SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-Sam The Record Man, Toronto. ON (November 13, 2004).
The Rheostatics played live at Sam The Record Man in Toronto, during the afternoon of the 3rd night of their 10 night Fall Nationals run at the Horseshoe.
The recording level is really quiet. In fact the first track called “crowd” is virtually all silence. I gather they were supposed to start earlier but Martin was delayed. So they eventually note: “we’ll press on in absentia.”
Dave continues, “We’ve given martin 50 [or 15, I hope] minutes. He’s a in a cab so it’s just the three of us.”
Just as they start, the store announcement is made to join everyone in the video room for the show.
Without Martin, they play the more acoustic songs. “Little Bird” sounds great, and as he begins “My First Rock Concert” he says,”This is ironic. This song… many of the events happened not too far from here.”
“Marginalized” sounds really different without the rough guitar. The bass is funkier and the overall song is much more acoustic. It’s a little unnerving.
And then Martin arrives: “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr George Jones.”
Dave: “Okay we are complete.”
Martin: “I made the mistake thinking I could hail a cab and they decided not to exist.”
Dave: “Nobody’s buying that, Martin.”
Tim: “I think you have to get out of bed to hail a cab, they don’t see you in bed.”
Michael: “It was international ‘Don’t pick up Martin Tielli on the street day.'”
Introducing “Power Ballad for Ozzy Osbourne,” Dave says, “This is a song we were commissioned by Health Services Canada to write for their 2004 testicular awareness program.” After the song, “That song is from our new album 2067, on sale for the remarkable price of $9.99. Back to 1978 prices.” he remembers back to the “Old Sam’s Boxing Day–not to sound like a big old geezer or anything but…. you could get 14 albums for… $9.99 in the late 80s.”
In the opening section yo can hear some kids talking and chatting. I wonder if it’s Dave’s kids. When “P.I.N.” starts, someone says it’s a “Big toy throwing number.” Martin’s voice is strained and crackly. The whole song feels a little restrained.
Dave introduces “Easy to be With You” as from “our psychedelic children’s album.”
Martin still sounds a little rough during “Christopher.” He speaks the first line and kind of flubs a later line. It’s followed by “Horses” which is acoustic and rollicking but not too intense.
Martin’s voice breaks a bit and he seems to mock himself on “Saskatchewan.” It’s really unusual to hear this as an acoustic number and he sounds kind of aggressive during the “farm and the work to be done” line.
It’s not an especially great show, but it is an interesting peek at the band during the day.
[READ: May 1, 2017] The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe!
Amid all of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl books (there are currently 6), done by Ryan North and Erica Henderson, this book is a one-off and is considered graphic novel unto itself. I don’t entirely understand why it is done as a single book rather than as part of the series, but I don’t really care, because it’s great.
Of course, the title is confusing as all get out, right?
Well, as the book opens, we see that the main characters are going to be Doreen Green aka Squirrel Girl, Nancy Whitehead (Doreen’s roommate with no special powers (boo)), Tippy Toe (Doreen’s faithful squirrel sidekick), Ken Shiga, (Koi Boi), Tomas Lara Perez, Chipmunk Hunk and, The Rest of the Marvel Universe.
The book opens in typically hilarious Squirrel Girl fashion. The one thing I love most about Squirrel Girl is that it utterly mocks everything in the Marvel Universe end yet is a part of the Marvel Universe. Hale has no compunction of just being meta and hilarious and I love him for it.
So the gang is sitting around at lunch and Doreen’s phone rings. It’s Tony Stark. She plays it cool until he forces her phone to play his theme song: “Tony Stark/ Makes you feel/ He’s the cool exec / with the heart of Steel.” One of the great continuing jokes in the series is that there are little comments at the bottom of each page. And a second continuing joke is that Hale is creating canonical parts of the Marvel Universe. So, the joke here is : “This comic canonically establishes that among Tony Stark’s powers is the power to make people’s cell phones play his theme song on demand. Honestly, I don’t know why he doesn’t use this power way more often.”
