Bison at the Rickshaw - featuring THE RETURN OF "WENDIGO PART 1!" (And a Blue Öyster Cult interview snippet)

Bison L to R - Eugene, James, Evan, Dan

Preamble: When I interviewed Eric Bloom of Blue Öyster Cult last year, I asked him a question that had been on my mind for awhile. Y'see, I've heard a few artists complain about songs that they've played vastly too many times, until there was no life left in them, and I've seen encores where people have, to all appearances, fulfilled contractual obligations by trotting out their best known songs for an encore, while practically rolling their eyes at the tedium of it (Lou Reed dampened an otherwise amazing concert the night I saw him in Tokyo on the Ecstasy tour by doing a perfunctory, sped up, lets-get-this-shit-over-with run through of "Perfect Day," "Sweet Jane," "Dirty Blvd," and "Walk on the Wild Side." Personally, I'd LOVED the whole rest of the concert, which bypassed any such obvious moves, so we could hear Lou jam with Mike Rathke on songs of Ecstasy, which were clearly ALIVE and fresh and fun to play for both men; that was not the case for any of the songs in the encore. I don't care if they're his "hits" - if I coulda replaced that whole bored encore with a 20-minute jam of "Possum Day," I would have, and had a better night for it). 

Now don't get me wrong - I loved the last Blue Öyster Cult concert I saw; I'm not bored of their big three hits; and the band gave no signs that they were, either, unlike Mr. Reed. But if you consider that they've played "Don't Fear the Reaper" at pretty much every concert they've performed since 1976 (unless there was a power outage or something totally unforseen, Bloom told me), you gotta wonder: Wouldn't it be more fun for them to trade out "Don't Fear the Reaper" for, say, "Flaming Telepaths" or "I Love the Night," or "Lips in the Hills" or some similar deep dive into their catalogue, just for a change? I want them to be having fun too! My question to Eric: is it a challenge to keep "Don't Fear the Reaper" fresh for themselves, after all these years?

Bloom's response: "No, not at all. That song is always fresh, everybody likes it, it puts a smile on everybody’s face and everybody’s happy. If we can do that, and everybody feels good about it, we’re fine with it... I hear stories about certain bands – I won’t mention names, I don’t want to cast any shade on’em – that don’t want to play the stuff that everybody wants to hear; they won’t do it, or they change the arrangement. I went to see somebody, it was a British 60’s invasion person, at a great club setting, and I had a great seat. Couldn’t wait to see this act. And they played most of the hits, but they had re-arranged everything. And I said to myself, 'Why the hell would they mess with hits? These songs are not supposed to go that way! Play them the way they were a hit! Why’dja change it?' It just annoyed the hell out of me. The whole audience wants to sing along with what they remember!"

Which is fair enough - I'm glad for the band that they feel that way - and if that's what they feel, may they never stop playing that song. I mean, "Don't Fear the Reaper" is one of those few songs in the world that it is very difficult to burn out on. Certainly I've never gotten tired of it, so it may be a testament to that song's magic that it still feels good for them to play it. 

But as a listener I DO get burned out on some songs now and then. The thing about retiring something for awhile is that it can bring life BACK to a song that you've burned out on. It certainly feels that way for me as a music fan - I mean, since COVID struck, I've discovered, happily, that I can listen to Pink Floyd's The Wall (or Dark Side of the Moon) and Led Zeppelin IV again, after a decades-long personal moratorium on playing any of those albums in full. Imagine my delight to discover that instead of rolling my eyes and clutching my ears for "Stairway to Heaven," I could feel it again, after three decades of being sick of it? 

(The second-to-last time I saw Bison, in 2018; photo by me!)

End preamble. I, for one, am totally stoked to hear that my favourite-ever Vancouver metal band, Bison, will perform their retired crowd-pleaser, "Wendigo Pt. 1," as part of this weekend's livestreaming event. It's an amazing song that I have only had the privilege of hearing half a dozen times or so, and that I've been secretly hoping they might bring back any of the last five times I've seen'em... but I'm gonna shut up and let Bison's James Farwell tell you about it. I sent him an email asking about what old or new songs they were going to break out for this weekend's concert streaming event, what lineup of the band we'd be seeing, and so forth. What follows is 100% Farwell:

The current line up is Dan And - gits and vox / James Farwell - vox and gits / Evan Joel - Bass / Eugene Parkomenko - drums

We have a plan to play songs from our entire catalogue - including a very special song we are exhuming for this stream - "Wendigo Pt. 1." We retired this song about 8 years ago, determined we had played the life out of it. Due to the excitement of performing after more than a year, we thought it would be appropriate to dust off this favourite for the occasion. It also gave us an opportunity to have our friend  Emily Bach playing the violin for the opening instrumental of the song. We also Invited Terence O'Shea, who recorded violin for our song "Tantrum," to perform that song with us.

 
We felt so grateful to be performing and documenting this night, I thought it important to acknowledge how honoured we are to be making our music and doing our good work in this part of the world. I've invited Cease Wyss, a local indigenous artist, to perform a land acknowledgement and a drum song welcoming us, and supporting us in our music being made on the unceded, ancestral, traditional homelands of the Səl̓ílwətaʔ, Xʷməθkwəy̓əm, & Sḵwx̱wú7mesh peoples in Vancouver, and the shíshálh, Kwikwetlem, q̓íc̓əy̓, Kwantlen, Qayqayt, Tsawwassen, Semiahmoo, and Sto:lo Nations of the Lower Mainland.

 

James is stoked to see Mo and the Rickshaw staff again "after all the time away," he adds. "They are indeed the most welcoming and professional crew around. Long live The Rickshaw Theatre! And long live LIVE MUSIC!" 

For more information about the Bison streaming event this weekend, see here! (Maybe if we move the couch, I can get my wife and cat to mosh with me?).