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Archive for the ‘The Inbreds’ Category

James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost–Hocus Focus (2017)

Posted in #10yearsof01, Adventure, Alexis Frederick-Fost, Andrew Arnold, Canadian Music, Children's Books, Citroën, Fantasy, First Second :01, Funny (ha ha), Graphic Novel, Horses, Hot Butter, James Sturm, Local Rabbits, Rheostatics, Short Books, The Inbreds, The Tragically Hip, tagged on March 9, 2019| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-Pacific Coliseum Vancouver BC (November 9, 1996).

Rheostatics opened for The Tragically Hip in Fall 1996.  Some of the shows were online already, but in 2018, Rheostatics Live added about ten more shows.

This is the 2nd night of the 24 date Canadian Tour opening for The Tragically Hip on their Trouble At The Henhouse Tour. It also includes “Fan Letter To Michael Jackson” from the first night in Vancouver November 8, 1996.

Rheostatics as an opening band are quite different from a headlining show.  As headliners, they play for over two hours, the banter a lot and they are quite funny.  As an opening act (especially for a band like The Tragically Hip), they are much more efficient.  They have about 45 minutes.  I imagine the fans are receptive, although it’s hard to tell from these recordings.

Of course, the Rheos had been together for over a decade by then and had certainly done their share of opening slots, so they play  their songs and sound pretty great.  They even set up the night for fun by having their walk on music “Popcorn” by Hot Butter.

They are playing a lot of songs from The Blue Hysteria, their recent release.  And this set features Tim Vesely on lead vocals quite a lot.  Three of the eight songs!

The show begin with “Fat” with Dave on vocals and Tim playing some fun bass parts.  Both guitars sound great.  Everyone’s vocals are in top form.  Dave gives the rather bold introduction: “Thanks, Vancouver, we love you and we’d like to change your life.”

Up next is Tim singing “All the Same Eyes.”  The note on the cassette says it was hyperfast.   Then it’s back to Dave with “Fan Letter to Michael Jackson.”  Instead of Jackson, he sings Tielli and Martin gets a great solo.  Martin also hits some great high notes.

Martin’s first song of the night is a great “Dope Fiends.”  There’s a mellow middle section with some nice drum work before Martin roars back in.

Dave says we come from Etobicoke–it’s a long way from here.

Then it’s back to Tim for “Bad Time to Be Poor” which energizes the crowd.  Even more Tim follows with a lovely “Claire” in which Martin gets a ripping solo.

Martin says, “The guy with the bald head is Dave Bidini….  now you introduce me.”

Dave tells everyone that after the show (after the show??!!) at the Starfish Room on Homer Street is a bill with The Inbreds from Kingston, the Local Rabbits from Pointe-Claire Quebec and Citroën from here.  It’s cheap and it’s great and it’s new and it rocks.  And this is a song about pumping gas.  Not having gas, pumping gas.  Don Kerr says that that song is not on their new album which just came out.

They play a terrific “Self Serve Gas Station”  It ends beautifully and then it’s jarred out of the beauty but a slamming “RDA” to end their set.

This recording has a bonus track from the night before (which is kind of odd–why just this one song?).  It’s a recording of “Fan Letter to Michael Jackson.”  Martin asks if Michael Jackson ever played there.  We can’t hear an answer.  It’s got quite a slow opening and when they get to the line “I play Bad until my parents….” Dave winds up repeating the line.  It seems like a stylistic choice until he then says Here I am at the Pacific Coliseum and I forgot the words.  It’s my greatest moment of rock so far.

Otherwise the song sounds pretty great.

[READ: March 1, 2019] Hocus Focus

I have really enjoyed these short comic books based on the Adventures in Cartooning series.  Although this one was a little subpar, I felt.

Each one follows the adventures of the Knight and his horse Edward.  In most scenarios the Knight is impulsive and gets himself into trouble (often at Edward’s expense).

The Knight is tired of peeling vegetables,  he is working for the wizard and decided that he wants to learn to do spells.  So he asks the wizard to help him make a spell that will turn him into the greatest wizard ever.  He want to use a horn of unicorn and the feather of a phoenix for his super spell.

