Music / Live Music
The Kind of Show Where You Know Every Word to Every Song
And a Sort of Homecoming for Me
I’ve been to a lot of shows. You probably have too. Can we agree to call them that instead of concerts?
The best one I’ve ever seen was hands down Bruce Springsteen in Vancouver, BC in 2013. He came on at 8 pm and at 11:15 they had to drag him off the stage. By the third song (Hungry Heart) he was crowd surfing from back to front.
Nobody beats the Boss.
The most I’ve ever paid for a ticket was for Fleetwood Mac in 2012. Poor Stevie Nicks didn’t know where she was, telling the crowd at the end, “Goodnight Toronto, you’ve been great”. Maybe so, but it was in Vancouver.
The first one I went to as a wide-eyed youth was Sting in 1988. It was the first of hundreds more.
I often structured my travels around going to shows, especially in the last 15 years or so. Morrissey in Lima, U2 in Santiago, Depeche Mode in Bogota, Placebo in Barcelona, Kings of Leon in Copenhagen, and Kasabian in Naples. And most recently, on my way home last month, New Order and Pet Shop Boys in New York City.
As a result of living abroad for the past seven years, getting to shows by my favourite bands has not been easy. There were some that came through Colombia in the three years I lived there, but none ever made it to Tanzania in those three years and none in the year that I was in Jamaica.
Of course, none of this is to say that there isn’t live music in those places; certainly, there is. But not involving those bands, if you know what I mean.
And so, one of the ways I was able to wrap my head around the reality of returning home after being away for so long, was to envision all the shows that I was once again going to get to go to and reacquaint myself with the joy of hearing the songs I love playing live.
On my first weekend back, I went to see Stewart Copeland play rearranged Police classics in front of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.
This past weekend, I saw that band that every city has. The one that has been around forever and has a loyal following and a list as long as your arm of instantly recognizable classics. They got significant airplay on the radio and video channels when that was a thing and did manage to sell an armload of records.
They had that one album that you thought for sure was going to put them over the top, but then the follow-up just didn’t get the same push and the momentum was gone. You just couldn’t figure out why they never blew up. And blowing up for a Canadian band meant making it in the US.
54–40 is that band in Vancouver. They’ve been around since the early 80s punk scene and evolved into a more accessible and radio-friendly rock sound by the late 80s and early 90s on albums such as “Fight for Love” and “Dear Dear”. If you are from here, you’ve heard of them and if you are from elsewhere in Canada, they were probably in your periphery at some point. Hootie and the Blowfish covered their “I Go Blind” on the Friends soundtrack, to every true fan’s utter dismay.
Hopefully, the residuals are still trickling from that in some form. That’s probably as big as it ever got for them, in terms of the exposure of their music in listeners’ ears. Here’s the original for comparison.
Since their high water mark five albums in, they’ve made nine more and I found that each one interested me a little less. And though there was a time during which I would go to every single one of their live shows when they played locally — probably at least 40 times between 1992 and 2010, it has been a long time since I’ve seen them.
But when I realised they were playing at the Commodore Ballroom on just my second weekend after returning, I knew I needed to make a point of going.
I was not disappointed. Two hours of straight ahead no-nonsense rock and roll and general good times was produced by Neil Osbourne on vocals and guitar, Brad Merritt on bass, Matt Johnson on drums, and Dave Genn on guitar. (An aside: original guitarist Phil Comparelli has not played with the band since 2004 and if anyone knows what happened to him, I’d be interested to know).
And I knew every song. And all the words to every song, came back to me instantly like it was yesterday. Does that ever happen to you? Have you experienced a show at which everything they played was instantly recognizable to you and the words just came out of the filing cabinet of your brain and out of your mouth as you belted out the hits along with the band? Didn’t it absolutely make your night?
It’s a pretty good feeling and a great way to get back into going to shows again. But most importantly, a good way to come home again.
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