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I’ve been putting off writing this one for a long time.
In the spring of 2008 the extremely severe Cyclone Nargis hit Burma with devastating effects. Over 100,000 people were killed and countless lives were affected, and these people needed help.
Not long before we had met each other m’lady had done some fairly extensive travelling through the area and she had nothing but great things to say about her experiences in Burma. And bless her kind soul, she took it upon herself to immediately plan a benefit concert to help the Burmese relief effort. In no time at all she had booked a great room and a great lineup, put up posters and sent out a press release, and she even collected a pile of nifty items for a silent auction. After a week of fantastic media coverage the day of the show was upon us; June 7th, 2008. We picked up the show’s headliner at the airport, checked him into the room that a local hotel had comped us for free and headed to Barrymore’s to set up.
It was unusually hot out, especially for early June. The air as was as thick and muggy as if it were the deepest days of August. Inside, m’lady set up the silent auction table while I helped the opening bands load in their gear for soundcheck. Despite the media hype very few if any advance tickets had been sold but as a guy who used to promote concerts in town I assured my worried lady that Ottawa crowds often didn’t buy advance tickets and she need not be concerned, we’d get a crowd.
But when the first act – a fantastic local quartet called The Murder Plans – started their set I started to worry a bit myself. Hardly anyone had come through the door, and walking down to the sidewalk between songs I could understand why. It was hot enough to melt the crowd off of a benefit out there.
It was so unbelievably sweltering outside that nobody in Ottawa wanted to leave the comfort of their air-conditioned couchspace or at the very least their backyard, and if they did it was to go straight to the nearest patio for the first full-on summer experience of the season and not to a dark, cavernous music hall to help dying Burmese.
And when Tony D took the stage with his brand-new act Monkeyjunk the big bar was still almost empty. The band tore it up, blasting through their soon-to-be-mulitiple-Juno-winning swamp-boogie hits like they were playing to a festival crowd, which they decidedly were not.
By this point I had already ducked into the office and dialled every number I could remember, begging anyone who answered to please, please, please get in their car and come down to the bar. The effort managed to bring out just the smallest handful of friends – for which I am very grateful – and when Bob Wiseman took the stage to close the show there was still less than twenty people in the room, staff included. Good on him, like the seasoned professional he is Bob Wiseman put on an admirably wonderful performance.
But it’s hard for me to recall the greatness of Bob’s set at Barrymore’s that night. All I can remember is the deep look of sadness in m’lady’s face, and it hurts me to think about. Somehow, despite CBC mentioning the benefit every night for a week on their drive-home show, despite blurbs on the nightly TV news, despite significant print media and having a killer lineup booked into Ottawa’s most identifiable nightclub, somehow the night was a bust.
All her work, all her smiles as one piece after another had fit together to make this night a reality, it all fell away. She was so sad and she tried so hard to be brave, but as we stood together at the back of the big, empty room watching Bob sing his beautiful songs the lady I love quietly started to sob. It almost broke me.
Years before I had stood in almost the exact same spot with an uncannily talented eleven year-old singer/songwriter/guitar player named Jane. She had just led our band through a great set playing a bunch of her songs at a Battle Of The Bands and we thought that we were looking good to win the pretty serious first prize package. But as we stood there watching the last band go a full hour over the otherwise very strict time allotment it dawned on us that the fix was in and we had just been duped into playing an opening set for free.
When that cute little girl with her whole life ahead of her stood next to me in that smelly old bar and started crying at the unfairness of it all I figured I couldn’t possibly feel much sadder than that.
Turns out I was wrong.
The bartenders were kind enough to donate their paltry tips and they and the sound guy purchased pretty much all of the silent auction items (at a justified steal, I might add), and like a saint Bob Wiseman covered a chunk of his travel expenses that we had agreed to pay out of his own pocket. So in the end m’lady did manage to raise a few dollars to help the Burmese people, and I tried my very best to make her feel good for her efforts.
But here it is more than a decade later and whenever this night creeps into my mind I still do whatever I can to push the memory away. To have the weight of the love I have for m’lady shift to such crushing disappointment and sadness is still too much to bear.
Thank goodness I never had children.
Thank-you to The Murder Plans, Monkeyjunk, and to the wonderful Bob Wiseman for donating their time and talent to this event. And my heartfelt thanks goes to m’lady for trying so hard to help, and for being so damn adorable.
(If I thought hard enough about it from enough angles and did enough rewrites I might one day be able to express in words just how sad this experience made me feel, but I don’t think I could bear subjecting myself to such torture. Sometimes writing can be difficult.)
Todd Man Out 