Friday, November 23, 2007

the white Prince and the Land of JLS

Some of my ideas are good... others could use some more thought.

Interestingly on the morning of this supper show (november 21 2007), i received what one might call a "setback email" at around 6:15 am... which is unfortunately the time i had to get up to go to work as a pizza, drugstore and school advertisement flyer boy... i mean mailman. Word to the wise would be to always take your time to digest things because what you think might happen may in fact not happen at all.

About an hour before the show i had a good idea of who was going to be there and there was a chance that some of them were going to be on time, but then at home we had a baby malfunction and he twins needed a nap so as CT put one down i held the other while Kaiya entertained. That setback put me a few minutes behind and i thought i would take the bus to the sky-train to save some time. There was a lunatic in the bushes yelling at something and two women talking about why the bus is so late... i began to waffle about trying to walk towards the sky-train but then surly the bus would come right. In the end it was me who was late as i walked into the club to see JLS lounging with everything ready.

The good news was we had 2 ace drummers in the house and 2 sound-men one of them being an expert bass player. All we needed was for someone to think ahead and have a bass guitar... this is where one of my good ideas came through... you see as part of my deal for doing the supper show the club has given me a fair sized titanium locker with a galvanized thompson bank lock that is big enough for a few things like a Bass guitar i call "the white prince". The white prince was my original ROADBED bass that constantly turned heads with it's booming tone and full fret-board. Now all i had to do was put on my white gloves, work the combination, submit to an eye-scan, get the bass to JLS and presto we were ready to rock.

21 tandem Repeats opened the show and with Simian Special on drums we hit some songs from the Supersimian disk "how the tiger got lionized" to get going. We also hit "dishpig" (that saw a total WB guitar clinic), "4 feathers", "sun rises" and then called up Deborah to sing "Blue skies" from our cd "never wanted to be anyone" which went very well if i don't say so myself. Then i left the stage drummers changed (Shawn Killaly for Simian Special) and The Land of Deborah played a wonderful set of original music with shawn, Willingdon Black and JLS. Powered by her strong voice she stayed on guitar and played some LOD hits including one called "Optimistic Death Song" one she wrote for a movie a while back. She plays the Railway on November 29 if you are looking for something to do... nudge nudge. A few audience member came up to me during her set to ask who she is and "is she from here", which i always take as a good sign for various reasons.

At the conclusion of the land of Deborah set we did a version of Mr. Greenie with Shawn Killaly on the drums and JLS leading the band on a song he played once before... which of course is why we had to do it.

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