Saturday Night / Early Sunday

Sorry for the delay in writing about the rest of the weekend, but I usually write posts when I'm up late and can't sleep, so here we are. Saturday I took a break from the No-cases and decided to go to see Mark Bragg at Baba's with Sabriina, since she really likes him, having spent a couple of years in St. John's. After hanging out and watching Loony Tunes cartoons at her roommate's brother's place, the three of us who went out were originally going to try and see Nikkie at the 72 Hour Jam, we even made sure to give ourselves about 40 minutes to get there early just in case, but the Myron's staff were keeping people lined up outside even though they were letting people into the supposedly free jam if they would pay the money for a ticket to the main show downstairs. This is pretty scummy behaviour on their part, but scummy was a good word to describe that place all weekend.

So we went straight over to Baba's and came in in time to hear the last bit of Midnight Auto Supply, a local rock act with a fairly good guitarist, Thomas Mears, playing with them. We grabbed ourselves a few seats in the back that were perfect for being quiet enough to hear the people you're talking to without them having to shout. Next up was Yellow from Cape Breton. They're as far as I know one of the best kept secrets of Cape Breton's musical offerings, they don't seem to tour much and aren't big self-promoters, it seems. But Allicia, the guitarist, was as good as anyone else that night on her instrument and seemed to be able to put a level of subtlety and depth into her loud playing that is very hard to come by for a lot of players. The vocals were also very good but seemed to take a back seat, or were simply too low in the mix that night, not sure which since this was my first time seeing them.

Rock Ranger were up next. I can't find much info on them online aside from a couple of badly written articles on music websites that are convincing me that I could write music reviews for a living if these chuds can get paid for it. Basically they're a power trio from Cape Breton who's sound is as close to pure 80s rock as you can get. Probably their closest musical brethren would be C'Mon (who are going to be playing in Charlottetown in March according to the rumour mill). We were moving from being in back to making forays up to the front to watch. Fortunately the crowd wasn't too thick to move in. People really seemed to be getting into the music by this point, dancing and hopping around and cheering loudly. None of the bands did much talking between songs which I always hope for, they're up their in front of an audience but so often when they will muster up some words, the singer will sound shy and timid and will use as few words as he or she can.

The transitions between bands was the smoothest I think I'd ever seen, especially for that many bands in that small a place. Baba's is just extraordinarily well-run all around, though. You never hear any drama or bullshit from any of the staff, all the business matters are taken care of away form the customers and as far as anyone is concerned the place just runs itself. Compare that to some other places where you seem to always see someone running around putting out fires and handling crisis after crisis and you can really see the difference that experience makes.

Up next was Pat Deighan and the Orb Weavers. They're becoming such a regular fixture there that it's hard to think of new things to write about them. They were very well placed on this bill, though, with all the other traditional rock'n'roll acts.

So next up after that was Mark Bragg. And even though I had seen him a few weeks ago and he did mostly the same songs (but a shorter set and not as many rarities.) of songs from his latest album, Bear Music, it was still really enjoyable and the crowd was totally into it, which is nice since me and Sabrina were almost the only ones up front last time around.

72 Hour Jam

After that Sabrina and her roommate went home and I met up with some other people who had been out at other various places and we wandered into the 72 Hour Jam which had moved back down to the main floor again. One of the funnier bits was when one of us who was there was on her mobile phone talking to some other people we know and we got them to go to the webcam that was set up and we waved and made gestures at it. Then we had the rap-type group that was up there give shoutouts to them which was hilarious and enough to get them to come out.

Musically it was hit or miss that night, with some rather odd hiphop type acts mixed in with some pretty good rock bands like Annapilla and Shelter With Thieves. A surprisingly large number of people even stuck it out long enough to see Chara at 7am, the only metal band on the Jam's schedule. Maybe it was the lack of sleep but I was totally into them when they got going, bouncing around and making tons of noise and just generally rocking out. Thankfully there weren't any idiots trying to hardcore dance or any of that bullshit. I felt way safer in the middle of Chara's crowd then anywhere else, considering the massive amounts of glass everywhere and the disgusting bathrooms that were definitely not cleaned the whole weekend.

One of the members of Chara apparently had to work an 8 hour shift at his job at a convenience store right after their set, which makes them doing the 7am thing even more heroic.

After they were finished there was the most hilarious change of pace ever, with a woman named Kelly Bellamon coming up on stage in a 19th century-looking white dress and acoustic guitar all by herself. I stuck around and watched and really enjoyed her set, probably the only person there who was equally enjoying her and Chara and might just as easily have either of them in my music collection.

The funniest part about Kelly's set was when I turned to walk away from the stage and apparently caught my foot on the patch cable which cut off her guitar. This is after the madness during Chara's set in which nothing like that happened at all. I was pretty embarrassed but it gave me an excuse to talk to her after she finished, and she seems very nice and appreciated that someone was listening attentively. She gave me a CD with three songs of hers on it and it's quite good as well for a demo.

I missed most of Andrea MacDonald's set because I was over sitting with someone whom I hadn't seen since we were kids and doing some catching up. What's really funny about that is that she was apparently using my jacket as a pillow and I had to wake her up to get it, and it took us a little while before we recognized each other.

After Andrea finished there was the rather forgettable 'Tom and Mary' duo (I think that's what they were called.) Pretty much your stereotypical aging hippies who put way too much naive idealism into their songs. My favourite line was "peace will come when greed is gone." Which, if true, means I should probably just kill myself now, if you've ever seen the way children play with each other I'd say we're doomed. But I don't think he meant the line with any dark humour at all. But hey, at least they played a couple of John Prine songs at the end which made me happy before finally leaving to go home and crash for the rest of the morning.

Overall I had a fun night, had some good conversations with people I only sort of knew casually before that, and enjoyed the music. But Myrons was so filthy and obnoxious even by their own standards that they probably ruined the ECMA experience for a lot of people. I know from checking out a couple of message boards that they probably went a good way to hurting Charlottetown's reputation as a whole. They never once cleaned the place, there was broken glass everywhere, a friend of mine actually cut her foot quite badly on it when a piece went through the soul of her shoe, and the whole atmosphere just shouted from the walls that they didn't care. This gave a lot of credence to the rumours floating around that the place is about to be closed yet again and they were just doing the minimum possible to keep the doors open and the lights on for the whole weekend without caring for their reputation or their customers' experience. It's as sharp a contrast as you can get with what a great and smooth operation Baba's has going or the open and friendly and casual atmosphere at Hunter's.
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