graydon james's show blog

Before we even got to Sackville, around 6pm, we had eaten three times.  Breakfast was cold pizza from the night before, brunch was a giant crepe at Cafe Archbald (not Archibald, but Archbald), and late lunch was a huge amount of seafood for Shawn, Noel, Lara, and MJ in Shediac, which is the lobster capital of the world, or so they claim.  I will admit: they have a giant lobster in bronze on the way into town.  The legend goes that it was the biggest lobster ever trapped, and then they bronzed it and made it guard the town from other giant novelty statues.  That might be pure mythology though.  Shediac is, however, a great town and our waitress at the seafood place was a lovely young lady named Amy.  She apparently lives in Sackville but, it being after the show now, I know she didn’t come to the show as she promised.  I think Noel scared her off with his throbbing sexuality and his Italian hair plume on his chest.

This show was, by far, the best of the tour to date.  I actually managed to play some chords correctly, and we even had a bit of rehearsal before we actually started playing.  The last couple of shows have felt a bit rushed, and ill-prepared.  But this one it felt like we were starting to actually get it in terms of the songs and the harmonies and such.  And the people and the vibe at Bridge Street Cafe were supportive and extremely nice.  We met Sara (or possibly Sarah with an “h”) and Erin, and they were the friendly staff members who made us lemonade and wraps and caesar salads.  And there was kindly old man who plunked himself down right near the stage for MJ’s set, and then didn’t move; he stayed for all three sets and enjoyed every one.  What a great guy.  I think he fell in love with MJ and/or vice versa, or both.

It was nice to have a show come off fairly nicely, and even somewhat smoothly, like we almost knew what we were doing.  Tomorrow we are playing in Halifax and that is kind of a big show so we ought to know exactly what we are playing.  I have had this notion that by the end of the tour we will be seasoned on each other’s songs and able to play at the drop of a hat.  Like today, when MJ was playing her set, Shawn and Noel and I actually jammed a bit with her on her tunes and it felt good and sounded decent.  We are almost like professional musicians or something.  Wild.

We were all set to roll in to Moncton sometime shortly after 7PM, which would have been perfect because we were due to start playing around 8PM.  The thing is, we forgot about Atlantic Time, so suddenly our post-7PM arrival time was a post-8PM arrival time and we were late.  We discovered this as we were zigzagging up and down interstates heading through Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.  There is no direct interstate to get into Canada, and I felt like we should have taken highway 2 right through the mountains but I was gainsaid by the GPS, so it was super-highways all the way.  Which was good in a way because we could speed like demons when we realized we were going to be quite late.  I directed Noel down a bad turnoff that I thought would be a shortcut, so we lost probably a half-hour, and that was also bad news.  However it was a lovely drive.

When we got to Plan B, which is a great little venue with a decent stage and a fantastic proprietor/booker named Brock, we were already late but Shawn started setting things up like a champ and we got things going as quickly as possible.  Brock was only slightly discomfited by our lateness, but he generously doled out fries and something called chicken fries to me after Lara’s set and I ate as fast as humanly possible.  Lara’s set was better than last night, but I still made a few too many mistakes to be comfortable.  Tomorrow we will have some time (not having a 10 hour drive helps) so perhaps we can get a rehearsal in.  MJ’s set was next, and her friends were in attendance and gave her the sort of applause she deserves, which is raucous and plentiful.  MJ had a banjo-playing amigo in the crowd and he hopped up for a couple of songs, which was pure East Coast fun.  I played like a drunken Jesuit, though, and that detracted slightly from the proceedings.

