Sass Jordan performs in Hollywood, Calif. in November, 2012.Ron Lyon/Reuters
Montreal’s Sass Jordan, a bombshell rock vocalist with a whisky-soaked rasp and an indomitably vivacious spirit, died on Friday, according to her publicist. She was 65. No cause of death was given but she had recently cancelled multiple concerts.
Her guitar-riffed hit song Make You a Believer from 1992 defined her as bluesy belter with swagger and optimistic messaging: “Let me tell you all a little story about this time I was down and out, just goes to prove there’s always a light on / But if you look you’ll find it’s inside of you, so I want y’all to listen up.”
People listened. The song, from the album Racine, released by MCA Records in the United States, climbed to No. 11 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart. The album sold an estimated 450,000 copies worldwide and 100,000 in Canada, leading Billboard magazine to name Jordan its top female rock artist of the year. Things were looking up, but then, positive energy always glowed from Jordan regardless of her place on the charts.
“She believed in positive energy and spreading love,” said Jake Gold, who managed Jordan at one point and was a judge with her on all six seasons of Canadian Idol from 2003 to 2008. “She was in tune with the universe in that way.”
Jordan kept her chin up in a music industry dominated by men and plagued with misogyny. Early in her career, she was told by a radio programmer that he couldn’t play her new single because they already had a song by a female rocker in heavy rotation. Melissa Etheridge was singing I’m the Only One, and how’s that for a quota?
Montreal rock singer Sass Jordan dies at 65
On another occasion, disc jockey Danny Bonaduce of The Partridge Family fame admitted to Jordan he had a higher standard for female rock singers. In an interview with the music website Pause & Play, she recalled that he said “I don’t mean to sound sexist, but if you’re a girl you really have to convince me. You really have to sell me.”
Imagine what he’d say to her if he did mean to sound sexist.
The late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who got his start in the mid-1990s as a 22-year-old member of Jordan’s band, said she gave him his first rock ’n’ roll pay cheque. In 2015, at the Toronto venue now known as RBC Amphitheatre, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl told the audience, “If it weren’t for Sass Jordan, Taylor Hawkins wouldn’t be in Foo Fighters.”
In between Jordan and Foo Fighters, Hawkins was Alanis Morissette’s drummer. In the 2021 HBO documentary Jagged, Hawkins admitted he and his male bandmates lured women backstage with the promise of meeting Morissette. He described the You Learn singer’s role on the road as motherly.
What he meant was Morissette, like Jordan, was the adult in the rooms often full of man-children.
Sarah (Sass) Jordan was born in Birmingham, England, the daughter of a French literature professor and a British ballerina. She was a toddler when her father moved the family to Montreal for a position at Concordia University.
As an eight-year-old, she had an epiphany while watching real-life pop star David Cassidy in the aforementioned sitcom The Partridge Family. “I took one look at him and said, ‘That’s me. That’s what I want to be,’” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1992.
She had no interest in Bonaduce or even Susan Dey (who played keyboardist and supporting singer Laurie Partridge). “No way! She was in the back. I wanted to be way up front.”
That would have to wait. For a time, she contributed backing vocals to the Montreal band the Box. Jordan’s own first hit was Tell Somebody, from the 1988 album of the same name. A run of hit singles that followed kept her on the radio and MuchMusic: Double Trouble, Make You a Believer, High Road Easy and more. 1994’s Sun’s Gonna Rise was reflective of her upbeat nature.
In the mid-1990s, Jordan jammed with Van Halen in guitarist Eddie Van Halen’s studio in Los Angeles, where she was based. With singer Sammy Hagar no longer in the band, Eddie and drumming brother Alex Van Halen were on the hunt for a replacement. Though the audition went well, nothing became of it.
“Eddie and Alex loved her,” said Ray Danniels, who managed Van Halen, as well as Rush, Max Webster and Kim Mitchell. “But Sass called me and said, ‘The brothers are crazy, this would never work.’ She was right on both counts.”
In 2001, Jordan starred as Janis Joplin in the off-Broadway musical Love, Janis. More recently, she recorded a pair of blues albums on Alberta-based Stony Plain Records. One of her last hits was Desire, from her 1997 LP Present. It was defiant yet vulnerable − a mature pop-music statement about scars, wounds and hard-won wisdom from an artist and human being in search of the same elusive things we all seek.
How can I deny what I want to be?
I won’t try to be something else
How can I deny what comes naturally?
I don’t want to be someone else