MtH #6 Opening Night

The Old Lady’s Doing Fine

How’s this for a great start to the Massey Hall run. It’s 2:30 pm, a perfect time to leave my house in Mississauga and get downtown comfortably for a 4pm sound check. That will take into consideration most contingencies like traffic jams, searching for a parking spot etc. And it even allows 20 minutes to check all my gear. I can’t find my keys!!…….Where are those damned keys?

Wait a minute………I put one of those “tile” things on my keychain. All I have to do is fire up the app on my iPhone, press a button and the tile will emit a high pitched sound leading me to my keys. I can’t find my iPhone!!……..Where’s the damned iPhone??

Oh shit……….it’s 3:15. What to do? Call Rick on my land line.

“Rick!”

“Yeah”

“Can’t find my, expletive, curse word, speaking in tongues, expletive, pig snorts, weeping, a quote from The Exorcist, expletive, fucking keys!!”

Amazingly short rant from me, but all the same, poor Rick.

“Get a cab you moron”

Seventy dollars later, 4:20 pm and sound check-rehearsal in full swing I trudge onto the stage at Massey Hall like Atlas, stooping with the weight of the world on my shoulders.

Now, the unprofessionalism of being late completely aside, and the “egg on face” humiliation with unspoken demerits also aside, there’s a real danger that the band sounds just as good or even better without me. I gotta act quick.

The first thing I need to do when I get to my keyboards is to hook up my MacBook. I open my back-pack to pull out my computer ( you know what’s next, don’t you? Maybe not….). If you’re expecting some more bold type because I’d forgotten the computer, your wrong. The Mac is there……….. and so are my keys. Yo dude.

So It Goes

The opening night performance was inspired as were all the performances, culminating in one of the best ever on Saturday. Fueled partly, I think, by the sound. Massey Hall, as much as we loved the old girl, always howled on stage a little, like we were perched over the open end of a giant drainage pipe. There was this dank reverberation thing happening. Tolerable for “a castle dark or a fortress strong”, at odds with “meet me at the rockpile”. An expensive new sound system, a ton of baffling and an actual demolition did the trick. The back of the stage is the back of the building now. They lopped off a whole section which included dressing rooms and reception areas that were acting like the sound box on a guitar. 

This “new” more solid sound was like a shot of adrenaline to us old farts. But it was just the spark. We were still your favourite recliner but suddenly in the upright position. It was a unified sound, more than a singer/songwriter with a band, that traded away comfort in return for the sublime tension and resolve that make a live performance bigger than life.

Still More Coming