The only time I played acceptably was during the Young Novelists set, which seems to me to point toward the fact that I am a lacklustre musician.  Or I just need a lot more rehearsal than most other people.  Either way, I’ve got to tighten things up or this ship will go down with all hands.  Or just my hands.  Anyway, that’s a confusing analogy.  I think by the time we get back to Toronto I will feel very comfortable with everyone’s material and that will be a good thing.  Let’s hope it happens earlier than that, though, because I don’t want to keep mucking things up for the very talented people I am touring with.  After everything was all done we went to a very fancy hotel that MJ’s dad got a deal with and we had a room that included an executive desk and might have come with a secretary as well.  We wedged Noel’s queen-sized air mattress amongst the other two queen-sized beds and so every couple (Lara/Shawn, me/Laura, and Noel/MJ who are a couple for this tour) had a queen-sized bed to themselves.  And then we got pizza.  And babies were probably made in the night-time.

I’m not big on maps, which makes touring a whole lot of what we call fun.  But part of my reason was because we had already been to Burlington to play a show and I basically knew where I was going…basically.  But the first order of the day was leaving Laura’s parents’ cottage and heading to Picton to drop off a PA system for the final show of this tour we were heading out on.  So we drove backroads, country-style (that means whooping it up and arms out the window) and burned our way from one small town to another all the way down from a lake north of Peterborough to Picton, in Prince Edward County, a huge tract of land jutting out into Lake Ontario.  We met Mile (pronounced frenchly: Mil-eh) and Krista of Small Pond Arts, who were absolutely lovely folks, and we left our PA in their Zed Shed, a brightly painted shed with a white Z painted on the front door.  Then it was back up to the 401 to rocket across into the States and across upper NY state to Vermont.

The border crossing was so smooth you’d think it was done on a baby’s behind.  They asked me twice how I knew Noel, and I said “We’re friends”, which is no explanation at all but the lady just nodded and said “You’re friends” like I had pulled some Jedi mind trick on her.  They waved us through, and we were backroading it again across the great state of New York.  The highway we were on was actually very beautiful and had light traffic, not too many towns, and we got across fairly handily.  When we got into Vermont Laura chastised me for speeding and we had a lengthy argument about how fast is too fast as we drove the most scenic drive of Vermont, down through the islands of Lake Champlain (the sixth great lake!).  Noel cowered in the back, sometimes interrupting our argument to point out lovely views.  And we got into Burlington in plenty of time to hang out with Lara, Shawn, and MJ who had come from Montreal that day.  We watched the act before us at the Radio Bean, which was a collection of string quartets from a local university program, each playing different pieces.  Lovely.

The Radio Bean is a very hippy kind of place, with great teas, coffees, and 100-mile type of foodstuffs.  I had sliders and poutine, but classy, and chatted up a young lady named Marie who had played cello for one of the string quartets.  Before I could adequately secure us a place to stay on her floor I was interrupted by MJ, who had been sleeping in her car, and Marie had to beg off because she had driven the van that brought all her fellow chamber musicians.  So close to free accomodations…but she was a lovely lady and it was nice to have chatted with her for a while.  Then we played the show, which was only a slight kafuffle due to me not knowing what I was doing playing on one of MJ’s songs and some of Lara’s songs and even a few of my own songs.  People stuck around, though, to watch everyone and we managed to cram three good sets (MJ, then Lara, then the Young Novelists) into a little less than two hours.

After the show a lady named Olga — a much underrated name, I think — approached Laura and bought a CD.  I joined their conversation and found out that Olga and her husband were on an anniversary trip to Burlington and had found the Radio Bean by accident the night before.  They were the kind of folks that are fans of most kinds of music and they were very supportive and it was super nice to talk to her.  Another lovely person from the States.  There are many, which is maybe an obvious statement to make, but I find Canadians sometimes demonize people from the States.  Maybe it’s more the southern States that seem filled with crazies to us…  In any case, a decent show (at least people stuck around and were very complimentary!) and a couple of great folks to chat with and then we were back on the road heading to Montpelier to check in to a hotel after midnight.  We had a big drive ahead on the next day and we wanted a leg up.  We were all quite tired from a long day, and we knew tomorrow was going to be another long one.

