I'm still working on the Winnipeg photos, a few at a time in-between trying to catch up on the rather daunting Home Front Backlog. I could wait until I get everything done, and everything I want to say written and the photos all edited, before putting this next blog up, but that would take a considerably long while. I'd rather do it a bit at a time. For you who come here looking for something new.
I saw Martin Sexton perform the other night, the first full performance of his I've seen, the first time I've seen him on stage since he so thoroughly impressed me as the opener for Great Big Sea at the Buffalo Rocks The Harbour show last August.
The Neptune Theatre show was a fascinating evening, partly because of the strength of his performance, partly because of how that performance compared to to the one I saw in Buffalo...and most of all because of how both of those performances got me thinkng about shows in general, about solo shows in particular; about Alan's solo shows most particularly of all. About where to find - where I find, where others find - The Wonderful.
Where, and from Whom.
Now I'm tired and I'm scared and wide open to the rest of my life
And I almost had it all
I'm fooling myself by thinking
That a cure will be found
Cause I can't stop thinking 'bout you
I can't stop thinking 'bout you. - Martin Sexton
Not a bad preamble. More Something New to come for you soon.
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Letting the need show...
Martin Sexton has an awesome voice. I already knew this, before I saw him at the Neptune, before I saw him open for GBS in Buffalo; quite a few of my friends have been telling me for years just how awesome that voice is, several of them playing recorded tracks of his as indisputable proof of his vocal pyrotechnics, all of them telling me how utterly blown away I'd be if I'd go see one of his live shows.
Which I never got around to doing, not until a hot, sticky August night, when I was there to see Someone Else at Buffalo Rocks The Harbour. Despite the cool location - right on the waterfront and "below the hockey rink," as Alan describes it - the Rocks The Harbour gigs are considerably far down on my List of Favourite Shows: The entry lineup is interminable, the gate-opening is Darwinian, and the lengthy wait for the headline act (my Someone Else) requires a stoic endurance of often-not-so-great opening acts as well as of the pushing and pummelling of a progressively (rapidly so) more-drunken crowd. The same restive, rowdy crowd that usually starts acting like a pack of rude arseholes as they grow increasingly less patient with that lengthy wait for the headliner.
It takes a lot to hold the attention of such a crowd, especially if you're the last act up before GBS, performing during that time when the crowd's impatience is hitting its peak, the worst nitwits among them starting up the "Great Big Sea" chant while the opener's performance is still going on. It takes a great deal of passion, a great deal of of command, a great deal of need to come close to winning the forbearance, let alone the approval, of such a crowd, especially when out there on that big stage all by yourself.
For the most part, Martin Sexton pulled it off, hushing many in the crowd, thrilling more than a few. Yes, his voice was awesome, a finely tuned instrument of terrifc range that served his will with perfect obedience, blissful accompaniment soaring from his guitar. But what struck me - what touched me and moved me - was the wide-open, aching vulnerability of his performance, no retreating behind the protective aesthetic distance of vocal acrobatics, the weapon of his voice a keen double-edged blade wielded solely in the service of his songs, cutting both artist and audience deeply and to the quick.
It was exactly the performance needed to gain the notice and attention of that crowd, even for a short while - direct, straightforward, incisive, painfully honest. He let his need - his need to be heard, his need to be responded to - show clearly, and that gave his performance the fleeting but genuine power to connect with even a rowdy and resistant crowd. Impressive - enough so that soon after this show I checked his website to see if he'd be playing his own show somewhere near, sometime soon. I found the Neptune gig and immediately bought the tickets. That's not something I often do.
It didn't take long at all chatting with others in the (scrupulously polite) lineup for the Neptune gig to realise that this would be an audience very different from the Buffalo crowd. Instead of thousands of impatiently eager GBS fans, this was going to be 600 or so Earnest Devotees of Martin Sexton. On this night, he would be playing to The Faithful, his Faithful. I wanted to see how this difference changed the dynamic of the show and I wanted to see how the artist and this audience interacted, so when we strolled into the theatre (no Darwinian rushing required), I chose a front-row balcony on-high vantage point.
It was a fascinating show. Out there again on his own, just himself and his guitar and three mics (one cleverly tricked-out to allow him to truy use his voice as an instrument by singing his lead solos), Martin Sexton turned in a viruoso performance, each extended vocal offering met with gasps of pleasure and rousing cheers. It was an aesthetically accomplished performance for an audience that belonged to him from the first song, an audience that wanted to feel justified in its adulation. An audience that wanted to be utterly blown away. Martin Sexton gave them exactly what they wanted. After the show ended, all the way out of the venue, what I heard being said over and over again were the words Wasn't that wonderful?
