080189 The Blushing Brides, Moncton, NB

In the summer of 1989 I was on the cusp.  I was soon to be leaving my small-city existence and jumping into the eye-opening immersive world that lived in the big-town of Ottawa, I was about to trade my freshly inked high school diploma for an entry into the high-brow realm of university, and I was about to cross the bridge from seeing cover bands in storefront nightclubs to witnessing the real thing in stadiums around the globe.

To wit: On August 1st of that changeling annum I staggered off of the aging, cracked sidewalk and into the even more aging and cracked Urban Corral, a long-gone country themed bar and sometimes music club on St. George Boulevard.  As always I was there for live music and as usual it was standard Moncton ’80’s fare, which meant it was to be an evening of live versions of songs everybody knows.  In other words, either a cover band or a tribute act, and in this case it was the latter, in the form of The Blushing Brides, who themselves were in the form of The Rolling Stones.

As in “Jello form”.

I wonder if I knew I was four months and two days away from seeing the actual Rolling Stones in Toronto’s Skydome?  I suppose I did; I certainly bought the tickets while I was still living in Moncton.  It’s actually a rather comical tale.  I spent an hour hang up-redialling, hang-up redialling the Ticketmaster outlet in Toronto trying for tickets when it occurred to me with a horrific shock that each “We’re sorry, we are receiving a higher volume of calls…” I heard was costing me long-distance charges, which back in the late ’80’s were a lot higher than they are now (remember the days when you would call “collect” and ask for yourself?).  Anyway, I stopped dialling without getting tickets and had to foot a hefty phone bill for my efforts.  I don’t remember how much it cost but it was a) a lot, like maybe $100 or so, and b) nothing in comparison to the $300 per ticket I ended up paying a scalper for tickets.

Anyway, back to the evening at hand I struggle to know what notable comment could I make about it?  This wasn’t the last time I saw a tribute act but I’m pretty sure that it was the last time I might have been excited to.  It’s a given that I would have walked in half-cocked (my ill-conceived plan to save money at bars was to make sure I was drunk when I arrived) and walked out twice cocked again (like I say: ill-conceived) and I’m pretty sure I had a great time in between, as I was very prone to having a good time in just such a situation back then.  I can’t say that I came out of the show a changed man or anything, but like I say I was on the cusp so I wasn’t too long from leaving much of me behind.  Whether or not any of that had anything to do with this night will have to remain theoretical.

One thing that is not theoretical: I have much in common with the Urban Corral.  The building is still there but it ain’t the same place anymore, not by a longshot.

Though I would long maintain my habit of drinking before going out to the bars.  Call it what you will, but I prefer to think of it as nostalgia, an attitude that has thus far kept me out of the twelve-steppers.

[In a spurt of creative forgetfulness I mistakenly wrote two separate entries for this single, half-remembered bar show. Frugal as I am with my efforts, I am wont to publish both. The other one can be found by clicking here.]