The wizard says she should learn stuff first (like patients) before jumping into something, but the knight refuses. (more…)

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Deborah Willis–“Girlfriend on Mars” (Lucky Peach, No. 15: The Plant Kingdom: Summer 2015)

Posted in AC/DC, Adventure, Boredom, Canadian Content, Canadian Music, Deborah Willis, Drugs, Explorers, Film & TV, Funny (ha ha), Grace Jones, Jealousy, Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Lucky Peach, Martha and the Muffins, Outer Space, Pink Floyd, Ramones, Rheostatics, Romance, Short Story, Stompin' Tom Connors, The Beatles, The Inbreds, Travel, ZZ Top, tagged on August 31, 2017| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-The Quilted Bear, Banff, Alberta (February 11, 1997).

I am quite surprised that the Rheostatics Live site doesn’t make a bigger deal about this show, given its unique nature.  This is an acoustic show that sounds like it was played in front of ten people and a lot of beer.

The shows seems to have started with the second song (at least the way Dave introduces it).  But the first track is a romping acoustic “Record Body Count” (sound check? or maybe just put out of place?).  Whatever, it sounds great with some electric guitar squeals but mostly just folk style with lots of backing singers).

The show proper starts with Dave introducing “an Ontario drinking song.”  There’s lots of shushing as people keep talking over him (although those people might be Tim an Martin).  Dave says, “a drinking song, there’s got to be some drunks talking.”.  Dave tells the story behind the sons and then they launch into a spirited rendition of Stompin’ Tom Connor’s “Midnight Ride of Red Dog Ray.”

Next comes “Christopher.”  It’s hard to believe they used this version for Double Live because it is so imperfect.  Martin coughs in the beginning and his voice cracks a bit.  But it sounds great and is a wonderfully unique version, especially for the live record.

It’s followed by a folksy rendition of “Chanson les Ruelles.”  Although Tim is too quiet.  mid song, you can hear someone in the crowd says “is it in French?  Yea!”  The version of “Wendell Clark” that comes next is only the second part.  But it is stompin and rompin (with someone yelling “yeeeha”).  At the end someone shouts Wendell broke his back.  “He didn’t really break it.”  “Well, he hurt it.”

Someone shouts for “Palomar” (or “Alomar” that seems less likely).  But they play “Take Me in Your Hand” instead.  It is also a folkie version and the end features a percussion addition of wood blocks.

Dave shouts “Hey, Mike, you wanna do Noah’s Cage?”  I have to assume this is Mike O’Neill from The Inbreds (the song is an Inbreds song).  They play the song although Mike forgets the second verse so he repeats the first.   He says its been a while since he played it.

Martin introduces “Introducing Happiness: as “this is a song about being happy.”  Dave says, “I hope so.”  It’s followed by a surprising acoustic version of “P.R.O.D.”  Surprising only because the song tends to get noisy and out of control, but it’s not in this version.  Towards the end, Dave shouts “all percussion solo–whatever you got.”

Martin busts into the melody of “Dope Fiends” but instead they play a long funny version of “Desert Island Discs.”

Dave: AC/DC-Back in Black; Ramones-Rocket to Russia; Martha and the Muffins-Danseparc.
Tim: The Inbreds-Hilario; The Inbreds-Kombinator ; The Inbreds-It’s Sydney or the Bush.
Donny: Randy Newman-Creates Something New Under the Sun; Grace Jones-Nightclubbing; Herbet von Karajan conducts Beethoven’s… “Last Waltz?” (Dave: could you believe he said the classical one?)
An audience member: Kiss-Dressed to Kill;  The Beatles White Album, and… someone says Billy Idol-White Wedding.  Dave: Billy idol?  Gigs over.  And a later line: I’m going to get me to an island not with that guy though, he wants to bring Billy Idol. I don’t even think White Wedding’s the name of the album (it’s not)–although the fans argue the point).
One last guy: Pink Floyd-The Wall; Led Zeppelin-IV… how many picks? How many picks!?)  ZZ Top-Degüello.

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is sung my Tim, Dave sings “I wish I was back home in Derry” at the appropriate moments.

They end with a piano-based version of “Jesus was Once a Teenager Too.”  He has to start again (“it’s just that that thing fell over”), but when he does it sounds really good–very different.

What a fun show to have been at.  There’s a lot of interaction with the band and fans–I really wonder how many people were there.

