Velvet

So bloody good.  

I am in the woods and have little time to respond, but thanks for the nice words and the suggestions!

Yes, please pass it around!

Big day in Ottawa 22 years ago:

On July 5th, 1994 I had a few drinks and strolled the handful of blocks between my house and the Ottawa Congress Centre to see a band I had been hearing a bit about called Phish.  I had missed them before in Montreal when a friend that I had seen the Grateful Dead with all but insisted I come with her to see Phish at Metropolis.  I remember bowing out with the excuse that I had been out several nights in the past week seeing local bands in Ottawa and could use a night off.

Ouch.

But a few days before Phish played their one and only show in Canada’s capital city another friend of mine played me a cut off of the Junta album, a catchy rock number with the unlikely title Golgi Apparatus.  “Pretty good,” I said, not entirely convinced.  He put on one more song that he thought would hook me, and he nailed it with Contact.  Quirky, weird, and clever; I’m in.

The room was sparse at best, maybe 200-250 people in a room that could hold 3,200 or so.  I grabbed a couple of drinks from the bar and walked right up to the stage and stood audience-right in front of the drum kit.

That was odd, thought I, having the drum kit set up on stage left instead of in the middle.  

No matter, I had the whole area to myself and if I remember correctly I even used the stage as a table to set my drinks on.  Soon the band went on and changed me.

They opened with Rift and then Sample before The Curtain went into the first Letter to Jimmy Page in several years.  The second set had the first Cities played in half a decade but none of that meant anything to me - I had never heard any of this before.  Frankly, I had never heard anything like this before.

For me the show was a mind-bending display of musical and instrumental pyrotechnics that poured out of these four guys in a never-ending cavalcade of shock and surprise.  Nothing went the way I thought it would, the music was utterly unpredictable with sharp turns and right angles all over the place; time signatures overlapped each other in ways I had never heard before…vocal harmonies that shouldn’t have worked landed perfectly on top of jagged melodies that were unforgettable.

I was flabbergasted.

At the time I was just about finished my music degree and I was in a band that thought we played some pretty crazy, off-kilter rock and roll so I was simultaneously completely ready for this Phish concert and not at all ready for it.

The gorgeous instrumental beauty juxtaposed with the Dada-esque lyrics of Stash, the miraculously original melody of Bathtub Gin (how had nobody found that one yet?), the absolutely jaw-dropping YEM with an intro that pits Trey’s 11/8 guitar part over Mikes 5/8 bass line and Page’s 10/8 keyboard part while Fishman pounds 4/4 underneath and the vocal outro jam and oh yeah, the trampolines?  I mean c’mon now!  I was thoroughly humbled and awed.

Oh, and then the band plays Pink Floyd’s Great Gig In The Sky with the drummer playing the solo on a vacuum cleaner, then they performed two songs with no amplification whatsoever, melodica/standup bass/acoustic guitar with the crowd alternating between hushed applause and shhh-ing each other, then they did a couple of barbershop quartet classics and ended the set with that very first song my friend had played for me a few days before, Golgi Apparatus.  I was dancing like a fool laid out to dry, my t-shirt long wrenched from my body I flailed away banshee-like with the entire Fishman-side floor area to myself.

Capping the show as they did with a Good Times, Bad Times encore was perfect, proof that they could tear up a straight-ahead rock and roller without any gimmicks just fine, thank-you very much.  The show I had just seen had changed how I looked at rock music and to see them Zep out and nail it hard for my walkaway song felt like a kudos to the history of the genre…a reminder of what rock music used to sound like now that I had seen the future.

To date I have seen the band ninety-five times.  I’ve travelled all over North America and met friends from a thousand places following them, so yeah, this was a pretty big show for me.

Phil has been officially added: http://www.jambase.com/article/phil-lesh-friends-added-to-lockn-festival-announces-2016-2017-new-years-run

The Barr Bros. were so very good last night.  I really like seeing jazzfest shows inside.

2 minutes ago, bradm said:

"The band will play as a soundtrack to the 1919 silent slapstick comedy The Oyster Princess (directed by Ernst Lubitsch), itself a landmark for delightful excess in the ridiculous."

Aloha,

Brad

Yeah, I'm super-duper looking forward to this.

According to their respective websites, DBT are on the 16th, Ween on the 17th.

Thank the gawds Cityfolk sucks.  This shouldn't take much deciding at all.

Motherfuckerface.

http://torontourbanrootsfest.com/schedule_day/artists/

So, who's going tonight?  I'll be there but I might be arriving a bit late.  I hope they don't open the show with all their big hits.

I like love.

11 hours ago, Booche said:

I love the name. I love the feel. I love the story.

 

Velvet, I thought I had seen you do your best at something but I was wrong and I hope I am again, 

 

 

Thanks very much sir, very kind of you to say.  BTW this is of course completely and utterly separate from Instruments For Africa.

Love that Joe Grass.  He's a dude to watch for sure.

1 minute ago, Hartamophone said:

...I had been looking forward to the lineup dropping, but God bless 'em. Hopefully the turnout is killer and there will be more of my thing (or our thing, judging by the other comments) next year.

Agreed.  I think I'll check out Dropkick Murphys from the hill outside the venue.  That'll be appropriately punk-rock of me.

Awesome!  From the clip above it kinda looked like Dylan was standing around while his band played Free Bird but that's good enough for me.  Cool stuff.

For the first time in recent memory I won't be getting a pass for one of (what I consider to be) the big three local festivals.  Just for fun I checked prices for a pass today, it said they started at $89 but the one I had in my cart was $100 + $15 + $3.50.  If the full festival passport was $30 I would still probably not buy one.  There are perhaps three acts that I have a marginal interest in and zero acts that I am actually interested to see.

Hopefully there is a big demographic that is excited about the lineup.  

I really struggled with subtitles, especially because I'm quite familiar with the regional accent.  The problem is when words get said that people won't understand, like "kwacha" (the local currency.  And then there is Albert, who's accent definitely requires subtitles.

As for them being hard to read, that was another problem I was aware of.  It's hard to see, but I did put a small dark border around the letters themselves making them a bit easier to read.  I figured these two issues kind of resolve themselves in that the subtitles are kind of not necessary and at the same time they're not that readable!  

I agree, the 'commercial breaks' are too long, I'll shorten them to a second or two instead of five.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Yeah, I realize that an hour is a pretty significant chunk of time to allocate to watch something online.  I certainly appreciate any and all who give it a shot!  I'm very much looking forward to comments/suggestions.  Though I've seen it a billion times I've recently discovered two changes I want to make so there will be more editing going on, so I'm hoping to get some feedback before I delve back into a re-edit.

Damn!

How many people do you think will stay for the entire 24 hours?

Thanks Mike!  Yeah, I watched a lot of Anthony Bourdain as I was prepping for this.

It's a travelogue doc-style program called Earth Beat.  The idea is that in each episode I travel to a different city or country and look at the music indigenous to that particular area.   I shot the pilot episode in Zambia and spent the last long time figuring out software and editing it together.  The next trick is to sell it to a network, and the first step in that direction is to see if anyone likes it.  

So if you have forty-nine or so minutes to kill I urge you to give it a spin.  I am very open to comments and criticisms.  If you have any thoughts that can make this thing better please, by all means let me know.  

And finally: skating skating skating.

On June 6, 2016 at 5:12 PM, bouche said:

 

I had no idea that you had a gopro.  What other hijinks will you be up to?    

Start this one at about 1:10 - it's oddly hypnotic.

Again.

http://www.blogto.com/sports_play/2016/06/indoor_fishing_returns_to_toronto_this_weekend/