There are precious few rock and roll bands still want to see. Thank God for comedy.

Oh the irony there.

So Yeah. Last night, I got to see Eddie Izzard at the Walker and was treated to a Springsteenesque three hour or ad libs and odd riffs.

We don’t get a lot of higher end comedy shows here in Winnipeg. I can’t think of the comedy equivalent of AC/DC ,which would be the sort of big time comedian that would sell out here in river city.

I can see why a certain segment of Winnipeg would have some issues with Izzard. Transvestite. Well there is that. Atheist. Well there is that too. But English. That’s beyond the pale.

Of course having been a fan for years and being a fellow Kent-ite, er Kenter, er Kentishperson, I was going to be front row for that. Ticketmaster had other plans.

But a good crowd did show up and it was truly an interesting mix of young and old, hip and downright nerdy. The seats are as hard as concrete and I managed to get stuck behind some guy whose head was the size of a beachball, so it took some nomadism to find a good view. It was worth the work.

Izzard was on form last night and managed to drag an audience through about four billion years of history. Raptors to Popes makes for a strange evening.

Izzard makes this show look like work in progress and Izzard did a lot of bits that sort of didn’t go anywhere or end anywhere. Although these digressions were very funny. Izzard has such a style that you are drawn along on these journeys and the trip is better than the destination anyway. I was expecting an hour and half and got three.

This show mines much the same content as Ricky Gervais’ stand up and even a bit of Carlin. A lot of riffs on the Bible and the absence of god. “If god existed you would think he would flick Hitler’s head off.” History is Izzard’s angle and he took the audience from the Sumerians to Charles Darwin with a lot of Latin and Greek in between.

While i like athiest humour as much as the next person, Izzard’s real talents show in those oddball digressions about rabbits and raptors.

There are not a lot of shows that mix the Battle of Themopylae, problems with Latin, Giraffe conversations, the problems of medeval journalism and Noah’s ark.

The difference between the top tier comedians as opposed to hacks and rock stars is the willingness to exclusively try new stuff. Sting can go out do a concert and try his new stuff, but if it isn’t going so well, you just strum the opening bars to Roxanne and the crowd goes wild. For a comedian, it’s not like Izzard could slide into Death Star Canteen. Although that would have been sort of cool. So there is a fair amount of bravery in reinventing a whole show. And a fair amount of trust from an audience who pay to go along for the ride.

Was this show as good as Glorious or Dressed to Kill? Not quite, but it was very funny and it was great to see an artist actually work some new stuff in front of an audience. Brave yeah? Excellent definitely.

Adrian Belew rocks Winnipeg

Today, the chances of seeing something musically significant is both easier, as great musicians find themselves playing at small venues, and more difficult, as fewer great musicians are finding a way to get their music out and get themselves into any venue at all. I don’t want to sound like an old fogey, but while many of today’s “rock stars” for want of a better term are interesting performers, there are precious few real musicians; musicians with the sort of discipline and technical expertise that was on show last night at the Adrian Belew Power Trio show.

The Power Trio lived up to the name last night and blew everyone’s socks off at the West End Cultural Centre with a set that mixed new songs, experimental stuff and some classics. While he is approaching sixty and sports a hair-do one could politely call ‘ironic,’  Belew was spectacular. The other two members of the band are a couple of kids in their early 20s and boy can they play.

Belew lived up to his billing as one of the most innovative guitarists of the last 30 years. He has played with everyone from David Bowie to Laurie Anderson, The Talking Heads to  Nine Inch Nails to Frank Zappa and of course is best known for his stints with the later incarnations of King Crimson. Belew’s distinctive style and sound and that were in evidence last night. The Crimson songs he played (including a second encore rendition of Elephant Talk) seamlessly fit with his solo work. I don’t know whether that indicates how much Crimson’s later sound was down to him, or the fact that the rest of the trio sounded distinctly like Bruford and Levin. Apparently Robert Fripp can be done away with after all.

The kids in the band, Eric Slick on drums and his sister Julie Slick (both related distantly to Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane) were awesome. And I don’t mean just for kids. They more than held their own with Belew. On one hand I was very impressed and then on the other melancholic. If these two had emerged in the 1970s, they would as well known as Chris Squire or Bill Bruford and have an army of followers. But these days are not easy on the prog rockers and I suspect they will end up doing session work with some ditzy 17 year-old Rhianna clone.