We opened for a gentleman named Steve Gleason last night at the Cameron House, sans Mike on drums and Shawn on bass.  And some things worked out and some things did not, but it was a gentle kind of a show and I think it worked well as the opening act, because Steve is just one guy, one guitar, one harmonica.  We definitely didn’t overpower his stage presence, and I think that’s a good thing from an opening band.  We aren’t often invited to open, but I would like to do that more often.  So really, who needs a rhythm section?  I guess it does help us along, especially Shawn’s additional harmony.  But it is nice to know that different configurations of the band can actually perform a solid set.

The show itself had a few gaffes but mainly due to lack of rehearsal.  We hadn’t practiced the song Scarecrow in a long time, but we played it, and it was something of a train wreck, but we got through it and that was okay.  Some other songs came off pretty well, so hopefully by the end it was all a balancing act.  When Steve took the stage he ripped into a whole bunch of great folk-style tunes in the vein of a young Dylan, so he wowed the crowd within moments.  He’s good like that.  But it was a sweaty night and I had to step outside for a bit because the capacity crowd was making the back room of the Cameron like a sweatbox.  My friend Amaya came by, which was great because she’s never seen the band, but she was too late for the band so we just hung out.  She got to see Steve, though, and that was good.

I also got to chat with a few member of the last band: Gospel of Marmalade.  Really nice folks and very supportive, and I watched the first part of their set which was very solid and had people up and dancing.  They had mentioned before they started playing that they wanted to play a show with us, and they are definitely fun and in our vein, so it would be good times to have another show with them.  Plus I wouldn’t have to leave early just because we were going to Laura’s cottage for a pre-tour good time and had to be up and away very early in the morning.  I always feel like a bit of a doofus if I have to leave before the last band is done.  It’s just not very professional, and we all know how professional I am.

There’s a band from Winnipeg called Ultra Mega, and they contacted me out of the clear blue sky and offered us a show at Circus Room in Kitchener.  I wondered if it was some kind of scam, but they seemed legit and they had a tour going on and they just needed someone to open for them.  And so I said of course we would do it, because it was a show on the day before Canada Day and my horoscope told me to never turn down a show on the eve of a holiday.  And so it was that we rolled into Kitchener and crammed our junk onto a stage at the ol’ Circus Room, where I had seen multiple shows back in my university days, but I had never played before.  Then Ultra Mega showed up and they were a super-nice group of folks, with some great road stories and some hilarious camaraderie.  I found out why we had been invited to play the show.  Firstly, their drummer Ben found us on Myspace and liked us enough to ask us to play with them.  Secondly, they had been trying to get local bands to play at all the places they were playing on their tour, but they had contacted a bunch of local KW bands and no one got back to them.  So they spread their net and contacted a Toronto band (us!) and we, of course, said yes.  Hence the show.

And it was a fun show, despite the fact that we were missing Shawn and, for about an hour, it seemed like we would only have one microphone.  I brought a microphone because I wasn’t sure what music equipment they had at the venue.  Turns out they had a PA and not much else, but finally the owner arrived and scrounged up one microphone but no stand.  So we used my stand and mic, and then Laura just held her mic, and we went that way.  It was great, except Laura is not used to holding a mic and when she wasn’t singing she would let the mic point right at the monitor speaker and it would feed back like a banshee.  Still, it was a decent enough show, and we acquitted ourselves well enough to sell a few CDs.

Ultra Mega had to use our piano stand as a mic stand, but they rocked a great set.  I found out the lead singer’s brother is Luke Doucet, and wasn’t thereafter surprised that he turned out to be a solid songwriter and good singer.  I’m a fan of Chris Murphy’s brother Matt’s old band the Flashing Lights.  Sometimes the brothers of famous musicians end up being better musicians themselves.  Not that Luke Doucet isn’t a fantastic guitarist, but I think his bro beats him in the songwriting department.  They played some great roots-rockin’ tunes.  And they had a projector set up running a loop of some baseball movie from the 1930s or somesuch.  It was their main source of light through their set, and it was pretty hilarious to see someone’s face on a person’s chest at random moments.  The projector was a reel-to-reel, so the whole thing reminded me a bit of those public school days when your teacher would show a movie.  Except this was pure awesome.

