Last summer had been interesting. Not only has the weather been much different than it ever has before, and not only have I traveled to a few more of the cities in Canada that I always wanted to, but the 80's are back with a vengeance, and the bands that we all knew and loved back then are coming back for the resurrgence. Everyone is happy. The bands are making some extra bucks, the fans are reliving high school days, and the music is just.... well it's just awesome. Sure, I might have been a wee thing of 0-9 during the 80's, but I did have an older sister, and if you don't think I had Barbie and My Little Pony dance parties to her Miami Sound Machine tape, you are wrong wrong wrong.

Over my time this summer, I managed to see a lot of good old music and see a lot of music-related things. Some of it stretches back farther than the 80's for sure. But it was all life-altering stuff, very important stuff in a number of ways. I started off in Montreal this summer, where I took a side trip to Ottawa for a day. My companion and I spent the day being shown around town and dumped off at the art gallery by a fine and knowledgeable fellow who has done amazing work to get my photos looking hot. Wanna see what he does? Here, this is what he does:

As luck would have it, I found myself a couple days later in Toronto. I was wondering what to do with myself during the daytimes, as my original plan for a weekend companion had unintentionally fallen through. I walked out of my hostel and headed down Richmond Street on my first day there, in the direction of MuchMusic and Queen West and all the muggy, dirty, big-city insanely fun things Toronto has to offer. As I was in front of the Chapters store, a svelte young woman in hot pants and a teeny Molson shirt happily handed me a matchbook-sized flyer, telling me there was a Molson Indy party going on on the next block that night. I grabbed the flyer out of idle interest, and quickly scanned it. And almost fell over. I could see from where I was standing that there was a race car and some race flags and a whole lotta Molson stuff by a fenced-in parking lot on the next block. And a huge stage. What would be appearing on that stage? It boggles the mind... Among others, Honeymoon Suite, Alannah Myles, Alan Frew, and Loverboy. Holy shit!

Well, I had obligations that first evening, but I was able to go for the earlier bits of the show. It was outside in a parking lot behind a bar, completely sponsored by Molson. So that's what it was, a Molson beer garden with burgers and a bunch of old bands. Awesome. Perfect way to celebrate the summertime. I was essentially having a business meeting over a plastic cup of beer, shouting over the tunes, until I had to depart for another show much further down Queen Street. That's where I fell into a grate on the road. But that's another story.

It was the following night that I descended upon the Montana's parking lot for the headliners. Man... it got pretty crowded in there. No wonder - free show, cheap beer, good times. Who the hell wouldnt go there? Even the meek, dark-haired boy from my hostel was there.... working. I later learned he was British, hanging out by himself in Toronto for possibly months, just sitting every night on a couch downstairs with his nose in a book or a laptop, paying no mind to the movie-watching, social travellers surrounding him. Here he was, looking quite stunned by what was going on. I guess they don't do this sort of thing in Britain.

I dont blame him though. Words can hardly describe some of the things I witnessed there that evening. Myself and my two new Toronto pals spent the entire evening watching some of the best and some of the worst. Bands with storied pasts, Canadian legacies. Some of them have aged gracefully. And some of them are Alannah Myles. Honeymoon Suite was incredible. If you're Canadian and you don't remember them, shame on you. Singer Johnnie Dee (okay so this was really just him, but come on... Honeymoon Suite!) looked pretty hot, he wasn't a raging lunatic trying to be twenty years old again. He just sang his songs with vigour, looking extremely happy to be on stage again in front of an attentive crowd.

But then was Alannah Myles. I was kind of excited about this. Yeah, I liked her. Why? I don't know. Didn't everyone like her? Inexplicably? I remember very distinctly being in grade 8 and doing model-castle-building projects with my best friend in her basement, and all we listened to for like a week straight were Alannah Myles tapes. I think she may have even had a CD! Unheard of! So, my personal connection with her was there. Without Alannah, that castle would have been nothing. I ended up with my heart simply going out to the poor girl. Oh. Dear. God.

She come onto the stage in a head-to-toe red crushed-velvet jumper thing - tights and a big shirt over top. Knee-high black boots. A scarf. Her hair all done up in a bun and a wicked smile on her face. She was here to corrupt someone. She ended up looking sad and lost. She plunked down on a bar stool and proceeded to swing her legs around, sitting upright, lounging back saucily, cavorting with her mic stand, flinging that scarf around, and all the while with that psycho look on her face. Was she drunk? Insane? Having a mid-life crisis?