Bassist Julie Slick of the Adrian Belew Trio.

I hope not, for their sake and, who knows, maybe there will be a revival of prog rock music as guys (and I’m not being sexist here but let’s face it, there were 20 women at the concert last night which was about 21 more than I expected) finally decide they don’t like dance floor fluff and want some decent , difficult music.

A great show. And well worth seeing. As i get older i am increasingly more interested in hunting out this type of show than seeing the like of Fleetwood Mac doing yet another rendition of Rhiannon for 200 bucks a ticket.

Now I have seen three of the four members of King Crimson albeit it at different venues. If only we could get them in the one room, now that would be great.

Where is my sequined glove?

Oh good lord…enough with the Jackson hysteria. We are going to end up with people throwing themselves on his funeral pyre. Does silicone burn or melt? So maybe not a pyre then. Perhaps a glass pyramid in which his remains are entombed in a glass case ala Lenin.

Maybe Don Mclean will reappear with a new version of “American Pie.”

The newspapers, airwaves, internet are all full of nothing but Michael Jackson, his untimely death and his lasting legacy on the history of civilization, or indeed the universe as a whole. Apparently, the Internet actually slowed last night and Google and Twitter crashed. The latter being not a bad thing.

Am I missing something? Did I miss a meeting? I mean, I remember the early 1980s, was a young man then. Was really into music. Liked R and B. But I never quite got the whole Jackson thing.

Michael Jackson was a talented performer no doubt. The Jackson Five one of Motown’s best groups. His first two solo albums ‘Off the Wall’ and ‘Thriller’ were excellent. But that was the last good work he did. And that was 1982. Or 27 years ago.

I heard a guy on the radio this morning saying that when Thriller came out every young man wanted to be Michael Jackson.

Er no, not really. I can’t think of anyone who wanted to be Michael Jackson. Especially me. I wanted to be Sting or Paul Weller. I definately did not want to be disco johnny one glove. People liked to dance to his records, but really that was about it. Anyone caught wearing a bejeweled glove would have been roundly jeered. I can’t imagine a whole lot of sequined hats and moon walking going on in downtown Newcastle either.

I am not going to criticize the music people like and if Jackson was an important part of your youth, then great. But enough with the hystrionics.

The revisionism about his impact on videos is also crap. British bands had been producing “videos” for Top of the Pops for years before MTV. If you don’t believe me, consider this…the first song ever played on MTV (trivia alert) was the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”  It wasn’t called “Video Will Kill the Radio Star” because videos were already well established. Jackson just made a really long video and, finally, it was an American not a Brit. And only Americans invent stuff, right?

Another person on the radio show this morning was going on about how he was a pioneer who broke down racial barriers, an artist who merged R and B, pop and rock and roll and got African American music onto rock stations. Really? I thought Elvis had done that about 25 years earlier. And if you don’t buy the Elvis argument then certainly the Rolling Stones and MC5.Or mmm, I don’t know, Jimmy Hendrix?!?

This neatly brings me to the main irritation in all this hagiography, namely the glossing over the fact that Jackson was an alleged child molester. He bought off and silenced those who accused him and so was never convicted, but let’s be straight about this….no normal person would let their child within three miles of him. Whatever led him to his strange behaviors and his pathologies was certainly complex and facilitated by an army of enablers, but that still doesn’t change the facts. His aberrant behavior was criminal in the worst way.

We have this habit in our society of building people up into gods, then tearing them down and then deifying again in death. Jackson for example — King of Pop, freak, bat shit crazy, most important music genius since Mozart. Farrah Fawcett is another person who died yesterday. 70s goddess, 90s nut bar, now in death the bravest American woman ever. She was none of those things, except perhaps fighting her disease with a modicum of bravery and dignity. Princess Diana another example. Just prior to her death people were calling her batty. Then she dies and now she is Ste. Diana of Kensington.