It was an awesome show. But it wasn't the Buffalo show. Most of the same songs that had so impressed me in Buffalo were there, but the ache and the need were muted, the edge blunted, submerged and subsumed by all of that virtuosity. And that difference is what made it such a fascinating show.
I don't go to shows for the purpose of being utterly blown away. I can enjoy and be entertained by that kind of show, but, as a general rule, I look elsewhere for my Utter-Blow-Away Experiences. For that matter, I don't go to shows to be Made Happy, either. I find that elsewhere too.
What I do go to shows for - what I look for and think most highly of in any artistic expression, among other places - is something that can move me and touch my heart because it's honest and real, a vulnerable passion that reaches out and makes a genuine connection, an open need that elicits, that demands, an answering response. I admire talent and I respect skill...but I come for Truth. And when I find it, I come again.
That's what I love best; that's my Wonderful.
I'll come again for the next part of this too, which should be about specifics of shows, solo shows in particular. Very nearly done with the Winnipeg photos too.
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Today's chapter is a Tale told by Alan's expressive face and in his own reflective words, with a bit of help from a thought-provoking comment made by a Martin Sexton fan during the Neptune gig's pre-show lineup.
All photos from the October 2010 Winnipeg GBS show.
This place is one of the three or four pubs that served as the first GBS circuit in the Spring and Summer of 1993. I think it is the second pub Great Big Sea ever played, following a Paddy’s Day weekend at the Rose and Thistle. Back then, we would typically book from Thursday to Sunday in either the Rose, or Nellies, or the Garret or 7 George. Along with the occasional solo or duo gig, or a happy hour here or there, that’s how the months looked. Pushing our little PA as West as far as Nellies, East as far as the Garrett. About 300 Meters I suppose.
But these gigs were our classrooms. Four sets a night. Booming noise from the street and every other bar. Patrons and Punters with dozens of excellent options battling for their attention. This is where we learned how to do the most important job a pub band has; keep the bar full and keep them drinking. Pub owners loved us. We eventually shattered every beer sales record in pubs in St John’s Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver, just to name a few. By the Summer of 1994, we had it down. Get them in early, keep the Sociables coming, and comment of the excellent quality of a particular beer or drink…whatever the pub owner wanted us to push. And most importantly, keep the tunes up-tempo and engaging. One person leaving in the middle of a set is a failure. Get all two or three hundred people who may come and go over the course of the evening to buy one more drink than they might have otherwise. Pub owners won’t mind paying you top dollar of you can demonstrate you are capable of this. - Alan Doyle, August 29, 2010 blog entry
Well, tonight Martin won't have to work at pleasing anybody. He can play anything he wants. We're his biggest fans - we're all gonna love him tonight! - Jerry, diehard Martin Sexton fan, at the Neptune Theatre show
I'll add in my own words tomorrow. For now, Alan is telling the Tale with power and beauty. And Truth.
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I never said I'd have to rely solely on my own words for this next part, not when there's still so much Beauty for the sharing.
And music too...
So I followed my angel down to the crazy river
Where I know the water is dirty and dark and it runs so cold
She told me
Cast out your will and then cut the line
With the trust of a child well I knew it would be all right
Even though I don't know
Where does it end
I don't even know
Where it begins
Oh where it begins
And I'm never quite sure
But I'll know in the end - Martin Sexton
Martin Sexton began his career as a street performer in Boston's Harvard Square, selling 20,000 copies of his own self-produced album (recorded in an attic on a friend's 8-track) out of his guitar case while busking. I didn't know that about him before I went to the Neptune gig; it's the Tale I was told several times that night, told by Sexton fans I met in line, at my seat, at the bar. As soon as they learned I was seeing my first Martin Sexton show, they told me that story.
It's clearly an important story to his fans, as well it should be because it's truly an amazing feat. So much so that I kept thinking about it for the rest of the night, all through the opening act and into Martin's own set - thinking about what it would take to draw passing strangers to you, not just to catch a few dollars' worth of their attention for a moment or two before they hurried on their way, but to stop them in their tracks, to captivate them so thoroughly that they'd actually purchase your album on the spot, on the street. To do that, you'd have to spellbind them...utterly blown them away.
It's the kind of accomplishment of which Legends are made, from which Expectations - and Fan Dynamics - are born. It's Where It Began. Each delighted gasp from the assembled Faithful at every instance of vocal virtuosity that night in the Neptune Theatre, each heartfelt cheer for having been utterly blown away yet again - everything still as it should be, as it should always be - told The Tale again.
Alan's words tell GBS's own Where It Began, the first chapters of their Tale. How they learned to do what needed to be done to get them where they wanted to go, those first few steps along their chosen path. I've seen only glimpses of Pub Band GBS - albeit lingering glimpses at some Stateside shows, especially the most soddenly debauched of those wild and crazy Uprooted Tour gigs - because by the time I came along, they'd grown, learning new lessons in larger classrooms, taking their well-crafted uptempo and engaging performance onward and upward to the next level, out of the bars and into the big rinks.
