It was awsome 🙂
I met up with Yohimbe around 4, chatted a bit and listened to some stuff he’d done in his fancy new studio, and then after a chick chow-down of sushi, headed out to the new west skytrain station to go downtown by transit (so much easier that way).
Cut to the opening act.
I can’t say enough about the opening act. I don’t remember who the hell they were, but I wanted to get one of their CDs. They were called something like “Saiges” and they played… erhm…. I have no idea. One part traditional country, one part bluegrass, one part rock and roll, one part old spahgetti western theme, one part everything else. They kicked some serious behind. The one thing that I will say is that I’ve never heard a band explode like they did. Almost all of their songs went from 0-90mph in the first note, and you went from relative silence to 5 guys just ripping it up with guitars and fiddles. Amazing.
During the break to get things set up, I thought I saw Darren, the accountant guy from my building, and I wandered out to see if I was right. I was, found him and chatted with him and his lady a bit. They asked where I was sitting and I told them about halfway up in the mezzanine. Darren said “well have I got a present for you!” and handed me sixth row tickets. Apparently they were originally going with friends, but they couldn’t make it so they were “stuck” with sixth row tickets (they had first row ones). Yohimbe and I of course, were quite happy with this 🙂 Not that we had bad seats, but getting close enough to see Jim Cuddy sweat was fun.
Remind me to tell the Garth Brooks story sometime.
A pause to get things set up and then Blue Rodeo came onstage. They were of course, awsome. I’ve never been to a Blue Rodeo concert before, but I own all their albums, and I was very impressed. They had a high energy show, with lots of interaction with the crowd. At one point Jim announced “this is the latest single off the new album, whatever that means… I guess that’s the one we ask you to download first.” I thought that that was cool. He also made fun of some latecomers, and Greg Keelor also had a good time. Man, that man has some serious energy on stage with a guitar… wow. The first song they did was Is It You, with just Jim and Greg and their guitars. At the end of the first chorus they got messed up, and each started singing a different verse. It was bizzare to hear the same tune, and same vocal pitches come out, but have two sets of words. They kept going until they hit the chorus againd and recovered nicely, but they (and the audience) had a good laugh, and it was nice to see that they weren’t some lame lip syncing act that is hugely over produced with no substance.
They encored with Five Days in May, and two other tunes that went well. I think that everyone came off very happy, I know I did.
Head back to transit, drive back, drop Yohimbe off, end up back home at around 1:30am, where I prompty fell asleep until I woke up this morning with a strange dream in my memory.