SOUNDTRACK: SPIRIT OF THE WEST-Live at Massey Hall (June 6, 2015).
This proves to be a pretty powerful show.
I was introduced to Spirit of the West by my Vancouver based friend Amber back in the 1990s. I didn’t really keep up with them, but I have long enjoyed their album faithlift.
But here it is 2015 and as the blurb at the beginning of the show says:
In 2014, at the age of 51, John Mann, Spirit of the West’s lead singer, was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease. On June 6, 2015, Spirit of the West would play their one and only show at Toronto’s Legendary Massey Hall.
The rest of the band includes Hugh McMillan, Vince Ditrich, Tobin Frank and Matthew Harder all of whom play various instruments including keyboards, accordion and all things with strings.
Most of the band have never been in Massey or even seen it. But they marvel at the venue and are genuinely moved by the end of this show.
They open with their hit (from faithlift) “And If Venice is Sinking.” It’s got accordion and a big bass line and some funny lyrics and a full backing vocal chorus.
We made love upon a bed
That sagged down to the floor
In a room that had a postcard on the door
Of Marini’s Little Man
With an erection on a horse
It always leaves me laughing
John Mann is the lead singer, Geoff Kelly is the co-lead guy. He does most of the speaking. He says “This is as close as were every gonna get to Beatlemania.”
Next up is “King of Scotland” about a man who desperately wanted to be Scottish. It, like many of their songs is a rousing half-trad/half rocking song. Incidentally, Mann has been singing off of an iPad to help with his memory.
“Doin’ Quite Alright” is the first of many songs sung by Kelly. he also plays bodhran. It sounds quite trad and is much faster with a cool bassline. The addition of 70s sounding keyboards is a little odd though.
“July” sees the introduction of what I think is a bouzouki and sounds an awful lot like “Love is All Around” by Wet Wet Wet except for the fun and powerful chorus of JuLYYYYYYYY!
Kelly jokes that someone in the band is delighted by Massey Hall because it is finally something he’s found that is older than Kelly is.
Up next is “Political,” a song “we recorded on our Labour Day record in 1988ish and then again on Go Figure and then again with the Vancouver symphony. I guess we really like this song. Kelly is on flute and plays a wild harmonica solo.
Next up is their newest song, which is about 12 years old. It’s about how every year New Year’s parties just get worse and worse. “Another Happy New Year” starts out with slow staccato piano and then it really takes off (with Kelly on the penny whistle).
After sincerely thanking everyone for their kindness (it’s getting pretty emotional), they are going to play a drinking song called The Crawl. The crowd really gets into the raucous song.
The night ends with Kelly saying this was the most awesome night ever. They are going to leave everyone with “Home for a Rest.” The audience sings along with Mann for the first verse and then Mann backs off and lets them sing it all. It’s pretty great. As is the song which ends with a wild instrumental jam that’s basically a flute-led jig which ends the sing and the show.
I imagine being there was pretty special.
[READ: May 15, 2018] “Nothing But”
This is a wonderful short essay on memory with the epigram: “The truth–that thing I thought I was telling.”
He begins by talking about a chapter in his book White Sands about a visit to the house of Theodor Adorno. The essay takes its title “Pilgrimage” from a short story (why is it not considered a memoir?) by Susan Sontag in which she and her friend Merrill went to the house of Thomas Mann when she was 14.
It came out later that Merrill never understood why Susan left their friend Gene (who had gone with them) out of the story entirely. (It happened in 1947, she wrote it in 1987). This shows “a startling manifestation of the vagaries of memory and a vindication of what can sometimes seem like the fussiness of editorial fact-checking.”
There’s another story about Sontag. Her friend Terry Castle said that when she, Terry, was invited to a dinner party with other artists and celebrities she, Terry, “a non-artist and non-celebrity” was so “not there” I wasn’t even registered enough to be ignored.” Interestingly there was an online rebuttal (Dyer can no longer find it but he wonders is it was from “the freakish-looking lead singer from the cult art-pop duo Fischerspooner”) that he had been even more ignored and that Terry ignored him too.
There was another example of people doubting veracity: “Be doubly cautious about teaching as a deposition a piece of fiction that seems reliable.” It involved George Orwell shooting an elephant. When asked why he didn’t believe Orwell, Bernard Crick his biographer, said, “because he was a writer not a bloody cub reporter.”
Dyer mentions his own mis-remembering of things by quoting Friday Night Lights: Are you going to show me some heart, son.” Upon re-watching recently, he finds that the line is never spoken.
He was the also the star (meaning only) witness at a trail. A man drove into a cyclist and knocked him down. Dyer was nearby and witnessed the whole thing. They brought the man to trial and it seemed to hang on a discrepancy.
“The defense exploited a discrepancy between my version of events and that of the cyclist. He remembered my being on the passenger side of the car whereas I said–correctly–that I was won the driver’s side. The stories of the father and son, on the other hand, matched perfectly. One would have thought that part of the training and experience of magistrates would teach them that a slight discrepancy is often a sign of the truth, whereas exact uniformity often indicates collusion.”
Something for Robert Mueller to think about.
Leave a Reply