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Sometimes I just have to shake my head and laugh.
Perhaps it was some sort of hypnosis or mild internal hysteria, but for some reason when I heard Bad Company for the first time in my early university days I became hooked on their easy-rock ballads and raged at their every power chord. Maybe it was a final gasp of my high school hair-band aesthetic – I don’t know – but for the next two years I couldn’t get enough of Bad Company, and I can’t deny it…
So I jumped all over tickets for their show at Lansdowne Stadium on August 18th, 1991. It didn’t hurt my cheese-rock soul that the concert was a double-bill with Damn Yankees, a dull flash-in-the-pan supergroup featuring members of Styx and Night Ranger and fronted by the very icky Ted Nugent.
I think Nuge and his motley crew were up first, but there’s a 50% shot that I’m wrong about that. I do know that they played most of their sole album (could there have been another to come? I care too little to bother googling it, and I bet you do too) and they even played songs from everyone’s main band, including the greatest Styx song ever: Renegade.
In what I’m sure was the highlight of the show south of the border (and probably gained popularity the farther south the band played) was the Ted Nugent schtick that had him firing crossbow arrows into an oversized Saddam Hussein cutout that was sliding back and forth across the back of the stage like a duck in a shooting gallery at the country fair.
I don’t remember the gag playing very well to the northern crowd, myself included. It was actually pretty pathetic but as I said, sometimes you just have to shake your head and laugh.
And speaking of that, if I could see myself with my long hair, double-pierced ears, brown leather hat and no doubt sporting my most recent facial hair atrocity-of-the-month rocking out like a banshee for the next seventy-five minutes in pure singalong bliss to hits like Shooting Star, Rock ’n Roll Fantasy and Feel Like Makin’ Love…yes, if I could see that now I would surely shake my head and laugh.
But who cares? I had a good time at the show* (except for that whole Ted Nugent fiasco) and I even bought a t-shirt. I was just wearing it the other day and a stranger commented on it, a British guy. As we were chatting a third guy jumped in the conversation. He assumed we were together and the British guy told him, “Oh, we don’t know each other but he’s wearing a Bad Company t-shirt and I used to really like Bad Company, so I’m sure we’d get along.”
Sometimes I just have to shake my head and laugh.
*Though I must say this concert feels similar to the time I was happily pulling on what would become my final Molson Canadian before having my taste buds drastically widened by the wonders of IPA beer. I had no idea that I was at the end of an era, but this is arguably the last cheeseball classic rock show that I would enjoy with true excitement before my aural taste buds would be drastically widened by entities like The Tragically Hip, the Grateful Dead, and (gasp!) jazz.
Todd Man Out 