Andrew Paul

"I-IV-V...Okay, Doing Good, I'm Rocking Out. I-IV-V..." | Nathan James performs on Saturday afternoon at the Labatt Blues Festival.

Labatt Blues Festival
Hawrelak Park • Aug. 24

The Sunday morning scene resembled a day camp for parents as 3,000 bleary-eyed blues fanatics lined up outside Heritage Amphitheatre for the last day of the Labatt Blues Festival.

It had been a good party so far: the crowd was absorbing the vibes that blues legends like Pinetop Perkins and James Cotton were laying down, women were dancing with trees and the tangy smell of marijuana was wafting through the air. This is where baby boomers come to get their kicks.

The organization of the event was top-notch as well, thanks to the efforts of the small army of volunteers, many of them 10-year veterans of the event. Considering that it took an average of just three minutes to purchase a cup of beer, other festival organizers should be taking notes.

The highlight of the weekend was Sunday night’s boogie-woogie spectacular featuring Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne, David Vest, and pinch-hitter Ann Rabson — the jolly old grandmother of soul — who stepped in after D.K. Stewart was stopped at customs for reasons that were never fully explained. Seating was scarce, but on Saturday a friend discovered that the best seat in the house isn’t in the house at all. Instead, for $7 we rented a paddleboat for an hour and listened to the blues roll across the water while we communed with the pond-dwellers. Who knows — in the right company, with Janiva Magness serenading you, those paddleboats could be the best makeout spot in the city. The potential of this paddleboat business is something I will definitely confirm next year when I make my return visit to the fest....

ANDREW PAUL

Darrek Anderson specializes in classic Albertan songwriting: his songs are best heard through at least two shots of Royal Reserve, with a long-abandoned range road charting the verse-chorus-verse course. And The Guaranteed are a perfect backing band for him: the changes are sharp, the chords chime, the drums beat large and loud. These are the kind of boys who have no interest in rock-star fantasies; they listen to rock ’n’ roll because it reflects the sound of the dirt beneath their boots on the side of a highway. In Anderson’s world, all the booze is home-brewed and all the bars are full... which makes it all the more painful when you find yourself choking on the words to say to the beautiful girl across the room.

These simple, straight-ahead country songs might sound lonely and broken-hearted on an acoustic, but in the hands of The Guaranteed, they’re transformed into full-on bar-raising riots. Drummer Scott Davidchuk doesn’t so much keep time as feel where each beat should drop, bassist Tom Murray proves that a metronome has nothing on the instinctive rhythms of the human soul, and Everett LaRoi’s swelling blue guitar shakes the brittle pint glasses all the way to the dartboard at the back of the bar.

EAMON MCGRATH