I did a fair bit of work massaging some presentations and software demos into shape last weekend, but there was also some downtime. The Ginger Ninja and I enjoyed dinner with the Accordion City foodie group/dinner club known as the Society of the Secret Pickle. The photo above shows me playing Happy Birthday to Pat, one of the guests at the event.
Photo by Pat.
I’ll write more about the Society of the Secret Pickle and the lovely food we had later, but in the meantime, you might want to check out:
Yes, that Dolph Lundgren – the guy who played “Ivan Drago” in Rocky IV and the cyborg preacher in Johnny Mnemonic. Here he is, bringing the house down with the long-underappreciated Elvis single as part of his co-hosting duties for Melodifestivalen, the event where the Swedish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest is chosen. He doesn’t just sing, he also dances, plays the drums, does some martial arts and rocks the black tie look:
How could I not like OMC’s one hit, How Bizarre? It’s a catchy little pop tune penned by a Pacific Islander that features the accordion (the credits say that Hershal Herscher played it) prominently. Although it has a happy “Pacific Rim pop” sound with its C-G-F chord progression, its bounciness belies its subject matter: gang life and trouble with the cops, New Zealand style. It’s a gangsta campfire song!
Released in New Zealand in 1995, it went triple platinum there, an achievement that Wikipedia says had not been surpassed as of 2005. In 1996 it found its way into the Australian, British and Canadian charts and even did well in the U.S., despite its being released for radio airplay only and not as a commercially-available single. How Bizarre sold nearly 4 million records between 1995 and 2000, making it the best-selling one ever to be recorded and released by a Kiwi band. (Somewhere, the guys from Split Enz are fuming.)
No visit to Halifax is complete without a stop to the Lower Deck pub for a pint (or five), and no rock band is complete without an accordion. A fortunate combination of the two came about when I went to Halifax to help run TechDays there in early November, and it resulted in the performance recorded in the video above, in which I joined the band for a rousing and drunken version of Steppenwolf’s classic, Born to Be Wild. Let this be a reminder to you: the accordion is not just a machine that creates music; it also creates serendipity.
Oddly enough, the band had never played the number before, but that never deterred them from doing so in front of an audience, and they played it as if it were a well-established part of their repertoire. This is not the first time that this has happened either – the Zaitchik Brothers, the band at our wedding reception, had also never played Born to Be Wild before, but we brought the house down. I’ll have to post a video of that one sometime.
I think that there’s something so basic, so primal, so inherently rock-and-roll-y in Born to Be Wild that it’s encoded into the genetic memory of rock musicians and hence they can play it on command without having rehearsed it.
While walking back to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel from Centre Mont-Royal through Montreal’s network of underground shopping malls and Metro tunnels, we passed by this pair of buskers, who were burning up their frets with some very fast-paced jazz:
Christian suggested that I join them, and moments later, the bassist, guitarist and I agreed to [...]
As a reader of this blog, chances are that someone read Goodnight Moon to you when you were a child:
And as a reader of this blog, chances are that you like offbeat humour and have at least a passing interest in rock and roll. This means that chances are you might enjoy the darkly amusing [...]
GO!’s host Brent Bambury gets the audience warmed up before the show.
A little while back, Jeff Goodes, producer for CBC Radio One’s Saturday morning flagship show GO!, emailed me asking if I’d like to do a radio appearance on a show featuring some kind of music-related contest. I said “of course!” and ended up at [...]
If you listen on CBC Radio One on Saturdays you’re in for a surprise: Yours Truly will be appearing on the Brent Bambury’s show Go! tomorrow. There’ll be musical merriment of all sorts. Go! broadcasts live at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, 11:00 in Newfoundland.
I caught Dragonette at the launch party for MSN.ca a couple of weeks ago and was pretty impressed. I’m fond of their synth-pop-cut-with-guitars sound and am going to have to get my hands on their new album.
I took some shots of their performance; you can either check out this Flickr photoset or watch the slideshow [...]
At the Mesh Conference held earlier this year, I was asked at the last minute to play an opening number for the big panel discussion on using social media for marketing. I decided to get cheeky and played AC/DC’s Big Balls, since having them is a quality that you need to really use social media [...]
The anime-girl outfits that the YouTube user “hjfreaks” wears may be a little off-putting, but if the bass tracks on these video are really of him playing, he’s pretty good:
Sometimes a guy wants to take a break from blistering bass runs and just dance:
Not the fast food chains, but the amusing hip-hop number by the oddly-named duo “Das Racist”:
I’m with this commenter: someone needs to record the Canadian version:
I’m at the Swiss Chalet! I’m at the Harvey’s! I’m at the combination Swiss Chalet and [...]
Back in high school, after reading Space-Time and Beyond for the umpteenth time and drinking one too many zombies with my friend Henry, we came up with a theory:
In the infinite set of universes, there had to exist a particular universe in which the events in our lives were being watched as a TV show.
We then made a solemn vow to live the kind of life that got high ratings.
Photo by Jennifer Brown.
Photo by Pat.
Photo by Pat.
