Posted by New Year’s Eve, 2008*: M’lady and I took in a world juniors hockey game between the Slovakians and the Swedes at the Ottawa Civic Centre and stopped off at home for some anticipatory pre-drinks on our way downtown to Maverick’s Bar, where we and a good number of our closest friends rang in the New Year with The Spades, a great mostly-under-the-radar original rock trio from Peterborough. There were balloons and paper party hats, mounds of hugs and kisses, champagne served in plastic glasses abounded at the stroke of midnight, and no doubt a smashing afterparty took place at some nearby abode (quite possibly mine) until the sun closed things down. I don’t really remember a lot of the details from the post-midnight era of the evening and neither does m’lady, which is just that much more circumstantial evidence and shouldn’t really surprise anybody.
What is surprising is that I’ve found little opportunity to expound upon The Spades amongst these diatribes. It’s not that I didn’t see them play a lot – I did – but they were pretty much exclusively local $6 bar gigs that seemed so commonplace that despite their awesomeness (for The Spades were consistently awesome) I tended not to record the events in my ticket binders. Sure, they played a Canada Day party and I think maybe a Come Together Music Festival or two that might have made it to the pixels, but aside from this unticketed show I fear they have received little mention in this personal musical history of mine.
For the record let me state that if all things were indeed equal you would probably be getting sick of hearing me blabber on about how much fun The Spades were by now, about how unique and blatantly musical frontman James McKenty’s songwriting was, how I could never keep my eyes of the half-slack-jawed head-bobbing bass player who totally held the group together both rhythmically and visually, and how even though I was over the moon to have such easy access to a straight-up rock and roll band with no weird leanings whatsoever, that m’lady somehow loved the band even more than I did.
So we went to see The Spades a lot. They were great.
(Frankly I’m glad I didn’t write down all the The Spades shows we went to. If I did I’d be sitting here trying to figure out how to rewrite that last paragraph a dozen different ways. Like I do for all the Sisters Euclid shows.)
*That’s what December 31st, 2008 is properly called, right? It almost feels like the celebration is more of preceder to 2009 than it is a capper to 2008 but at the same time referring to a holiday that occurs in 2008 as That Holiday 2009 feels even more wrong. And we all know that proper diction comes down to feelings, don’t we? So: New Year’s Eve 2008 it is. (Don’t even get me started on the apostrophe; it seems so wrong but it feels so right.)
Todd Man Out 