I managed to see five bands this weekend, and to meet and interact with another, who sold me hot sauce. I also did an interview, the dishes, and the laundry. The wife was away, but I feel like it was a productive chunk of time.
Note: I am soon to take a break from this. I won't be around for much of the rest of August. I have lots of writing to do, but not for this blog.
But I am awake in the heat, having a pee-and-hydrate-and-pee-again break, before I attempt "sleep round two," and thought I would take a minute to report.
The weekend began with Rong at the Tears of Joy Hot Sauce Festival out in Langley. I have written much about Rong and will have more to come presently, but let me say this: they suit a daytime hot sauce festival ambience. I danced to "Same Team" and "The Ships" and "ACT." I chatted with them. I shot video of "Run With Us," their cover tune. I learned that Kristy-Lee has a Freddy Mercury tattoo (later she explained to me that she also has a Beethoven one, and a number on her arm that reflects, if I've got this right, her father's hockey jersey number; her brother has a matching one, which they got after he passed).
Also at that festival, I bought hot sauce off Cheap Flavor. They asserted that they were the only band who made their own hot sauce from scratch and I said, "What about Bison?" and they responded with a haughty, "Do they grow their own peppers?"
I somehow do not think Bison grow their own peppers.
Cheap Flavor is a better name for a band than it is a name for a hot sauce, but I did not see them perform, alas (their set had taken place by the time Beeman and I arrived). Their sauce, however, while not especially cheap, is absolutely delicious. It's especially good in guac; it has an agreeably fruity zip to it, with pineapple among the non-pepper ingredients. When I heard it was a hot sauce festival that Rong was playing at, I had hoped to get a mango sauce, but all the ones I tried, from different vendors, were adulterated with things like tamarind or ginger or turmeric or so forth. I want my mango to taste like mango, damn it!
Tamarind does just fine in a tamarind sauce; blend it with mango and you have something that tastes like barf. I did not buy that hot sauce.
But truth is, it wasn't a sample Cheap Flavor proferred that sold me: I bought the Cheap Flavor sauce because I had liked what I heard online of their music and wanted to have some interaction with the band (and had run out of hot-sauce-shopping time, and wanted to have one sauce to speak of for the day). Agreeably, it turns out, of the various hot sauces I sampled, theirs is actually the closest to the sweet, light, fruity hot sauce I had hoped to find.
Emilor of Rong -- she of the keen eye for tornados; see aforesaid vid -- told her own hot sauce story, which involved a nameless fellow member of a past band buying dollar-store hot sauce and re-labeling it. She did not name the band, but declaimed, "That's capitalism!"
But so is Cheap Flavor -- capitalism of a much higher order. I wonder if they drop the "Canadian U" from their name because they have designs for their hot sauce in American markets? Go, Cheap Flavor, go!
Ylem
Later that night I ended up at Bully's for Ylem and Sweetbeast. Both were great. Ylem, whose name rhymes with phylum, not feel'em, started out reminding me of early 70's Pink Floyd and ended up covering All Them Witches' "When God Comes Back," but I had to ask the band what the song was. Everyone else at Bully's knew it -- younger kids with more hair, abundant tattoos, and visible muscle tone, for the most part. It wasn't entirely my kinda crowd, but I got lost in the music no less, just as I'd hoped. There was one song in particular where Ylem pulled off this massive shift in tempo that made every stoned person in the audience go "Whoaaaa," like your consciousness suddenly slipped into a lower gear, or maybe even reverse, dropping you down into your seat and causing some drool to emerge from your mouth. Or maybe that was just me?
Sweetbeast presented with a slightly more Southern-Fried visual aesthetic. I enjoyed what they did too, but shot vid in lieu of wanting to describe it. They'd do well on a bill with Black Wizard, if Black Wizard ever plays again!
I want to see a few more shows at Bully's before they shut down operations. The last couple I've been to have seemed so successful that I wonder if they'll reconsider? There's a scene happening there, and it's a cool one. They have an all-day metal event on August 16th that I won't be at, but...
