i remember reading an article a few years ago about how the iconic canadian rock band, the tea party (often cited in the short list of best canadian rock bands of all time), refused to sell it's domain name to the corporate-dominated american political movement of the same name. rumours were running up to seven figures. yeah, they could have used the cash. but, which koch would have written that cheque?
i missed most of the preamble, but this combined track of an original (requiem) and a well known cover that he does regularly (hurt, by nine inch nails) was dedicated to the united states in the wake of rising racial tensions and police shootings. a requiem. it's not smug. you can dwell on "what have they become?". or you could dwell on "my sweetest friends". it's more about concern than superiority. but, it's a requiem, nonetheless - a requiem in the face of what is increasingly obvious american decline. would eight figures have shut him up?
how many times have i seen the band? i don't know. lots. so, getting a chance to see jeff martin play an acoustic set opening for a reformed i mother earth was a nice addition to the show, in the sense of it being a throw back. he played mostly tea party songs, and i don't think anybody was upset about it. but, i want to point out that seeing jeff martin play acoustic is not your average folk performance. i don' check setlists; i happened to catch a more toned down track, even as it was presented kind of heavily. most of the tracks featured foot driven percussion. he was playing a 12 string at one point (the badger). the truth is that he can fill the sound up on his own: he didn't really need to bring a band with him.
as it turns out, he brought one with him, anyways.
here is a full set from the same week:
given that jeff martin was coming home from australia for the set (something he pointed out as he was playing 'coming home'), it was sort of obvious that he would at least try and get his bandmates up on stage. and, it happened to work out. this is the complete band set, at the end of his solo set. the first track is a led zeppelin cover, and the second is a track from their first record, splendor solis.
yeah. you're not seeing things.
they're on a twenty year anniversary tour for scenery and fish, and i enjoyed every second of it. again: how many times did i see this band in the 90s? i don't know. lots. the setlist was pulled from both of their records. you can pick up from the footage that the audience knew all the words...
this show was pure nostalgia, and nobody pretended otherwise. i got everything i wanted out of it: some sing-alongs, some guitar freakouts, some drum circles - and even some pot floating around through the audience. score.
you can probably pick out almost immediately that this wasn't your average 90s alt rock band. i've argued pretty strongly that they really foreshadowed the sound developed by the mars volta, although they themselves were drawing heavily on the more progressive side of alternative rock: rhcp, jane's addiction, the smashing pumpkins. with a dash of rush, for canadiana? sure, even if the lyrical references are largely on the level of satirical post-modernism rather than serious objectivism. they were and remain viciously virtuosic on their instruments, and worth the price of admission simply for that fact.
if you weren't around to see it the first time, you're not going to get as much out of this. but, it's something that kind of got lost. to be clear: they were huge in canada. when they played edgefest '98, they co-headlined a concert that included green day and foofighters as opening acts. that's right: they didn't open for foofighters and green day. green day and foofighters opened for them. that's how big they were in canada, for a few years in the 90s.
they then completely imploded before they got a chance to build an audience outside of canada - the singer bolted and the band didn't recover. this is the original singer, apparently performing with the band for the first time in 18 years. so, it's something special for us old 90s canucks.
here is a full set from earlier in the month:
i walked out of this concert completely fried due to minimal sleep, overexposure to my ears (remember: i saw swans on tuesday, too), alcohol, nicotine and the other one that's still a few months away from open mention. so, i'm not done sleeping yet. but there was an experience near the end of the show that i want to say something about. it was one of those really surreal moments of racism that you just can't do much about besides point out loudly and shake your head about. so, i'm going to scream about it for a few paragraphs.
i mother earth were a kind of iconic canadian band in the 90s, and they were uniting here with a singer they hadn't played with in many years. the announcer said 18 years. i'm not sure if that's literally true or not, but it's been a while. the audience was consequently full of nostalgia: an older and mostly white crowd rocking out to records released in 1993 and 1996. much drinking, yes.
now, everybody knows you're not supposed to smoke anything at all in these kinds of outdoor bank concerts. you're just supposed to shut up and drink your over-priced beer. that is, of course, the economic purpose of this event: to sell over-priced beer. but, you can't actually enforce this rule once the sun comes down a little, the least important reason being that most people in the crowd at rock concerts like this actually don't agree with bans on smoking at outdoor concerts. many of them actually even smoke. and, not just cigarettes.
the smell of marijuana is pretty normal at outdoor rock concerts. it's a part of the experience - whether you're actually inhaling, or just taking in the aroma. it wouldn't be a real festival, without it. whatever the eventual legality of the substance in canada, that smell is not going to lift from the concerts of the nation. there will simply be a trail of corrected signs "thank you for pot smoking".
the spirit of this event, combined with the nature of the audience, actually at one point near the end of the set had joints passing around amongst strangers. somebody decided everybody at the show ought to be high. or it seemed that way. they were just circling around. my nose and eyes caught multiple burning around me.
so, i will acknowledge that there were people smoking pot in the audience. see, but that's just it - *everybody* in the audience was smoking pot. no exaggeration. nine out of ten, anyways.
so, you'll imagine how absurd it was to watch security swoop in, walk past several burning joints and key in on the only black guy in eyesight - who, yes, was caught green-handed. like, they took it out of his hand. ok. drug abuse. but, they had to blatantly walk by scores of stoned white folks to do this, and then scores more as they were escorting him out. 90 out of 100 people in the immediate audience were stoned. it was being openly passed around. but, only one person in the audience was black.
i didn't stay for the literal headliner, so i don't know if they came back later for more minorities, or even for some white folk - or maybe if they just backed off and let people have a good time. but i know what i saw and how obvious it was.
i don't really have any point besides the obvious one: it's really not ok. i don't know exactly who the security personnel were (mall cops?), either, but....i guess the way i should articulate this to organizers is that i don't want to see anything like that ever again.
of course, this has nothing to do with the band. the actual show was excellent, for what it was. tight. no fuck-ups. the tracks were identifiable, but expanded upon enough to play out. i'd need at least two hands to count the number of times i saw this band in the 90s, and they were always a strong live set like that. so, i will actually have some footage coming up in the next few days of i mother earth with edwin in 2016. that's something that is actually happening. there's some teaparty footage, too.