We actually played three times yesterday: once at the Burlington Sound of Music festival, once in the lobby of Burlington City Hall when the rest of the festival got rained out by a sudden downpour, and then late in the evening for NXNE 2010.  So it was kind of a ridiculous day of music for all of us.  It would have been ridiculous anyway, just having two festival appearances in the same day, but we rocketed down to Burlington early to be able to set up and soundcheck before our 1pm slot at the Sound of Music festival, which is an amazing free festival that has dozens of acts on a whackload of different stages throughout the day, plus a parade, plus quite a few people just performing on the sidewalk.  The beginning of the ridiculousness was that there were two sound people for the stage we were on: one for the sound in the audience, and one for the monitor sound.  So we each got our own monitor mix on stage, which is a luxury I’ve never experienced before, and is quite amazing.  They loved us because we kept telling them they could turn us down.  There weren’t a ton of people in the square outside City Hall when we started playing, but they were highly appreciative and the weather was fantastic, where it was supposed to be pouring rain.  We were quite happy, and played a pretty solid set, it felt like.  Not the best ever, for sure, but certainly in the acceptable range.

After that we wandered the streets, ran into some musician friends we knew, and went down to the main stage to see Elliott Brood.  I kind of barely know Steve Pitkin, who drums for Elliott Brood, so I watched them and then afterward got to go backstage at the main stage into a camper that they had as a green room.  I got some official backstage water.  It was delicious.  And it was nice to see Steve briefly, although I left kind of quick because I didn’t want to get whacked in the head by a security guard’s flashlight.  We wandered around some more, saw some of Great Lake Swimmers on the main stage and then a bit of Hey Rosetta.  At that point the sky got black and it rained actual buckets down on us.  Noel and I hid under some trees, but we got pretty soaked, so we ran to the gas station across the street, which had a covered section over the pumps.  The rain sort of cleared enough for us to jog back up to where our stuff was stored by the City Hall stage.  It had been moved inside City Hall, so it was safe from the rain, and when we went in there we met up with a bunch of other band members.  Mike had the bright idea for us to sing for the people while they were caught inside, away from the rain.  I was pretty against the notion, because it felt like we were forcing people to listen to us, but he cleared it with the festival folks and the security guard and so we climbed some stairs to a little balcony overlooking the foyer and sang about five songs at the top of our lungs because there was no PA.  Mike used his sandals as drumsticks, Alex played melodica as loud as he could, Shawn nearly lost his voice, and Noel cranked on the ol’ banjo.  It was a great time, and we got some tremendous applause.  Later, I glad-handed with a bunch of older folks who said they had a great time listening to us.  Magic.

Then we had to bolt back to the city to grab some dinner and make sure the organizers didn’t give away our 1am slot at Mitzi’s Sister.  We had some dinner there, heard a few bands, then played our first NXNE appearance.  Which only makes sense because we’ve been a band less than a year…  Anyway, that was an okay show as well (not great, not bad), and by the end Shawn and Laura were feeling the effect of multiple shows on their voices.  I would say I made it through like a champ, but I did feel a little tweak towards the end of the set.  But I felt really proud of the band for marshalling reserves through three fairly solid sets in one day.  Not bad for a bunch of yahoos who have only been around with this line-up for a couple of months.

UPDATE: At the Burlington Sound of Music they had this contest for the Galaxie Rising Star Award where the judges would listen to the first song of everyone’s set at the City Hall stage and the winner would get a prize.  Well, we opened with “Alyson, Everything I Know Is Wrong” and it won the prize.  We are now Galaxie Rising Star Award winners, and that means we won $3000.  Holy f-bomb.  We beat out people like Jill Barber and Madison Violet.  That’s ridiculous.