[READ: April 3, 2017] “Girlfriend on Mars” 

This story is probably my favorite Lucky Peach story (even if it had nothing to do with food).  Although the end seemed to maybe spiral out of control a little bit–with a finale that was, possibly, a little trite (although, not exactly).

This plot is simple.  Amber Kevinn, the narrator’s girlfriend is going to Mars.  Well, maybe.  She has (unbeknownst to Kevin) entered a reality show contest in which two winners will be selected to travel to Mars on MarsNow.  They will live on Mars until they die–no hope for returning.  This story intersperses the contest with just how Amber’s boyfriend feels about the whole thing.

Amber and Kevin are drug dealers.  Well, not exactly–they sell drugs, but only to family and friends.  They grow them hydroponically–this skill with plants was one of the reasons she was accepted for Mars in the first place.  But why didn’t she say anything to her boyfriend (of twelve years!) until it got to this point?

She made a video, she sent in an essay she even met with the TV people–all without him knowing.  Of course, Kevin’s a pretty heavy stoner at this point so he doesn’t notice much. (more…)

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Douglas Coupland–Polaroids from the Dead (1996)

Posted in Big Dirty Band, Books about writers, Canadian Content, Canadian Music, Consumerism, Corporate skewering, Dead Kennedys, Die Mannequin, Douglas Coupland, Essays, Fables, Flash Fiction, Grateful Dead, Greed, James Rosenquist, Nostalgia, Photo Essays, Rheostatics, Rush, Short Story, The Clash, The Future, The Inbreds, The Tea Party, Threats, Travel, Video Games on February 28, 2011| 2 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: BIG DIRTY BAND-“I Fought the Law” (2006).

I just found out about this “supergroup” which was created for the Trailer Park Boys Movie.    The group consists of Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson from Rush, drummer Jeff Burrows from The Tea Party and three people I don’t know: the singer from Three Days Grace, the singer/guitarist from Thornley and on lead vocals Care Failure from Die Mannequin.

I have to say that I’m not that excited by this cover.  The song has been covered so many times (some very good: The Clash, some very clever: The Dead Kennedys, and some terrible: many others).  And frankly there’s not much that you can do with this song.  It’s simple in structure with potential for shouting (which everyone likes), but little else.

For Rush fans, you can’t tell that Geddy or Alex are even on it.  So really it’s just a kind of metal-ish version of this old song.

Oh well, they can’t all be zingers.  You can hear it here.

[READ: February 1, 2011] Polaroids from the Dead

After reading Shampoo Planet, I wanted to see if I remembered any of Coupland’s books.  So I read this one.  It’s entirely possible that when I bought this book I was disappointed that it was not a new novel and never read it.  Because I don’t remember a thing about this book.  (This is seriously calling into question my 90’s Coupland-love!).

But I’m glad I read it now.  It’s an interesting time-capsule of the mid-90s.  It’s funny to see how the mid 90s were a time of questioning authority, of trying to unmask fame and corporate mega-ness.  At the time it seemed so rebellious, like everything was changing, that facades were crumbling.  Now, after the 2000s, that attitude seems so quaint.   Reading these essays really makes me long for that time when people were willing to stand up for what they believed in and write books or music about it (sire nothing changed, but the soundtrack was good).

So, this collection is actually not all non-fiction.  Part One is the titular “Postcards from the Dead.”  It comprises ten vignettes about people at a Grateful Dead concert in California in 1991.  As Coupland points out in the intro to the book, this was right around their Shades of Grey album album In the Dark, and huge hit “Touch of Grey”, when they had inexplicable MTV success and it brought in a new generation of future Deadheads.  He also points out that this is before Jerry Garcia died (which is actually helpful at this removed distance).

These stories are what Coupland does best: character studies and brief exposes about people’s lives.  The stories introduce ten very different people, and he is able to create a very complex web of people in the parking lot of the show (we don’t see the concert at all).  As with most Coupland of this era, the characters fret about reality.  But what’s new is that he focuses on older characters more (in the first two novels adults were sort of peripheral, although as we saw in Shampoo, the mother did have millennial crises as well).  But in some of these stories the focus is on older people (Coupland was 30 in 1991, gasp!).  And the older folks fret about aging and status, just like the young kids do. (more…)

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Douglas Coupland–Shampoo Planet (1992)

Posted in Boredom, Canadian Content, Canadian Music, Consumerism, Corporate skewering, Douglas Coupland, Funny (ha ha), Greed, Marriage Trouble, Neil Young, Rheostatics, Technology, The Inbreds, tagged on February 21, 2011| 2 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-Live at the Bathurst Street Theatre, Toronto ON, April 4, 1997 (1997).

