fluffhead77

Pretty pumped to see this lady at Outlaw Music Fest in a couple weeks! 
 
Edit: F&*K... she's not on the TO leg of the tour

Pretty pumped to see this lady at Outlaw Music Fest in a couple weeks! 
 
Edit: F&*K... she's not on the TO leg of the tour

Well, THIS guy is at least coming to TO in Dec! Just heard this the other day for the first time, which blew my mind given J recorded this over 5 years ago! Thanks, @backbacon!!! 

This person is a comic genius.
 
Also... HI everyone! Been a while... *waves

This person is a comic genius.
 
Also... HI everyone! Been a while... *waves

This person is a comic genius.
 
Also... HI everyone! Been a while... *waves

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.
 

I just shared this on FB, I figured maybe should live here too... 
 
This news today of Gord and his illness has left a pit in my stomach, something altogether fetid. A part of me is going with this and I’m not ready to say goodbye. This man and his band are tied to me in way that few other bands could be. For those that know me well, you know I champion a lot of music and how it has developed into a significant driving theme in my life, but this band is different. 
For what felt like a lot of my youth, I was often the new kid with the weird accent. From being the Yank transplanted to UK, to then the kid with the British accent plonked down in Perth, ON (Lawd ‘ave mercy!). As anyone moving from country to country or town to town can attest, being new is not the easiest thing to slide right into, in fact it still gives me anxiety to this day, but there are some equalizers that help the situation. A few things cut across culture, geography and language and among them, my favourites; food and music. 
Perth was a tough transition for me - scrawny kid, brit accent, (and dressing me for school in a snowsuit in April didn’t help either, Mom) but one thing that can make a transition easier is having a common thread. The Hip came to be this to me. 
At age 13, I remember my first Hip encounter… listening to Road Apples at Byron ’ s place, in his tiny room, dancing around like a couple of monkey’s plowing through a case of red bull, to the seizure-inducing atmosphere of the strobe light Byron had recently completed in electronics class. This is forever etched into my brain pan, but it began a relationship with a band that regardless of who you were, or where you were from, at least in my experience, was a band you could pull out of the hat and all could relate to. There was no awkwardness, no uncomfortable things to avoid - just admiration and appreciation for The Hip. Everyone seemed to revel in it.
They also proved to be a great comfort and help to me moving on to Brockville when I was 15. Having this tool in my hip pocket, to play and prove that I had something to relate to these new bunch of people, helped assemble the basis of many friendships to which I still hold dear in my life today. Like many things in life, there’s an ebb and flow. The Hip haven;t been in my musical lexicon regularly for quite a few years but I recognize them for their very foundational place in  the creation of this mixed up being; yours truly. They were, in a nutshell, both a coping mechanism for my chronically newness and spark for my gregariousness and for that I’ll be forever grateful. 
2016 has been a year of upheaval, sadness, shock and awe and it doesn’t appear to be slowing. Today’s news sucker punched me when I wasn’t ready and it’s taking a bit more of a toll than I expected. But this corduroy road isn’t at an end yet. I hope to be out there one last time this summer, with all of you, taking in the sheer brilliance of the best front man Canada ever produced. Calling all to muster that Courage to see Gord off in the fashion he deserves. 
It couldn’t come a worse time. 

Shocking news.
I'm already thinking back to when the Tragically Hip played a school dance at my highschool when I was in grade 10.  I didn't know them at the time and I think they may have still been primarily a cover band.  The only song I remember was their cover of "Money" in the style of the beatles,  I was big into the beatles so that made me really like them.
The times when my friends and I would sneak on some private property near lemoine's point in Kingston with beer, build a fire and play Up To Here and Road Apples all night on a ghetto blaster.  
The time a friend and I went on a last minute road trip to brockville in my crappy first car to see The Hip play a little music festival and saw how much the band had changed, and had become rock stars.  
The time I volunteered at the first Another Roadside Attraction in Kingston at a Queens U stadium. While working the artist entrance back gate, let Gord Downie in after busting his balls and pretending I didn't recognize him and asked for ID.  He didn't have any and said he's late for soundcheck.  I laughed and let him in.  He laughed,  then he asked for a smoke and a light. I gave him one, but I didn't have a light and wanted to smoke too.  Gord takes off to the stage, thanking me.  5 minutes later, he's running across the field back to the gate.   He arrives and says "Hey, I got you a light!". He lights my smoke, and heads back for soundcheck    I learned how swell of a guy he is that day.
 
 
 
 
 

It's called The Bell Jar.  If you watch the whole thing, you can see Meggo and I standing in the doorway for the whole thing. I'm in the green Antelope hoodie. 
 

It's called The Bell Jar.  If you watch the whole thing, you can see Meggo and I standing in the doorway for the whole thing. I'm in the green Antelope hoodie. 
 

Really? Cheaper than LOCKN'? I suppose it's possible, but I feel like the target demographic for this will be milked pretty aggresively. I hope I'm wrong (assuming the event even happens).

Just no. 
No-one puts maple syrup near my bacon anything and gets away with it. 

http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/01/radiohead-to-headline-lollapalooza-other-major-north-american-festivals/
 
If Osheaga can get them at the end of July, then perhaps the contract would allow another date down the 417 at the start of the month. Hopefully Monahan pulls through for you folks in Ottawa! 

Yeah, we'll see... Care to wager a pint of Guinness on this, friend? 

Had a bag of these babies on the weekend - just as good as I remembered. Salty little devils!! 
 

Bought these fuckers today. Best flavour I've had in a really long time. Just awesome.  

New Moxy Früvous tour happening called "Hot licks and all the Hits" 

A couple of Roy Keane's autobiography highlights:
 
'I rang Mark Hughes. Robbie (Savage) wasn't in the Blackburn team and I asked Mark if we could try to arrange a deal. Sparky said: 'Yeah, yeah, he's lost his way here but he could still do a job for you.'' Keane explains. 'Robbie's legs were going a bit but I thought he might come up to us, with his long hair, and give us a lift - the way Yorkie (Dwight Yorke) had, a big personality in the dressing room.
 
'Sparky gave me permission to give him a call. So I got Robbie's mobile number and rang him. It went to his voicemail: 'Hi, it's Robbie - whazzup!' like the Budweiser ad. I never called him back. I thought: 'I can't be f**king signing that.'"
 
Keane also details his concerns over the dressing room music at Sunderland, with the players' pre-match preparations not meeting his expectations.
'It might seem strange but you find out about characters when you look to see who's in charge of the music,' Keane continues.
 
'A young lad might want to put on the latest sound; an older player might say: 'I'm the senior player' and put himself in charge. But I noticed none of the (Sunderland) players were in charge of the music and this was a concern for me. 'A member of staff was in charge. I was looking at him thinking: 'I hope someone nails him here.' The last song before the players went on to the pitch was 'Dancing Queen' by Abba.
 
'What really worried me was that none of the players - not one - said: 'Get that s**t off.' They were going out to play a match, men versus men, testosterone levels were high. 'You've got to hit people at pace. F**kin' 'Dancing Queen.' It worried me. I didn't have as many leaders as I thought.'
 
edit to add:
 

Goddamn you!!! I want ribs now.