A FAN’S NOTES

This Just In: The 70s Are Ending

Should the rain ever stop, my law of twelve lawn mows between Victoria Day and Thanksgiving remains applicable, mushrooms sprouting like dandelions, not withstanding. West Coast League short season baseball wrapped here Sunday afternoon. August arrives in Edmonton with a slightly crisper air of gentle denouement. Ann’s remarked that the angle of the sun’s light, provided we can actually gauge it through the rain or the wildfire haze, has dulled a degree or three. Our al fresco newspaper morning coffees require an extra layer of clothing. Anyway, Ann, a retired music teacher, still considers Labour Day New Year’s Eve.

This awareness of time passing pervades and prevails. Next week’s looking pretty good except for the funeral to kick it off. The mixology of our attendance is genuine affection for the deceased diluted by obligation and diplomacy and I’m not anticipating lingering long enough to rate the sandwiches following a full Catholic service. Tuesday promises to be a fine night out, sort of a Mobius strip déjà vu, a show postponed from about this time last year, and what would’ve been an epic double bill forty years ago: Rod Stewart with Cheap Trick. I haven’t caught either act since I was in my early twenties. Ann loves Sir Rod’s good old stuff as much as I do, but she’s never seen him perform and, dear me, it’s getting awfully late in the day to debate with which album he really began to misdirect his incredible talent. As for Cheap Trick, I’ve reassured Ann she’ll know every song. As for me, I’m hoping the opening slot and perhaps something like arthritis will curtail the duration of Rick Nielsen’s power pop guitar pyrotechnics.

Thanksgiving in Edmonton is a confusing and peculiar time of year. I know I won’t have cut the lawn again, but the array of hand tools by the Crooked 9’s back door is schizo: leaf rakes and snow shovels; I just don’t know, I never can tell. Our October will run out with the Doobie Brothers who surely must be down to the last green tinged roach in the teacup saucer ashtray after more than fifty years of road work. One hook was tickets selling for twentieth century prices and the second was, as I assured Ann, “We’ll know every song.”

My high school social whirl was more often than not time well wasted in friends’ basements. There were popular albums I never bought because everybody else already had. And some, like the Doobies’ The Captain and Me, could only exist in a collective context; they would never sound as good to me alone in my bedroom. Following my graduation the Doobies created the template for rock band as rock brand and no one since has done it with such elegant ease: Takin’ It to the Streets (an absolute knock out title track) featured both group founder and vocalist Tom Johnston who was preparing to step away from active duty for health reasons and his dauphin Michael McDonald. The reconfigured band’s next album, Minute by Minute, was one of those mainstream commercial juggernauts that, like Let’s Dance, Freeze Frame, Brothers in Arms and Born in the USA, may’ve proved more yoke than windfall. Anyway, both singers are back with the Doobies for this apparent final lap around the concert circuit and, anyway, you know, despite commercial radio’s best efforts, I’ve never tired of the breathless gossip concerning the preacher and the teacher in that sleepy little Texas town.

It’s a long night and tell me what else were you gonna do? Everything dies in Edmonton in November, baby, and that’s a fact. So, man, Ann and I want those E Street sparks to fly before Remembrance Day. Of the aforementioned rockers, only Bruce Springsteen remains relevant, two of his last three albums were worthy of his back catalogue and the other was Friday night fun, drop the needle and sway, but this tour cries elegy, a sweeping exit from the world’s biggest stages. My sense with Springsteen is that if he feels he’s incapable of living up to his live legacy, his prisoner of rock ‘n’ roll shtick, he’ll step back, ratchet things down.

Winter’s coming everywhere and to everything; there’s no stopping it.                      

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did from various retailers in your preferred format.