Our lives have become a sea of trivia and the lives of unimportant clowns and jesters are elevated to such heights of celebrity and adulation it’s getting weirdly close to Huxley’s Brave New World… and rather than getting upset about real stuff…like why we just got fleeced by corrupt idiots on Wall Street, burbing witches in Kenya and why aren’t we supporting the uprising in Iran, we instead choose the clutter up the internet with our comments and bleatings on a faded, crazy singer/dancer.

And for those guys on the radio who said his music will be celebrated 200 years from now, consider Rudolph Valentino. 100,000 people showed up to his funeral in 1926 and I defy anyone to pick his picture out of a line up today.  Well you could now, he is at the top of the post. (Ohh that’s why!)

your typical hairy prog rockers

I think I have finally become that old guy that complains about kid’s music today. “When I was a young lad we had real music not this rubbish” I think my old man said something like this. I guess he didn’t appreciate Elvis Costello. Although as I get older and appreciate Sinatra more I think he might have had a point. A small point.

I bring this up because I had a conversation the other night with a friend from Japan and a friend of his who is widely regarded as an expert on all things musical and who has, allegedly, ten thousand CDs and records. The type of guy who knows the producer’s wife’s name on Mott’s first album.

My friend K teaches music in his hometown of Himeji. We were at a local pub downing the customary Guinness when he said something extraordinary. A couple of students came to his house for a lesson recently and were amazed to actually pick up one of K’s CDs. They were musicians and yet they did not own records or CDs. All the music they owned came in the form of an MP3 downloaded to their Ipods. It seems astounding to me that this is the case for kids today. Japanese kids are a little ahead of the technical toys curve but North Americans are getting that way too.

One of my favourite music videos is by a Canadian band called Grapes of Wrath. In the song, “All The Things I Wasn’t” a tracking camera follows one of the band members as he puts various records on an old mono record player. Like I used to do as a kid. I can vividly remember those favourite albums I used to cherish. Jazz by Queen, My Aim is True by Elvis Costello, All the Mod Cons by The Jam, Avalon By Roxy Music, Fragile by Yes and Then There Were Three by Genesis. I can remember going to the record shop on King Street in Ramsgate and flipping through the racks and then getting the album actually given to you in a sleeve, checked over for warps and scratches. It was just like the shop in ‘High Fidelity.’ And I’m not that old. I can still remember the liner notes, the album art, the tactile joy of putting a record on the player and sweeping that arm onto the record and that couple of seconds of crackle before the music started. When things moved to CD, it was less of a joy to play music but it seemed easier. CDs still had substance and the album art was smaller but it was still there.

But today that doesn’t exist for kids. An entire lifetime of record collecting could be reduced to a couple of hours of downloading. Can kids today enjoy the feeling of finally tracking down that obscure Gong album you had heard about but never seen? Or unwrapping that ‘In Through The Out Door’ album not knowing which version of the cover you’d get. Now, it’s a couple of clicks. In one way that’s better, — I can find that Killing Joke song with little trouble but in another way it’s just too simple and too much instant gratification.

Another issue is the type of music today. When I “were a lad” or even when I was a music journalist, there were 20 to 30 record companies. And they all had diverse rosters of artists. In 1980, you could buy new albums by Costello, Joe Jackson, Ian Dury, Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, The Jam, Clash, Police, Pretenders, Talking Heads, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin, Springsteen, Dire Straights and Queen. And that was just a few albums. Who could you buy today? The Killers, Rhianna and Sum Blink Hoooberstank 152. It’s not that these acts are bad…ok actually they are crap…and Franz Ferdinand and Arcade Fire don’t constitute a movement in great new music… my worry is that there just isn’t the diversity any more. Once one act does well —  a pop tart like Britney for example — there are ten clones. A dancy hippy chick sampling old 80s riffs like Rhianna and a few weeks later and the radio is full of the same crap. It’s all disappointing.

There is has always been crap music of course. In the sixties, for every Jimmy Hendrix there was a Paul Revere and the Raiders and in the seventies while there was Mott The Hoople there was also Showaddywaddy.

But today it seems the good stuff is marginalized (when was the last time you hear Radiohead on the radio…ironic no?) and the crap is now dominant. Few other art forms have this type of dirth. I would wish kids could have music they could call their own. I don’t think that has happened since the grunge era about 15 years ago. Now there are four record companies run by accountants who think Christina Aguilera is a soul singer.

