When Blue Rodeo walks onto the Leon’s Centre stage, it might take Jim Cuddy a minute to remember where he is.    “It’s going to be a long time before I get used to calling it Leon’s Centre,” he says with a laugh over the phone from his home in Toronto.   The co-founding frontman of the iconic Canadian band is no stranger to Kingston, though. He went to Queen’s University in the 1970s, eventually earned a degree in English literature, and received an honorary doctor of law degree in 2015. His parents went to Queen’s, too, as did his youngest son, and Cuddy also met his wife there (they had their first date on a Saturday morning at Morrison’s). “I love going back to Kingston, every time,” says Cuddy, 64. “I think it’s a beautiful place, and it’s nothing but good memories for me.”   Those Queen’s memories begin in 1975, when a 20-year-old Cuddy arrived at his student home on William Street. The previous few years of high school and a year of travelling out west had left him “pretty burnt out,” he says, so he didn’t do a lot of socializing while at Queen’s and never went to the pub, though he did work as a bartender at the Kingston Curling Club when it was on Clergy Street.  Read the full story by Jordan Whitehouse on the Visit Kingston website. Posted: May 3, 2023 Originally Published: Mar 13, 2020
In this Article Artist(s) Blue Rodeo, Jim Cuddy