There's No Time To Lose

Well, that’s a relief.

At one point while they were still counting the votes the TV news coverage cut to a split screen of the Obama and McCain crowds waiting for the results to come in. The Obama crowd milled about, tense and hopeful, the McCain footage didn’t show the crowd, just some Nashville wonk strumming his way through a plaintive country ballad. It was the perfect soundtrack for a generation of sociopathic neo-cons weeping and counting what remains of their money before they ooze off in disgrace.

For once it appears voting for hope and change trumps hate and fear. Toby Keith's Album Sales Are Going to Plummet.

Don't Make Me a Target

The #19 bus journey serves up the same sights and sounds every day. There's a rustle of bad commuter papers that make up for their total lack of news merit with brevity. Commuters send cold glares at each other or quickly avert their eyes from elderly people looking for reassuring conversations, or pipeheads looking for someone to bark at for awhile. Shoulder to shoulder we bounce off each other as the bad transmission of the cheap eco friendly electric bus lurches through every intersection switch. There’s a tinny symphony of cranked MP3s in the air this morning; dull thudding bass and overwrought shrieks from miscellaneous pop divas.

I’m disgorged into the street, into the cold snap of too-early-in-the-morning air. It’s lightly scented with financial district musk: expensive cologne, perfume, Italian coffee, baked goods, diesel exhaust, and the greasy funk of bike courier body odour. One Quebecois courier waits at an intersection pounding on the hood of a car that’s nearly killed her, cursing its terrified carpoolers in thickly accented English. She flips them off, winks at me and takes off a fraction of a second after the light changes.

Two terrifying things await me at my desk. One, an advisory that something called “Scary Bingo” is going to begin circulating to assist in ramming this month’s enforced fun agenda down our throats. I’m afraid to ask what Scary Bingo is. Certainly the dauber stained people standing outside Planet Bingo in my neighborhood are certainly scary enough some days, but I don’t think this is what’s meant.

Scary thing number two is a Happy Halloween card that’s been sent to us by one of our low function sex offenders who’s taken to incessantly calling us. He is the world’s worst mascot. It looks like it was drawn by an eager to please six year-old. It has the same obvious determination to stay inside the lines hidden in the black and orange strokes of pencil crayon. One dimensional black bat on the front says “boo”. A bedsheet ghost next to it smiles happily.

Good morning downtown.

That’s When I Reach For My Revolver

Friday morning the sky was full of hazy clouds slowly beginning to thicken and obscure the sun. I had a perfect vantage point to slowly watch everything turn grey. There was one last gasp of incredibly bright sunlight that washed over the building across from me. A huge reflection of gold on the obsidian black windowpanes of the financial district before the clouds closed in fully and the sky started to look like the inside of a smoker’s lung.

True Vancouver October at last. The air turns cold and the wind slowly leeches away the last of the summer heat stored in the pavement and in the building stones. The rain starts in earnest and rinses away the last lingering scents of piss and rotting garbage that haunt the alleyways all summer long. That’s the real signal for the beginning of fall. By mid-October I’ll be shivering outside in the gusty damp trying to keep a cigarette lit while the rain undoes any plans I have to stay even half dry by coming at me sideways.

Mission of Burma played a brilliant show this week. It’s a rare treat to see a band reform and not only play incredibly well, but to clearly be having a really great time while doing it. Hell of a loud set too. Roger Miller doesn’t wear the industrial headgear he used to use to combat his tinnitus anymore. I guess the last tour allowed them to spring for fancy, nearly invisible earpieces. Sadly the ringing in my own ears after the show was not sufficient to drown out the three-way hippie drum circle that broke out on the bus on the way home.

Picture a Tim Buckley circa 1970 looking tye dyed alpha male, arm slung around peasant skirt wearing earth mother with a drum clutched between her matronly thighs. Third wheel dirty sidekick in a camouflage baseball cap (what kind of self respecting hippie wears a camouflage cap anyway) cackling like a madman throughout the rhythmic frenzy. All of them proudly flying the freak flag, 40 years too late.

Perhaps they were celebrating the coming of fall, or the fact that Phish reformed, or some such thing. A common sight in Vancouver during the summer months. Watered down, fourth generation counter cultural bullshit sadly mistaking annoying all and sundry with “blowing our minds”.

The trip with them was mercifully brief, and this behavior is one that is also seen less and less once the fall rains start; I guess all the damp in the air makes hippie drum-skins too flaccid to help them freak out the squares. Welcome back October. I've missed you.

"We're all heroes here....twat"

What the 21st century needs most is a tv show about superheroes that drink. I give you...No Heroics.

Dream me oh dreamer, Down to the floor

I was on my way home last week and saw posters up all along Pender Street advertising an upcoming show from a Motley Crue “tribute” band. You don’t pay tribute to a band like Motley Crue; they appear in your town like the first sore before a major herpes outbreak and infect other innocent bands. The World Health Organization should follow them on tour. They were here a couple of months ago on another cash-in tour of sad, predictable Disneysleaze and two months later here comes a poster advising me that “rock n’ roll ain’t dead”. What a relief.

I don’t want to come across like some effete indie fan who sits at home listening to The Decemberists or Belle and Sebastian albums, cataloging my cardigans and bursting into tears every time I get an erection. But I also don’t need a washed-up cock rock band touring around perpetuating the myth that if you don’t wake up next to some strange silicone and peroxide casualty every morning while coughing up cigarette tar onto a pile of money and cocaine somehow you’re a less authentic rock band. Yep, rock and roll is all about sex and there are tons of awesome sleazy bands that rock out with their cock out but clinging to that faded rock star fantasy is a tired move. The 80’s were a dark time that is currently in vogue, we don’t need any more reminders than we already have.