This concert is free as a download on the Rheostatics Live website.  According to the on-stage banter, the band had just finished a string of live dates with the Inbreds that were recorded for their amazing Double Live album.  They even say that this night’s show is also being recorded for the disc.  And the set list is pretty amazing.

Which is why this show is such a disappointment.  Part of the problem is obviously the quality of the recording, and you can’t fault anyone for that…a bootleg is a bootleg after all.  But the band makes some really odd flubs and some of the songs seem really lackluster.  This is all the more surprising because the band seems in really good spirits –making jokes with each other and with the crowd (they make someone take off a Mr. Bean T-shirt!).

The biggest gaff comes in “King of the Past” where (I think Dave) begins the chorus a measure early (yipes!).  “Fan Letter to Michael Jackson” for some reason removes the loud rocking “Michael!” and “Jackson!” sections and replaces them with whispers.  It’s an interesting change, but the intensity is completely lost.  Something is also missing from “Sweet Rich Beautiful Mine,” there’s no oomph to it.  And, my favorite song “Claire” sounds off to me (I think it’s the recording though).

On the plus side, “My First Rock Concert” is great and well-received.  Dave introduces it as if it was the first time they’ve played it, which is very exciting.  The end of the show picks things up and the band sounds better.  In fact the last two songs are really great (and you can really hear Neil Young’s influence on the guitar).  I’m willing to blame some of my disappointment on the sound quality…it’s missing a fullness that you really need to appreciate the band, but this is not an A+ show.  They played another show the following night there (also available online).

Heh, I just learned that they used a number of recordings from this show on Double Live.  They used “Torque, Torque,” “Claire,” “Bread Meat Peas & Rice” and “Feed Yourself.”  Listening back, “Torque” and “Peas” sound great in the set and “Jesus Was Once a Teenager, Too” is a fun, light version.  “Claire” still sounds funny to me (even on Double Live), but it’s definitely worse on this bootleg.  The mixing is so much better on Double Live (of course!), that it really accentuates the guitar solo and backing vocals much more.

[READ: February 1, 2011] Shampoo Planet

On the inside cover of my copy of Shampoo Planet, I scribbled my name and “December 1992.”  I was in a phase of putting my name on all my books (which is kind of cool looking back, but really rather silly).  This is Douglas Coupland’s second book, and I remember being very excited when it came out.

I’m sure I read it then, but upon re-reading it (admittedly almost twenty years later), I didn’t remember anything from it.  Does that mean I didn’t read it, or that the book was just ephemeral?  Well, in some ways it is ephemeral, because it’s such a document of its time.  It also seems to me that either Coupland is (or was) unique in his writing style, or that very few writers dealt with 90’s culture as directly as he did.  Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another writer who approached 90s culture in the same way

In many ways, this book is all about dealing with the wealth of the 90s, when money was everywhere and people felt free to experiment with their lives.  And, yes reading this now the story feels so light and free and I wish that I had the problems that these kids deal with.  I also wondered if anyone could write a story like this now, with youth culture being so very different.

The inside front and back cover are (different) periodic tables that he has personalized with 103 elements of the 90s.  (Lu=Moon, A=Ambition, Dd=The Dead).  This is the only nod to unconventional book tropes here (where Gen X had all of those definitions that he footnoted).  In fact, the novel is fairly straightforward and conventional.

The main character, Tyler, is a twenty year old who cares more for his hair (he has a vast array of products–my favorite observation: “always better to buy well-advertised products–preferably those products endorsed by a celebrity” (133)).  He was raised in a hippie commune off on Vancouver Island (the only real nod to Canada in the book), but when his parents divorced, his mother Jasmine took the kids to Lancaster, a suburb of Seattle.  And, as seems to happen, the children of hippies became proto-yuppies. (more…)

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