whatever was going until I started learning to play guitar and accompany myself. The thing that I discovered later, what really moved me, was blues styling and phrasing, gospel-type emotive singing. My first exposure was in a band (Mother Groove) playing '60's music. A lot of it was blues- influenced, British stuff. We'd see McKinley Morganfield and Willie Dixon credits on the back of Rolling Stones records and say "who's that?"

We had a teacher in high school who was a guitar player (noted music historian John Einarson), and he lent us a bunch of records, which I eventually bought from him. There were five of them that I recall: B.B. King Live at the Regal, Albert King Live Wire Blues Power and Born Under A Bad Sign, the Vanguard Series' Chicago: The Blues Today, Volumes One and Two, I think, and Buddy Guy A Man And The Blues. So that was my first exposure to that style."

The quiet little town of Morden, Manitoba (pop. 5,000) seems an unlikely spawning ground for blues players. Primarily a Mennonite farming community, the area is more known for its production of corn and apples than for its contributions to the world of music, As fate would have it, however, in the early 1980s, a group of Morden teenagers discovered a common interest in blues that would eventually see them evolve into world-class (as well as world- travelling) musicians.

In the spring of 1983, Lepage, Jon Penner, Lorne Petkau, and Michael Chubey formed a band called Mother Groove. They started off playing cover versions of blues-rock material by artists like Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter and ZZ Top at parties and socials and in the local bars. The band's repertoire was usually well-received - one notable exception was a bar in Swan River, where the band was abruptly fired after their first night.

"For all of us, it was the beginning of really playing music," recalls Lepage. "In the sense of musicianship, that's your first step, you know. We were cutting our teeth, as they say. Doing four nights at the St. Vital Hotel for 600 bucks, getting bad reviews in the local papers, and being told to go back to the garage. We were just a bunch of greenhorns, finding out what it's like to be a musician, finding out what it is that inspires you. In terms of music, though, it was an interesting time.

We were all coming out of the rock and roll thing, and in effect, to get where we wanted to go, that band had to end. We wouldn't have called it [Mother Groove] a blues band," says Lepage, "but that's where we were heading. And one by one, we went our separate ways. We never lost touch with each other, though, and it's been pretty amazing the way things worked out."

While Jon Penner and Lorne Petkau moved west to Vancouver and eventually wound up in Austin, Texas with Ottawa-born singer/guitarist Sue Foley (Penner would work with Foley for ten years, and Petkau, under the stage name Shorty Lenoir, would later go on to record and tour with Austin harp stalwart Gary Primich), J.P. headed east to Ontario.

Lepage's odyssey brought him first to London, where he planned to take a course in music industry arts while his new bride, Glenda, intended to enter a program in graphic design. But the college they wanted to attend had a requirement that they be residents of Ontario for a year before being eligible for admission. While they waited, J.P started nosing around the local blues scene in hopes of finding a gig. But it was tough.

"We had nothing when we moved out there," admits J.P. "We had our suitcases and, basically, first and last month's rent between us. No job prospects. Nothing. We were heading out to some strange town with no idea of what to expect. I didn't have a clue of what the music scene was like there. Oddly enough, though, we ended up about minute's walk away from the main blues room there, so that was good.

The time in London, in terms of music, wasn't really happening, though. I got a chance to see and hear some great touring bands, but as far as the local stuff went, there wasn't much of any interest to me. I definitely had my ideas of what kind of a band I wanted to be in and the kind of music I wanted to play. And the few guys I met that liked the same stuff as I did weren't prepared to actually play it.

It just never materialized for me there, largely, I guess, because my interests were different from what the general ones were. What I was looking for, really, was a four piece harp band that could do Littler Walter and Muddy Waters, that Chicago blues kind of thing. And there was nobody locally who was doing that."

Although it was not Lepage's fate to find his ideal musical situation immediately, it would not be too long before things would start going his way. Six months after his arrival in London, while hanging out at the club where touring bands played, the Firehall, he met Kelly Hoppe and the Windsor Dukes, a meeting that would be pivotal in his musical career.

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