The reason I bring this up is K’s friend began talking about Soft Machine. Now, even that band is too arcane for me. But he spoke lovingly and passionately about them. The bartender at the pub we were in chimed in and said he had been playing them in the bar the week before. What followed was a passionate and funny debate on the best Soft Machine album. They shared an experience. I had no idea who the band was but these people were really passionate about them. And what of young people today? Will they ever have that type of discussion about N’Sync? I doubt it.

Pop music is in a sorry state and the promise of the internet and downloading has yet to change things. I trust kids will sooner or later turn that around and music will be listenable again. I hope because if I have to listen to Aguilera whoop one more time while sampling Aretha Franklin I am going to nuts.

It’s bad enough when you don’t know the name of any bands on a tribute album but when you haven’t even heard of the band that the tribute album is for…then you know its all over.

I was looking in a record shop…oh how quaint…I mean a music store…and saw a tribute album to some band named Lower Than Vomit or something. There was a day when I knew the name of every obscure band and cherished albums that most people had never heard of…Spirit of Eden…that Julia Fordham album…Robyn Hitchcock’s Globe of Frogs….The The …Today, I couldn’t name two bands on the charts.

I blame radio. Depending on who you listen to you in our fair berg you either get 24 hours of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, 24 hours of AC/DC and Journey or three stations all owned by the same people playing Rihanna on a loop…because, you know, I haven’t heard that damn Umbrella song enough. Just once it would be really cool to flick on the radio and hear The Jam, an unusual Clash or Costello song, Snoop even, anything but endless bloody bleeding Kashmir. I’m not asking for The Motors or Uriah Heap but how about something remotely interesting.

Meanwhile back in the record shop I reminisce about the record shop on King Street when I was a kid…a grotty place full of grimy snot bags ala High Fidelity…flicking through bins of vinyl records…my first Queen album…Breakfast in America….but after flicking through today’s cd bins I realized I have an itunes account. Oh yeah. Maybe I’m not that old, so bugger nostalgia…now to create that John Wetton compilation…

Manchester has more of its share of arses. More on that later. But the lads who make up Oasis are alright by me.

It’s getting pretty rare to see an all out old fashioned rock and roll band these days. But last night I got to see one of the most honest working rock bands around at the MTS Centre. I was pleasantly surprised by just how good Oasis are live. Despite the sound being pretty muddy for the first half of the show, they still rocked the ‘peg and got the usually docile Winnipeg crowd acting more like a soccer crowd. Admittedly more Notts County than Man City, but better than nothing. By the encore, the crowd was rocking, which I think the band appreciated.

Liam Gallagher is a cocky bastard but I have to say he pulls it off. I was surprised about how strong a singer he is. And brother Noel actually cracked a couple of smiles, which seemed to indicate they were having a good time.

With any Oasis concert you almost expect a fight to break out on stage or to be told to “fooock off” but last night all things seemed very civil. I think Noel was happy about Man City getting sold by that Thai bloke and them buying Robinho at the trade deadline. Then again i think this was only the third or fourth gig on the tour.

They started with a couple of more recent and new songs, which were OK although hardly groundbreaking stuff. The band kicked it up a notch with a great version of Cigarettes and Alcohol…pretty hard to go wrong with that crowd pleaser…and then proceeded to mix it up with hits and lesser known “b” sides. They wound up the set with Wonderwall and The Importance of Being Idle. The encore was a good mix of Noel and Liam with Noel doing great versions of Don’t Look Back In Anger, with lots of crowd support, and a song I’d never heard before..Falling Down. Just when you though Liam was pissed off or something and not making it to the encore, he showed up to render a great performance of Champagne Supernova and the Beatles’ I Am The Walrus.

It is a great loss to music that the Beatles decided not to tour after 1965. After watching Oasis nail I am the Walrus you get a glimpse of what it might have been like to see the Beatles do songs like that live.

Overall well worth it. And given that tickets were around fifty bucks it makes you wonder why Neil Young, who is from Winnipeg BTW, can’t tour for anything less than hundred and fifty bucks a ticket.

grumpy ole bastard

It was great to finally see Van Morrison. But I got the impression he wasn’t too pleased to see me.