The crowning moment of course came when she stood up and knocked over her barstool. She tried to catch it a few times while singing, but it didn't happen, and she eventually let it clatter to the floor. She dashed around the stage, laughing, molesting her band, singing forcefully to the crowd, tempting men to come closer, and falling onto her back and doing scissor kicks and bicycle kicks into the air with her legs. What was happening?? I took a trip to the outhouses (the evening's highlight for sure) during one song, and when I emerged, Myles was starting up arguably her strongest hit (my favourite was always "Love Is"), "Black Velvet." Well, that was neat. I could almost feel my friend hot-gluing my watch to my wrist in her basement as we made that castle. But then, she crowned even her earlier crowning achievement. She started climbing the speakers. And mind you, these speakers are sitting on uneven pavement in a parking lot. They move. A lot. She seemed to have no concern for her own safety, and even though she had some difficulty climbing the stupid speaker towers, she cajoled and rocked back and forth on top of them every time they moved a bit. A few people came over to try and hold them in place while she grinned and shimmied up there, and she took that to mean they totally wanted a piece of her. So she started shaking her butt at them and leaning down towards them. Eventually she crawled back off, again with difficulty, and continued kicking and dancing and lifting her shirt up til her set was done.

Phew. Exhausting.

I was sorely disappointed to find out that Alan Frew was not performing. I loved Glass Tiger. Maybe he performed the night before. Argh!

So all that was left was Loverboy. I had to call a friend of mine back home so she could listen to it for a while. These guys are somewhere in between the grace of Honeymoon Suite and the insanity of Alannah Myles. Mike Reno seems to still want to be a kid, and he still kind shuffles around awkwardly in an attempt to dance all hip and stuff. But you have to forgive him because the music is so much fun! And it was fun. Everyone was dancing, beer cups were flying. Loverboy kicks ass. Someone mentioned somewhere about how it's too bad that he can't shoehorn himself into his red leather pants anymore (is that a blessing or...?), but you know, it's not even Reno's ass on that oh-so-famous album cover. It's a 14-year-old girl. Hmmmm.

Fast-forward to late August. Plans here were to go with a small group of people to Seattle to see the Curiosa tour, which was put on by, of course, the Cure, and featured all kinds of fringe acts of many genres, mostly really super-excellent. The Cure would have fit into the oldschool category, even though they are more active currently than anyone else I'm discussing here. But two days before the show, we get a call saying the show's been cancelled (okay, moved to a Tuesday, and it's now only the Cure). None of us could schedule a Tuesday off, but either way, we had a hotel room we couldn't get rid of, so down we went for the weekend to Seattle.

We drove down, got settled in our hotel, and then emerged again in the characteristically-dismal Seattle day. It was rainy, cold, windy, grey... and we were on the hunt for the dead. We started out looking for Jimi Hendrix's grave. We had directions to it... somewhat cryptic, like a treasure map. I guess it kind of is, huh? Go to the pyramid, then find the sundial. Twenty feet west of the sundial is his grave. We got there and noticed a couple other guys carrying rolls of paper, wandering aimlessly around the same field. All the headstones were those flat ones, flush with the grass. So we really had to keep our eyes peeled. After finally figuring out which way was indeed west, we walked back and forth down the rows numerous times, to no avail. "Hey, what are you looking for?" one of the guys asked me. "What do you think we're looking for?" I replied. We joined forces and still had no luck. We were soaked. One of the guys called a buddy of his and discovered that the grave had been moved to a shrine near the front of the cemetary - the strange granite gazebo thing I had commented on while we drove in. We spotted it, walked over, and noticed a couple of aging hippies clustered in the small area. They were both smoking furiously, had an empty bag from McDonald's beside them, and the woman was kneeling in front of Hendrix's tomb marker, making a rubbing onto the back of a photocopied drawing with colourful crayons. The drawing was cool. The woman's sister in Germany had drawn it. Below the inscription on the tomb was a thick layer of multi-coloured chalk dust and other artist materials' shavings that had accumulated over the short time the grave had been located here.

I suddenly realized I was standing with Jimi Hendrix.

Our new friends made charcoal rubbings onto large sheets of paper, and then some more people arrived. We took some photos. I fell in love with the stone on the outside of the shrine with Hendrix's signature engraved into it. And the rest of the family line was also being progressively buried there in a circle around the outside.