It affected Franziska and Shawn a bit more than it affected me, I think, but this was a disconcerting show because we all felt a bit raw before we hit the stage.  The thing was, this was an all-female artist poetry and music extravaganza called EstroGenius, with Shawn and I being two out of three guys in the entire quaint and cosy coffee bar.  The emotion level was much higher than pretty much any other show I’ve ever been to, and I’m not sure that it was because it was a mostly female crowd, or even mostly female artists.  I think it had to do with the fact that it was virtually all poetry, and poetry can be damn raw sometimes.  Granted, it didn’t help that there were poems about gender issues, rape, trauma, and power struggles.  But it seems to me that music can soften a message as much as it helps deliver a message.  Which may be part of the reason why music tends to be more popular than poetry; poetry can be hard to handle sometimes, emotionally speaking.

Anyway, when we got on stage we played like we had never even met each other before, let alone like we had even rehearsed anything.  The set wasn’t terrible, but it fell apart pretty quickly and pretty often.  We don’t normally play so badly together; in fact sometimes we gel nicely, but it wasn’t happening yesterday afternoon.  As Franziska said, we were trying to assimilate all the things that we had heard that day.  And I think, too, that she was trying to play a great show for the people, because up to that point it had been quite an amazing display of talented artists, both in poetry and music.  It started from Franziska’s first song, playing the African thumb piano called a kalimba, and singing a Portishead cover.  She messed up on parts where she is normally super-solid.  Then when Shawn and I joined her we didn’t do anything to help matters.

The crowd, however, was ridiculously supportive, and they were very attentive as well.  Which may not have helped matters…when a crowd is really attentive it can kind of throw you off, because normally a good half of the crowd doesn’t usually care that much, and they chatter amongst themselves.  You get to be kind of used to that, so when the crowd is silent it almost feels like you’ve done something wrong.  But at the end of the show a lot of people came up to tell Franziska how awesome she was, how well she had played, and that sort of thing, so by the end I think she felt good about having played the show.  Even if she didn’t like her performance that much.

Remember when you were young and your friends all knew your parents, because whenever you went to someone’s house, well hey, the parents were there?  Well I demarcated the point between childhood and adulthood as the time when I didn’t know any of my friends’ parents, because everyone lived away from their folks.  Last night I took a step back towards childhood by meeting my friend Christy’s parents at our show at the London Music Club.  And it was a little weird to meet a friend’s parents as an adult (you can’t call them Mr. and Mrs. G anymore, you have to use first names), but I suppose I have actually done it before so maybe it shouldn’t have been that weird.

The venue itself was pretty fantastic, with multiple rooms that all had music going on.  We were downstairs in what is colloquially known as the Cellar, which had a good-sized stage and was actually a fairly large room with what I’ll call Vegas-style seating.  Everyone hunkered down and MJ Cyr, who I’d met before but never heard play, cracked into the first set.  She uses a looping pedal to great effect, and is quite amazingly talented with it.  Being a drummer first, I’m always impressed when people can play well and easily to a metronomic device, because a looping pedal really ties you to a certain tempo.  MJ did it without batting an eye, and played a great set with Cameron, who rocked the sax and the flute and the iPhone (somehow using the iPhone to alter the sound of the saxophone).  Then Lara took the stage and, even though I was playing some guitar and some bass for her, she played a great set.  It was probably the best that her band has played together, which was nice because London is Lara’s home town.  David (drums), Cameron (sax/flute), Shawn (bass/guitar), and I managed to actually gel pretty well with Lara and the set came together well.

Then it was the Young Novelists turn to get up and play, and I think we played quite a decent set.  Alex is also from London, and he had a great group of friends who were kind of frighteningly attentive.  It can be slightly disconcerting when people pay too close attention to your set, although it ought to be a great thing.  Maybe I’m still a little shy.  It’s hard enough for me to say that the show was decent; I’m a little too self-deprecating.  But something slightly different happened last night, that doesn’t always happen.  Because the songs are generally about pretty personal and/or painful things and I felt a little emotional during some of the songs, especially “For The Record”.  I don’t know why, it just happened that way.  But maybe having that connection to the songs gave them a little more oomph.  Afterward we all went to Noel’s friend’s studio where he showed us how he made guitars and guitar-like objects (like lutes).  I’d never met a luthier before, and his studio smelled like the greatest woods of all time.  We left London, heading back to Toronto, with the heady smell of Brazilian rosewood in our memories.

