Paul Myers didn’t set out to write a biography of Long John Baldry. The journalist-musician had another book in mind, and, he recalls, as he got set to pitch it, the distracted-looking editor preempted him: “I want to ask you if you’re interested in writing a biography on Long John Baldry, because he’s kind of a Vancouver story.”

Baldry, a legendary figure–and, at 6-7, an almost literally larger-than-life one–from the earliest days of the British blues, rock, and R&B scene of the 1960s, had recently died of lung complications, in July 2005, after a life punctuated with many equally legendary episodes of booze-fuelled partying. Myers eventually took on the task, which resulted in It Ain’t Easy: Long John Baldry and the Birth of the British Blues (Greystone Books, $24.95). But in a West End hotel room he says it wasn’t because Baldry was a famous rock pioneer he felt honoured to profile. Rather, it was because the more he learned about the man who launched the careers of rock behemoths Elton John and Rod Stewart, the more he wanted to find out.

Myers, 46, grew up listening to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin, all of them part of the British explosion of the ‘60s. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is my chance to find out how that all happened.’ And as I’m researching, I’m going: ‘Baldry did that too! I can’t believe no one’s done this [book] yet.’ I guess it takes someone dying for that to happen.”

He spent the better part of two years investigating and writing up Baldry’s life, the last two decades of which were spent in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood.

”Everybody I talked to said, ‘God bless you for telling his story,’” Myers recounts. “But I didn’t get into this project thinking, ‘I want to tell the story of Long John Baldry.’ I wanted to find out the story of Long John Baldry.”

That story has been recounted in bits and pieces over the years, especially the parts about Baldry discovering Stewart playing his harmonica on a train platform and giving him his first gigs, and encouraging Elton John to pursue his musical dreams. Add in a TV appearance with the Beatles, gigs in Blues Incorporated with devotees Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, sessions with Jeff Beck, and an assertion from Eric Clapton that Baldry inspired him to learn how to play guitar, and you have the stuff that music legends are made of. Legends, but true ones, Myers says. His extensive research confirmed most of the stories.

”You couldn’t make that stuff up,” Myers says of Baldry’s sighting of Stewart one cold morning at London’s Twickenham Station. “All that John saw was the mane of hair sticking out of the scarves and hot breath coming up from this huge nose.”

Myers, a Toronto native who lives in San Francisco and is a former Georgia Straight contributor, never figured out why Baldry wasn’t as successful as some of his protégés.

”He was our rock star, our local rock star, the neighbourhood rock star.…He was very cool about just being a man of the people, and at the same time he had this incredible past.

”The thing is, he loved Vancouver. Maybe the whole point was to be out here and enjoy the lifestyle after running around and having crazy party life and, you know, all the drinking.…He had a taste of the limelight, but maybe he didn’t want to be a pop star. I don’t know; I wish I had a chance to ask him now.”