Tony Stark (who looks delightfully like Robert Downey, Jr.) invites Squirrel Girl and her team to his lair, um, headquarters (and he is cheesey charming and wonderful) so that he can experiment on some animals with his new device. He assumes that Doreen will happily round up some squirrels for him to test out this contraption that the Avengers brought back from a bad guy. He has no idea what it does.
Of Course Doreen (and Koi Boy and Chipmunk Hunk) would never give up their precious animals for this experiment. Tony is cool with that, but just as they are about to part ways the bad guys come back for their device. In addition to the High Evolutionary’s Goons, they are attacked by Evolved Humanoid Animals (Okay the whale one is called Clarence and the Ostrich one is named Ally and lets call the bear one “Commander Huggy Q. Loveyface the Sixth.”
During the fracas Squirrel Girl is forced into the machine which turns out to be a cloning machine. Doreen comes out with a double–totally amazing right? And in a two page Spread Squirrel Girl(s) take on everyone. After some discussion, there’s a nice big box that says “And then Squirrel Girl and her duplicate fight crime and did school work together and everything was great forever.
…for precisely 24 hours.”
The problem comes not because the two Doreens are evil opposites. Indeed, no, they are identical, except for one aspect. Doreen’s clone who will go by Allene (Doreen’s middle name) has a wee bit less compassion.
So while the two Squirrel Girls set out to save the world, they agree on the solution… up to a point. They agree that they could enlist the help of squirrels and other innocuous creatures to be aware of bad things that are going on as they happen–these creatures are everywhere, after all. But Allene goes one step further–she realizes that humanity is actually dangerous for squirrels. So why should squirrels fight to protect humans? They should fight humans to make the world safe for squirrels.
She and Doreen argue and Allene storms off for a few days only to have cloned thousands of squirrels to put her plan into action and thus:
The squirrels do what they do best–chew through power lines to knock out the grid on the entire Western Hemisphere. They even take over one of Ironman’s suits (they enter a board meeting dressed as Ironman and when they are unsure what to do they play “I am Iron Man” (“50% chance that the button that makes that song play is something the squirrels installed, 50% chance it’s something Tony insists in making standard in all his suits”). And when they are unsure what to do they just shout “The Avengers need me!” and crash through the window. As the scene ends, we see one of the board members say “Dang it Tony, Every time. Just tell me you don’t want to come to these meetings and we save tons in glass repair.”
Then Allene lures the Avengers in for a surprise fight. And she quickly defeats them all. Then she takes all of their gear (except Thor’s hammer (I didn’t want that stupid hammer, anyway) and heads out.
And thus, armed with Deadpool’s super villains cards (452 cards with the powers and strengths and weaknesses of every single super-powered villain in the universe. Honestly it was way irresponsible of Deadpool to go around publishing these. We’ll thank him by beating him up last).
As for heroes, she plans to start with the weakest one and defeat him or her and take their stuff, defeat Hawkeye take arrows, use arrows on Ironman, etc–a tech tree. I already know which guys to take down in which order. We follow the plan I figure we;ll be done in less than three hours.
And so it goes, taking out Spider man and then Black Cat and Hobgoblin (Deadpool’s comments on his card about Hobgoblin is hilarious). And there’s a hilarious section in which people argue the pronunciation of Magneto (is it Mag-NEATO or MAGNET-toe?).
In a series of panels, we see her defeat all manner of people. Until we get to Hulk. How will she ever defeat Hulk? (Hilariously, that’s how).
How will (real) Squirrel Girl ever defeat her clone? There is nothing left for her to fight with. And if Doreen defeats her, what will she do with Allene–a girl who meant well and isn’t evil at all. The answer is interesting and rather clever and I would love to see it play out.
There’s also a very funny sequence in which all of the Marvel heroes get into battle (on one page) and the comments say “Every Marvel character ever is here for this fight, we just didn’t have room for them all on this page. You now what this means, right? This means every single ‘Squirrel Girl verses your favorite character fight scene’ fan art you draw is now canon. Thank me later.”
The end of the book shows some sketches and more Deadpool cards. And like every great Marvel enterprise you must read after the credits for the great final ending page.
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