the road there
friday night was the long, long, long journey to mississagua on the ttc/local transit. man, who knew that leaving downtown toronto (queen/bathurst) at about 6:40pm would put you at the venue in mississagua at about 8:50pm. during the long slow trip i felt that i could of gotten to montreal faster.
arrival at the gates to the mississagua waterfront festival
the name makes it sounds like it might be half-way impressive, don't it? but really, let's not make it sound anymore grandiose than it actually is... i grew up in a town of about 5,000 people and our little annual community event was organized better than this one was...
back to the arrival - there is a line up of about 30 people waiting get in. should take no time at all, right? well - normally that would be true - but normal events don't have the yellow-shirted-community-spirit-ladies working the gate.
i swear, there were 6-8 people associated with the festival there, but only 3 of them were doing any work. 1 was giving passes to the pre-purchased folk, one was dealing with cash tickets and one was hard at work diligently putting the wrist bands on us once we moved through the twilight-zone of ticket ville. for an example : my friend and i arrived with a 20 each (admission was 12). the woman said, 'oh, you both have twenties and need change.' she turned around and made change out of her moneybelt for about 5 minutes. she turned back around and gave audrey her change. then she looked at me and said, 'oh, you'll need the same change.' the one saving grace to this all was that these folk were so damned nice - not at all like toronto where if someone needed to make change, they'd give you the evil eye, roll said evil eye and then spit on the change as they gave it back to you.
the show
was amazing, as always, of course. missed the opening act - but it seems like this was a bad one to miss. i normally skip out on the openers for david, usually it's just painful and gets the crowd energy feeling somewhat angry and hostile - but this one david actually commented on during his set. he too sounded pleasantly surprised that matthew barber was actually quite good.
the set actually included two moist songs - holy shit! i thought we'd never hear those live again... and i got to hear 'underground' live - which was such a happy thing for me since back in the day, the moist shows i went to never had it in the setlists. david's voice has really gotten so good. could really hear the difference in the way he sang 'silver'. it was so nice to see jeff & kevin and david having such an amazing time playing 'silver' can't believe that song is 11-years old now - where does time go?
and again, as always, david has such an amazing way of bringing the audience right in to feel like they're having the most intimate and close experience. he came into the crowd twice and again - didn't think we'd ever see that again! yey! the pic above is actually from the first time he climbed the barrier fence to play with the crowd. another thing he always does so well is to actually speak on stage. so many acts you go and see just rip through the songs and don't say a word. on david's forum, someone *waves to forestfire* said that she thought david might be working out some of the material for the pride show next weekend - too true - to paraphrase, "kevin young and stephen harper actually got married last night - which is a good thing. stephen harper needs a little gay marriage in his life"
the crowd had it's usual amount of annoying-ones. there is always a hand-dancer or two who insists on acting out the songs solely through the supposed-elegance of their wrists, and hands - in the process, sharing their creative expression with the 5-or-so rows of ppl behind them. friday night was no different - except for the hand-dancer in question was a very tall woman, with very very long arms. she got so freakin' excited at "black black heart" she pushed her way to the front right in front of david and then tried to steal the show (what with the hand-dancing and all). to make matters worse, for a while she was right beside me and she had this strange red & blue flashing pointy-star on her chest. so annoying. then again, maybe i'm just old and crunchy now... no, i don't think so - that woman was just annoying - no two ways about it.
david has several political statement songs in the live set and during one of the most poignant (devil by my side) there is a moment where he sings "i've seen war*pause*but it was only the television kind". some crowds are silent in that moment and are actually listening to the lyric and the sentiment - and some crowds just take the oppoutunity to scream and yell and say 'i love you!!!!!' in any quiet moment. david's reaction is always interesting. he's normally in a good mood about it and just goes with it - but i think on friday a bit of his heart broke when several people cheered really loudly at the 'war' line. that has to be one of the hardest things for an artist like david. he doesn't perform for kicks - he actually believes in what he's written.
the trip home
after waiting for about 20 minutes to use the bathroom in the nearest starbucks and vanilla bean frappe in hand we started waiting for the bus. and quickly discovered that this part of mississagua is pretty much like a very small town - kinda rough and absolutely filled with drunks and swarms of punk-ass kids (my god, i'm old, i think of them as kids!). after some mini-drama ("swat is here! adrien, swat is here! this shit is gonna be in the papers") we hopped in a cab and got back to kipling station - otherwise known as the edge of civilization. can't wait to do this all again in a few weeks for the show in hamilton!
setlist :
No comments:
Post a Comment