I left shortly after Moonbather went on. They had a great t-shirt but they were playing too loud for my middle-aged-ears, with some notes causing my eardrums to cringe in pain. Just as I had failed to bring sunscreen to Rong, I had failed to pack earplugs to Bully's. Soon, I began to think of how much I wanted pizza, and how lonely my cat must be.
Had a pleasant interaction with the girls at the New West Station Fresh Slice, two of 'em from India: "You have corn on your pizza!"
"We're the only ones!"
"I lived in Japan for awhile, and that's a thing there, corn on pizza. Is it a thing in India?"
They said it was. But their butter chicken pizza was better. I must say, the Indian-ification of Fresh Slice has vastly improved that chain. I no longer think of them as a last resort. I actually will look around, sometimes, when I am hungry, with the thought, "Is there a Fresh Slice near here?"
I considered heading back to Bully's after that, but like I say, I had a lonely cat to come home to, so home I came.
Sunday saw me take in two bands at the Pearl. Chopping Spree were the more curious of the two, in that they had elected to draw for musical inspirations on a genre of light 70s jazz that reminded me of late night TV talk show big bands, the Barney Miller soundtrack, and maybe bands like Spyro Gyra: stuff that I would normally dismiss as pastel wallpaper soft-rock shlock, with an edge of mainstream smooth jazz like you'd expect a conservative college to teach their students in the 1980s: music made by people from a universe where punk rock never happened.
This is not my universe, I assure you. But the thing that was both fascinating and maddening about Chopping Spree is that they were fucking fantastic at this. They totally engaged with a completely banal style of jazz and fucking COOKED in delivering it. By the time they had hooked into a rocking, proggy "Night in Tunisia," I was kind of converted and deeply confused. Then they ended their set with something that I thought was Dick Dale's "Misirlou" but which Tim Reinert assured me was Duke Ellington's "Caravan." I refuse to spend much time A-Bing those songs to see if there are actual musical similarities, but fill your boots. Reinert no doubt is right!
Oh, and: asked-and-answered: the weird animated doppleganger thing is a Pearl thing, not a JP Carter thing. Good to know!
Chopping Spree left me asking the biggest questions of the weekend, like, is this how someone becomes a crotchety old man: the culture that you knew beyond a doubt sucked hard when you were 15, that you were convinced was the absolute nadir of human expression at that time, ends up trickling down through the decades to influence kids who weren't even born until you were in your mid-20s, who don't know that people of a previous generation thought that music sucked, who hear it with fresh ears and do something authentic and cool with it, thereby leaving the 50-and-up contingent in their audience struggling with their inability to evaluate what they are seeing... think about it enough and your head will collapse...
Suffice to say, the crowd at the Pearl loved them, but they loved the Cowboy Bebop Bebop Band (which shared some members) even more.
Truth is, I also felt somewhat on the outside of the enthusiastic reaction the band was receiving; the people who loved it most were obviously plugged into a communion that is not intended for one such as I, grooving with them on a level I could not, much as I enjoyed what they did. Apparently EVERYTHING THEY DO, Reinert told me later, is drawn from the soundtrack to this single TV series, which seems only to have a had a short run, but that has made a lasting impact no less. Wikipedia explains that
Cowboy Bebop has been hailed as one of the best television series of all time. It was a critical and commercial success both in Japanese and international markets, most notably in the United States. It garnered several major anime and science fiction awards upon its release, and received acclaim from critics and audiences for its style, characters, story, voice acting, animation, and soundtrack. The English dub was particularly lauded and is regarded as one of the best anime English dubs. Credited with helping to introduce anime to a new wave of Western viewers in the early 2000s, Cowboy Bebop has also been called a gateway series.
I don't know the first fucking thing about Cowboy Bebop. Reinert compared it to our attachment to something like Looney Tunes -- a cultural comfort food for a certain contingent. I observed of the number they were playing as we chatted that it reminded me of the (fantastic) soundtrack for The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3 and he responded with an apt observation about Henry Mancini -- hell, yeah! -- but I think the girls singing and dancing in the audience probably associated them most with, well, Cowboy Bebop.
I shot vid of them, too, including a few peeks into the adoring crowd, happily singing along with all the, uh, meows. It was so fun that I would actually consider seeing them again: turns out I didn't have to understand it at all to still totally enjoy myself.
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