Sarah Greene and Ben Bootsma.  Both solid songwriters and talented musicians that I highly recommend after playing with them at The Bean on College Street last night.  Sarah had taken over hosting duties for Signe Miranda, who usually runs the weekly open-mic-followed-by-a-folk-show night, and she ran an efficient night of music.  The open mic had some very talented individuals including a pair of brothers who had the exact same voice.  It was eerie when you heard them singing together, they had perfectly matched inflections and timing.  But the real good times for me was watching Ben and then Sarah play their two sets.  Ben’s set was kind of like what Leonard Cohen would sound like if Leonard Cohen had actually been a decent singer.  I like a good solid baritone voice, and Ben has that in spades.  Sarah played a too-short set, but her songs are very well crafted and enjoyable to hear.  As I say, I quite recommend both of those artists.

Usually, because The Bean is so small, we just play purely acoustic.  In fact, they’ve never had a PA when we’ve played there before.  But last night they had a PA and a single microphone and we decided to put it a goodly distance in front of us and just all belt it out and use the mic to get a little extra boost.  I have no idea how well it worked, but it felt all right.  It had aspects of both a purely acoustic show as well as having a PA to help us out.  With acoustic shows I find it’s a little easier to match your voice to the instrument, both in volume and temperament, if that makes sense.  So this show had that quality as well as being fun in terms of finding where I should stand in order to balance the vocals coming through the PA.  I’m naturally a louder singer than Laura, so it works better if I stand sort of behind her and sing over her shoulder.  Then she comes through about as much as I do.  But that kind of thing is actually fun to work out, and when it comes together is therefore that much sweeter.

Anyway, last night sometimes it came together and sometimes it didn’t.  But it was fun working it all out.  It was a solid show, overall.  And the hot chocolate was pure deliciousness.

My second Pitter Patter experience was playing keys for Towns & Cities at a tiny shotgun-style venue that used to be Bread & Circus but is now Rearview Mirror.  This was a much better time, partly because the band before us decided that it would be fun to play a movie on the projector that was behind the stage and that movie was Tron.  It’s been a long time since I saw Tron, so it was partly hilarious and partly awesome to see it playing behind the band as they cranked through some pretty solid roots-rockin’ material.  They were a good group of guys, and played some good songs, but they never mentioned their name and so I don’t know how to tell you to check them out.  History will probably prove me right when I say they will become hugely famous.  If only I knew what they were called.

Our show was slightly ridiculous, because I haven’t been playing keys very long for the band (previously I was the drummer, and before that the lead guitarist.  My whole experience with Towns & Cities has been awesomely weird), and I kept pounding my keyboard and losing the notes I had made on the structure of the songs.  So sometimes I had to guess a little bit at what chords to be playing.  I did, however, get to rock organ and tambourine at the same time which, if you ever get a chance, can be amazing fun.  I had to stand to do it, and left-hand the upper keys of the keyboard while smacking the tambourine off my chest.  Some might say it was a stupid thing to do, but I think it was just fun and ridiculous.

The bad side of the organization was trying to get a soundcheck going.  We all arrived relatively early in order to try and get some sound checked, but the sound person was nowhere to be found.  So Noel and I headed out for more Chinese food (just like last show, both Rearview Mirror and El Mocambo are nicely situated near a lot of Chinese restaurants) and by the time we got back the venue had decided to play the hockey game so a soundcheck was a no-go.  Not that there was anyone there to watch the game; I think the bartender was the main person in charge of wanting to see the game.  This is why sports and music don’t mix.  Except in the form of Sports: the band.