So, in the interests of reminding myself that there’s more to rock and roll than the “we like to score” ethic I decided to get me a scalped ticket to TV on the Radio last night. I wanted a good show to cap off the summer and TVOTR seemed like a safe bet as they’re a transcendent live band, and one that I’ve got a mad love on for.

I hit the street early and ended up waiting some time for the scalpers to show up while sitting drinking cheap beer on the patio of a café next to the Commodore Ballroom. It wasn’t a pleasant wait.

Granville Street is a weird place to hang around these days. The entire street has a nasty “brought to you by Jagermeister” vibe. Crowds of people wander around drunk, coming up with increasingly annoying ways to let passers-by know what a good time they’re having. Three douchebags had set up shop next to me with pitchers of beer and an Mp3 player and proceeded to serenade everyone with bad renditions of popular rock hits. One of the three didn’t even sing, he just screeched out phonetic recreations of all the guitar solos.

Bad karaoke like this is the dark by-product of games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. There was a horrible moment when they started to sing and I realized that they were practicing for another marathon gaming session. Don't they have homes to go to? Girlfriends to neglect? I had to sit through not one, but two renditions of Say it Ain’t So. They went on for at least an hour and a half and finally wandered off singing We are the Champions. I had rich, detailed fantasies of beating them to death with my chair. I should have moved, but the patio had an excellent view of the street and as I said the beer was cheap. In a way I was a little bonded to them by the end. Some kind of weird Stockholm syndrome thing. After they left I missed hating them so much I kind of wished they’d come back.

Eventually I sidled up and bought a ticket. I ended up paying more than I would have if I'd gotten off my ass earlier and bought it through regular channels, but I consider the extra cash paid to be a sloth tax. The show was worth every penny.

TV on the Radio played brilliantly. There's no point in breaking it down to "they played this song, they played that song" commentary. The band don't waste a lot of time with banter, they just wander out on stage and get right down to business. They take songs that on their albums are interconnected sheets of noise and adapt them into epic rock songs that are free of irony, free of cliche. Each song is totally reborn from the way you're used to hearing it every time they play. Well worth wading through a sea of douchebags to listen to.

I feel more like smiling these days than I have for some time and they made the perfect soundtrack. One last burst of summer enthusiasm to carry along with me as the nights get longer and colder and wetter.

Oh, be joyful

Hot and humid out there today. Air’s thick like syrup and the light has this tan coloured particulate quality, polluted and grimy. A wasp flew into my apartment and has been slowly flying in confused angry circles for 10 minutes. I’m hesitant to disturb him. It started raining for a few short minutes and that did nothing but drag down more oppressive heat. Humidity like this doesn’t break, it cracks.

Had the distinct pleasure of watching the Pack AD last night. There’s never any shortage of blues in this city, from the seriously limp white-boy portions served up most nights at the Yale to the odd busker ripping out his best sub-Clapton street corner shtick. For the most part BC should hang its head in collective shame for we are the province that brought you both Colin James and David Gogo. None of our home grown blues has any bite, which is horrible. Phoning it in while playing the blues is like having a loaded .357 and only using it as a paperweight. The Pack AD play some mean blues and the .357 is not only loaded, the safety is off and they're coming for you and your loved ones. Not an ounce of fat on those songs and they're totally free of the ego driven noodling that is the downfall of so very, very many blues songs played by so very, very many white people.

It was a bit of a sloppy performance, there was some confusion over a misplaced bottleneck and some guitar tech issues seemed to have them both a little peeved, but their phenomenal live dynamic was as great as ever and the new album is killer-b.

After an evening of too much drinking I spent most of today reading outside on my balcony, consuming cigarettes and pomegranate juice in equal amounts and listening to the masterpiece that is "Oh Be Joyful" over and over and over. All around the world yet another poncho wearing bastard in a Stevie Ray Vaughn cover band burst into flames while slouching through his set and few people know why. Anyone who hears Funeral Mixtape by the Pack AD knows why. The world is at last beginning to balance itself out.

That is all.

We Are Our Only Saviors

"I didn’t make this myself but I’m gonna do it. ‘Twas a man he had a pretty wife and she went and losed her mind, about her husband. We’d go out and play for the insane asylum people and they would dance. She was there and her husband would go and sing to her. And two weeks after he sang this song, she came back to her senses and they got back together. That’s to show how music can bring you back….if you ain’t too far gone."

Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter talking about the song Dancing With Tears in my Eyes.

Was there really any point at which a song saved your life or was it just self aggrandizing hyperbole? I’ve spent so much time this week, when I wasn’t sleeping, thinking that there was such a thing as a song that was keeping me alive. Maybe it was me the whole time and the songs were just reminding me.

For the last month I’ve been on a search for a new really great summer album. The album that provides you with a single that gives you a real survival anthem. I’ve combed through the bins at every record store in this sad little city on what I feared was a futile search, and then all of a sudden the great Steve Lee reminds me that the Hold Steady have a new album out and I gave that bastard a listen

Even though at their worst, songs by the Hold Steady just kind of sluggishly relay on power chords and roll along like the worst lay ever, at their best you realize they’re writing hymns. Big power chord fuelled hymns. The kind of songs that can keep you alive. Or that remind you that you need to get out in the street with the kind of people that keep you alive.

I’ve cheated this week and put up You Tube posts when I could have been writing something better. I’ll try to be less lazy in the future. At the best, at least I've kept to a week long theme.

In closing I will give you what I think is the best survival anthem I’ve heard in some time. A very nice reminder. We are our only saviors. Let's see how I do next week.