SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-Ultrasound Showbar [2nd GSMW Matinee Day 3] (February 27, 1994).
Second annual Green Sprouts Music Week held at Ultrasound Showbar Feb 25-March 1 1994. Setlists for all shows were fairly similar in content focusing mainly on the 25-30 songs that they would use for consideration on Introducing Happiness which began recording the following week. Rare performances of Green Xmas, Floating and one of the earliest Desert Island Discs. This is the all ages Sunday afternoon show 3/5.
Sadly there was to be no celebratory party for the Canadian hockey team who lost the final match and took silver (they’d have to wait until 2002).
They’re going to play a lot of new songs and some old songs. So they start with “Crescent Moon” from Greatest Hits (it’s so synthy!). Midway through they seem to mess up and Dave says, “We know the new ones well we just don’t know the old ones very well.”
As the start “Green Xmas,” Dave Clark says, “I love Christmas Time so much so that I love playing this song even though it’s not Christmas.” When the song is over there’s lots of talk about gum–I assume someone had some in the audience: Black Cat, Ton o Gum or Bubbalicious. He asks what kind and they start talking about Dubble Bubble and how so many bad things happened to Pud (He could never win). He contends that Ziggy ripped him off.
They get an organized snap going for Fishtailin’. They play a verse and then hold it, Dave says “We usually play this song in A, Martin.” However we will employ “capo technology.”
Clark says he enjoys playing that song because it reminds him of …Dave. And all the good times they had…before the bad stuff happened (ha). Clark describes how he met Dave when they were kids. Bidini says he doesn’t remember the meeting and jokes “did you steal something off of me?” Clark says Bidini’s aunt and uncle got the first in ground pool in the area and that’s where they met. Bidini asks what he thought of him. After shouting “Doofus,” Clark says, I thought “he would become a well kempt perhaps overspoken person.” Bidini says he remembers being in his Delta 88 going for a drivers test in 1981 and picking up Clark and thinking “he has lips as big as mine–we can be square together.”
It’s a good segue into “Me and Stupid” (which they make family-friendly by singing “messed up” instead of fucked up). For the fish chant at the end “pike, trout, bass, smelt,” Dave says they are the “four fish of the apocalypse.”
Dave apologizes that he “spit on you from afar but luckily I hit one of the Wooden Stars and I think that will bring me good luck in 1994.” The Wooden Stars are the band that’s playing during the break.
Once again Tim says that “Introducing Happiness” is about having cats–not birthing cats, just discovering them.”
Clark says that they are “one of the laziest bands in rock.” Bidini says they have inherited the mantle from Valdy. Then he says I thought you meant “laid back.” Clark says “I didn’t say lamest.” But Bidini says that Valdy once paid The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos $1500 to open for them at the Port Credit Arena. Clark says he wasn’t talking about Valdy, he wrote the Four Seasons. Tim says he also sells really cheap groceries (I assume he’s joking about Aldi).
For “In This Town,” Martin asks for “Lots of reverb on the intro.” Bidini says it’s like they’re in a cave. Then there’s a great “Michael Jackson, ” followed by a rocking “RDA.” A sloppy intro to “Soul Glue” is fixed and then the song starts for good. Midway through Bidini tells them to do it nice and breezy, like Valdy would do it, and they make it very smooth. “Zero angst, Tim.” The gentle ending segues nicely into “Self Serve Gas Station.”
Clark tries to wax eloquent about the loss of sun, but he can’t get the words out. So they encourage the kids to dance, which it sounds like they do.
They play the mellow “Row,” which features a really great solo from Martin in the middle. After a discussion of new wave, they play the rapid, rather odd “The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos.” They play “Floating” again–one of those songs that has never gotten official release. It’s pretty cool with a few different parts that complicate the song.
They ask, “Any teenagers in the audience? I heard that teenagers don’t like to be called teenagers what do they like to be called?” Someone shouts “Young adults.” They play “Jesus Was Once a Teenager Too.”
They ask that the lights to go up and they play a song/game called “Desert Island Picks.” You say three albums you’d take with you if you were stranded on a desert island (in this case New Providence Island). They walk around singing the folk song and then some people come up: it is really fun and very funny, a great good time is had by all. They even bring up a little kid and he sings his three favorite things in the world. When they ask another kid what school she goes to, she says “uh…what?” And someone shouts “Must be U of T!”
Someone had picked three Beatles albums, and Martin says “This is from our next album Let It Be…” He sings “Jo Jo was a…” before beginning “Take Me in Your Hand” properly. Then they play a lovely version of “Claire” and then a noisy messy sloppy verse of Neil Young’s “Farmer John,” which morphs into the crazy trilogy “Artenings Made of Gold/Cephallus Worm/Uncle Henry.”
Clark asks if they should play longer or shorter, and longer wins. But he must take a five-minute bathroom break. So Martin plays a gentle acoustic version of “Record Body Count,” which the crowd loves. Then, “Oneilly’s Strange Dream” is introduced as “Saskatchewan Part 2”. And then (despite some apparent crying from children) they play “Horses” (the moaning child actually sounds like a pretty good fit for this intense song). There’s even a kid who sings the “Holy Mackinaw, Joe” part. At the end, there’s kids doing the whole ending with them.
And then it’s a couple of covers: Jane Siberry’s “One More Colour” and a rocking rendition of Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” They leave the stage and there is a truly wild and rowdy encore cheer (banging things and lots of screaming).
Dave gives away a prize–nightgowns (?) from Sire Records–which Clark says he doesn’t want because he’s ashamed of being on a major label. I’d love to see those.
It leads to a cool trippy version of “Dope Fiends,” and the end guitar section segues perfectly in to “Earth Monstrous Hummingbirds,” a version which doesn’t ever get really weird but which still sounds fantastic.
I can’t get over how cool it is that Rheostatics played matinee shows like this. The show lasted over 2 hours, tickets were $6 and it was all kind-friendly. That’s pretty awesome.
[READ: January 17, 2017] “The Curse”
This is an excerpt from Marías’ recent nonfiction book To Begin at the Beginning. It is a reflection on the art of writing fiction.
This brief section looks at how he writes; he doesn’t know how things are going to turn out when he begins–that would be boring for him. And if he was bored, it would reflect in his writing and then his readers would be bored.
Just as we do what we do when we’re twenty without knowing that when we reach forty we may wish we had done something else, and just as when we’re forty we have no alternative but to abide by what we did when we were twenty, we can’t erase or amend anything, so I write what I write on page 5 of a novel with no idea if this will prove to have been a good idea when I reach page 200, and far from writing a second or third version, adapting page 5 to what I later find out will appear on page 200, I don’t change a word, I stand by what I wrote at the very beginning — tentatively and intuitively, accidentally or capriciously. Except that, unlike life — which is why life tends to be such a bad novelist — I try to ensure that what had no meaning at the beginning does have meaning at the end. I force myself to make necessary what was random and even superfluous, so that ultimately it’s neither random nor superfluous.
He cites an example. When Marías’ Cuban great-grandfather was still a young man, he refused to help a beggar. The beggar put a curse on him: “You and your eldest son will both die before you are fifty, far from your homeland and without a grave.” He wrote about this curse in his book Dark Back of Time. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 