Let’s start at the beginning of this week:
Monday night.
Mad Professor with Aisha at Richard’s on Richards, 8pm.
I thought I was going to an “early/short” show (Doors at 8? Who goes to a club on a Monday at 8pm?) and turned out that I was going to a “full meal deal” with that started at 10:30 on the dot. Wandered around outside for a bit, watched two young guys smoke pot (doesn’t matter how far away you get from other people, if you’re tokin’ people a block away know about it), and talked to the second person in the “will call” line (an Asian lady with one of those little wool toques that makes me think about how itchy/sweaty wool would be on my scalp) who had an Australian accent and…
…wrap your head around that for a minute…
There’s a lot of Asian folks here in Vancouver, seeing as it’s the first stop in North America for many students coming from China/Japan/Korea, as well as a large and thriving population in an area near “Vancouver Proper” called Richmond. So there’s lots of Asian folks around. Some of them have the same goofy “mumbly BC accent” that I have (having grown up in/near Vancouver, aside from a 5yr stint in Kingston, Ontario), and some of them have that strangely calming accent that just sounds like they’re trying to get the stupid white guy to shut up and listen for a minute, even though that’s totally not what’s going on. There’s usually one or the other audio coming out of folks of a certain skin colour.
Australian accents is not what you usually expect from a person with brown skin in these parts. It was a hoot. I kept wanting to go “okay, okay… now… say something else in Australian.” We bonded on nicotine, and our great love of Mad Professor’s annihilation of Massive Attack’s Protection album (justly titled “No Protection.”)
OKAY, so I get inside, and I’m like, the second person in, because some coke-head lookin’ promoter dude got in first (why? who knows), and go pay my $6 for a pint of beer, and make my way up to the truly cherry spot in the bar: The Eagle’s Nest, let’s call it, directly above where the DJs do their thing. I was set. I was ready for this show that’d start early, and I could go home early, and still get to work the next day. No problem. Then the two burns who are going to open the show wander in (oddly, the same two guys I saw smokin’ outside), and jump up onto the stage and start unpacking their 45s. These are the opening DJs. One dude looked like Shaggy on picture day (of Scooby Doo fame, not the DanceHall Reggae guy), and the other guy (in his SlipKnot t-shirt) looked like he was just along for the ride. ShaggyDoo starts spinning his ancient Reggae 45s, which was kinda fun, largely due to the urgency of 3-minute songs that would often sorta trail off into nothing more than a beat while Slipknot dude kept sorta looking lost and hiding his cigarette (the legal kind) behind a stack of 12-inch vinyl that was propably brought purely for hiding smokes.
To be perfectly honest, these guys had a pretty good collection of stuff, (none of which was Bob Marley or anything so mainstream, so I felt they had some legitimacy for their catalogue alone), but they kept either running the single into the ground (letting it finish completely, with silence at the end like you’d expect on a various artists tape), or they just sorta blow it off (hitting the stop button on the turntable, letting it just grind to a halt while they crossfaded into the next track). Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I could’ve done the beat juggling with old 45s instead of these two, but I felt sorta like they were just coasting through and doing a lot of “hey, is thing song any good, or am I just really stoned?”
During this time, the promoter chickoid from DOSE magazine started putting up a banner along the railing that I was leaning against. She was flinging chunks of packing tape over the railing, with nothing attached to ’em, and I finally turned to her to see if she needed to get to where I was sitting, and she introduced herself as “Nie-ee-ma” or something similar, and then asked if I’d help her. Not in that “Oh help me Mister Big Strong Burly Man” way, but more in that “You’re a human, and not an asshat, so grab and end of this” kinda way. I felt like we were setting up a tent at a bus stop or something. It was surreal for no particularly good reason. After we were done, she asked me my name and shook my hand, again with this weird “When the shooting starts in here, let’s promise not to kill each other” kinda way. She was cool, man. I didn’t feel like a kid here (I usually feel like I’m too square to be in a club that has anything more interesting than a jukebox happening), but like maybe some sorta vaguely hip dude, who was still SOMEHOW in touch with music that’d been recorded in the last fifteen years.
By then, I’ve finished my beer, and am trying to figure out how to get another one without losing “The Good Seat,” and that’s about when Johnny Vancouver shows up (not without me having a “who’s this big asshole, and why’s he standing so freakin’ close to me?” moment first). He tells me he’s here with a friend from his work, and is hanging out with the bartender, so I should come over to the other side, where I can get a drink (and there’s some light).
After a bit, I find out that Mad Prof is going on at 10:30, and my (3rd beer) brain clicks in that it’s 10pm, and this is no “short show,” over at 9:30…
After my mishap with Q-Bert two months earlier (I paid my $25 for the ticket, and one for Jesse, I got there for 11pm doors, and dude STILL WASN’T ON STAGE WHEN I WENT HOME AT 2AM)…
I found out later that I’d missed him by about ten minutes, but by that time I was so tired (this had been a Friday night, and I’d got up for Rip’s breakfast and work at 7:15am that day).
But then MP starts.
Hegoly Sheggit.
Dude can remix dub on the fly. Aisha starts doing the “VanCOUvahhhh!” thing going (and I kept waiting for her to yell “Thank you Springfeld!” a-la Spinal Tap on the Simpsons) and getting the croud yelling. Then the Mad Professor flattened the tiny hairs in our ears with eight-foot deep bass hits. He had this gigantic mixer board thing and a hard drive recorder. He’s sampling what she’s singing live, and then playing it back at her/us, over and over again, looping and echoing the bejesus out of it, and it’s just liquid audio yumminess. JohnnyV and I have many beers (never having to line up, ’cause somebody keeps getting the bartenders attention though the magic of eyebrows), and I get well and truly DRUNK. I end up dancing on the floor at some point, just wanting to be part of the music and the crush of people and not really caring that I’ve got a (mostly) white beard, and just wanting to MOVE in the think chocolate & licorice wall of sound. Feels great. Realised I used to dance a lot in my day, and that I should do more of it.
It gets to be midnight, and I drop my Blackberry while trying to check the time, and announce to JohnnyVan “I just dropped my Blackberry, I’m going home.”
Get home about ten to one, and whisper deafly to my better half that I had a great time, and I’m going to go sleep on the couch so I don’t roll over on the baby in a drunken stupor.
Tuesday
I’m awoken the next morning around 7am by Ripley turning on the TV to Blue’s Clues and the somehow not annoying Steve (go see his web page to see what he’s done since leaving the show: quite a good singer, and has this weird sense of the absurd, and I wonder whether he got weird before or after doing “Clues” in front of a green screen for five or more years).
I’m hung over. Not badly, but it’s there. I can probably make it to work, but it won’t be fun. I get up and make Rip some breakfast, and lie back down on the couch. Arwen gets up and we have some sort of conversation that ends in me agreeing wholeheartedly that I shouldn’t go to work. Mental Health Day declared for January 31st. Mark your calendar for next year.
I manage to stay awake long enough to watch Peep and the Big Wide World, which I love more than Ripley does, I think. Joan Cusak does the narration (she reminds me of our friend Liz, for some reason), and Ripley and I sing the theme song together. Quack (the blue egg-shaped duck with a sailor’s hat) makes me giggle a lot.
Spend the day sleeping and just generally hanging out. It’s awesome.
Gotta close for now, Steve Martin’s hosting SNL, and PRINCE is the musical guest… Can’t miss that, can I?
