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As the Christmas season of 2019 started to rev up I started planning my annual holiday pilgrimage to Moncton, which of course involved a lap or two through the concert listings for southern New Brunswick. It wasn’t that long ago that such a search held significantly more hope than substance, normally unearthing some local guitar player putting in a set of cover songs at a downtown tavern or even more commonly, nothing at all.
But then the Casino New Brunswick made it’s appearance just down the road from my brother’s house and with it came the standard casino entertainment fare, which generally includes a plethora of classic rock artists or at least a name-brand comedian or two. All of which is a dramatic improvement over “nada” and thus a-okay with me.
And what do you know, this time my search unearthed an upcoming show by that most classic of Nova Scotia country-rockers, Matt Minglewood, who was once again bringing his band of young whipper-snappers to the casino to put on a show and that was plenty fine enough Moncton entertainment for a guy like me. As a matter of fact I knew that I was going to enjoy the concert because I had seen the exact same band in the exact same room almost exactly one year earlier. That had been a rare birthday show for me and while this one happened a day earlier (on December 28th) it almost felt like another birthday show.
First off, I went with family. My first plan was to attend with my brother; I knew he liked Matt Minglewood and as an added bonus he had already forgotten about attending the Minglewood show with me the previous year (which was pretty surprising, I thought). But no, he said he was going to be on his way to Florida by then (he wasn’t), so my mom bought the second ticket. When she realized that she had double-booked herself over the busy social holidays she passed the ticket on to my cousin Kenny. Kenny was confused about who had actually given him the ticket so he offered to buy me dinner in exchange for it. I bit my tongue, nodded my head, and just like that we were at a Ramen place down on Main Street* for my nearly birthday dinner**.
So like I say, it was all feeling quite birthday-like. And never mind that the concert itself was basically just a big pile of deja vu from my birthday show the previous year. Both had vastly entertaining opening acts (this time there were two: Travis Furlong from an old east coast blues/rock band called Glamour Puss who put in a mini solo set to start the night while Christine Campbell and her fine guitar player Blake Johnston were even more impressive with their longer duo set) and both featured an embarrassingly bad intro from the promoter. This year the promoter’s daughter mercifully took over most of the introductions but she brought out her dad for a few words and he used those words to merely state that he was “…very, very much in love…” with Matt Minglewood’s wife, a sentiment he made awkwardly obvious just 364 days before. It was just so, so weird.
As for Matt Minglewood, he put in pretty much the same set as the last time, albeit in a different order. His stories were few and not the same as before (which was great! Nothing much worse than sitting through the same stories at a show, as anyone seeing their second Arlo Guthrie or Don Ross concert can tell you), and it was all the same sidemen; in other words a fantastically solid bass player, a flashy young guitar player, and Mr. Young & Flashy guitar player’s dad, who had gotten significantly better on drums over the course of the year.
I recall Minglewood making the odd mistake of playing his cover of Rita McNeil’s beautiful lethargic dirge Working Man as a second encore after nearly closing the show with a super-solid run-through of his hit cover of Can’t You See by The Marshall Tucker Band. I mean, what an astounding bring-down that ballad was after such a fist-raising anthem! It really just proved what I’ve thought for years: if Matt Minglwood knew (or cared) a little more about the business he was in he would be a much bigger player in said business.
After the show my cousin booked it home while my brother joined me for a few hands of Blackjack. I was still at the tables when the clock rolled over and I paid for my annual 12:02am birthday-morning tequila shot (I was born at 12:02am on the 29th) with a casino chip. Though I played fast and loose with the waitress and her pricey drinks I kept pretty tight with the cards. Before too long I stumbled out of there with $200 of the casino’s money in my pocket.
Which made for a fine birthday kickoff.
*Wow, has Moncton changed! I didn’t see my first perogie, crepe, shawarma, or even a bagel (seriously) until I moved away from my very ethnically undiverse hometown in 1989. Nowadays Main Street Moncton sports an Indian restaurant, a Vietnamese spot, and a sushi bar to name just a few. And when we were at dinner the tiny Ramen place was absolutely full of Asians, with not an empty chair in the room. This, in the same town where my high school counted just two Asian kids among it’s 1,000+ students when I was a student there. Sure, we still had bigotry but it was entirely language-based. I tell you, back in my day if you wanted to be a racist in Moncton you had to search high and low to find someone to hate unless you were English and wanted to hate the French or vice-versa. Fortunately, even now that many, many visual minorities have arrived the bigotry and hatred still seems to remain mostly along the French/English divide, as everyone seems to welcome the new arrivals with a sideways glance at worst.
**Of course for my actual birthday the next day I went to Pizza Delight for my free birthday meal.
Todd Man Out 