The rain continued, and we left for our next destination. A rich area of Seattle, near the waterfront. We parked by the ocean and walked up a steep hill to a small park, basically planted right on the side of said hill. In the park are two benches. On the benches is a lot of penmanship, some candles, a few odds and ends. Through a small gap in the trees, you can see a balcony and some doors on a house that have been well-documented since 1994. It's a beautiful house, the one where Kurt Cobain died. I felt a little strange standing there, peering at that window. That was it. That's where it happened, whatever 'it' is. I never counted myself as a huge Nirvana fan, but no music-loving person can deny the significance of the event that transpired here, and to be so close to it was both humbling and unnerving. At the top of the hill, by a winding road that passed above the house, clinging to the fence surrounding the upper yard, there was a row of blackberry bushes. In the waning summertime, the fruit was quite past season, all shrivelled and mouldering on the branch. But as I passed by, I spotted one single, absolutely perfect, absolutely ripe, absolutely alive berry. I thought that was very interesting. And in the tradition of better-to-burn-out-than-to-fade-away, I plucked the lone survivor off the branch before it had a chance to wither like the rest.

We stood for a while on the grey beach by the car while we contemplated this weird world we're in. It was a gorgeous spot, and we could easily see how the area attracted Cobain to it. Beautiful, a bit lonely, and surrounding himself with old money that likely couldn't care less who was living in their neighbourhood. We left when a group of kids showed up with bags of McDonald's and a bottle of whiskey.

The next day was mostly spent at the Experience Music Project. For anyone who has not been there, drop what you're doing right now. Quit your job, take your kids out of school, whatever. Just get to Seattle and go to the EMP. Yeah, it costs $20 US to get in (hint : find a place that has racks of tourism brochures - there's one that has coupons for EMP admission), but you can easily spend a day there. We spent about four hours, and I felt like I hadn't seen it all. Beyond anything else, the place is amazing just to look at. I could walk around the outside of the melted-plastic-metallic scuplture of a building for hours and be quite happy. There's a fair beside it too if you want another angle, like from the top of a roller coaster. Inside, it's equally impressive from an architectural standpoint. But the content! My goodness...

I think it's even more important to go to this place if you aren't a musician. Why? Because, you get a chance to see how things are done, you get to go into rooms and jam out on instruments, you get to stand in a booth while a computer teaches you how to drum, you get to watch Joseph Arthur make weird noises, you get to mix a demo, you get to read over Rhett Miller's lyrics in his awesome Richard Marx notebook, you get to record a demo for ten bucks. If you don't make music yourself, you don't know what it takes, you don't know the magic that goes into it. This is barely a taste, but it gives you that feeling of how amazing it is to create something with your own hands and head and watch it come to life in front of you. And then you get to see all the stuff of the stars, all the flash and splash of the industry. A living guitar tornado, a Beatles exhibit, a Seattle-history exhibit, an incredible, sense-assaulting room full of rock costumes... It's unreal. And we got doses of what we had witnessed the day before - a healthy Nirvana contingent, and a full room of Hendrix.

That Hendrix exhibit was spectacular. I'll leave it to you to actually go there and check it all out, but suffice to say, that man lived through a lot in his short life. But here's the part that got me and my gals riled up. In a good way. One of the displays has some articles from an old music magazine, and one of the articles was a full-page spread on Procol Harum. Here's the history - one day, our fine friends in Retrograde played a show at a bar called the Royal. Afterwards, the bar turned into a dance club, and the band went out back to load their gear into their van. When we went out there to visit, there was a small group of older fellows standing around talking to them, British accents abounding, video camera in hand to capture the famous Vancouver back alleys. They introduced themselves by first names only, and then said they'd just played at the Commodore. They had so many questions for us about Vancouver, and were so much fun to talk to. Dude, it was Procol Harum. Somehow they ended up in the back alley behind the Royal, talking with a local band and us gals and recording everything for... well, who knows. We're on some Procol Harum tour reel I suppose. That's just bonkers - and here they are immortalized in the Hendrix exhibit. Neat.

We left EMP, but not before I picked up a fun guitar-themed shot glass. So then it rained some in Seattle (my travel and show tradition of the year I think) and we had food in a crazy Irish pub off one of the main streets. I got the hugest deep-fried meal I've ever had in my life for $5 because their new cook screwed up the order, and rather than chuck all the extra food, they just gave it to me. And that was pretty much it for south of the border.

