How much blues is enough for you? Three hundred and fifty-seven pounds? Forty-six and five-sixteenth tonnes? Can such a thing even be measured? Does there even exist a limit as to how much concentrated “done-wrongness” you can accept as your personal saviour?
Well, either way, Edmonton is a fine place to be this summer if you relish dependable textbook beats, lyrics that describe your exact position in life, and repeated citations of the plural form of one of the three primary colours. First off, Jeremy Loome—the singer in front of The Hardline Blues Band and an enthusiastic blues journalist—has issued a general summons:
“A radio company out of Ontario, Skywords, is currently pitching six large-market FM blues stations to the CRTC,” he says. “It has applications in cities across the country, including Edmonton.
“The CRTC is holding a hearing on May 27 in Edmonton and I was hoping you could put the word out over the next week and see if any artists you know would be interested in becoming intervenors on behalf of the station, to show why having mainstream blues (and the license is for 100 per cent blues—a first, as far as I know) on the FM airwaves would benefit blues musicians and music culture in general.”
Done and done. Anyone interested in helping out should e-mail Jeff McFayden quickly at jmcfayden@skywords.com. Non-artists can get involved by writing letters of support through the bluesincananda.com site. Seeing as we’re already groovin’ on the blues-puter, you can also download some of Loome’s music at littleknownblues.com.
Now the second way to seriously immerse your entire twitching body in this music is to join in the 10-year anniversary celebrations at this year’s Blues Fest down at the Heritage Amphitheatre from August 22-24. For the hot dogs alone, people. I must say I admire organizer Cam Hayden’s specific attempt to bring fresh bands in every year—a lesson to be learned. That said, this is a big anniversary, so Blues International is treating 2008 as a best-of year, which is fair enough. The lineup includes a good mix of Downchild, the sultry Janiva Magness, Ann Rabson, Charlie Musselwhite as a festival closer, and piano legend Pinetop Perkins, who’s coming up fast on his 100th birthday in 2013. Tickets go on sale today everywhere, including Megatunes.
Incidentally, Ike Turner was not asked to return. Though his show in Hawrelak a few years back was spectacular and hilarious, he’s actually dead now. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is some serious blues. But if you’re still looking for even more blues, the realest blues of all, visit democracynow.org.
Fans of music and DJ culture were sorely disappointed in the midnight lineup for the new Grand Theft Auto IV this week, instead serving up a bland, Soviet-style lineup with two models dressed as cops occasionally harassing us with posters and XXL Xbox Live T-shirts, fertile ground for chip grease and man tits. While I hella appreciate the tough love behind cop shades, the only other thing to “entertain” us in the shivering queue were Chinese vacationers torturing a cockroach by melting a Tim Hortons straw onto it and a bunch of showboater, truck-driving doofs rolling over every curb possible, looking around to see if everyone’s watching. I cannot believe the lame depths this fucking world has sunk to.
First, as fun as they are to play, rock ’n’ roll, metal and punk have become inarguably suburbanized by a tsunami of karaoke band games... and now “crime” has been totally nerdified by the latest murder simulator?
Does everything evil need bouncers at the door now? Go back to math, you fucking geeks. At least you’d be good at something.
