Back Medows wrap up

Wow. What a week. I've been playing trumpet and banjolele with The Burning Hell for a while now and having a blast. Other than the hopefully impermanent damage done to my body from 4 straight days of playing music, staying up waaaaay past my bedtime and lots of travel with musicians of varying degrees of smellyness I'd have to say it was the most fun I've had in recent memory.

We started on Wednesday evening playing a studio party in Toronto. On this particular mini tour we were paired up with a great duo from Brooklyn: Jess Seagull and Shu Nakamura. These two are not only great musicians, they're a heck of a lot of fun to goof around with. Charlie Glasspool also introduced his new project 3C84: a band featuring music about outer space. The highlight of the evening for me had to be Jess Seagull's incredible shadow-puppet play about the history of corn. No explanation of this piece of art would do it justice, so I'll leave it at "wow!"

Everyone was great - there were enough cookies to feed a small army, nothing too important got broken and since I had to get up early for work as usual, I left reasonably early....around 1:00.

On Thursday night, it was off to Peterborough. I attended the performance of Kafka's "The Castle" adapted by Ryan Kerr which I thoroughly enjoyed, then rushed over to The Spill to play a Burning Hell show with Jess and Shu, They did the puppet show again for all the lucky people at The Spill.

Friday night, we had the great privilege of playing the Velvet Elvis in Oshawa. If you've never been, GO. It's the perfect mix of cool little cafe and house party. The proprietor Lisa is without exception the best hostess I've ever had the privilege of being hosted by. From the moment we walked through the door (all 9 of us) there were pitchers of beer, snack trays, sandwiches and it all just kept'a comin' all evening. I believe the band collectively drank enough draft beer to float our little Toyota Echo around in the parking lot. Most of the band stayed over but considering the fact we had a whole-day-long music festival to play the next day I jumped on the opportunity to get back to an actual bed and good old (sober) Dave Toby drove us back to Peterborough.

Our cello player Darcy was bedless for the evening, so I put him up at my folk's place since they were away and wouldn't mind a wayward musician being boarded for the evening. After a bachelor's breakfast of boiled eggs and toast, we set out on the trek to the
P.A.U. to bum a ride out to the festival site. I ran into Ben Rough of the Bloody Miracles and scored a ride out with him.

After a blistering and bumpy ride in the gear van we arrived at the festival site proper. Once we had signed in with the friendly and well-organized production folks, got the tents all set up and our gear sorted (and drank a cold beer) we began wandering around the lovely property while we were waiting for the first band to go on. DJ Who was spinning records to keep us all funky in the meantime. Between dancing (and sometimes while dancing) there was t-shirt and merch shopping, lots of getting our picture taken because we looked "colourful" (I think he meant weird) there was plenty of meet-'n-greet with friends old and new. After a few bands and a few more schedule shuffles, we were re-assigned the 4:05 timeslot. Perfect! Early enough in the day that everyone in the band is still sharp but late enough that the crowd has seen a bunch of bands and are now officially Warmed Up.

I have no idea what it sounded like out in the crowd, but the onstage sound was fantastic. Trumpet is one of those instruments that you can only play in tune if you can really hear yourself - and outdoor sound is notoriously bad (and difficult to do well). Major kudos to the audio crew. That was an amazing feat of cable, gear, ears and skill folks.

We played the best show we'd played all week and - get this - sold every last one of our remaining CD's! Even all the dusty old copies of Tortured Souls Burning Together. Now we can almost pay for the recording we'll be making this coming weekend at London's House of Miracles. Almost. I hope they take Canadian Tire money. It's great that folks enjoyed the show enough to dig into the merch - it's what pays our gas and keeps the big crazy mob shambling on to the next show.

Even though it's dirty and still smells like beer, I tip my hat to the organizers and crew of Back Medows 2007 - you kick ass. Except for having my tent periodically collapsed by foolish people who forgot flashlights (doesn't it get dark EVERY night?) and a short-lived conversation with some overstimulated fellows in the dance pit about how grown-ups behave in public I had a fantastic time. For those guys, it's never cool to shove your large friend very very hard into groups of other (much smaller) dancing people. To their credit, once I made my point that particular idiocy stopped. Other idiocy ensued, but at least it wasn't potentially dangerous to anyone but the idiots. Oh - and for the record, gentlemen - stage diving off a 2' stage into your group of 5 friends is lame.....EVEN if you come from Duro.