Does the old school ever end though? I think not. Days later, there was a show that I had literally been waiting a lifetime for. Indeed, the last time the two shared a stage was 22 years ago, which is pretty close to my whole life. Images In Vogue and Spoons. Yikes! If you're Canadian and were alive in the 80's you should know these two bands as well. I had the good fortune of meeting Dale Martindale, IIV's lead singer, about three years ago on a trip to Toronto. It was a good way to get acquainted with him, as he had a different band at the time that no one knew a lot about, so it was really casual just to hang out with the guy. He came to Vancouver then too, but I hadn't seen him in almost that entire three years, so you can bet I was looking forward to this. Despite the fact that my camera decided to break irreparably the day before the show, and therefore I got almost no photos from the gig, it was pretty amazing to watch.

So here I stand, wondering if maybe a band like the Strokes will do a reunion tour in 2024 when the 00's start getting retro-popular again. The whole night, the DJs prepped the crowd by playing an awesome selection of 80's music. Much of the crowd was sitting at this point. Interesting crowd. Of course it was largely comprised of middle-aged folks who had been in high school or their twenties when IIV and Spoons were simply the tops. Some of them dressed in their 80's finery, some of them just looking like parents on their one-night-a-year to get really smashed. Good a night as any, right? The remainder of the crowd was the hipster set, who find such bands to be so delightfully de rigeur. Anyhow, Spoons were awesome. I, certainly, had never seen them before. Amazing guitarmanship, great male-female vocal harmonies. There were a few guitar-cord trips, no injuries though. The floor of the Commodore bounced with enthusiasm. This all comes from a time when music really did have substance. No matter how cheesy you find the 80's tunes to be looking at them now, they truly were pretty innovative, and really great songwriters. Okay, not all of them, but I suppose just with there being less music around in general, less accessibility, only the best ones made it, and that shows, especially alongside a today where anyone can get their time in the spotlight. I bet even I could. I'm gonna go get me a manager.

It was fun and danceable, and people really got excited about it. I have so much more to write about this show than I do about half the schlock I see now. It's amazing how bands can hit the right time (22 years later...) and just completely do it up. They all have great haircuts. Is that relevant? I dunno, just a thought. They still move like gods. And the people still idolize them as such. I couldn't believe the women who stormed the front of the stage squealing at the top of their lungs about Martindale and what a babe he is. "Oh my god, there he is! I see him I see him!" It wasn't him. But then they went off for a while about the Grapes of Wrath and how many times they'd seen that band and whatever else. It was like they were 14 again! Which is pretty nuts. But I have to ask, where are these enthusiastic people when 69 Duster (Martindale's other band from 2001), or Tom Hooper, or Kevin Kane (the Grapes of Wraths who now have solo careers) play shows in the city? Mysterious. I guess even nostalgia has its limits.

You can tell the IIV guys are having so much fun up there again with one another, smiling and laughing and hugging. I have never seen so many electronics on stage. All the 'futuristic' synths of yesteryear have been replaced by swanky widescreen plasma Macs. There's people in the crowd yelling to Martindale that he's still cute, and girls handing him notes, which he proudly displays, instructing him to shake his ass. And happily, he does. That guy can move. Shaking, dancing, posing, kicking, leaping, and making sure he takes tons of time to be right in his audience's faces, touching hands, clambering through the crowd, chucking people on the chin (even I got that, much to the squalling delight of the ladies beside me). Did Martindale knee me in the head because he knew I wouldn't really mind? He's very personable, loves the audience, and was given virtually the entire stage to run around on. He even leaned into the audience over my head near the end of the set and told three of us where he was planning to have an afterparty. Only, no one heard where he said. The girl beside me though was ecstatic. "Were we just singled out for the afterparty?" I don't know what she was thinking. Blow jobs and cocaine in the green room? Who knows, maybe it happened, I wasn't back there. But the afterparty, as I was told post-show by Martindale, was actually at a posh martini bar at the street level of the hotel I suppose he was staying in.

After the set finished (with the hit "Lust For Love"), the crowd, rather than leaving immediately, spread out across the floor and kept dancing to the DJ's groovy tunes. You only get so many chances to live a night in the 80's. I kinda wish I'd been more of a human then.

