Category: Music

Throwing the horns at Queen’s Park, May 1999, on the first day I took the accordion out on the street.

While waiting to pick up my sister and her family at Pearson’s Terminal 1 last night (and oh yes, is Terminal 1 so much nicer than the skank-o-riffic Terminal 2), I noticed a young woman holding up a sign right by the doors leading to the baggage claim area. This wasn’t noticeable in itself. There are always a half-dozen or so folks with signs like that; some with names of people, others with names of tour groups.

What made this woman’s sign unusual was the name on it: Paul Stanley.

The KISS guitarist? I thought. Of course that would be the first thing that came to my mind. I’m a former solider in the KISS Army (I filled out a form at the age of 10 and got a small kit including some stickers and buttons plus an announcement of their upcoming movie, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park.)

Ten minutes later, Paul Stanley emerged from baggage claim. He was actually looking good — pretty healthy, wearing a black blazer, black shirt, black scarf, jeans and dress shoes. He looked more like an architect (of either buildings or software) or ad exec than a rock star, and nobody seemd to know who he was.

Naturally, I “threw the horns” at him with a silent nod and a smile, and got a nod and smile back. Then, the young woman walked off with him, presumably to a waiting limo.

Welcome back to Accordion City, Paul.

Related Reading

Accordion vs. Rock Star An entry in which I encounter various rock stars, armed with my accordion. Hilarity ensues.

Before the Home Alone series of movies completely ruined him, John Hughes could put together some decent movies: National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, Planes, Trains and Automobiles and what I consider to be one of the most important films ever made, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. His teen coming-of-age movies were a cut above the typical celluloid fare aimed at adolescents. They were known not only for their scripting, but for their soundtracks as well: there were always at least three or four good alt-rock singles in each movie’s soundtrack album — with the notable exception of The Breakfast Club.

The soundtrack album for The Breakfast Club was the least remarkable of the bunch, featuring only one track of note, both commercially and critically: Don’t You (Forget About Me), written by Keith Forsey. Looking for someone to perform the number, Forsey approached both Bryan Ferry (lead vocalist for seminal art-rock band Roxy Music) and Billy Idol, who was then enjoying the wave of success from his 1983 album, Rebel Yell. Both turned down the gig. Ferry’s reasoning is obvious: he’s an arts-school wanker (really, he has a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and that gives you ten automatic wanker points) and taking the gig would be “selling out”. On the other hand, Idol is no stranger to the concept. He’d already traded in his punk cred from his prior band, Generation X (in fact, one hit single of his, Dancing with Myself is a remake of a Generation X number) — why didn’t he take the gig?

The band who would end up performing the number, Simple Minds, turned down the offer at first, not wanting to perform someone else’s music. Their record label pressured them to do so, and by caving, the band ended up with their biggest hit single. This was a sore point with both the band and their fans. Die-hard fans of the band would boo them whenever they played the song at their concerts in the mid-80s, and the band were annoyed that the song for which they will be remembered isn’t one they wrote or originally wanted to do.

The single was a big hit at parties; I own a very worn-out beer-stained 12″ vinyl single that spun several times, a few of which were during parties thrown while my folks were away in Europe. I would also end up playing the keyboard part on a borrowed Roland Juno-106 synth with my friends in our Billy Idol/Platinum Blonde cover band. I’ll have to write up some stories about those times someday.

In 2001, in what seems like an admission of “coulda, woulda, shoulda”, Billy Idol included Don’t You (Forget About Me) as a bonus single on his “greatest hits” album. His version’s pretty decent and gives us a taste of what could’ve been.

This song will be available for a week, after which it’ll evaporate. Enjoy!

Old fart alert: Yes, I bought the Police’s first album, Outlandos D’Amour, when I was a teenager (a too-young-to-drive one, at that). On a format that involved dragging a diamond needle over grooves on a spinning vinyl surface.

(For those of you are thinking, “Oh c’mon, record players aren’t that ancient!”, here’s something that will shock you. Natalie Portman had to be shown how to operate a record player for a scene in the movie Garden State; she’s from that generation that’s only operated CD players or newer devices.)