There are few people left in the music world that I have a burning desire to see. There are a few old farts that I wouldn’t mind seeing still…Clapton maybe, Laurie Anderson, Gabriel, Billy Bruford, Prince, Oasis, King Crimson if they ever got their cool line up back together. That’s really it. The rest are the smaller type guys who might be interesting to see in a club ala the great Tony Levin Todd Rundgren show I saw late last year.

Van Morrison was one of those guys. Have a lot of his albums and even like the more obscure ones. I didn’t go to last night’s concert at the MTS Centre to hear the greatest hits package. I went to see someone who is a great performer, vocalist and someone who has a great body of work from which to draw on. Someone who is adept at reinterpreting his own songs. I also realize he is sixty and hardly likely to blow the roof off the place but… who thought you would leave a Van Morrison concert and be home in bed, sober, at 10.20?

As Sick Boy says in the film Trainspotting “he was good but not great.??? The sound was way too low for that size venue. And the band was, well just way too mellow. That might have been a great show for the Folk Festival, outside, warm summer night, sun going down type feel…but for an arena on a cold Thursday night the show didn’t cut it. I heard some people say they really loved it and the laid back vibe of the whole show. I am not sure I would go to Van Morrison to be laid back. He’s not a jazz singer. He a full out blues, soul, rock singer.

Van’s voice was great although that mumble got tiring after a while — there were a couple of sings that if you didn’t know the riff already you would not have recognized from the lyrics which for the entire evening were unintelligible. But then Van has always been that way I guess. I was impressed by the amount of sax he played…he is a great sax player I’ll give him that. But the band while tight really didn’t get going …just noodled through songs, hardly rocking out or pushing it. Restrained would be how I describe them. A great contrast was Dylan a couple of years ago when he brought along Charlie Sexton to liven things up. And even Morriosn has toured with Georgie Fame and Candy Dulfer to liven things up. (mmm Candy Dulfer….but i digress)

And how many freakin’ piano, violin and steel guitar solos can you fit into one concert? In fact, every song had one of each.  I think last night set the record for most bass solos. My rule for bass solos is one is two too many. And the solos hardly blew anyone’s socks off. It really did seem like people jamming in a kitchen. Which might have been what Morrison was going for, and he might feel ok about charging 150 bucks for people to join him in his kitchen but it was a bit rich to charge that much and then put on that type of show in an arena.

He wasn’t going to do a greatest hits thing — he always does obscure stuff from his back catalgue and a few old standards mixed in, which is to be expected and that is fine as he usually does awesome renditions. Last night featured, oddly, nothing from the new album but a bunch of songs from “What’s Wrong With This Picture” of a couple of years ago. But he didn’t really come up with anything exciting for me.  And I am not sure I was alone, as the crowd really didn’t get into it until he played one of the more famous hits ‘Domino,’ and then rather than run with energy that generated he just slowed it down again. Finally, the show wrapped it up with an encore of sorts which consisted of  ‘Gloria’ and ‘Brown Eyed Girl.’ And to be frank, he really looked like he couldn’t be arsed about doing the hits at the end. It was an obligatory run through. Gee.Ardh.Arggh.Arggglll. Eyeyeyeye. Gaaaaaarghieeey eh. It seemed exciting at the time because the rest of the show was so slow. So no ‘Wild Nights,’ no ‘Have I Told You Lately,’ no ‘Here Comes the Night’ nothing from “Astral Weeks’ nothing from his last album oddly, no ‘Caravan,’ no “Jackie Wilson Said’ no “Queen of the Slipstream’ and most disappointingly no “Into The Mystic’ etc…

Apparently, Morrison does a 90 minutes set not a second more…If that is the case I would like to get my 90 minutes of Van Morrison and not 20 minutes of Morrison and 110 minutes of  Hammond organ solos.

Here is the set list:  My Own Business (band only) T-Bone Shuffle (band only). Wavelength. All Work and No Play. Stranded. Whinin’ Boy Moan/Symphony Sid. Domino. Little Village. They Sold Me Out. Cleaning Windows. In the Midnight. Baby Please Don’t Go. Days Like This. Moondance. St. James Infirmary. Goin’ Down Geneva/Brand New Cadillac. Help Me. Brown Eyed Girl. Gloria