THE TOWN PANTS GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL (AND MEET MARYLIN MANSON)
You never know what sort of night you're going to have. You can never second-guess what you're going to get back from the crowd you play to. It's probably one of the altruisms of music that all bands can agree upon--no matter whether you play lead Oboe in the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, or you're playing in a band at Al's Bar.
The Audience makes all the difference. No matter how big of a band you are, when you show up to play, you never know when you're up there exactly how well--or how bad--you're going to go over. And I reckon most bands can agree that sometimes the "sure thing" packed gigs end up being the hardest work, and other times the show you've shown up for that feels like it might be an unremarkable night ends up being a riot.
But I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I woke up to Dave Keogh prodding me in the arm, as the plane was landing. I'd been asleep on the plane having a bizarre dream. I dreamt that I was naked holding a parade baton--proudly leading a huge herd of monkeys in the New York St. Patrick's Day parade to a cheering tickertape crowd, (ok, ok, I know, all you Freudian dream analysts drop me a line c/o this website), I'd been marching away when one of the monkeys stepped out of the parade formation and started poking me and calling my name. Shocked the monkey could speak, I could feel the dream ending. I began to surface quickly from the sleep, and woke up sharply to find a decidedly un-simian Dave Keogh seated next to me, poking me in the arm, calling my name to wake up and get my seatbelt on as the plane was landing in the city of Yellowknife.
In the land of the midnight sun, the city of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, is high in the Canadian north a good 1400 km's north from Vancouver and the scene of the Folk on the Rocks Music Festival every summer, where the festival had invited us up to perform that year.
It;s a pretty big affair that brings out about 10,000 people a year over the course of a weekend festival, which is impressive considering how isolated Yellowknife is, relatively speaking. The festivals attendance is largely made up of the permanent residents of Yellowknife, plus many of the temporary residents like geological workers and scientists stationed there from other parts of Canada and the rest of the world, and more than a few tourists. The whole affair gets more than a bit of attention from CBC North and local media, and its quite the summer event.
We were all pretty excited--it being the furthest north in Canada any of us had ever been, a place a lot of Canadians never travel that far north to visit. Over a hundred years ago hard-type prospectors, hot with gold rush fever blazed a trail through these parts of the country in search of Death or Glory.