Even better, I saw them perform near the peak of their popularity in 1983 (when the album Synchronicity came out) at the Police Picnic, a Lollapalooza-like all-day concert series. The Toronto show, held at the no-longer-standing CNE Grandstand, featured:

• Canadian new wave act Blue Peter
• King Sunny Ade and His African Beat
• The Fixx
• Peter Tosh
• James Brown
• and as the closing act, The Police

Last night, the Police gave the Grammy Awards audience a taste of some of their live performance skills, which are still pretty sharp after all these years. Here’s their performance of their first hit single, Roxanne, which someone captured and kindly uploaded to YouTube:

The Ginger Ninja and I are going on vacation for a week starting quitting time tonight. Expect posting up until next Tuesday morning to be a bit on the light side. There may even be an automated post or two made in my absence.

In celebration of this vacation, I present to you this week’s song of the week, California Stars [7.1MB MP3] by Billy Bragg and Wilco, off their delightful and unexpected joint project of an album, Mermaid Avenue. I remember playing this song back in 2001 at full blast on iTunes 1.0 the first time I closed OpenCola’s new San Francisco office for the night and thinking “Whoa, I live in California now.” (By June, I’d been relocated back to Toronto, and that’s a story for another time.)

I also remember playing this song — again on iTunes, but a later version on a faster Mac — as the bride and groom’s first dance at Ashley Bristowe’s and Chris Turner’s wedding in Canmore at the start of 2004. That was the first time I’d travelled anywhere with Wendy, so the song brings back as many happy memories for me as I’m sure it does for Ash and Turner.

You’ve got a week to download this song, after which it’ll evaporate. Enjoy!

Update, February 12th, 2007: A week has passed and the attached songs are no longer available.

In the spirit of yesterday’s Toronto Transit Camp (which I wrote about in this entry), I thought I’d post a transit-related song. The problem is that I only have the best-known song about Toronto Transit — the Shuffle Demons’ Spadina Bus (a minor hit here in Canada in the 1980s) — in vinyl format. Luckily, someone uploaded the video to YouTube and I present it below:

Of course, as most locals know, there is no longer a Spadina Bus — it’s been replaced by the Spadina streetcar.

Yesterday, we talked about ideas that were worth borrowing from other cites. Among the transit systems mentioned — Cologne, Montreal’s Metro, New York’s MTA and the “T”, the transit system of Boston, my second home — was London’s famed tube system. The tube, for all its plusses, has it downsides, and they’re captured excellently in a song called London Underground by Adam Kay and Suman Biswas. Be forewarned: there’s swearing aplenty in this song!

If the tune to London Underground sounds familiar, it’s because it’s borrowed from Going Underground by The Jam. As a bonus blast from the past, here’s the video for Going Underground from my high school days, over 20 years ago. Geez, I’m old…

This week’s song of the week is the criminally underplayed Dragonflies by Povi.

It wouldn’t be technically correct to refer to Povi as a “group” or “band” — the term “long-distance collaboration” might be more apt. Povi is really two people: Los Angeles-based music producer/technical wizard Carmen Rizzo taking care of all the electronic instruments and Cristina Calero handling guitar, bass and vocals from a studio in Australia.

Povi put out only one album, but it’s a charming one: Life in Volcanoes, which hit the streets in 1999. The album navigates that territory between trip-hoppy chill out a la Morcheeba and catchy female-led alt-rock in the vein of Garbage. It’s definitely a product of its time: the sounds and production of the album evoke a time when one Fatboy Slim was eating up the charts and the songs would fit nicely in a Napster “makeout playlist” between Esthero’s Heaven Sent and Radiohead’s Paranoid Android.

(Now that I am a married man, I can neither confirm nor deny that I was ever in possession of said makeout playlists and will only state that I am speaking hypothetically. I can only say that I can imagine that you single kids might enjoy making the “hot sweaty pancakes” with those songs in the background.)

Dragonflies is the catchiest tune on the album, and as Christopher Thelen wrote in Daily Vault Album Reviews, “if there’s any justice in this industry, should be burning up the alternative charts in no time flat”. Alas, justice didn’t prevail, but that’s no reason that you shouldn’t enjoy this tune.

This song of the week has now expired, but you can always download it (and two other songs off the album) from the Epitonic website.