December 27th 2012 Re-Cap

The show was a number of things... for us the evening started @ 5pm for a rehearsal... perhaps that's when the first beers were had. You see we hadn't played music together in a year, and weren't sure what we were going to do. Perhaps we should have gone in cold... these set lists can really cramp a style (an inside joke for certain people). If anything we hung out like brothers from 5pm-6:30pm, and then it was time to get to the Club... set up you know, get ready to Kill. I found my old conch shell that my Uncle Bruce gave to me when he got back from Hawaii somewhere around 1982. Did i mention that somebody on social media suggested Blogs are dead and that they heard it from a reliable source. Blogs are dead EH! I guess that makes me a Jack Ass... alright, more on that later in another blog. So i took the damn conch shell and we grabbed a cab after a fair wait and ba boom! There were people there and more coming in... all these people i know... and SUPER STEVE, who i didn't even talk to that night. Well after he tapped his watch and eyeballed me @ 7:40PM... old habits die hard. Notice that we haven't eaten dinner yet but it's time to play... Tiger Prawn were tight and dynamic, Super Robertson sang like a goat and they punched through an hour long set... hot damn did i just change persons again... luckily blogs are dead so this never happened... right. Well i had to get a personal dig in on myself right... that's the way it rolls here at the SRSS blog. While the music industry experts stress fluff the positive, in doing so, they force my hand (180 degree wisdom) to focus on the negative. In my defense i have spent the year trying to master banjo folk music and then i show up for the big show with an acoustic guitar for a punk rock show. It was all good, heads were bobbing and smiles were all around the room, and i don't believe many were there out of obligation, and if they were at least they got to eat dinner. The biggest thing i missed was poem moment, damn shame too, given the number of ace guitarists that were in the crowd. I could have handed of my axe to any number of them and improved a song written by the audience with a king hell trio providing the soundtrack. That would have been a sweet touch... damn, damn, damn. We played the song dish pig and i had my conch there, but no Fire-Man, so we had to do animal sounds instead... it was going well until the word "squirrel" got mentioned... it got some laughs however. We did some cover songs out of the Los Neighbourtones songbook one being a speed/ bad vocal version of the Gillian Welch song "Everything is free" a fitting number for a long running free show. We also hit the Neil Young Classic "Hey Hey, My My" missing the last verse... Mule said that it was fine and people were singing along. Historically i have been against posting cover songs for obvious © reasons, but it seems like everybody is doing it and if my account gets deleted then maybe i can start a new, better online presence. It appears i have 666 videos up on this youtube account... i see them as records of events of people playing music in a room. A smart man might have the 30 best available but can you imagine the amount of waffling that would take. I believe Smash appeared again at the end of the night when things were getting sloppy... i think i asked him what he thought of the covers, and i believe that while he enjoyed them he seemed to indicate that some want to hear the originals... sometimes you win losing i guess. I was then going to ask him about the version of the beggar where i sang the first line wrong and basically hummed a bastard version of the first verse, but i think we got distracted. I imagine Smash could see beauty in that too, a sense of chaos, like a surfer on a big wave with a rocky start... can he right himself and bring this one home, perhaps a perfect tension. It seems that Super Steve was upstaged by John Tweed for the line of the night. You see most of the crowd was by the back bar and Stephanie said to John "we should go sit up at the front"... john looked back in horror and said "are you kidding me, that's like sitting front row at a Don Rickles show". We don't call Super Steve "the pike" for nothing... sometimes staying back in the reeds is a good idea. That said i think a room full of people knew what they were getting into when they came down, and they had a good time. I even showed them how to relax... We did some other songs, and you can find them if you want. I'll give you one more however. A song by and old friend who is now a professor at U of Vic. His name is Cam Owens and the song is "None of these things mean that much anymore". later dudes. SR