Just as they'd gotten the Happy Hour Pub Band gig down by the Summer of '94, so too they nailed it as the Uplifting & Inspirational Happy-Fix Rink Rockers, probably by the time they'd wrapped up the Turn Tour, maybe even sooner than that. They sure were expert at it by the time they set out on their Sea Of No Cares Tour.
One GBS song I have always longed to see done live is Buying Time. It's a wonderful song, one of GBS's best, thoughtful and wise and piercingly true. I hoped and hoped and hoped for a very long time that one day they'd play it, to no avail. Eventually I came across an old interview in which Bob responded to a question about the performance of Buying Time by saying that the band liked playing the song but it seemed that whenever they had tried to at shows, the audience didn't enjoy it nearly so much as did the band.
Ever since I read that comment, I've played the Buying Time Game at subsequent GBS shows, asking myself each time whether the audience at this show might possibly enjoy Buying Time as much as the band would. As much as I would too.
I've heard it said before that the so-called "Ideal Audience" is the one that buys all the available tickets and fills all the empty seats. Pragmatic, to be sure, but I still believe that the Truly Ideal Audience is the one which is the most open to as much of the music as the artists want to play - as well as the most accepting of the absence of that music the artists choose not to play. And the most appreciative of and eager for the strongest and the best of what those artists have to offer.
I'm still waiting - still hoping - for the perfect time and the perfect place for Buying Time.
At a fairly recent Safe Upon The Shore Tour show - this time I'm genuinely unsure exactly where it was...somewhere in the US Midwest, possibly one of the "I" States, as Christina calls them - I found myself chatting with a rather oddly assembled group of people while waiting in the lobby for the theatre's inner doors to open - no outside lineups at this posh suburban-venue gig, which came complete with comfy plush lobby couches and a fully-stocked bar - a group comprised of myself, three loud, Pogues-T-shirt-clad, beer-chugging young fellows originally from Nova Scotia, and a refined, elegantly dressed middle-aged local couple genteely sipping their white wine. Mine was a double rum and Diet Pepsi; I recall that fact quite clearly since I wound up having to gulp down most of it all at once when the tiny blue-haired volunteer usher lady told me, with excruciating politeness, that no messy old drinks could possibly be allowed into the even-posher auditorium, news that provoked an indignant howl from the Bluenoser Three.
Before I was forced to go bottoms-up, my Odd Little Group had been engaged in a fascinating conversation, though I was pretty much just listening to the rest of them being so fascinating. In-between returning to the bar for more beers, the Maritime trio was going on about how many times they'd seen Great Big Sea back home - two of them harkening back to the Lower Deck Days, which surprised me not one bit - and promising the refined couple, who were seeing the band for the first time...as theatre season-subscribers, they may have been hearing of the band for the first time... the show of their lives. The fellows noisily assured the couple, along with most of the rest of those in the spacious lobby, that nobody, absolutely nobody, could do Drinking Music better than GBS.
The couple now had that pinched, mildly appalled expression on their faces that well-mannered people get when they see no way out of what they're reasonably sure they want to escape. The missus (actually, she was more a Mrs., maybe even a Madame) gave me a look of muted appeal. I probably smiled at her and took a sip of my drink, though I don't really recall. But I've got no trouble recalling what I said to her, because it's what I always say in such situations: They're my favourite band. They do some of the songs I love most and they put on a great show. The front man The Best I've ever seen; he's Wonderful.
After the doors opened and we went inside - sans drinks, of course - I made a point of noting where the trio wound up - near the back to the left - and also the couple, who sat down at the far end of my own row, still looking more than slightly reluctant. I kept an eye on all of them during the show, though the fellows apparently spent much of the eveing out in the lobby, at the bar, I'm assuming; I didn't really need to turn my head to know when they were back in the auditorium - I could hear their bellows for Mari Mac and Old Black Rum and Donkey Riding. The couple were easy to watch, fun as well. It took them a few songs to warm up - to be warmed up, I should say, since Alan immediately identified them as Conquerable Ground and promptly made them his - but once they did, their enjoyment was clear to see.
No, they didn't get up and jump around and shout out for Sociables - they smiled and sang along on the choruses and clapped. They listened attentively and they appreciated enthusiastically. And at the end of the evening, I saw them paying Glenn a visit at the merch table.
On my way out of the theatre, I stopped by the bar to exchange cheerful goodbyes with the fellows.
The tellling of the Tale's not done yet. We still don't know where it ends.
I might yet hear Buying Time.
I'm not done, not yet. And I'm finally ready to write about the solo shows. That can be the upcoming Something New for you.
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