And so it continues. Here's another one that's still actively producing new music. Maybe not as old school as... no I guess he is, but he's just made the same style of music for so long without taking a long break from it, I guess it all sort of runs together. I'm talking of course about the super-ultra Canuck rock n' roll trans-Canada hero, Tom Cochrane. Get this - he played Malkin Bowl. It's an open-air amphitheatre in the city's big park, usually reserved for Broadway-style plays. And also get this - Vancouver decided to play devil's advocate and totally piss rain on the whole damn thing. On my way over, I almost vetoed the night. My alternate was a nice cozy dinner-and-drinks CD release industry night at the Media Club with the fine folks at Boompa! I had just bought a new camera (see earlier paragraph regarding broken camera) and hunkered down in a coffee shop to familiarize myself with it. So I'd already missed most of the Boompa! event, but looking out the windows at how much it was raining, and how much I didn't have an umbrella or anything waterproof, and not wanting to ruin a camera the day I bought it, I nearly ditched and went home to bed or something. I wasn't even really supposed to go to this show. I'd had a late invite from the opening band, Barlow, to go and shoot. Since the label set it up without me even raising a finger or having a chance to protest dragging my gear through inclement weather, it would have been rude of me not to go. Couple that with getting a 'where the fuck are you' call from part of Barlow's bunch as I sat staring at the rain in that coffee shop, and my mind was made up. I'd tough it out, and if it rained too much, well, no photos, sorry.

Everything on me was running with rivulets as I stood waiting for a bus that I wasn't even sure was hitting that route. It was thankfully, and I soon found myself sloughing up a muddy incline towards the Bowl. I was let in through a back gate, acquired a media pass that was somehow listed under one of the major TV networks, and then stood about in the musty, damp backstage area for a while trying unsuccessfully to dry off and warm up. No sir, I was not too happy at this point. Yeah, it would be a neat show. But there's a certain breaking point where carrying around twenty pounds of gear, having one's trusty machine break, being soggy for hours, nearly wiping out on sludgy mud, and sleeping an average of three hours a night for about a month that kind of adds up into a vicious cocktail of angst and miserableness. Thank goodness for the hilarious Sony label rep, always a cheery feller. I still found myself a bit anti-social, which isn't good when friends are introducing you to 20,000 people all at once. If all those people end up hating me, I can't blame them, for I was shooting daggers from my eyes I'm sure. There were violins and there was writing on the wall. Doesn't that sound melodramatic? But it's true.

Things changed a bit when the show started up. The audience out front was sparse at first, but surprisingly filled up quite a bit. Barlow wasn't overly impressed for a while, and they feared they'd sell maybe ten CDs that night if they were lucky. But more and more people filled the lawn furniture set up in rows in the soupy field. A sea of plastic, it was. It was like Quebec City all over again. With such a stunning hot summer, I imagine a lot of people bought tickets to this show, and were stuck with them no matter what the weather, so everyone just made the best of it. And it actually stopped raining for the most part when Barlow hit the stage. The huge, giant, enormous stage of doom. Man, they were so far back on that thing. I suppose that's a good thing where the gear was concerned, to avoid the pools of rainwater. And off Barlow went. With a band that had barely been together in that particular combination, they really pulled it off, wandering about and interacting like they'd been a group for eons.

Being good band boys, they went up to the merch booth afterwards to meet the people. The aforementioned label rep was up there busily barking away and selling CDs. An unprecedented amount. Really really unprecedented. Sony rep apparently decided that he should go into sales cuz he rocks at it, and the Barlow guys signed/talked to/met their new crop of fans, and found some old pals. And then Tom Cochrane came on. Man, it's Tom Cochrane. You just don't mess with that. First of all, he looks like my dad, which is just sort of bizarre. But he just has a way of commanding people... he's not like some extremely active guy, he's not a hugely-comedic cut up, but it's Tom Cochrane, and everyone knows and respects that. All eyes on the master of the Canadian roadtrip-highway-driving song. How many bands are doing that these days??? Oodles! Before you know it, he whipped out the "Life Is A Highway," and boy did that kick ass. Look people, don't even try to deny it, especially you west-coast folks.You know you've all bopped and mumbled through that whole song, and then screamed out "TO VANCOUVER'S LIGHTS!" at the top of your lungs every last damn time you heard that song. Don't lie to me. Don't lie! I can tell when you lie!

My dad. Not Tom Cochrane.

Tom Cochrane. Not my dad.

Anyhow, the past kicks ass! Screw the future, memories and our younger days are completely where it's at!

By Andy Scheffler
Photos : Andy Scheffler
Published : March, 2005.